The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which closed out the era of wars “of”—or allegedly “about”—religion, established what might be called a rule-bound cartel of sovereign, territorial states, conceived as externally equal to one another and internally hierarchical. At that moment, we see an end to any effective claim by the Papacy and the Holy Roman (German) Emperor to universal jurisdiction. The state system that displaced those competitors thereby created a rule-following international “society” of civilized, Christian European monarchies and states.

In this article, Thomas J. DiLorenzo reviews Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund, Jr’s Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War.

Volume 18, Number 4 (2004)

An introduction by Roderick T. Long to the 19th Volume of the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

Volume 19, Number 1 (2005)

Murray Rothbard devoted his life to the struggle for liberty, but, as anyone who has made a similar commitment realizes, it is never exactly clear how that devotion should translate into action. Consequently, Rothbard formed strategic alliances with widely different groups throughout his career. Perhaps the most intriguing of these alliances is the one Rothbard formed with the New Left in the mid-1960s, especially considering their antithetical economic views.

Volume 19, Number 1 (2005)

Volume 19, Number 1 (2005)

Henry Hazlitt, Economist and journalist, played a decisive role in the postwar presentation and dissemination of Austrian ideas in America. Not only was he Ludwig von Mises’s friend and editor, he was also a book reviewer at the New York Times and (later) columnist for Newsweek. From these positions, he brought broad attention to the works and ideas of Mises and Hayek to an English-speaking world that might have otherwise tended to disregard the writings of these Austrian exiles as coming from another time in another land.

The year 2004 marks the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Engelbrecht and Hanighen’s Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry,  a book that made it into the general consciousness of most thinking Americans by the mid-twentieth century. The stark language of the title no doubt contributed to its fame. Moreover, the theme of arms merchants pushing for war is both easily understood and easily discussed, even by those who have not read it.

Volume 19, Number 1 (2005)

In the present article, it is my goal to critically comment on Caplan’s most recent argument. The next section is devoted to Probability and Science, followed by a section on Synthetic a priori and Common Sense, and then a section on Caplan’s Bayesian Cure.

Volume 19, Number 1 (2005)

In this article, Gary Galles reviews Benjamin Constant’s Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments.

Volume 19, Number 1 (2005)

In this article, David Gordon reviews Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff, and Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order by Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl.

The existence of common property in anarcho-capitalism naturally points to the interesting policy question of how this common property would be controlled and maintained. While one might speculate on the issue, this paper stops short of any hard-and-fast conclusions on this point, focusing instead on how common property comes into being in anarcho-capitalism.

Volume 19, Number 2 (2005)