Boettke was born in Rahway, New Jersey to Fred and Elinor Boettke and remained there until he moved to Pennsylvania to attend Thiel College in Greenville and later Grove City College. It was at Grove City College that he became interested in economics, when he took a course taught by Hans Sennholz and there that he developed his religious convictions. After completing a B.A. in economics at Grove City, Boettke attended George Mason University where he earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics with thesis titled The political economy of Soviet socialism, 1918–1928 under the supervision of Don Lavoie.
Professional life
After receiving his doctoral degree, Boettke taught at several schools, including Oakland University, Manhattan College, and New York University. In 1998, he returned to George Mason University as a faculty member. In 2004, he was named a Hayek Fellow at the London School of Economics. He has also been a Faculty Fellow at the Charles University/Georgetown University in Prague and a Visiting Scholar at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. As of 2011, Boettke has also been made an affiliated member of the Philosophy Department at George Mason University and in 2012, he was awarded a Doctorate honoris causa in Social Sciences from Universidad Francisco Marroquín. In addition to his academic positions, he is also Vice President for Research at Mercatus Center and Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Until 2007, Boettke held the position of Director of Graduate Studies for the Ph.D. program in economics at George Mason. He serves as editor of George Mason University's Review of Austrian Economics and as Vice President of the Mont Pelerin Society for the 2018-2020 term. Boettke previously served as the society's president from 2016 to 2018. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia with his wife and two sons.
Analytical anarchism is the name given by Peter Boettke, to the positive political economy of anarchism, or anarchism from the economic point of view, in the libertarian tradition of Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty and David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom. Boettke claims that analytical anarchism has developed out of this tradition, and is currently being pursued by economists such as Peter Leeson, Edward Stringham, and Christopher Coyne. These professors are related to Mercatus Center and to the faculty of economics at George Mason University.
* Handbook On Contemporary Austrian Economics, Edward Elgar, 2010.
* Market Theory and the Price System, the second volume of Israel Kirzner's Collected Works, edited with Frederic Sautet and published by Liberty Fund, May 2011.
* Essays on Capital, the third volume of Israel Kirzner's Collected Works, edited with Frederic Sautet and published by Liberty Fund, 2012.
* The Oxford Handbook of Austrian Economics'', with Christopher Coyne. October 2015.
Personal life
Outside of the classroom, Boettke has pursued a parallel career in athletics. A former high school and college basketball and tennis player, Boettke first worked as a tennis teaching professional before pursuing his graduate degree in economics. After graduate school, he began coaching youth basketball and eventually coached at the high school and elite AAU level, qualifying for the AAU 16U National Championships in 2007. Several of his former players are now competing in college. In 2009, he was inducted as a coach into the local basketball Hall of Fame in Northern Virginia.
