An impromptu tribute to Henry Hazlitt by Scott Lahti:

Henry Hazlitt definitely held his own with the academics, to say the least, and not just with The Failure of the “New Economics”, or his near-million-selling Economics in One Lesson. His whole life was testament to the power of well-directed self-education, maintained across almost 99 years. Take a look at his library sometime at FEE in Irvington. Or read, e.g., such non-economic works as Thinking as a Science (1916); The Way to Will-Power (1922), virtually impossible to find outside university libraries (I own two of the only privately-held copies in all of Christendom); The Anatomy of Criticism (1933), a charming “trialogue” on the principles of literary judgment, and *summa* of his three-year stint as literary editor at The Nation; The Foundations of Morality (1964), an erudite tome on ethics; or The Wisdom of the Stoics (1984), a selection from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, assembled with wife Frances as old age found stoicism of more than scholarly interest.

I had the good fortune of meeting Hazlitt while on spring break in 1982 in Wilton, Connecticut, where I lived while in high school five miles or so from Hazlitt. He was then 87. Two letters from him are in my files. Try to imagine him running regularly in the latter-day incarnations of Newsweek or the Reader’s Digest, as he did for decades surrounding the mid-century last.

“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” – Julius Caesar

“So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” – “THE PUNCH LINE,” Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

This essay by Murray Rothbard is based on a paper presented at the April 1979 national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Chicago. The theme of the meeting was “Conservatism and Libertarianism.”