ABSTRACT

One of the main contributions of Professor Murray N. Rothbard has been to show that the prehistory of the Austrian School of Economics should be sought in the works of the Spanish scholastics of what is known as the ‘Siglo de Oro Español’ (in English, the ‘Spanish Golden Century’), which ran from the mid-sixteenth century through the seventeenth century. Rothbard first developed this thesis in 19742 and, more recently, in chapter 4, volume I, of his monumental History of Economic Thought from the Austrian Perspective, entitled ‘The Late Spanish Scholastics’.3