I want to do the following in this paper: First to present the theses that constitute the hard core of the Marxist theory of history. I claim that all of them are essentially correct. Then I will show how these true theses are derived in Marxism from a false starting point. Finally, I will demonstrate how Austrianism in the Mises-Rothbard tradition can give a correct but categorically different explanation of their validity.
Fueled by almost frantic efforts to adjust and adapt in the face of intense inter- national competition, American industry undertook an immense corporate restructuring in the 1980s, partly in the form of corporate mergers and takeovers. The magnitude of these corporate acquisitions, both collectively and in individual cases, has been large.
Murray Newton Rothbard, eminent economist, historian, and philosopher, unquestionably the most ardent advocate of liberty in this century, did more damage to the cause of socialism than any other Western intellectual. To say that Murray Rothbard was a critic of socialism would be a serious understatement. Rothbard saw his mission in the never ending fight for liberty with all its enemies:
In American Power, a survey of American foreign policy and its chief architects since 1914, John Taft observes that the shadow cast by Woodrow Wilson, our twenty-eighth president, has affected our long-term view of international relations. Taft demonstrates his point by citing the appeal to Wilsonian ideals made by politicians and thinkers as ideologically varied as William Bullitt, Chester Bowles, Henry Wallace, Herbert Hoover, John Foster Dulles, Walter Lippmann, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and (even intermittently) George F. Kennan.
Murray Rothbard was seriously interested in a remarkably large array of topics, one of them being the effects of rival eschatological views during the Progressive era. The period was marked by four major eschatological views: postmillennialism, amillennialism, and the two forms of premillennialism, historic and dispensational (a post-1830 development).
The consubstantiality of liberalism and democracy has become a modem religious dogma. It is a doctrine transcending established political divisions, and ever since the de-Sovietization of Eastern Europe that began last year American journalists of otherwise differing ideological persuasions have urged the American government to nurture the seeds of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe.
Perhaps the best way of writing an introduction for this most welcome French translation of Ethics of Liberty is to discuss what has happened to libertarianism since the book’s original publication in 1982. Any such history can be divided into first, the development of libertarian theory, and second, its spread throughout the opinions and views of men and from there into human institutions.
Prohibition, I venture to say, was the last thing in the world the American people expected to have come upon them. “It can never happen” might be our national slogan. Let us wake up, and face conditions as they are.”1
This paper seeks to present Mises’s views on cultural questions as well as his belief that certain cultural institutions are buttressed by a laissez-faire social order. It also seeks to show that Mises was an opponent not only of the political agenda of the Left, but of its cultural agenda as well, which he saw as inconsistent with and indeed hostile to a laissez-faire social order.
The following essay attempts to touch on one aspect of modern environmentalism and to examine it against the backdrop of the values associated with a truly liberal society. What I hope to do is to explore certain traits common to the rhetoric of the environmental movement that I find particularly inimical to rational discourse and that serve only to support untenable and fallacious conclusions and recommendations that, if accepted, would prove devastating to civilization.
