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I had the good fortune of attending the Rothbard Graduate Seminar (RGS) twice in succession, during the summers of 2020 and 2021. By that time, I was already quite familiar with the ideas of the Austrian School thanks to the many podcasts and recorded Mises University lectures, among much more, the Mises Institute has made freely available online. However, I likely never would have realized my own understanding of Ludwig von Mises’s economic works was so deficient without twice undertaking a close reading of Human Action for RGS.
Further, and importantly, the opportunity to engage in critical conversation about Mises’s masterwork with Mises Institute scholars as well as the other highly motivated attending students makes RGS a priceless experience for those interested in studying the Austrian tradition of economics. It is not an exaggeration to say that I owe most of my present knowledge of praxeology to my time at Auburn over the course of those two summers.
Why I Wanted to Attend RGS
While it is possible to access practically everything published by the great Austrian economists for free on the Mises Institute website, it would take a truly disciplined person to carefully read, cover-to-cover, the numerous tomes published in the Austrian tradition even once, let alone multiple times. Before attending RGS for the first time, I was already quite familiar with the basic tenets of the distinctive Austrian approach thanks to years of listening to The Tom Woods Show and sampling the annual Mises University lectures. However, I lazily shirked reading the systematic treatises like Mises’s Human Action or Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State, opting instead for shorter works and summary materials such as Bob Murphy’s excellent study guides on both Human Action and Man, Economy, and State, among many others.
Upon enrolling in the economics PhD program at George Mason University in 2019, I knew it was time to finally tackle the major tomes in the Austrian tradition. It was then obvious that I should apply for RGS, as it would not only encourage me to read Human Action—which was the required RGS reading for 2020—but also afford the opportunity to finally visit...