Rothbard’s Education: Free and Compulsory in Russian

by PFS on November 12, 2026

Murray Rothbard’s classic monograph on state schooling, Education: Free and Compulsory, is now available in Russian, translated by Mikhail Parfeniuk (Михаил Парфенюк): Мюррей Ротбард, Образование, добровольное и принудительное (PDF).

The original: Murray N. Rothbard, Education: Free and Compulsory (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999), with a preface by Kevin Ryan. It first appeared in the April and July–August 1971 issues of The Individualist, and was then revised and published by the Center for Independent Education in 1979; the Mises Institute edition restores Rothbard’s original text. The English version is available on Mises.org in HTML, PDF, and EPUB.

Rothbard shows that the problem with today’s school system is that “at every level, from financing to attendance, the system relies on compulsion instead of voluntary consent,” whereas a market-based system of schools “would adhere to a purely voluntary ethic.” He also traces the history of compulsory schooling in Europe and America. Fittingly, the Russian title renders Rothbard’s “free” not as бесплатное (“free of charge”) but as добровольное (“voluntary”), which is precisely his point.

Mikhail was able to do this translation only after obtaining permission from the Mises Institute. This used to be unnecessary. Under the open publishing model Jeffrey Tucker championed there, the Institute released its content under the liberal CC-BY license, which lets anyone translate, republish, and build on a work so long as they give credit. Since Tucker left, however, the Institute has abandoned that model and switched to the restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND license: non-commercial use only (NC), and no derivative works (ND). That rules out translations, since a translation is a derivative work.¹ So translators now have to ask first.

At PFS we take the opposite approach. We publish under CC-BY, not CC-BY-NC-ND, because we want pro-Austrian and pro-liberty writings to reach as many people as possible. Anyone who wants to translate a PFS publication can just go ahead; no permission is needed. See Translations of PFS Publications.

This isn’t Mikhail’s first such project. He also translated Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Getting Libertarianism Right (Mises Institute, 2018) into Russian as Понимая либертарианство правильно (PDF).