Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time by Noam Chomsky, edited by C.J. Polychroniou Haymarket Books, 2023; x + 330 pp. Noam Chomsky is universally respected for his contributions to linguistics and to the philosophy of mind, but he is a “public intellectual” as well, and it is in the public arena that opinion about him is
In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace by Christopher J. Coyne Independent Institute, 2022; xxii + 217 pp. Christopher Coyne, an economics professor at GMU, forcefully attacks America’s foreign policy, claimed by its defenders to aim at a peaceful international order under benevolent American
In last week’s column, I discussed Christophers Coyne’s excellent book In Search of Monsters to Destroy , a cogent account of America’s endeavor to build a “liberal” informal empire. Coyne shows the inherent contradiction of using brutal means to achieve humane values. This week, I’d like to discuss an even more deplorable part of American foreign
Nigel Biggar, a recently retired professor of theology at Oxford University, has never shunned controversy, as the title of one of his books, In Defence of War , suggests. In this week’s column, I’d like to examine an article of his, “ A Christian Defense of American Empire ,” that appeared in the October 2022 issue of First Things . As you might
In the early decades of the Cold War, the Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr attracted a considerable following among American intellectuals who influenced foreign policy. People such as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who wanted to found a group called Atheists for Niebuhr, maintained that Niebuhr provided a new, realistic basis for
Robert Kagan is a well-known neoconservative historian who believes that America ought to exercise a “benevolent hegemony” over the rest of the world. In his just-published book, The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941 (Knopf, 2023), he presents an odd argument for America’s takeover of the Philippines after the
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp. Samuel Moyn is a distinguished intellectual historian who teaches both history and law at Yale. His earlier books were written for an academic audience, but in Humane he has an urgent message that he wishes to convey to the general
In his valuable article “War and Humanitarian Intervention,” in The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (pp. 441–56), Fernando R. Tesón raises some interesting criticisms of Murray Rothbard’s views on war as part of a more general discussion of the topic, and I’d like to devote this week’s article to these. It has to be said, though, that a
How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How US and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe by Benjamin Abelow Siland Press; 75 pp. The Ukraine war has generated great controversy, but of one point there can be no doubt, and Benjamin Abelow, a physician with a longstanding interest in public affairs, has
Murray Rothbard is well-known as one of the greatest exponents of praxeology, which operates through a priori reasoning. He was careful, however, to distinguish praxeology from history. The latter could be studied only through empirical investigation. In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss some observations he makes about this in For a New
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.