http://mises.org/journals/aen/aen11_2_1.asp
AEN: What about Conceived in Liberty?
MNR: After the Volcker Fund collapsed, I got another grant from the Lilly Endowment to do a history of the U.S., which I worked on from 1962-66. The original idea was to take the regular facts and put a libertarian assessment on everything. But once I started to work on it, I found many facts had been left out, like tax rebellions. So it got longer and longer. It turned into the five volume Conceived in Liberty, covering the Colonial period to the Constitution. I don't chart this stuff in advance. I don't like to work that way. I go step by step and it keeps getting longer. After Arlington House published volume four, they went out of business. Volume five, on the Constitution, was written in longhand and no one can read my handwriting.
So that's it? Has it ever been translated or decrypted? That, to me, seems like the most important part!
Well, it is not lost. It is a huge pile of yellow paper. I have many thoughts about this topic because it comes up quite often. One is that Conceived is MNR's least-read project. There are four massive volumes. They are wonderful. But not many people take them on. Over the years, I've found it interesting that there is so much interest in the unpublished 5th volume but very low interest in the published 4 volumes. I'm not saying that is true in this case, but I offer it as an observation from accumulated evidence.
Another point is that MNR very much wrote in drafts. They were revised and revised and revised again and again. Whatever we came up with out of this--and we are talking about years of work here--it would not be what Murray would have finally approved. We can know this for sure. He would have changed many things. What he would have changed is very difficult to say. So it is right to be a bit squemish about this idea.
FEE has produced several books of Mises's lectures. They are wonderful. I really like them. They sound like Mises to me. And yet you end up reading with some slight doubt that this would have been precisely what he would have approved for print. I'm glad FEE did this, very much so. And yet I'm not sure that one can really say for sure that this is authoritative in every way.
Murray's Conceived 5 notes are far far far less publishable in some form that notes take from Mises's lectures. So I really doubt that anything will ever come of it. Sometimes it is hard to realize and fully adjust to the fact that some things didn't go the way that might have, and not having this 5th volume is just one of those things. Another is that he never completed his History of Thought. For my part, I think it is sometimes good to rejoice in what we do have rather than getting too upset about what we do not have.
Ok, one last example here. For years, a manuscript by MNR on the conservative movement--brilliant and autobiographical--circulated in private, copied hundreds of times. Finally it came out as a book--after years of work on our part. It is called Betrayal of the American Right. I must say that it has not been a smash seller, and perhaps that is our fault, I don't know. But it certainly is my impression that there was more interest in the book before it was printed than after, and this has nothing to do with quality. It is a great book.
I think this has to do with the normal human tendency to desperately want what you can't get to but to be oddly indifferent to what is readily available.
Publisher, Laissez-Faire Books