The Late Murray Rothbard Takes on the Constitution: A lost volume of American history finds the light of day.

• Author: Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers

THE CONSTITUTION IS traditionally seen as the culmination of the American Revolution. But in the fifth and final volume of Conceived in Liberty, the libertarian firebrand Murray Rothbard portrays it as a reactionary counterrevolution against the Revolution's radical principles, orchestrated by a powerful array of monied interests who hoped a more centralized government would reproduce many hierarchical and mercantilist features of the 18th century British state.

The first volume of Conceived in Liberty was published in 1975, launching a lengthy history of America from the founding of the colonies to the adoption of the Constitution. Three more volumes came out in due course, but the fifth, which promised to explore the period from the end of the American Revolution to the Constitution's ratification, never appeared. Rumors circulated that Arlington House, the conservative publisher of the first four volumes, was not happy with Rothbard's critical approach to the Constitution. But the actual explanation is probably more mundane, since Arlington House went out of business in the early 1980s.

By the time of Rothbard's death in 1995, any trace of the fifth volume was thought to be irretrievably lost. But an early manuscript copy, partly typed but mostly handwritten, ended up in the Mises Institute archives. Now the economic historian Patrick Newman has painstakingly deciphered Rothbard's scrawl and shepherded the book into existence.

When the first volume of Conceived in Liberty came out, I was a graduate student, and my field at the time was colonial history. The volume's 531 pages, written with the assistance of Leonard Liggio, covered the American colonies during the 17th century. I already knew a good bit about the subject. Yet I was amazed at its comprehension, its detail, and above all, its unique and revealing interpretations. The next three volumes maintained the same high standard.

Book five is not quite up to the earlier installments. How could it be? It does not have the thorough bibliographic essays that graced each of the previous volumes, although Newman has partly remedied this by supplementing Rothbard's few footnotes with his own supporting references. Despite Rothbard's reputation for being able to make his first draft his final draft, his earlier volumes definitely went through some editing by others. And the fact that Rothbard's original manuscript for the fifth volume apparently dates back to 1966, well before the publication of any of the other installments, strongly suggests that, given the chance, he would have done much editing and expanding himself. (In the other volumes, he clearly consulted important sources that appeared only after 1966.) Finally, the fifth volume could have done without Andrew Napolitano's fervid foreword, which will weaken the work's appeal to a wider audience.

But the book is still vintage Rothbard. As in all of his historical writing, he starkly identifies those he considers heroes or villains. That sometimes leads to a lack of nuance, thanks to prose that understates or ignores his heroes' flaws and his villains' virtues. On the other hand, Rothbard's partisanship helps to vividly capture the acrimonious sectarian and personal divisiveness of the period. It certainly serves as an antidote to the tendency of many other accounts to minimize these disputes and conflicts.

THE FIRST SECTION of the book deals with the "critical period" following the American Revolution. Rothbard quickly disposes of the common belief that the U.S.'s postwar economic hardships were due to excessive importation of...