Mises Review 15, No. 3 (Fall 2009)

WHY NOT SOCIALISM?
G.A. Cohen
Princeton University Press, 2009, 83 pgs.
 

Mises Review 15, No. 3 (Fall 2009)

LITERATURE AND THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY: SPONTANEOUS ORDER IN CULTURE
Paul A. Cantor and Stephen Cox
Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009, xviii + 510 pgs.
 

The contributors to this outstanding collection of essays propose a revolution in literary criticism — a revolution, moreover, that has as its heart the application of Austrian economics. At first sight, the project appears paradoxical: what has Austrian economics to do with literature?

Mises Review 15, No. 4 (Winter 2009)

BOMB POWER: THE MODERN PRESIDENCY AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
Garry Wills
Penguin Press, 2010, 278 pgs.
 

Mises Review 15, No. 4 (Winter 2009)

MORALITY, POLITICAL ECONOMY, AND AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONALISM
Timothy P. Roth
Edward Elgar, 2007, x + 194 pgs.

Timothy Roth has in earlier work offered a penetrating criticism of modern welfare economics.[1] In Morality, Political Economy, and American Constitutionalism, he continues and extends this criticism; but he combines this with an unusual thesis. Not only is modern welfare economics wrong, he says: it violates the principles on which the American Republic was established.

Mises Review 15, No. 4 (Winter 2009)

THE POWER PROBLEM: HOW AMERICAN MILITARY DOMINANCE MAKES US LESS SAFE, LESS PROSPEROUS, AND LESS FREE
Christopher A. Preble
Cornell University Press, 2009, xiii + 212 pgs.
 

Mises Review 15, No. 4 (Winter 2009)

RULE OF LAW, MISRULE OF MEN
Elaine Scarry
MIT Press: A Boston Review Book, 2010, xxii + 191 pgs.
 

Elaine Scarry, a distinguished English professor at Harvard, attracted great acclaim early in her academic career for her study The Body in Pain (1985). It is hardly surprising, then, that the use of torture in the Iraq War has attracted her attention.

Mises Review 16, No. 1 (Spring 2010)

JUSTICE: WHAT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO?
Michael J. Sandel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, 307 pages
 

It is easy to see why Michael Sandel is a popular Harvard professor. He presents major ideas of ethics and political philosophy in a clear way, tied to important contemporary issues. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, based on a famous course that Sandel teaches, offers a discussion of what Sandel regards as the three main competing views of justice.

Mises Review 16, No. 1 (Spring 2010)

LIBERTARIANISM TODAY
Jacob H. Huebert
Praeger, 2010, vii + 254 pgs.

Mises Review 16, No. 1 (Spring 2010)

NEOCONSERVATISM: AN OBITUARY FOR AN IDEA
C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook
Paradigm Publishers, 2010, 256 pgs.
 

To most of us, neoconservatism is inevitably associated with the Iraq War. A group of neoconservatives, including Robert Kagan and David Frum, played with consummate folly a major role in urging the Bush administration toward initiating that conflict. The movement, on that ground alone, has little to recommend it; but can one nevertheless make a case on its behalf?

Mises Review 18, No. 1 (Spring 2012)

RETHINKING THE AMERICAN UNION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Donald Livingston
Pelican Publishing Company, 2012, 272 pgs.

The contributors to Donald Livingston’s valuable collection of essays defend two main contentions. Each of these contentions may be held independently of the other, but the first one provides a reason to welcome the truth of the second.

Livingston, with characteristic care, states the first of these contentions in this way: