Rawls’s Ballet

Mises Review 7, No. 4 (Winter 2001)

JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS: A RESTATEMENT
John Rawls
Harvard University Press, 2001, xviii + 214 pgs.
 

One Flew Over Equality

Mises Review 7,  No. 4 (Winter 2001)

EQUALITY IN LIBERTY AND JUSTICE
Antony Flew
Transaction Publishers, 200, xx + 224 pgs.
 

The Student and His Professor

Mises Review 7, No. 4 (Winter 2001)

LUDWIG VON MISES: THE MAN AND HIS ECONOMICS
Israel M. Kirzner
ISI Books, 2001, xv + 226 pgs.
 

Professor Kirzner’s outstanding book “aims to present, in briefest outline . . . the story of Mises in his role of economist” (p. xi, emphasis removed). In this task, it is eminently successful. But Kirzner achieves much more than this. Owing to his profound grasp of Austrian economics, he clarifies Mises’s views in a number of important areas.

Inadvertent Ammunition

Mises Review 7, No. 4 (Winter 2001)

OUR SECRET CONSTITUTION: HOW LINCOLN REDEFINED AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
George P. Fletcher
Oxford University Press, 2001, xi + 292 pgs.
 

Professor Fletcher’s book brings to mind a remark by Yvor Winters, in a review of C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Winters praised Lewis for his grasp of the facts,

A Substitute for Knowing

Mises Review 7, No. 4 (Winter 2001)

INVARIANCES: THE STRUCTURE OF THE OBJECTIVE WORLD
Robert Nozick
Harvard University Press, 2001, x + 416 pgs.
 

Readers of this journal will probably be most interested in Nozick’s views on ethics, especially as they relate to libertarianism, and it is on these that I propose to concentrate. In doing so, I run the risk of distortion. Invariances is full of new ideas, and no review that stresses a small part of the book can do it justice. 

No Safety in Numbers

Mises Review 8, No. 1 (Spring 2002)

DEMOCRACY: THE GOD THAT FAILED
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Transaction Publishers, 2001, xxiv + 304 pgs.
 

Faith in Mammon

Mises Review 8, No. 1 (Spring 2002)

ECONOMICS AS RELIGION: FROM SAMUELSON TO CHICAGO AND BEYOND
Robert H. Nelson
Penn State Press, 2001, xxvi + 378 pgs.
 

The Folly of National Unity

Mises Review 8, No. 1 (Spring 2002)

THE DEATH OF THE WEST: HOW DYING POPULATIONS AND IMMIGRANT INVASIONS IMPERIL OUR COUNTRY AND CIVILIZATION
Patrick J. Buchanan
St. Martin’s Press, 2002, 308 pgs.
 

Argument by Axiom 

Mises Review 8, No. 1 (Spring 2002)

THE ANATOMY OF RACIAL INEQUALITY
Glenn C. Loury
Harvard University Press, 2002, xi + 226 pgs.

 

Critics of Austrian economics often attack it as “armchair economics.” Instead of testable hypotheses, Mises and his followers offer us truths about the world based on allegedly self-evident axioms. Is this not, according to positivists, the very height of folly? One can discover facts only by investigation, not by conjuring them into existence.

Let God Sort Them Out

Mises Review 8, No. 1 (Spring 2002)

WARRIOR POLITICS: WHY LEADERSHIP DEMANDS A PAGAN ETHOS
Robert D. Kaplan
Random House, 2002, xxii + 198 pgs.