The Footnotes

by Jeffrey Barr on July 18, 2026

When the email came asking if I’d contribute a chapter—a firsthand account of Murray Rothbard’s final semester of teaching—I sat with it longer than I expected to. Not because I didn’t want to say yes. Because I understood, reading it a second time, that I might be one of the only people left who could actually say yes. Not one of many who’d read his books. One of the few who had sat in that room.

That’s a strange kind of responsibility.

Rothbard has a vast bibliography—decades of it, footnoted within an inch of its life—and none of it can tell you what it was like to watch him teach. I could. So I said yes, and then immediately wondered if I actually could.

I remembered things, but I didn’t trust the things I remembered. Memory has a way of sanding an image smooth, rounding off the parts that don’t fit the story you’ve decided to tell about someone. I didn’t want to write a legend. I wanted to write the man.

So I went looking for something specific—something no bibliography could hand me. And I found it in the tangents.

Rothbard’s lectures wandered constantly. A current event would remind him of a politician, and the politician would remind him of some minor 19th-century economist, and off he’d go for five minutes on a man most of the room had never heard of—before snapping back, mid-sentence practically, to cite the exact work where you could go read more if you wanted. It used to feel like a detour. Writing the chapter, thirty-some years later, I finally saw what it actually was: Rothbard lectured the way he wrote. The tangents were footnotes. He was annotating himself out loud, in real time, for a room of people he’d never see cite him.

: Rothbard at 100 – Dust Jacket

That was the detail I built the whole chapter around. Not because it was clever, but because it was true, and because I don’t think anyone else in that book would have thought to say it.

I sent the chapter off and then didn’t think about it, mostly, for a long time—the way you don’t think about a letter once it’s out of your hands. There was an announcement of a release date at some point. I marked it and forgot it the way you do with things that feel too far off to be real yet.

Then today the box came.

I didn’t open it right away. I stood there for a second, feeling its weight, before I even broke the tape. And when the book was finally in my hands, cover up, I didn’t flip to my chapter. I didn’t check the table of contents. I just stared at it.

Because until that exact moment, that memory—the room, the tangents, the footnotes read aloud—had lived in exactly one place: Whatever is left of my memory of being twenty-four years old in that class. If I had forgotten it, or been hit by a bus, or simply grew old enough that the details finally did sand smooth, it went with me.

It doesn’t anymore.

I stood there a moment longer, then opened the cover.

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