Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy
By Murray N. Rothbard, Center for libertarian Studies, 1995

Introduction by Justin Raimondo

Murray Rothbard's 1984 analysis of modern American history as a great power struggle between economic elites, between the House of Morgan and the Rockefeller interests, culminates in the following conclusion: "the financial power elite can sleep well at night regardless of who wins in 1984." By the time you get there, the conclusion seems understated indeed, for what we have here is a sweeping and compressed history of 20th century politics from a power elite point of view. It represents a small and highly specialized sample of Rothbard's vast historical knowledge coming together with a lifetime devoted to methodological individualism in the social sciences. It appeared first in 1984, in the thick of the Reagan years, in a small financial publication called World Market Perspective. It was printed for a larger audience in by the Center for Libertarian Studies in 1995, and appears in 2005 online for the first time. Theoreticians Left and Right are constantly referring to abstract "forces" when they examine and attempt to explain historical patterns. Applying the principle of methodological individualism— which attributes all human action to individual actors—and the economic principles of the Austrian School, Rothbard formulated a trenchant overview of the American elite and the history of the modern era. (more)