The Free Man’s Library

JEVONS, W. STANLEY. The Theory of Political Economy. 1871. Numerous editions.

A work of epoch-making importance. John Maynard Keynes writes of it: “Jevons’s Theory is the first treatise to present in a finished form the theory of value based on subjective valuations, the marginal principle and the now familiar technique of the algebra and diagrams of the subject. The first modern book on economics, it has proved singularly attractive to all bright minds newly attacking the subject;—simple, lucid, unfaltering, chiselled in stone where Marshall knits in wool.”

JEVONS, W. STANLEY The State in Relation to Labor. 1882. Macmillan. 174 pp.

In this book Jevons takes a cautious, intermediate position regarding state intervention: “The all-important point,” he explains in the preface, “is to explain if possible why, in general, we uphold the rule of laisser-faire, and yet in large classes of cases invoke the interference of local or central authorities. . . . The outcome of the inquiry is that we can lay down no hard-and-fast rules, but must treat every case in detail upon its merits.” But in his Primer on Political Economy, published in 1878, he wrote, for example: “There is no reason whatever to think that trades unions have had any permanent effect in raising wages in the majority of trades.”

JEVONS, W. STANLEY The Coal Question. 1865. Macmillan. 383 pp.

This bears the subtitle: “An enquiry concerning the progress of the nation, and the probable exhaustion of our coal mines.” It is significant as foreseeing far in advance a physical condition which, when it developed, was attributed to the wastefulness of private competition and led to Britain’s futile nationalization of the coal mines.

JEWKES, JOHN. Ordeal by Planning. Macmillan. 1948. 248 pp.

The most forthright and powerful attack on government economic planning that has appeared in England since Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. While it lacks some of the philosophic penetration and depth of Hayek’s book, it is more explicit and concrete. Its style is lively, sparkling, and witty. Professor Jewkes was a wartime member of the British bureaucracy and has seen central economic planning from the inside. “The planned economy,” he concludes, “must finally destroy the very instruments of free speech. . . . This is no accident. . . . It is due to the logical incompatibility of a planned economy and freedom for the individual. . . . There is no end to this process of seeking to cure the evils of planning by more planning except a totalitarian economy of the Russian type.”

JOSEPH, H. W. B. The Labor Theory of Value in Karl Marx. Oxford University Press. 1923. 176 pp.

Professor Joseph holds that the theory which finds an objective measure of value for things in the labor embodied in them is fundamentally false. The author is well known as a logician. The late L. Susan Stebbing called his Introduction to Logic “by far the best systematic exposition of the traditional logic.” James Bonar wrote of the present book in The Economic Journal: “It is not censure but commendation that in showing [that Marx’s theory is false] Mr. Joseph follows the lines of many predecessors, especially Böhm-Bawerk, that model of conscientious thoroughness. . . . The book is sane and helpful. Its discussions give good training in Applied Logic.”

JOUVENEL, BERTRAND DE. The Ethics of Redistribution. Cambridge University Press. 1951. 91 pp.

Deliberately putting aside the argument that current government efforts to redistribute incomes reduce or destroy incentives, Baron de Jouvenel seeks to deal with the subject on purely ethical grounds. Would total equalization of incomes, he asks, even if it did not reduce production, be good or desirable? Or does justice demand individual rewards proportionate to the value of individual services? In an acute and original discussion, de Jouvenel shows not only how disappointing (in Great Britain, for example) the results of a further redistribution of incomes would be, but how redistribution has turned out to mean in effect “far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.”

JOUVENEL, BERTRAND DE. On Power. Viking Press. 1949. 421 pp.

“M. de Jouvenel, a French journalist and historian, who finished this book in exile during the war, maintains that all power is corrupt, no matter what political philosophy it is dedicated to. Even revolutions, which break up special privilege in the name of the common good, are the products of a desire for power, he believes, and the iniquities of power cannot be prevented by putting philosophers, scientists, and ‘men of good will’ in high office, for as soon as they are on top, they become politicians. . . . The book is not a tract, but a fully considered line of thinking, and has caused a great deal of comment in Europe. An important book, brilliantly written.”—New Yorker.

KALME, ALBERT. Total Terror. Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1951. 310 pp.

An account of the fate of the three Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—under the Nazis and the Russian communist regime.

KANTOROWICZ, HERMANN U. The Spirit of British Policy, and the Myth of the Encirclement of Germany. Oxford University Press. 1931. 541 pp.

The primary purpose of this scholarly and thorough book by an eminent German jurist is to disprove the notion of the “encirclement” of Germany through the operations of British diplomacy as a cause of World War I.

KAPLAN, A. D. H. Big Enterprise in the Competitive System. Brookings Institution. 1953. 269 pp.

A careful statistical study which throws a brilliant light on the question of bigness, monopoly, “oligopoly” and competition in American industry. Dr. Kaplan shows, for example, that of the 100 largest industrial firms in the United States in 1909 only 36 stayed in the list of the 100 largest for 1948. “The top is a slippery place,” and no safeguard against the hazards of competition. Dr. Kaplan points out that the attitude of the American public toward “big business” is oddly inconsistent. Individually, as investors, employees, and consumers, the people support and promote the growth of big business enterprises. But collectively they regard “big business” with distrust.

KASENKINA, OKSANA. Leap to Freedom. Lippincott. 1949. 295 pp.

Autobiography of the Russian teacher, Oksana Kasenkina. “Her story of the first faint glimmering of the idea of breaking away from the soul-crushing tyranny which surrounded her, of the slow growth of her hope and determination, of her first abortive attempt to pull free and of her final desperate plunge from a window of the Soviet Consulate into the courtyard below, and into the welcoming arms of America, make up the best part of the book. Even though you know that she did escape, the suspense at the end is terrific.”—Oriana Atkinson, in The New York Times.

KEETON, G. W. The Passing of Parliament. London: Ernest Benn. 1952. 208 pp.

G. W. Keeton is dean of the Faculty of Laws at University College, London. During the past seventy years, he points out, the British Parliament, although still nominally supreme, has conferred on government departments and agencies increasingly wide powers of lawmaking. The jurisdiction of the courts and the legislative powers of the House of Lords have been seriously curtailed. Party discipline has intensified, so that a government may rely upon a firm majority in the House of Commons to give legal force to almost any measure it proposes. The Rule of Law has been gravely undermined. It is Professor Keeton’s thesis that, in consequence of these developments, the sovereignty of Parliament is in danger of becoming a fiction, and that all the necessary machinery for Cabinet dictatorship already exists. This scholarly and cogent book is a worthy successor to The New Despotism written by Lord Hewart (q.v.) more than twenty years ago.

KEEZER, DEXTER MERRIAM, and associates. Making Capitalism Work. McGraw-Hill. 1950. 316 pp.

A program for preserving freedom and stabilizing prosperity. The volume is the joint product of several members of the economics department of the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. Its own declaration of purpose is: “This book is written from a definite point of view and with a clear-cut purpose. The point of view is that capitalism is the best way to economic life for the United States of America. The purpose is to explain that point of view and present a series of steps which, in the view of the authors, must be taken to give capitalism the promise of a prosperous future in the United States.”

KELLER, THE REV. EDWARD A. Christianity and American Capitalism. Chicago: Heritage Foundation. 1954. 92 pp.

Father Keller examines socialism, capitalism, big government and big labor, and restates the case for the American economic system.

KELSEN, HANS. The Political Theory of Bolshevism. University of California Press. 1948. 60 pp.

A critical analysis of the political theory of bolshevism. “The purpose of this study is to show the paradoxical contradiction which exists within bolshevism between anarchism in theory and totalitarianism in practice, and to defend the true idea of democracy.”—From the Introduction.

KELSEN, HANS. The Communist Theory of Law. Frederick A. Praeger. 1955. 203 pp.

“Hans Kelsen is one of the world’s leading authorities on legal theory and international law. . . . He begins with an analysis of the Marx-Engels theory of state and law that is positively brilliant. . . . Kelsen’s analysis of the logical contradictions in historical materialism and its application to state and law has, so far as I know, no equal.”—Bertram D. Wolfe, in The New York Times.

KEMMERER, E. W. The A B C of Inflation. Whittlesey House. 1942. 174 pp.

An excellent little book on the causes and consequences of monetary inflation, although the threat of inflation to liberty was not as clear when this book was written as it has since become.

KIEKHOFER, WILLIAM H. Economic Principles, Problems and Policies. Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1951.

A standard college textbook.

KING, WILLFORD I. The Keys to Prosperity. Constitution and Free Enterprise Foundation. 1948. 242 pp.

Dr. King believes that most of the keys that unlock the gates to prosperity were found by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Additional “keys” have been discovered since that time. Yet “a great tangle of misconceptions and fallacies” has buried many of them “so deeply that it has required a trained eye to detect them.” Dr. King attempts here to disentangle the fallacies from the economic truths in order that the reader may find the “keys to prosperity.” He writes with lucidity and statistical authority.

KINTNER, WILLIAM R. The Front Is Everywhere. University of Oklahoma Press. 1950. 274 pp.

“The author, now at Fort Leavenworth, started research for this book while doing graduate work at Georgetown University. He believes that an overruling military purpose shapes every aspect of Communist organization. Kintner endeavors to prove his point by examining the history of the Marxist movement from origins to era of Lenin and Stalin. The volume contains some significant observations, based on wide acquaintance with Communist literature.”—Library Journal.

KIRK, RUSSELL. The Conservative Mind. Regnery. 1953. 458 pp.

In my Introduction to this bibliography I call attention to the compatibility of an intelligent conservatism with a vigorous defense of freedom. Russell Kirk recognizes this. “Political liberalism before the middle of the nineteenth century,” he writes, “was conservatism of a sort: it intended to conserve liberty.” The present book analyzes the conservative spirit and philosophy as exemplified in a series of writers from Edmund Burke to George Santayana. “The author of The Conservative Mind is as relentless as his enemies, Karl Marx and Harold Laski, considerably more temperate and scholarly, and in passages of this very readable book, brilliant and even eloquent. . . . Against the Hegel-Marx-Laski axis he analyzes and describes the affirmative tradition of Burke, de Tocqueville and Irving Babbitt.”—G. K. Chalmers, in The New York Times.

KNIGHT, FRANK H. Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Houghton Mifflin. 1921. 381 pp.

In his preface, Professor Knight declares: “The particular technical contribution to the theory of free enterprise which this essay purports to make is a fuller and more careful examination of the role of the entrepreneur or enterpriser, the recognized ‘central figure’ of the system, and of the forces which fix the remuneration of his special function.”

“The outstanding fact about Professor Knight’s book is that the author has made a contribution to the theory of profit that no student of the subject can afford to neglect.”—G. P. Watkins, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

KNIGHT, FRANK H. The Ethics of Competition, and Other Essays. Harper. 1935. 363 pp.

A collection of eleven important essays by Professor Knight, brought together by a group of his former students. It includes a bibliography of his writings from 1915 to 1935. “Professor Knight . . . manages in the course of this volume to throw original and arresting light on almost every corner of the contemporary economic problem. One page after another in his book is filled not merely with great wisdom and subtlety, but with constant aphoristic sentences that strike the reader at once with their pertinence and truth. . . . It is . . . because Professor Knight is an economic theorist of the first rank and a believer in personal and political liberty, that his criticism of the existing economic system is so extremely valuable. He also has the great merit of seeing the philosophical background clearly, and not falling back, like some economists, on philosophical solecisms while professing to eschew philosophy altogether.”—London Times Literary Supplement.

KNIGHT, FRANK H. Freedom and Reform. Harper. 1947. 409 pp.

Essays in economic and social philosophy. “Knight’s personal influence, through his teaching, exceeds even the influence of his writings. It is hardly an exaggeration to state that nearly all the younger American economists who really understand and advocate a competitive economic system, have at one time been Knight’s students.”—F. A. Hayek.

KNOWLES, LILIAN C. A. Industrial and Commercial Revolutions in Great Britain during the Nineteenth Century. Dutton. 1921. 420 pp.

“The best general economic history of England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the question of the interpretation of State intervention during this period, its attitude may be described as ‘neutral.’”—PI.

KOESTLER, ARTHUR. Darkness at Noon. Macmillan. 1941. 267 pp. (Also Modern Library. 1946.)

A powerful novel based on the famous Moscow trials. It centers about a former People’s Commissar who has followed certain practices for a cause that seemed of supreme importance, and now finds himself victim of his own methods. In portraying the psychology of a loyal communist, the novel illuminates not only Russia but the conflict between the individual and the State.

KOESTLER, ARTHUR. The Yogi and the Commissar. Macmillan. 1945. 247 pp.

A collection of sixteen essays. These essays contain the shrewd and sometimes brilliant insights of a former communist—and the confusions of one who still remains a socialist.

KORNER, EMIL. The Law of Freedom as the Remedy for War and Poverty. London: Williams & Norgate. 1951. 2 vols. 562 pp. 663 pp.

This work, translated from the original German, contains much that seems to me confused and crotchety, but also much that is illuminating. “Korner offers stimulating viewpoints to those who adhere to L. Mises’, F. A. Hayek’s and L. Robbins’ doctrines of economic freedom or to H. C. Simons’ Positive Program of Laissez-faire and reject Marxism as well as Keynesian economics.”—Theo Surányi-Unger, in The American Economic Review.

KRAVCHENKO, VICTOR. I Chose Freedom. Scribner’s. 1946. 496 pp.

“About two months before D-Day on the beaches of Normandy, a frightened member of the Soviet Purchasing Commission deserted his post in Washington and placed himself under the protection of the people of the United States. He was Victor Kravchenko, long a member of the Communist party, an engineer, a factory director and for a time an official in the Council of Peoples Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, by far the largest of the republics constituting the U.S.S.R. Kravchencko was not frightened of shell-fire but of the long arm of Soviet law dealing with a renegade. He escaped, however, and in I Chose Freedom he and his translator have described his life in the Soviet Union, his views of the Soviet regime and the events that prompted him to desert.”—Weekly Book Review. “It is, I believe, the most remarkable and most revelatory report to have come out of the Soviet Union from any source whatsoever.”—Dorothy Thompson, in the Saturday Review of Literature.

KRAVCHENKO, VICTOR. I Chose Justice. Scribner’s. 1950. 458 pp.

“A sequel to I Chose Freedom. The author describes his successful libel suit against Les Lettres Françaises, a Parisian Communist magazine which had called his book a fake.”—The New York Times. “The world is indebted to the author for material which should settle once for all every honest doubt as to the Kremlin’s determination to destroy human liberties.”—Catholic World.

KROPOTKIN, PRINCE. Mutual Aid. London: Heinemann. 1904. 348 pp.

“The Anarchists are Individualists of a somewhat perverse kind. So extreme an Individualist as Auberon Herbert was very careful to disclaim any connection with Anarchy. Kropotkin—who was considerably influenced by the farm-loving Fourier—advocated the extreme Individualism which threw off all restraint, and arrived, through Anarchy, at Communism. But the goal is ‘free Communism untrammelled by the State.’ In economics a good time is coming. . . . In social life and politics there is to be the enjoyment for all of the same liberty. All contracts—above all, marriage—are void unless ‘voluntarily and frequently renewed.’ With almost incredible optimism, the Anarchists held that sovereign Reason coupled with the inherited instinct of solidarity impelling men towards mutual aid (this seems to have been Kropotkin’s own and comparatively commonsense contribution) would be sufficient to control human passions. Government would be quite unnecessary. There is a myth that the philosopher Empedocles, to prove some philosophical principle, threw himself into Etna and perished. Much the same fate befell poor Kropotkin. Believing that his principles had triumphed in Russia, he hurried to his native land in the expectation of seeing the world’s great age begin anew. He soon discovered that, as the Jacobins were said to have no need of chemists, so the Leninites had no use for philosophers, and he died in poverty that almost amounted to starvation.”—PI.

KRUTCH, JOSEPH WOOD. The Measure of Man. Bobbs-Merrill. 1954. 261 pp.

This is a well-written and closely reasoned book. It is a significant and hopeful sign that Joseph Wood Krutch, whose background has been mainly that of a literary and dramatic critic, and who has no special knowledge of economics and politics, should have arrived by an independent route at much the same conclusions as those of F. A. Hayek in The Counter-Revolution of Science (q.v.). Although the two writers show no knowledge of each other’s work, Krutch, like Hayek, has become profoundly critical of the mechanistic, “conditioning” and “engineering” point of view toward man and society: he answers the arguments of the mechanists not on emotional or mystical, but on scientific and rational, grounds. Historically he shows how nineteenth century thought, under the influence of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and their followers, left us the heritage of materialism, mechanism and determinism that has played into the hands of the totalitarians. Krutch contends that man is capable of making independent choices and value judgments and of freely choosing what he will do.

KÜHNELT-LEDDIHN, ERIK MARIA VON. Liberty or Equality. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers. 1952. 395 pp.

“The book is an exploration of certain interconnected hypotheses, of varying generality, about contemporary politics. The first set of propositions to be examined is: That the impulse of ‘democracy’ (popular government) is the pursuit of equality, and that this leads unavoidably (and has in fact led) to collectivism and on to oppressive totalitarianism; and that ‘liberalism’ is the pursuit of liberty and is an incompatible mate for ‘democracy.’ . . . The second proposition: That ‘monarchy’ is a more serviceable manner of government than ‘democracy’ and likely to be more ‘liberal.’ . . . The third: That the political temper of Catholic nations is more ‘liberal’ than that of Protestant nations.”—Spectator. “The book is uneven—sometimes naive, sometimes poorly thought out, and sometimes exasperatingly repetitious. But its genuine insights make it worth reading, despite its weaknesses.”—W. P. Clancy, in Commonweal.

LACOUR-GAYET, JACQUES, AND LACOUR-GAYET, ROBERT. De Platon à la Terreur. Paris: Éditions SPID. 1948. 268 pp.

This is a short history of the philosophy and practice of State economic planning and price controls “from Plato to the Terror.” It contains chapters on Plato and the planned economy, the price-fixing edicts of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, reflections on the “just price” of medieval theory, the search for economic liberty in France from 1789 to 1791, the enormous inflation of the French currency, and its culmination in the dreadful Law of the Maximum (price control), which made the situation far worse and abolished liberty.

LACOUR-GAYET, JACQUES (ed.). Vingt Ans de Capitalisme D’État. Paris: Éditions SPID. 1951. 302 pp.

A critical examination by nine writers of “twenty years of State capitalism” in France. The authors show the deleterious consequences of the nationalization of various industries in the period from 1930 to 1950. The contributors are: André Armengaud, Louis Baudin, Jacques Chastenet, Pierre Fromont, Emile Mireaux, Marcel Pellenc, André Thiers, Daniel Villey and Jacques Lacour-Gayet.

LACOUR-GAYET, JACQUES (ed.). Monnaie d’Hier et de Demain. Paris: Éditions SPID. 1952. 226 pp.

Essays by five distinguished French economists on the vicissitudes of French money in recent years and on the necessity for returning to an international gold standard. Charles Rist writes on the experience of 1926 and the franc of today. Jacques Rueff writes on the reasons for returning to a gold standard. Alfred Pose writes on monetary stability and gold money. And Edmond Giscard d’Estaing writes on commerce and the need for an international money.

LACY, MARY G. Food Control During Forty Centuries. Scientific Monthly, June, 1923. 14 pp.

Mary G. Lacy was librarian of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This paper on the results of government efforts to control food prices through the centuries was reissued in pamphlet form by Swift & Co. in 1933. Although compact, it is remarkably comprehensive and carefully documented, and deserves to be far better known. Mary Lacy also compiled in 1926 (with Annie M. Hannay and Emily L. Day), Price-fixing by Governments, 424 B.C. to 1926 A.D.

LANE, ARTHUR BLISS. I Saw Poland Betrayed. Bobbs-Merrill. 1948. 344 pp.

The author was appointed United States ambassador to Poland in July 1944 and took up his duties while the Potsdam conference was still in session, July 1945. He retired in 1947, after nearly two years of frustration, to “tell the story as I had seen it.” “For the sake of the American share in the history of the post-war years, one is sorry that the analysis of Soviet plans, the pattern for ideological conquest, were not presented to the public during the last days of the war. But since Lane was a career diplomat, that was impossible. He has done his best. It is very good.”—Drew Middleton, in The New York Times.

LANE, ROSE WILDER. The Discovery of Freedom. John Day. 1943. 262 pp.

A discussion of man’s struggle against authority. Mrs. Lane argues (1) that progress depends on a minimum of governmental control; and (2) that the only true control is individual and that individual control is in accord with religious faith. The book is eloquent and stimulating and covers a wide range of subjects.

LANE, ROSE WILDER. Give Me Liberty. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers. 1945. 56 pp.

An expansion of an article that originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. Mrs. Lane vividly describes her friendliness with communists in New York, her encounters with socialist bureaucracies in Europe, and her observations and discussions with simple villagers and primitive communists in Russia during the early years of the Soviet regime. She tells how she came to understand the rarity and the supremely precious values of personal freedom.

LE BON, GUSTAVE. The Psychology of Socialism. London: Unwin. 1909. 489 pp.

“This brilliant work by a convinced opponent of Socialism is based on the view that the best way to fight it and expose it is to make a scientific examination of it. . . . ‘Hitherto psychologists has disdained to study it.’ . . . The book abounds in epigrammatic apothegms. . . . ‘All that has gone to make the greatness of civilization [he insists]: sciences, arts, philosophies, religions, military power, etc., has been the work of individuals, not of aggregates. . . . The peoples among whom Individualism is most highly developed are by this fact alone at the head of civilization, and today dominate the world.’ . . . The theories of Socialism and its history are subjected to a penetrating analysis. Le Bon seems to fear that it will be victorious, and thus, he thinks, bring about the destruction of modern civilization. . . . Le Bon’s other works are The World in Revolt, 1921; and The Crowd, 16th impression, 1926.”—PI.

LECKY, W. E. H. Democracy and Liberty. Longmans, Green. 1896. 2 vols. 1169 pp.

“Of all English publicists Lecky was the most fit to take the place vacated by John Stuart Mill. He differed from Mill in most of his political and philosophical views, but he has the same candor and delight in learning. This discursive treatise is not one of his best works, but it has many wise comments on modern democracy, and the chapters on Socialism and Labor Questions should be studied. There is no systematic attack upon Socialism, but Lecky’s intellectual attitude is Individualistic. He observes that ‘Socialism is essentially opposed to Free Trade and international commerce.’ As democracy is hasty and impatient, it may make changes in a collectivist direction. ‘But proposed changes which conflict with the fundamental laws and elements of human nature can never, in the long run, succeed. The sense of right and wrong, which is the basis of the respect for property and for the obligation of contract; the feeling of family affection, on which the continuity of society depends, and out of which the system of heredity grows; the essential difference of men in aptitudes, capacities, and character, are things that never can be changed, and all schemes and policies that ignore them are doomed to ultimate failure.’”—PI.

LEVINE, ISAAC DON. Stalin. Cosmopolitan Book. 1931. 421 pp.

The first clear and complete account of the life of Stalin to appear in English, published when the Russian dictator was still an enigmatic figure to the Western world. The author’s thesis is that “if it was Lenin who conceived the Communist party as a military order . . . it is to Stalin that is due the lion’s share of the credit or onus of forging this order into an army of steel.” The book gives a portrait of Stalin that is “vivid, graphic, intelligent and convincing. . . . Moreover, it portrays Bolshevism infinitely better than most of the books on Russia do.”—Alexander Nazaroff, in The New York Times.

LHOSTE-LACHAUME, PIERRE. Réhabilitation du Libéralisme. 1950. Paris: Éditions SÉDIF. 320 pp.

The liberalism that this French economist wants to see restored is the traditional kind which demanded that the state should not encroach on “liberty of thought, of speech and of the press, private ownership of the means of production and a free market.” Felix Morley writes: “The epic struggle of today, as M. Lhoste-Lachaume sees it, is between true liberalism and communism. The parliamentary socialists, among whom he includes many Americans who would resent the description, will in the long run be taken over by communism. When people get the habit of living on subsidies, and expecting ‘social security’ from government, they tacitly become the fellow-travelers of the communists.” The book is the first of a contemplated trilogy, and has not yet been translated into English.

LHOSTE-LACHAUME, PIERRE. The Keystone of Liberty. Paris: Éditions SÉDIF. 1954. 79 pp.

The French title of this book is La Clef de Voute de la Liberté. It presents the English text on each left-hand page, and the French on each right-hand page, of an article that appeared originally in the British quarterly, The Owl, in September 1953. The book discusses the liberal era of the nineteenth century, the gradual giving up of traditional liberal principles, and the necessity of a “liberal renovation” which would recognize the beneficial effects of the free market and avoid “the blind alley of democratic socialism.” The author believes that the world’s present choice is between either a “spiritualist liberalism” or a totalitarian materialism. There is an eight-page appendix presenting an extensive bibliography of recent books in French, German, Italian, Dutch, and English which support a free society and a free economy.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS LEGISLATIVE REFERENCE SERVICE. Communism in Action. U. S. Government Printing Office. 1946. 141 pp.

A documented study and analysis of communism in operation in the Soviet Union. House Document No. 754. There is a foreword by Congressman Everett M. Dirksen.

LINDBLOM, CHARLES E. Unions and Capitalism. Yale University Press. 1949. 267 pp.

This is a strange book, written by an associate professor of economics at Yale University, a declared “liberal” (in the recent American sense, as opposed to “conservative”), yet which states the menace of present-day big unionism with far more power and clarity than most conservative economists have dared to state it. Professor Lindblom’s thesis, in his own words, “is that unionism and the private enterprise economy are incompatible. . . . Unionism is destroying the competitive price system. . . . The strike . . . paralyzes production, and it is dramatic. But the real labor problem is its aftermath. . . . For if wage disputes call a halt to production temporarily, their settlement may disorganize it permanently. Unionism will destroy the price system by what it wins rather than by the struggle to win it. It sabotages the competitive order, not because the economy cannot weather the disturbance of work stoppages but because it cannot produce high output and employment at union wage rates.” His grim conclusion is, in sum, that “union monopoly destroys the price system because it produces . . . waste, unemployment, inflation, or all combined . . . to a degree which the economy cannot survive.”

LINK, HENRY C. The Rediscovery of Morals. Dutton. 1947. 223 pp.

A discussion of what is wrong with the world of today and its people, and what can be done about it. Problems of race and class conflict are given special attention. The author takes our educational system to task for its lack of emphasis on morals, and advocates a return to Christian morality.

LIPPER, ELINOR. Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps. Regnery. 1951. 310 pp.

“A gently nurtured Dutch girl studying medicine in Berlin in 1931 was deeply touched by the miseries of the German unemployed, and at Hitler’s ascendancy transferred her loyalties to the Soviet Union. From 1937-1948 she was a political prisoner held without trial for the bulk of her hideous, subhuman imprisonment at Kolyma in Siberia.”—Library Journal.

LIPPMANN, WALTER The Good Society. Little, Brown. 1937. 402 pp.

Reviewing this book in The New York Times of Sept. 26, 1937, I wrote: “No more powerful and thorough indictment” of the fallacies of collectivism and of a managed economy “has been written in America.” The latter part of the book is marred by an inconsistent support of an apparently Keynesian type of “monetary management.” But the first half is as penetrating as it is eloquent. Mr. Lippman contends that it is governmental coercion that is creating the very chaos it purports to conquer. He insists that a managed economy must mean a censored and managed opinion. He concludes that the consequences of collectivism must be regimentation, censorship, militarism, war, despotism, impoverishment, and barbarism, and that the only hope of mankind lies in the restoration of liberal doctrine.

LOCKE, JOHN. Two Treatises of Civil Government. 1690. Many editions. (Everyman’s Library. 1924.) 242 pp.

The historical importance of these two works in the history of individualism is enormous. (For a discussion, see the introductory essay to this list, “Individualism in Politics and Economics.”)

LOCKE, JOHN. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Many editions.

“This work, which is a landmark in the history of philosophy, does not bear directly upon Individualism; but some of the earlier chapters at least should be carefully studied, in order that the reader may grasp Locke’s general principles, which guided politics in England and the United States for some 200 years. It bases all knowledge and practice on experience. . . . As Sir James Mackintosh said: ‘Few books have contributed more to rectify prejudice—to diffuse a just mode of thinking—to excite a fearless spirit of inquiry—and yet to contain it within the boundaries which nature has prescribed to the human understanding.’ This ‘fearless spirit of inquiry’ was subversive of the faith in established laws and governments and was a necessary equipment for those who, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, began their attack upon obsolete institutions. It was thus a preliminary to Individualism, to voluntary instead of compulsory co-operation—to use the phraseology of Herbert Spencer.”—PI.

LOCKE, JOHN. Considerations on the Lowering of Interest. 1691. Several editions. 138 pp.

“Here Locke anticipated many of the arguments of the better-known work On Usury by Bentham, i.e., his position was laissez-faire.”—PI.

LUTZ, HARLEY L. Guideposts to a Free Economy. McGraw-Hill. 1945. 206 pp.

A series of essays on federal fiscal policy, taxation, and public expenditures that give a rounded understanding of our journey along two divergent roads of fiscal policy—one leading to a controlled economy and the other to the strengthening of the enterprise system and individual freedom in a free economy. “Professor Lutz has written such a book as will give true liberals no end of satisfaction and cause the national planners acute anguish.”—G. R. E., in the Christian Science Monitor.

LUTZ, HARLEY L. A Platform for the American Way. Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1952. 114 pp.

The author, who was Professor of Public Finance at Princeton for nearly twenty years, is distinguished for his clarity and logic and his vigorous defense of the free enterprise system. His thesis in this book is that “we are both drifting and being steered into some form of the national socialist state.” He regards the Right to Own as a basic human right, and he here offers “a program and a way of life to all who believe in freedom and who want to remain free here in America.”

LUTZ, HARLEY L. Public Finance. Appleton-Century. 1936. 940 pp.

A solidly reasoned textbook pointing to the dangers in deficit financing and reaffirming the case for balanced budgets and other “orthodox” fiscal practices.

LYONS, EUGENE. Assignment in Utopia. Harcourt, Brace. 1937. 658 pp.

The author writes of his years of growing disillusionment in Russia, where he served as an American newspaper correspondent from 1928 to 1934. He describes among other things the famine of 1932-1933, and some of the causes of it. “An important book—vivid, sincere and full of factual and of psychological interest.”—London Times Literary Supplement.

LYONS, EUGENE. The Red Decade. Bobbs-Merrill. 1941. 423 pp.

A study of the activities of communists and fellow-travelers in the United States during the decade from 1930 to 1940. “The facts are fabulous, and Lyons relates them with a gusto that rises at times almost to hilarity. He has a gift of slashing satire, and no fear of calling foolish acts and famous people by their exact names. But besides that, and somewhat surprisingly combined with it, he possesses sympathetic understanding.”—Max Eastman, in The New York Times.

MACAULAY, LORD. Selections from Writings and Speeches. 1853. Many editions.

“Among Macaulay’s Essays the most notable for our purposes is on Southey’s Colloquies on Society. Among the speeches should be read that on the Ten Hours Bill (1846), in which he takes the modern view that in some cases it may be the duty of the State to protect labor. That on the Corn Laws (1845) is a vigorous statement of the Free Trade position. Another noteworthy speech is on the People’s Charter in 1842. To Macaulay the Chartists appeared as the Communists appear to most people today. He was convinced that their object was the nationalization of the land and the abolition of private property. He says: “The doctrine of the Chartist philosophers is that it is the business of the government to support the people. It is supposed by many that our rulers possess, somewhere or other, an inexhaustible storehouse of all the necessaries and conveniences of life, and, from mere hard-heartedness, refuse to distribute the contents of this magazine among the people. . . . Is it possible to believe that the millions who have been so long and loudly told that the land is their estate and is wrongfully kept from them, should not, when they have supreme power, use that power to enforce what they think their rights? What could follow but one vast spoliation?’ ”—PI.

MCCARRAN, SISTER M. MARGARET PATRICIA. Fabianism in the Political Life of Britain. Chicago: Heritage Foundation. (Catholic University of America Press.) 1952. 612 pp.

The Fabian Society, which later, through the membership of Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, H. G, Wells and others, came to exercise an enormous intellectual influence for socialism out of all proportion to its numbers, was originally founded in 1883 by a few obscure young people in London with the object of “reconstructing society in accordance with the highest moral possibilities.” This is a highly critical but encyclopedic reference work on the history of the society and its activities.

MACCUN, JOHN. Six Radical Thinkers. London: Arnold. 1907. 268 pp.

“The articles on Bentham and Cobden are worth notice.”—PI.

MACEOIN, GARY AND ZOMBORY, AKOS. The Communist War on Religion. Devin-Adair. 1951. 264 pp.

“Today few Americans are complacent about the threat Communism constitutes to the things they hold dear . . . But we are still hazy about the essence of the Communist threat. The essential threat is to truth and freedom: that is, the freedom of men to be men, free to choose, free to move, to speak, to think—free to worship God. Wherever the Communists have seized power, they have destroyed these freedoms, wading through seas of human blood. . . . This book tells that story as illustrated in the persecution of religion in every Communist-controlled country.”—From the Introduction.

MACINNES, HELEN. Neither Five Nor Three. Harcourt, Brace. 1951. 340 pp.

“A group of attractive, intelligent, well-intentioned New Yorkers who create, edit and publish an influential popular magazine called ‘Trend’ suddenly wake up to the fact that their magazine has been infiltrated, quietly and with devilish cleverness, that its columns are now being used subtly to disparage and undermine faith in everything American.”—New York Herald Tribune. “It is good, exciting reading.”—Edmund Fuller, in the Saturday Review of Literature.

MACKIEWICZ, JOSEPH. The Katyn Wood Murders. London: Hollis & Carter. 1951. 252 pp.

A former member of the Polish underground, who went to Katyn while the Polish Red Cross was investigating the discovery of the mass graves, describes his experiences and his beliefs about the crime. “The book is as fascinating as a detective story and deserves the widest possible audience as a final, conclusive exposure of Soviet responsibility for an atrocious butchery. This responsibility was hushed up far too long because of the supposed necessity of appeasing Stalin during the war years,”—W. H. Chamberlin, in the Chicago Sunday Tribune,

MADISON, JAMES. Reports of Debates in the Federal Convention. 1787. Several editions. 3 vols.

The basic source book on the actual framing of the American Constitution.

MAINE, SIR HENRY SUMNER. Popular Government. Holt. 1886. 261 pp.

“Including the famous essay on the ‘Constitution of the United States.’ The careful student will also familiarize himself with Maine’s Ancient Law.”—Felix Morley.

MALLOCK, W. H. A Critical Examination of Socialism. Harper. 1907. 303 pp.

“Mallock was a brilliant critic. This book in substance consists of lectures delivered in the United States in 1907. It is an able attack upon Socialism. He rightly begins with Marx, pointing out the main error of his theory of labor—the leaving out of consideration directive ability.”—PI.

MALLOCK, W. H. Social Reform as Related to Realities and Delusions. Dutton. 1915. 391 pp.

“The primary purpose of this book is to illustrate the ‘mischievous delusions’ by which popular opinion is vitiated in questions of social reform owing to the general lack of knowledge and understanding of the structure and functioning of the social system. . . . The immense material advance which the nineteenth century has witnessed is constantly emphasized. Strangely enough, most of the specific delusions to which Mallock drew attention in 1914 still seem to persist almost as much as they did when the book was published.”—PI (in 1927).

MALLOCK, W. H. Democracy. 1924. 213 pp.

“A ruthless exposure of the fallacies lurking in the term ‘democracy.’ The present edition is an abridgment of an earlier and very much larger work entitled The Limits of Pure Democracy. ”—PI.

MALLOCK, W. H. Property and Progress. Putnam. 1884. 248 pp.

“A criticism of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1882). Also somewhat out of date, even as George is out of date. But the Georgian theory of land is historically important and still has its influence on a certain type of Radical.”—PI.

MALTHUS, THE REV. THOMAS R. An Essay on Population. 1798, etc. Many editions. (Everyman’s Library. 2 vols. 315 pp. 285 pp.)

This book has perhaps been “refuted” more often, and denounced and ridiculed more often, than any other. Yet it is one of the world’s great seminal works. In the scientific field it helped to inspire Darwin’s theory of evolution. And in the economic field, if its influence has been unfortunately less than it should have been, it has given birth to an enormous body of controversial literature. The form in which Malthus stated his theory in his first edition was certainly extreme and erroneous. Yet he was the first to seize and document a great and sobering truth. This is that, unless restrained, population tends to increase up to the limits of the means of subsistence. Because he overlooked many technical and scientific possibilities, Malthus’s personal pessimism has not been justified by events. But it does not follow that his proposition, in its most general form, has been disproved by events, as it has been so often fashionable to believe. The rising standard of living in the Western world has been at least partly the result of deliberate population restraint (even if in the form of birth control rather than of the sexual “continence” that Malthus advocated). Where this population restraint still does not exist, as in India, China, and other parts of the Orient, the lesson of Malthus is only too plain today. An important corollary of his theory is that schemes of social reform and “redistribution of wealth” are not only futile but pernicious when they neglect the effect upon population growth.

MANDEVILLE, BERNARD. The Fable of the Bees. 1705. (Ed. by F. B. Kaye. Oxford. 1924.)

“The decisive importance of Mandeville in the history of economics, long overlooked or appreciated only by a few authors (particularly Edwin Cannan and Albert Schatz) is now beginning to be recognized, mainly thanks to the magnificent edition of the Fable of the Bees which we owe to the late F. B. Kaye. Although the fundamental ideas of Mandeville’s work are already implied in the original poem of 1705, the decisive elaboration and especially his full account of the origin of the division of labor, of money, and of language occur only in Part II of the Fable which was published in 1728.”—F. A. Hayek.

MANION, CLARENCE. The Key to Peace. Chicago: Heritage Foundation. 1950. 121 pp.

This bears the subtitle: “A Formula for the Perpetuation of Real Americanism.” The author, dean of the law school of Notre Dame University, believes that the only possible formula for peace was discovered by the Founding Fathers when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and framed the American Constitutional system. The basic American principle, he declares, is “an uncompromising and uncompromised demand for the freedom and independence of the individual man.”

MARKHAM, REUBEN HENRY. Rumania Under the Soviet Yoke. Meador. 1949. 601 pp.

“There is no better informed or more responsible writer on Balkan affairs than Mr. Markham. He was a European correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor for twenty years, and for The Christian Century for a shorter period, and during the war he served as deputy director of the Office of War Information. He knows the people, the languages, the history and (so far as anyone can) the present conditions in the Balkan states. In the 600 pages of this volume he surveys Rumania before and during the Hitler regime and recites in detail the course of events since the beginning of Soviet domination.”—The Christian Century. “Mr. Markham’s book is one of the strongest and best documented indictments of the system of political communism flourishing under the ever-lengthening shadow of Moscow.”—Christian Science Monitor.

MARSHALL, ALFRED. The Principles of Economics. 1890. Often reprinted. Macmillan. Eighth edition, 1920. 871 pp.

“This book has had an immense influence and will remain a standard work for many years to come. It shows a pronounced reaction from the severe Individualism of most of the early economists, and, whilst no one would belittle its value in focussing and clarifying earlier thought, one may doubt whether the ultimate verdict of economists will regard the reaction that it heralded as entirely good.”—PI.

MARTIN, EVERETT DEAN. Liberty. Norton. 1930. 307 pp.

The author seeks to arrive at the meaning of liberty partly through the method of historical survey. He discusses the Grecian conception, the contributions of Christianity and the Renaissance, of Rousseau, Voltaire, and others. In reviewing this book in The Nation of June 18, 1930,1 wrote: “It is with misgivings that one approaches Everett Dean Martin’s Liberty. These misgivings soon dissolve, however, before the flow of Mr. Martin’s eloquence, his gift for felicitous and forcible statement, his attractive historical summaries, his broad, humane culture, his shrewd analysis and unfailing clarity. His Liberty is not perhaps a profound book or a remarkably original one, but it is none the less admirable. For in spite of the great existing classics, and of the fact that much of his argument is necessarily repetition, Mr. Martin has done a task that greatly needed to be done.”

MENGER, KARL. Principles of Economics. Glencoe, I11.: Free Press. 1950. 328 pp.

This epoch-making book, “one of the great landmarks in the development of economic thought,” as Frank H. Knight calls it, had to wait seventy-nine years before it appeared in the present (or any other) English translation. The “Austrian School,” of which Menger was the founder, was a fountainhead of classical liberalism on the European continent. F. A. Hayek, who calls Menger’s Principles “the best introduction to the understanding of the theory of value which we possess,” has also pointed out that Menger was “among the first in modern times consciously to revive the methodical individualism of Adam Smith and his school.”

MIKOLAJCZYK, STANISLAW. The Rape of Poland. Whittlesey. 1948. 309 pp.

“The author, formerly Premier of Poland and head of the now suppressed Peasants’ Party, witnessed what he calls the betrayal of his country from every political level, starting as a common soldier during the war in Poland. . . . After the war, he was helpless, even as a leader of one of the great parties, to avert the violent destruction of his country’s democratic processes and finally had to flee in disguise. He believes that the Soviets were resolved from the first to annihilate Poland and says flatly that they killed fifteen thousand Polish officers in the woods around Katyn, near Smolensk, and that they purposely delayed giving help to General Bor during the Warsaw uprising until it was too late. . . . This book, heavily documented and written without fireworks, is a pretty powerful indictment.”—New Yorker.

MILL, JOHN STUART. Utilitarianism. 1861. On Liberty. 1859. Representative Government. 1861. Many editions. (Dutton. 1950.) 532 pp.

“Three short but vital works. The first is outside our immediate purpose, being ethical, but it should be read; it reveals the mind of Mill perhaps better than any other of his works.

“On Liberty may be called the Individualist’s textbook. It is a plea for allowing scope to individual character and action—even eccentricity is better than convention. Its whole argument should be carefully studied. There is also a concise and useful statement towards the end: ‘The objections to government interference, when it is not such as to involve infringement of liberty, may be of three kinds. The first is when the thing to be done is likely to be better done by individuals than by the government. . . . The second . . . in many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education.

“(Thus juries, ‘free and popular local and municipal institutions,’ and ‘the conduct of industrial and philanthropical enterprises by voluntary associations,’ are valuable on this principle as well as in themselves.)

“‘The third and most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power.’ Gladstone, with most of our Victorian statesmen, disliked increasing the functions and expenditure of the State. He came to regard with dismay the vigorous growth of the Income Tax, his own child, which he had adopted from Peel, its actual father. He sometimes likens it to a sword of excessive sharpness which is a dangerous weapon to entrust to a minister. He writes to Cobden in 1864 (Morley’s Gladstone, Book V, Chapter iv): ‘I seriously doubt whether it [the spirit of expenditure] will ever give place to the old spirit of economy, as long as we have the income tax.’ The income tax was then sevenpence in the pound, and within fifteen months was to fall to fourpence, and a little later to twopence!

“Mill’s book On Liberty gives the pure doctrine of Individualism. His excellent Representative Government does not bear so closely upon our subject. The present Master of Balliol (Mr. A. D. Lindsay) remarks: ‘It reflects strikingly Mill’s curious political position, combining as it does, an enthusiastic belief in democratic government with most pessimistic apprehensions as to what the democracy was likely to do.’ This is due to Mill’s Individualism, for he saw that individual freedom might incur great danger from majority rule in a Democracy. It led him to attach much importance to such schemes as Hare’s Proportional Representation, which he hoped would protect minorities against tyrannical ignorance.”—PI.

MILL, JOHN STUART. Autobiography. 1873. Many editions. (Columbia University Press. 1944. 240 pp.)

“All who study Individualism or any kind of economic or political science must devote much careful consideration to Mill. This autobiographical masterpiece is too well known to require much comment. It shows the influences to which Mill was subjected, his reactions, and his invincible candor. It is pardonable to repeat that Mill’s great object was not to found a sect but to discover truth, as far as it is discoverable.”—PI. (See also Packe, Michael St. John.)

MILL, JOHN STUART. Principles of Political Economy. 1848. Many editions. 1013 pp.

“Mill wrote this work at a time when Individualism had reached its zenith, and its triumph was largely due to the efforts of his spiritual and actual fathers, Bentham and James Mill. Thus this most important work is, in the main, an exposition of Individualism. But J. S. Mill here aims at stating his opponents’ case, and so has given Socialists the opportunity of citing him in their favor. In I, I, sec. 3, he makes an amazing observation: ‘If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism [Socialism] with all its chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, that the produce of labor should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labor—the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in a descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labor cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life; if this, or Communism, were the alternatives, all the difficulties, great or small, would be but as dust in the balance.’

“Again, Mill was so dominated by the Malthusian theory, that he was ready to adopt stringent Government measures to check overpopulation, e.g., by ‘a great national measure of colonization.’ (II, XIII, sec. 4.)

“Again we have his celebrated apology for occasional Protection when duties ‘are imposed temporarily (especially in a young and rising nation) in hopes of naturalizing a foreign industry, in itself perfectly suitable to the circumstances of the country.’ (V, X, sec. 1.)

“But the general spirit of the book is very strongly laissez-faire. The foregoing passages are exceptional. The following sentence is representative: ‘The grounds of this truth are expressed with tolerable exactness in the popular dictum, that people understand their own business and their own interests better, and care for them more, than the government does, or can be expected to do.’ (V, XI, sec. 5.) Throughout his life Mill believed, as he tersely expresses the truth in Liberty, that everyone ought to be allowed to do as he likes, provided that he does not make himself a nuisance to his neighbor. His candid mind brought forward numerous exceptions, but he steadily maintained his rule.”—PI.

MILLAR, FREDERICK. Socialism: Its Fallacies and Dangers. London: Watts. 1907. 1923. 96 pp.

“This little shilling work was written to warn the public of the dangers of Socialism. It has chapters to show that it means material and national decay, the abolition of family life, its impossibility, etc. The writer has a healthy dislike of all kinds of Government interference. ‘To attack wealth, to menace the free accumulation of private property, is like cutting open the bellows to see where the wind comes from. In this matter of wealth it comes from self-interest, and, therefore, the more you seek politically to prevent the free, unfraudulent, and unaggressive expression of self-interest, the less wind you will have to blow your fire, and consequently the worse off you will be.”—PI.

MILTON, JOHN. Areopagitica. 1644. Many editions.

This written oration against censorship is the noblest of Milton’s tracts, and one of the great documents on liberty. It is rich in magnificent sentences: “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” . . . “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” John Morley, in an article in the Fortnightly Review (August, 1873) wrote: “[John Stuart] Mill’s memorable plea for social liberty was little more than an enlargement, though a very important enlargement, of the principles of the still more famous speech for liberty of unlicensed printing with which Milton enobled English literature two centuries before.”

MISES, LUDWIG VON. Human Action. Yale University Press. 1949. 889 pp.

Reviewing this book in Newsweek of Sept. 19, 1949, I wrote: “Human Action is, in short, at once the most uncompromising and the most rigorously reasoned statement of the case for capitalism that has yet appeared. If any single book can turn the ideological tide that has been running in recent years so heavily toward statism, socialism and totalitarianism, Human Action is that book. It should become the leading text of everyone who believes in freedom, in individualism, and in the ability of a free-market economy not only to outdistance any government-planned system in the production of goods and services for the masses, but to promote and safeguard, as no collectivist tyranny can ever do, those intellectual, cultural, and moral values upon which all civilization ultimately rests.”

MISES, LUDWIG VON. Socialism. 1936. Yale University Press. 1951. 599 pp.

Reviewing this book in The New York Times of Jan. 9, 1938, I wrote: “This book must rank as the most devastating analysis of socialism yet penned. Doubtless even some anti-socialist readers will feel that he occasionally overstates his case. On the other hand, even confirmed socialists will not be able to withhold admiration from the masterly fashion in which he conducts his argument. He has written an economic classic in our time.”

MISES, LUDWIG VON. The Theory of Money and Credit. 1935. Yale University Press. 1953. 493 pp.

“In continental circles it has long been regarded as the standard textbook on the subject. . . . I know few works which convey a more profound impression of the logical unity and the power of modern economic analysis.”—Lionel Robbins.

It may seem strange to include any work on money and credit in a bibliography concerned primarily with individual liberty. But Professor Mises shows here as elsewhere how mistaken monetary policies lead to the destruction of liberty. As F. A. Hayek has written, Mises “has been working since the early twenties on the reconstruction of a solid edifice of liberal thought in a more determined, systematic and successful way than anyone else.”

MISES, LUDWIG VON. Omnipotent Government. Yale University Press. 1944. 291 pp.

In this book Professor von Mises provides an economic explanation of the international conflicts which caused both World Wars. He shows that economic nationalism and the trend toward economic self-sufficiency are the necessary outcome of present-day policies of government intervention in the private enterprises of citizens. He supports his analysis with an interpretation of the historical facts which both gave rise to Nazism and prevented Germany and the rest of the world from stopping until it was too late to do so without a frightful cost in blood and terror.

MISES, LUDWIG VON. Bureaucracy. Yale University Press. 1944. 125 pp.

Reviewing this book in The New York Times of Oct. 1, 1944, I wrote: “The main thesis of Professor von Mises is that bureaucracy is merely a symptom of the real disease with which we have to deal. That disease is excessive State domination and control. If the State seeks excessive control over the economic or other activities of the individual it is bound to need a bureaucracy to do it, and this bureaucracy is bound to function in a certain way. . . . Professor von Mises’ penetrating analysis is closely reasoned. . . . Published on the day after F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, [it] once more calls attention to the ironic fact that the most eminent and uncompromising defenders of English liberty, and of the system of free enterprise which reached its highest development in America, should now be two Austrian exiles.”

MISES, LUDWIG VON. Planning for Freedom. South Holland, 111.: Libertarian Press. 1952. 174 pp.

This is a collection of twelve addresses and essays which supplement and present in simpler and shorter form the analyses of Professor von Mises in his great works on Human Action and Socialism. Readers without a special background in economic theory will find these essays not only rewarding in themselves but an excellent introduction to von Mises’ work. The essays are: Planning for Freedom; Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism; Laissez-Faire or Dictatorship; Stones Into Bread, the Keynesian Miracle; Lord Keynes and Say’s Law; Inflation and Price Control; Economic Aspects of the Pension Problem; Benjamin M. Anderson Challenges the Philosophy of the Pseudo-Progressives; Profit and Loss; Economic Teaching at the Universities; Trends Can Change; and The Political Chances of Genuine Liberalism.

MISES, LUDWIG VON. Liberalismus. Jena: Gustav Fischer. 1927. 175 pp.

This is a discussion of Liberalism (in the traditional sense of the term), of the political basis, economic policy and foreign policy appropriate to it, and of its probable future. There is an appendix on the literature of liberalism.

MISES, LUDWIG VON. Kritik des Interventionismus. Jena: Gustav Fischer. 1929. 136 pp.

Five collected essays discussing interventionism, restrictionism, price control, and the economic theories behind these policies.

MOLEY, RAYMOND. How to Keep Our Liberty. Knopf. 1952. 339 pp.

Raymond Moley, contributing editor of Newsweek magazine and professor of public law at Columbia University, created and headed the famous Brains Trust of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first campaign for the Presidency and later was a major architect of the early New Deal. His opposition to later developments in national policy culminated in this lucid and vigorous, but admirably organized and carefully thought-out, “conservative manifesto.” “Today the people of this nation,” he writes, “are presented with a choice between two forms of political and economic life. One form is that of our traditions, in which individual liberty prevails and is guarded by ‘the long, still grasp of law.’ The other is the dominance of the state in human affairs. My purpose here has been to present a plan for political action for those who do not wish to go down the road to socialism.” Mr. Moley’s book combines rich scholarship with the readability of first-rate journalism.

MONTESQUIEU, BARON DE. The Spirit of Laws. 1748. Many English and French editions. 2 vols.

The Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) published his famous L’Esprit des Lois in 1748. The Encyclopaedia Britannica declares that it “may be almost certainly ranked as the greatest book of the French Eighteenth Century.” The political writer George Catlin thinks it “dull and prolix.” To Montesquieu, however, is due the classical formulation of the doctrine of checks and balances, and of the division of powers.

Lytton Strachey writes of it in his Landmarks in French Literature: “It is enough to say that here all Montesquieu’s qualities—his power of generalization, his freedom from prejudices, his rationalism, his love of liberty and hatred of fanaticism, his pointed, epigrammatic style—appear in their most characteristic form. Perhaps the chief fault of the book is that it is too brilliant. . . . Montesquieu’s generalizations are always bold, always original, always fine; unfortunately, they are too often unsound into the bargain. . . . He believed he had found in [the English constitution] a signal instance of his favorite theory of the beneficial effects produced by the separation of the three powers of government—the judicial, the legislative, and the executive; but he was wrong. In England, as a matter of fact, the powers of the legislative and the executive were intertwined. This particular error has had a curious history. Montesquieu’s great reputation led to his view of the constitution of England being widely accepted as the true one; as such it was adopted by the American leaders after the War of Independence; and its influence is plainly visible in the present constitution of the United States. Such is the strange power of good writing over the affairs of men!”

MONTGOMERY, GEORGE S., JR. The Return of Adam Smith. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers. 1949. 160 pp.

“This book is intended to serve as a little prayer for the awakening or—symbolically—for the return of Adam Smith.” And it speculates upon how Adam Smith would probably feel and think about our present institutions. Mr. Montgomery discusses the merits and demerits of government-run business and re-evaluates such terms as “reactionary,” “laissez faire,” and “robber baron.” He also points out vigorously the socialist and collectivist implications in many present-day textbooks, and particularly in some articles in the fifteen-volume Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.

MORGAN, CHARLES. Liberties of the Mind. Macmillan. 1951. 252 pp.

A collection of essays and addresses, some previously published elsewhere, several in the London Times Literary Supplement. The theme of the essays is what the author sees as the imminent danger of the loss of freedom of mind and moral choice, of individuality and identity, by the majority of mankind. “There can be scarcely a more important task than that which this book attempts, and perhaps no more encouraging and hopeful sign than that one of the greatest contemporary masters of English prose should be impelled to undertake it. . . . All that the mere student of these problems can do is to testify to the importance of the book and to acknowledge that here certainly the artist sees much to which the expert tends to be blind.”—F. A. Hayek.

MORLEY, FELIX. The Power in the People. Van Nostrand. 1949. 293 pp.

In this scholarly, thoughtful and often brilliant book, Mr. Morley attempts to present a unified study of the origin of the political ideas on which our nation was founded, and how they have developed. “This is a remarkable book, nobly written and profoundly thought out. It is also, at least to this reviewer, sui generis, an account of the founding and development and significance of the American Republic which is unique as far as my acquaintance with the literature on the subject goes. . . . There is a fire in it which no survey of the past as the past could kindle. The Power in the People is a Tract for the Times, concerned with what is of paramount importance for us today, at this precise moment in our history.”—Edith Hamilton, in The Saturday Review of Literature.

MORLEY, JOHN (VISCOUNT). The Life of Richard Cobden. 1881. London: Unwin. 1903. 985 pp.

The outstanding biography of the great Free Trader and leader of the Manchester School.

MORLEY, JOHN (VISCOUNT). The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. Macmillan. 1911. 3 vols.

A masterly biography of the great nineteenth century liberal statesman.

MORLEY, JOHN (VISCOUNT). Voltaire. Macmillan. 1872. 365 pp.

“Morley’s Voltaire fully appreciates the influence of Locke and English Individualism upon Voltaire.”—PI.

MOSCA, GAETANO. The Ruling Class. McGraw-Hill. 1939. 514 pp.

This is an English translation, with some reorganization of the material, from the 1923 edition of the work of the eminent Italian political philosopher first published in 1895. The Italian title is Elementi di Scienza Politica. It contains an illuminating chapter on the political character of collectivism. “This work, already a classic in Europe, deserves the widest attention in America.”—Foreign Affairs. “The picture Mosca gives of the ruling class, of politics and of political behavior is one which students in these fields cannot afford to neglect.”—A. T. Mason, in the Survey Graphic.

MUSSATTI, JAMES. The Constitution of the United States. Van Nostrand. 1956. 173 pp.

A short, simple and admirably organized statement of the basic principles of the American Constitution. Its intent is to explain to the layman the philosophies, motives, and actions of the framers of that great document. It is accompanied by full bibliographic references, and a study guide prepared by Thomas J. Shelly.

MUTHESIUS, VOLKMAR. Müssen wir arm bleiben? Frankfurt a. M., Germany. 1952.

A discussion by a courageous and outspoken German liberal, who is devoted to the principles of the free market, of the postwar problems of his country.

NEWBURY, FRANK D. The American Economic System. McGraw-Hill. 1950.

Designed as a textbook on the basic institutions and principles of the American economic system. Among those institutions and principles the author stresses private property; individual freedom of choice and action; individual responsibility for success or failure; free and active competition; and the principle of economic rewards proportional to economic contribution.

NEWCOMB, SIMON. Principles of Political Economy. Harper. 1886.

Schumpeter says of Simon Newcomb: “He was an eminent astronomer who also taught, and wrote on, economics but not enough to acquire the influence he deserved. His Principles of Political Economy is the outstanding performance of American general economics in the pre-Clark-Fisher-Taussig epoch. His presentation was masterly and highly suggestive, also original in several points.”

His rugged individualism and his vivid illustrations are often reminiscent of Bastiat. He emphasizes the “let-alone principle” and the “keep-out principle”: “The one claims that the government should not stop the citizen from acting; the other that it should keep out of certain fields of action.”

NICHOLSON, J. S. The Revival of Marxism. Dutton. 1921. 145 pp.

“A ruthless criticism and exposure of Marxism. Marx’s writings are shown to have contributed nothing of tangible value to the world’s knowledge. Insofar as they are original they are false.”—PI.

NOCK, ALBERT J. Our Enemy, the State. 1935. (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers. 1946.) 209 pp.

The author develops the theme that the State is founded on conquest and confiscation and tends to devour civilization. He foresaw “ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency and prodigality” under State domination which will lead us to impoverishment and “a system of forced labor.” Some of Nock’s ideas were extreme and tended toward anarchism. But his style combined urbanity with vigor.

NORTH, SIR DUDLEY. Discourses upon Trade. London. 1691.

“He exposes the fallacies of the Mercantile Theory and is an advocate—one of the earliest—of Free Trade. . . . ‘A nation in the world, as to trade, is in all respects like a citizen in a kingdom, or a family in a city.’ Therefore trade between nations ought to be left free and not loaded with restrictions, as is the present practice of rulers. The following sentence might have been written by Fawcett or any of his fellow economists: ‘There can be no trade unprofitable to the public, for if any prove so, men leave it off, and whenever traders thrive, the public, of which they are a part, thrive also.”—PI.

NORTON, THOMAS J. The Constitution of the United States. 1922. (New York: America’s Future. 1951.) 319 pp.

An elementary reference work, designed not for the legal profession but “to make accessible to the citizen . . . such a knowledge of the Constitution of the United States as will serve in emergency as a ‘first line of defense.’” The text of the Constitution is printed in boldface type, followed by a note to every line or clause “that has a historical story or drama back of it” or that otherwise calls for interpretation in the light of court decisions. The book has been kept up-to-date by numerous printings. “I know of no book which so completely and coherently explains our form of government.”—James M. Beck, former Solicitor General of the United States.

NORTON, THOMAS J. Undermining the Constitution. Devin-Adair. 1950. 351 pp.

“The author, who in the twenties published a standard commentary on the constitution, calls his new commentary a ‘history of lawless government’ and cites case after case to support his charge that ‘clever, irresponsible men’ have been doing their best to demolish the Constitution and popular government along with it. As examples of how the intent of the writers of the Constitution has been ‘demolished,’ Mr. Norton discusses such matters as the TVA, the agricultural adjustment act, the national labor relations act, the child labor law, the assumption by Washington of much police power originally held by the several states, the influence of the Supreme Court in creating new laws, and the loss of congressional power to the executive.”—Springfield Republican.

NUTTER, G. WARREN. The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly in the United States, 1899-1939. University of Chicago Press. 1951. 169 pp.

A careful and detailed statistical study. Professor Nutter concludes that there is no basis for the impression that there has been a significant increase in monopoly in the United States since about 1900.

NYARADI, NICHOLAS. My Ringside Seat in Moscow. Crowell. 1952. 307 pp.

“A report on a most melancholy mission to Moscow, written by the last non-Communist Finance Minister of Hungary. Mr. Nyaradi went to Russia in 1947 to negotiate with the Kremlin a two-hundred-million-dollar Russian claim against his government. . . . He got it reduced, but it took him seven months to do so, and by that time the Communists had infested his government and the claim had become academic.”—New Yorker. “From one point of view this book can be read as a rollicking account of Moscow life, with its strange contrasts between the abysmal poverty of the many and the sybaritic life of the rulers . . . More important, however, Nyaradi gives us a glimpse of some key figures in the Politburo and near Politburo levels of Soviet life.”—Harry Schwartz, in The New York Times.

ONEAL, JAMES, AND WERNER, G. A. American Communism. Dutton. 1947. 416 pp.

“A revision and extension of Oneal’s same title published in 1927 by the Rand School. To the original thirteen chapters now slightly revised, Werner adds nine, covering events since original publication. . . . The original sections are careful and judicious, the latter, somewhat less so; but the documented whole adds up to a clear picture of the development of Communism in the United States which the authors insist is not a political party in our sense but an agency of the Russian Dictatorship.”—Library Journal.

OPPENHEIMER, FRANZ. The State. Huebsch. 1922. 302 pp.

“This brilliant political study is simultaneously readable, brief and profound.”—Felix Morley.

ORME, ALEXANDREA. Comes the Comrade. Morrow. 1950. 376 pp.

Beginning with Dec. 22, 1944, this diary of a Polish woman, “Lida,” married to a Hungarian aristocrat, covers the days to March 28, 1945. During that time the Russians were supposed to have “liberated” that section of Hungary. At first Lida had welcomed the Russians, but as it became apparent that their ideas of liberation were very crude, she devoted all her time and intelligence to the, task of keeping one step ahead of them. “If one can imagine a group of Roman patricians caught by an invading flood of Goths and Vandals one can appreciate the situation which Mrs. Orme describes with courage, wit and vivacity. . . . There could hardly be a better close-up view of the Soviet overrunning of Eastern Europe.”—W. H. Chamberlin, in the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

ORTON, WILLIAM AYLOTT. The Liberal Tradition. Yale University Press. 1945. 317 pp.

This bears the subtitle: “A Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom.” “In an era that speaks so glibly and so hopelessly of the inevitability of collectivization, Professor Orton casts a favorite-son vote for freedom.”—H. T. Maguire, in Commonweal.

ORTON, WILLIAM AYLOTT. The Economic Role of the State. University of Chicago Press. 1950. 192 pp.

A discussion of the basis and limitations of government action. John Chamberlain writes: “Orton’s view is that the best society is the one in which people put their reliance on the voluntary action of autonomous non-state social groups. He brings us back to the central lack of modern man, which is philosophy. He himself is evidently in accord with the Catholic philosophy of economics and government. But he is so persistently oblique in his phraseology that he often leaves the reader in doubt as to how he would apply Catholic philosophy in given instances.”

ORWELL, GEORGE. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harcourt, Brace. 1949. 314 pp.

A satirical novel about a future time when men and women living in a collectivist society are constantly spied upon through “telescreens,” and drilled by a Thought Police into thinking that war is peace, that ignorance is strength, and that freedom is slavery. Orwell was the foremost satirist of our time. Nineteen Eighty-Four portrays with classic power and finality the intellectual paralysis and spiritual depravity that a totalitarian regime imposes. But except for its vivid picture of the dreadful end-results for consumers, it leaves the determining economic aspect of such a totalitarian society virtually blank.

Orwell in an earlier book (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius; Secker & Warburg: 1941) had argued for a special “English socialism.” With his increasing disillusionment he ceased to be a communist sympathizer, and, in the end (some time after writing Animal Farm), even to be a socialist. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he ridiculed his own former ideas by his sarcastic references to “Ingsoc” (the short name in his collectivist society for English socialism). But so bitter and complete had been Orwell’s previous hatred of “capitalism” that he never came to understand the real nature and effects of free private enterprise. This, I think, is why Nineteen Eighty-Four could only end on a note of utter despair. Yet the book presents an unforgettable picture of what collectivism leads to.

ORWELL, GEORGE. Animal Farm. Harcourt, Brace. 1946. 118 pp.

The animals on Mr. Jones’s farm stage a successful revolution and take the place over. The revolution begins to go wrong—yet ingenious excuses are always forthcoming for each perversion of the original doctrine. This fable is the vehicle for a brilliant satire on the actual course of the Russian communist revolution up to the time when Animal Farm appeared. Unfortunately, much in this satire implies the familiar socialist view that the Russian revolution was perhaps a necessary method of putting a great ideal into effect, but that the revolution was “betrayed” by Stalin through selfishness and abuse of power and a return to capitalist ideals. These implications spoil the satire for individualists and believers in free enterprise. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell was to become far more disillusioned with socialism than he is here.

PACKE, MICHAEL ST. JOHN. The Life of John Stuart Mill. Macmillan. 1954. 567 pp.

An admirable biography of the great nineteenth century liberal economist and philosopher. It carries the reader along like a first-rate novel, yet Mr. Packe never invents conversations or inner thoughts, but supplies documentation for all his statements. Readers of Mill’s Autobiography will find Mr. Packe’s book an almost indispensable supplement; it throws entirely new light on Mill’s life and character, and supplements the material in the Autobiography at a hundred points, while repeating surprisingly little. “For eighty years after his death,” writes F. A. Hayek in a preface, “no satisfactory biography of Mill has been available. In many ways, the unique value of his own description of his intellectual development has increased rather than diminished the need for a more comprehensive account of the setting against which it ought to be seen. Until recently, the material on which such a picture could be based was not available. . . . There may still be details to be filled in here and there; but on the whole I feel that Mr. Packe has given us the definitive biography of Mill for which we have so long been waiting.”

PAINE, THOMAS. Common Sense. 1776. Many editions. 129 pp.

———. The Rights of Man. 1791. Many editions. 389 pp.

“Paine’s Common Sense helped to inspire the Declaration of Independence, while The Rights of Man raised a great outcry among the admirers of the British Constitution. He was a bold champion of individual as well as of national independence.”—PI.

PAINE, THOMAS. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine. Edited by Philip S. Foner. New York: The Citadel Press. 1945. 2 vols.

These two volumes contain, among other writings, both Common Sense and The Rights of Man. “At once the fullest, the most inexpensive, and the most usable edition of Paine that has yet been published.”—Allan Nevins, in The New York Times.

PALGRAVE, R. H. INGLIS (ed.). Dictionary of Political Economy. Macmillan. 1918. 3 vols. 2,525 pp.

“An indispensable work of reference. The article on Individualism should be studied,”—PI,

PALMER, CECIL. The British Socialist Ill-fare State. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers. 1952. 656 pp.

A study of the shortcomings of the British welfare state, which examines the State’s challenge to individual liberties, nationalized medicine, and the nationalization of industries and utilities. The author was a former British publisher and lecturer, and was the organizer of the Society of Individualists. He died in January 1952.

PALYI, MELCHIOR. The Dollar Dilemma. Regnery. 1954. 208 pp.

In this vigorous, well-informed and penetrating book, the author argues that American dollar aid to Europe and elsewhere has done more harm than good. He contends that it has financed socialism, planned and directed economies, excessive social security and wealth distribution systems, the destruction of incentives and the promotion of inefficiency. Dr. Palyi was born in Hungary but since 1933 has lived in America, where he has been active as a research economist.

PALYI, MELCHIOR. Compulsory Medical Care and the Welfare State. Chicago: National Institution of Professional Services. 1949. 156 pp.

An analysis based on a special study of governmentalized medical care systems on the continent of Europe and in England.

PARKES, HENRY BAMFORD. Marxism: An Autopsy. Houghton Mifflin. 1939. 300 pp.

Reviewing this book in The New York Times of April 7, 1940, I wrote: “Mr. Parkes’s autopsy . . . cannot compare in depth, penetration and rigor of thought with von Mises’ masterly refutation of socialism, to the extent that the two volumes cover similar ground. But it is an important volume and one of the ablest direct replies to Marxism ever to appear in America. . . . In his attempt to formulate a constructive program Mr. Parkes is less happy.”

PATERSON, ISABEL. The God of the Machine. Putnam. 1943. 292 pp.

The author argues that only free men, in a free economy of private property, can maintain “the long circuit of energy” that makes civilization work. Collectivism, she contends, does not and cannot work. The book is acute, pungent, epigrammatic, full of original insights and sometimes powerfully eloquent. (The chapter “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine” is an outstanding example.) But much of the thinking and style of the work are marred by a persistent and obsessive effort to write of man’s economic, political and moral problems on the analogy and in the vocabulary of the flow of electrical energy.

PATON, WILLIAM A. Shirtsleeve Economics. Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1952. 460 pp.

A highly successful effort, by an eminent accountant and professor of economics at the University of Michigan, to present “a common sense survey” of economics in easily understandable terms. “The central proposition of this book,” declares the author, “is very simple: We can’t consume any more than we produce and only through increased production is a higher standard of living possible. This has an important corollary: We must be everlastingly on our guard to check those influences and developments that tend to limit and discourage production. Among such is ‘social legislation’ which emphasizes diversion only, without regard to what happens to output.”

PERCY OF NEWCASTLE, LORD. The Heresy of Democracy. Regnery. 1955.

The author, a British statesman and scholar, shows how democracy, in the sense of a temporary majority sentiment, may be corrupted and frozen into totalitarian forms. His book deals with such basic questions as the growth of state power, the relation of the individual to the state, and the dangers of demagogic mass manipulation. “It is possible,” he warns, “for multiplied legislation, whether by Act of Parliament or dictatorial decree, to destroy the very conception of law. . . . Under the best laws much governed men are less free than lightly governed men. For, whenever the law converts (as it often must) an obligation to a fellow-citizen into an obligation to the state it substitutes a claim to obedience for the give-and-take of mutual rights and duties between individuals.”

PETROV, VLADIMIR. Soviet Gold. Farrar, Straus & Young. 1949. 426 pp.

“A sixteen-year-old boy writes his political thoughts into a diary. Three years later a lady friend turns against him and plants anti-Soviet books in his room. The young fellow is caught in the net of the vast purges of the mid-1930’s. Terror-stricken ex-friends denounce him. It all adds up to a fat NKVD dossier, a six-year sentence to heavy labor, and an odyssey that leads through the prisons of Leningrad to the labor camps and gold mines of Siberia. That’s what happened to Vladimir Petrov. That is the story he tells.”—Saturday Review of Literature.

PETROV, VLADIMIR. My Retreat from Russia. Yale University Press. 1950. 357 pp.

In his earlier book, Soviet Gold, the author gave an account of his six years in the forced labor camps in Siberia. In the present volume he describes his activities after his release at the time of the outbreak of the war. He worked his way back to his home in Russia proper, where he discovered that as an ex-prisoner he was no longer considered a trusted citizen. Thence he fled through Central Europe into American-occupied Italy.

PETTENGILL, S. B. Jefferson, the Forgotten Man. America’s Future, Inc. 1938. 249 pp.

“Mr. Pettengill is a member of Congress from Indiana and one of those Democrats who, enthusiastic in their support of the first New Deal, looked with misgiving on the second; his attitude toward the third New Deal is one of dismay. In a vigorous style, with ample reference to Jefferson’s principles and precepts and to those of other eminent mentors, including the President himself, he explains this.”—W. M. Houghton, in Books.

PETTY, SIR WILLIAM. A Treatise on Taxes. 1662. Many editions. 75 pp.

“This and Petty’s other works are of much historical interest. Like North, later in the century, Petty anticipated Adam Smith in his exposition of Free Trade.”—PI.

PHILBRICK, HERBERT A. I Led Three Lives. McGraw-Hill. 1952. 323 pp.

“The now-it-can-be-told story of Herbert Philbrick, ‘Citizen, Communist, Counterspy,’ who testified before Judge Medina against The Eleven after nine years of conspiracy, uncertainty, and deliberate penetration into the Communist Party.”—Virginia Kirkus. “The real significance lies in the clarification it brings to Communist purposes and achievements through indirect infiltration.”—E. B. Canham, in the New York Herald Tribune.

PICK, FRANZ. Black Market Yearbook. 1951, etc. Pick’s World Currency Report. 160 pp.

Since 1951 Dr. Franz Pick has published a yearbook on world black-market prices and trading in currencies and gold. His book is dedicated “to the more than 2,000,000,000 victims of inflation, who, for obeying the law, have been punished by the law.” He declares in his foreword: “Distrust of every system of planned economy, fictional official values of gold, currency, and government bonds cannot be wiped out. People cannot and will not accept arbitrary confiscation through inflation, as practiced by every government in the world today.” In his 1954 edition he points out: “At the beginning of 1954, nine-tenths of the world’s population were legally denied freedom to transfer their assets into less diseased monies.”

PILAT, OLIVER RAMSEY. The Atom Spies. Putnam. 1952. 312 pp.

“An exhaustive account of how the Communist spy network succeeded, with disturbing ease, in relieving the United States of the biggest military secret in history. It is a complicated story, dealing not only with the machinations of the spies but also with their motives . . . Mr. Pilat focusses attention on this ideological aspect of the case, and on the clear and continuing danger of having among us an amorphous group of people who can be persuaded at any time to betray their country for what they are told are super-patriotic reasons.”—New Yorker.

POIROT, PAUL LEWIS. The Pension Idea. Irvington, N. Y.: Foundation for Economic Education. 1950.

The author points out that there is not nearly enough total capital or savings in any nation to support in retirement all citizens over 65, and hence there cannot be a fully funded pension plan covering everybody. The unfunded “social security” promises can only mean either further inflation, taxes upon private savings, or further attempts to tax the earnings of future citizens.

POLANYI, MICHAEL. The Contempt of Freedom. London: Watts. 1940. 116 pp.

Essays about the Russian experiment and its consequences. It includes: The Rights and Duties of Science (1939); Collectivist Planning (1940); Soviet Economics—Fact and Theory (1935); Truth and Propaganda (1936).

POPPER, K. R. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Vol. I: The Spell of Plato. Vol. II: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. London: Routledge. 1945. 2 vols. 268 pp. 352 pp. (Princeton University Press. 1950. 744 pp.)

The author, Reader in Logic and Scientific Method in the University of London, demonstrates that Plato, Hegel, and Marx formulated ideas in political philosophy inimical to the “Open Society,” i.e., to a society based on reason and not on myth. The encomiums with which this book was greeted on its British publication in 1945 were for the most part fully deserved. Certainly we can agree with Sir Ernest Barker that “There is an abundance of riches in the book—classical scholarship, scientific acumen, logical subtlety, philosophic sweep.” Bertrand Russell thought it: “A work of first class importance . . . which ought to be widely read for its masterly criticism of the . . . enemies of democracy, ancient and modern. . . . His attack on Plato, while unorthodox, is in my opinion thoroughly justified. . . . His analysis of Hegel is deadly. . . . Marx is dissected with equal acumen.”

The book is weak, however, on the economic side. Dr. Popper gives Marx undeserved credit for his alleged services to “social justice.” He is himself capable of saying that Marx was “right in asserting that increasing misery tends to be the result of laissez-faire capitalism.” This is because Dr. Popper has in his own mind a mere caricature called “laissez-faire capitalism,” as Marx had. In spite of this weakness there are so many merits in the book that we must set it down as powerful and important.

POSSONY, STEFAN THOMAS. Century of Conflict. Regnery. 1953. 439 pp.

“The author, Professor of International Politics at Georgetown University, traces the Communist techniques in revolution from 1848. Beginning with Marx, he depicts the story of Communist efforts in Western Europe, the Russian Revolution, Communist tactics between the wars, and Communist internal and external aggression since the war. He outlines the methods, both from without and from within, by which he believes the Communists hope to win a war with the United States.”—Current History. “An invaluable storehouse of first-hand information.”—W. H. Chamberlin, in the Chicago Sunday Tribune.

POUND, ROSCOE. The Rise of the Service State and Its Consequences. New Wilmington, Pa.: The Economic and Business Foundation. 1949. 34 pp.

This is a devastating analysis, by the former dean of the Harvard Law School and one of the world’s great authorities on jurisprudence, of “the service state, the state which, instead of preserving peace and order and employing itself with maintaining the general security, takes the whole domain of human welfare for its province and would solve all economic and social ills through its administrative activities.”

Dean Pound’s pamphlet is included in this list, in violation of my announced general rule against including pamphlets, in the hope that some publisher may be inspired to publish it in book form, together with a score of the same author’s other pamphlets and articles on kindred topics, now scattered in the files of a dozen legal journals. These would include such articles as The Disappearance of Law, Dangers in Administrative Absolutism, and Administrative Agencies and the Law.

POUND, ROSCOE. Justice According to Law. Yale University Press. 1951. 98 pp.

This small book consists of three lectures by Roscoe Pound, dean emeritus of the Harvard Law School, on What Is Justice?, What Is Law?, and Judicial Justice. The book is a wise, scholarly and compact survey of the philosophy of law, a plea for the rule of law rather than for widened administrative discretion, and a defense of the justice of the courts as against that of administrative or other substitute agencies. Dean Pound defends the rule of law also as the guardian of individual liberty. “The real foe of [governmental] absolutism is law. It presupposes a life measured by reason, a legal order measured by reason, and a judicial process carried on by applying a reasoned technique to experience developed by reason and reason tested by experience.”

POUND, ROSCOE. Administrative Law. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1942. 138 pp.

“To the growing attacks on current developments in administrative justice, Roscoe Pound adds the weight of history and philosophy in a volume that is one of the more succinct and reasoned analyses of the shortcomings of administrative justice unrestrained by the traditions and processes of the common law as administered by regularly constituted courts. Proceeding from the assumption that the common law is a taught tradition of the supremacy of law, of individual rights, and of adjudication instead of administration, Dean Pound denies the idea that ‘whatever is done officially is law.’ Administrative law, so-called, is, therefore, but a species of justice without law, lacking the restraints of judicial procedure and the techniques of decision inherent in that ‘artificial reason’ of the law.”—American Political Science Review.

POUND, ROSCOE. New Paths of The Law. University of Nebraska Press. 1950. 69 pp.

Three lectures delivered at the University of Nebraska in 1950, which marked the opening of a lectureship established in honor of Roscoe Pound. The lectures discuss, respectively, “The Path of Liberty,” “The Humanitarian Path,” and “The Authoritarian Path.”

PROTHERO, MICHAEL. Political Economy. London: George Bell. 1895. 266 pp.

“This is meant for beginners, who will find it most useful. Two chapters, ‘Alternative Schemes to Private Property,’ and, especially, ‘Theoretic Ideas about Economic Facts,’ give more serviceable information than perhaps will be found, in a concise form, in any other book.”—PI.

QUEENY, EDGAR M. The Spirit of Enterprise. Scribner’s. 1943. 267 pp.

It is the spirit of enterprise exercised by individuals and voluntary groups, according to the author, who is chairman of the board of the Monsanto Chemical Company, that has made America grow. The kind of social planning advocated by New Dealers, he contends, can lead only to a lower standard of living and a loss of liberty. “This book is a magnificent indication that business is finding its voice. In the public debate over what kind of social and economic system the U. S. should have, the professional theorists on the left have done most of the talking during the past decade. Now comes a businessman with a fluent pen and a vigorous set of convictions to take up the cudgels for free enterprise.”—Claude Robinson.

QUESNAY, FRANCOIS. Tableau économique. 1758. 216 pp.

“A man of great importance among French Physiocrats; he was physician to Louis XV, and a man of noble character; he had much influence on Turgot, the wise minister of Louis XVI. Accounts of him and his school are given in all economic histories. His doctrine, which was carefully studied by Adam Smith, is briefly: Let entire freedom of commerce be maintained; for the regulation of commerce, both internal and external, the most sure, the most exact, the most profitable to the nation, and to the State, consists in entire freedom of competition.”—PI.

RAE, JOHN. Contemporary Socialism. 1884. Scribner’s. 1905. 555 pp.

“A very useful and fairly full history of modern Socialism beginning with Lassalle and Marx. The point of view is strongly Individualistic, but the writer sees the necessity of constructive action. He remarks: “Free institutions run continual risk of shipwreck when power is in the possession of the many, but property—from whatever cause—the enjoyment of the few. With the advance of democracy a diffusion of wealth becomes almost a necessity of State.”—PI.

RAND, AYN. Anthem. 1938. (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Press. 1946.) 105 pp.

This book, first published in England in 1938, is a striking predecessor of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Anthem records the life of a rebel against the totalitarian order, a man named Equality 7-2521, who rejects the collectivist Utopia. He dwells in a society which, by deliberately destroying independence of mind, has laid waste all the achievement of earlier civilizations—a world which has banned as criminal the singular pronoun and all talk of ‘The Unmentionable Times.’ The Council of Vocations . . . proclaims him a street-sweeper. Secretly working underground in the shafts of former days, he rediscovers electricity. He defies the world of State-planned eugenics and State-directed mating and discovers a personal love. Among a people which exists to serve a soulless State, he discovers that the pursuit of his own happiness conjointly advances the happiness of his fellows. He is denounced, imprisoned and tortured, but his spirit cannot be conquered. Anthem is at once an exaltation of liberty and an exhortation to the counter-attack.”—Deryck Abel.

RAND, AYN. The Fountainhead. Bobbs-Merrill. 1943. 754 pp.

This novel about an uncompromising architect is based on a belief in “the importance of selfishness.” Its theme is that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress. Many will think the author’s intransigent type of individualism extreme, but the novel is exciting and impressive.

RANDALL, CLARENCE B. A Creed for Free Enterprise. Little, Brown. 1952. 177 pp.

An admirable book on American business and businessmen by the president of the Inland Steel Company. “Should do much in counteracting the untruthful and insidious propaganda of the socialists against free enterprise.”—The Rev. A. Keller, in The Freeman.

RANDALL, CLARENCE B. A Foreign Economic Policy for the United States. University of Chicago Press. 1954. 83 pp.

A plea for the removal of barriers and the liberalization of international trade by a distinguished businessman who is also a vigorous thinker and writer.

RAPPARD, WILLIAM E. The Secret of American Prosperity. Greenberg. 1955. 124 pp.

This book originally appeared in French as an attempt by an eminent Swiss economist to explain the secret of American prosperity to other Europeans. In my foreword to the American edition I wrote: “Among the qualities that make it remarkable . . . are not only the generosity with which it acknowledges and insists upon the economic superiority of the United States, but the still rarer generosity with which it attributes this superiority not merely to good luck—such as great natural resources or escape from the direct destruction of the two world wars (the usual European explanation)—but primarily to the character and the free economic institutions of the American people, to our greater efficiency and to our greater competitive spirit.” The book is lucid and admirably organized. It may serve as an indirect reminder to Americans that their own economic achievement has been the result, above all, of a free, dynamic, private, competitive economy, and can be preserved only by preserving this type of economy.

RAPPARD, WILLIAM E. The Crisis of Democracy. University of Chicago Press. 1938. 288 pp.

An analysis of democracy: its definition, sources, and probable longevity. While he “does not despair of modern democracy, [the author] rather questions the solidity and the longevity of modern dictatorships.”—From the Foreword.

RAVINES, EUDOCIO. The Yenan Way. Scribner’s. 1951. 319 pp.

“A sort of mea culpa by a man who was until recently one of the top Communist organizers in South America. Mr. Ravines, a Peruvian, studied his peculiar art in the same Comintern schools in Moscow that Klement Gottwald and Mao Tse-tung attended. He was one of the major figures in the South American Bureau of the Comintern and was very active in the Spanish Civil War. It was while he was on Comintern duty in Spain that he began to lose faith in the world revolution and in revolutionists, and began to see Stalin for what he is, rather than as the workers’ messiah. Altogether, an important, instructive, and astonishingly specific book.”—New Yorker.

READ, LEONARD E. Government—An Ideal Concept. Irvington, N. Y.: Foundation for Economic Education. 1954. 149 pp.

Leonard Read argues that the purpose of government is to use “defensive force” to neutralize “aggressive force”; and that government can have no legitimate function beyond that. He applies this principle to such subjects as socialism, taxation, conscription, world government, efforts to increase trade or prevent depressions, money, public housing, foreign aid, education and religion.

READ, LEONARD E. Outlook for Freedom. Irvington, N. Y.: Foundation for Economic Education. 1951.

This small volume contains an allegorical report of the ideas and experiences, failures and successes, of many associates and friends of the author during the last two decades, and relates it to the concept of individual liberty. “The substance for a thorough-going, twentieth century intellectual revolution,” he writes, “is in the making, and is showing a vitality that can be accounted for only by the inextinguishable spirit of individualism—the insistence of man to complete his own creation. That this spirit at present is evident among only a minority need not necessarily deject the devotee of liberty. Everything begins with a minority of one, extends to a few, and then to many.”

RICARDO, DAVID. Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. 1817. Many editions. 538 pp.

The work of this brilliant deductive thinker has been used to draw such corollaries as extreme laissez faire, the single tax, and Marxism! In 1952 The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo were published in nine volumes under the careful and scholarly editorship of Piero Sraffa with the collaboration of M. H. Dobb. “Ricardo is more the father of Victorian Political Economy (hated by Ruskin and Carlyle) than either Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill.”—PI.

RICHTER, EUGENE. Pictures of the Socialistic Future. 1893. London: Jarrolds. 1925. 134 pp.

“A satirical account of an imaginary Socialist regime by an eminent German. It is very interesting when read in conjunction with the earlier works of Robert Blatchford. Sir Ernest Benn writes in the introduction: ‘The really extraordinary thing about this book is that it was written and first published more than thirty years ago, in 1893. It is not, however, published afresh now on account of its interest as a piece of prophecy, but rather because of the remarkable way in which it fits in every detail the problem of Socialism as it presents itself to us in 1925.’”—PI.

RIST, CHARLES. Defense de l’Or. Paris: Recueil Sirey. 1953. 120 pp.

A collection of articles appearing over eight years in favor of a return to the international gold standard in place of present “managed” paper money systems.

ROBBINS, LIONEL. The Great Depression. Macmillan. 1934. 238 pp.

In reviewing this book in The New York Times of Nov. 18, 1934, I wrote: “If Mr. Robbins’s economic philosophy is ‘discredited’ and ‘outmoded,’ it is not because he is a bleary old man with an ossified brain. He is, to be sure, a professor, and his acquaintance with the work of the classical economists has no doubt poisoned his mind, but he is still only 35, and writes with as much clarity and vigor as J. M. Keynes or John Strachey. What he himself is sometimes pleased to call his ‘orthodox’ economics, indeed, will seem very unorthodox to those who are fairly well acquainted with contemporary British economic thought.”

ROBBINS, LIONEL. Economic Planning and International Order. Macmillan. 1937. 330 pp.

Reviewing this volume in The New York Times of Aug. 1, 1937, I wrote: “Altogether, Mr. Robbins’s short volume is one of the ablest and most vigorous statements in recent years of the orthodox liberal position, as it is one of the most uncompromising and damaging analyses of the whole philosophy of planning. Professor Robbins is deeply grounded; he uses the tools of classical economic analysis like a fine surgeon; he moves deliberately from step to step with relentless logic; and he writes a lucid and compact prose.”

ROBBINS, LIONEL. The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy. Macmillan. 1952. 217 pp.

Professor Robbins here presents in broad outline the theory of economic policy held by the leading English classical economists—notably Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham, Malthus, Ricardo, Senior, Torrens, McCulloch and the two Mills. It is the author’s conviction that the views of the classical economists on economic policy have been gravely misrepresented in contemporary discussion, on the one hand by presenting them as being callous to or neglectful of humane considerations, such as the problems of unemployment and poverty, on the other hand as carrying the doctrine of laissez faire further than they actually did. But Dr. Robbins does emphasize their general adherence to “the System of Economic Freedom.” This “was not just a detached recommendation not to interfere,” but “an urgent demand that . . . hampering and anti-social impediments should be removed and that the immense potential of free pioneering individual initiative should be released.” Dr. Robbins’s book is written with great lucidity and charm, out of a rich and accurate scholarship. It contains an excellent index.

ROBBINS, LIONEL. The Economic Basis of Class Conflict. Macmillan. 1939. 277 pp.

A collection of essays united by a common theme—an analysis of the way in which forms of organization facilitating group exclusive-ness may be the cause of social disharmony. The author contends that the real modern tendency of the West is not so much “collectivism” as syndicalism or corporativism. The book also discusses the causes of increased protectionism, the consequences of agricultural planning, and the general vices of restrictionism. In reviewing it in The New York Times of Oct. 22, 1939, I wrote: “Readers of Professor Robbins will find here, as in his previous volumes, vigor of style, rigor of thought and an uncompromising liberalism.”

ROBBINS, LIONEL. The Economic Causes of War. London: Cape. 1939. 124 pp.

“The chief British exponent of neo-classical economics writes in his usual lucid and suave way about war. He carries on his long standing feud with Marxian theory, and rejects any basic connection between war and capitalist imperialism.”—The New Republic. “A masterpiece of sound analysis and clear exposition by a professor of economics at the University of London.”—Foreign Affairs.

ROBBINS, LIONEL. Wages. London: Jarrolds. 1925. 94 pp.

“A modest but valuable essay. It is a lucid discussion of the economics of wage determination. Although written primarily for those who have no economic training, it is a work which might well be read with profit by all students of social problems, for although its language is simple, it is much more than a mere elementary tract. One would like to feel that a means could be found of persuading all intelligent workmen to read this book.”—PI.

ROBBINS, LIONEL. The Economic Problem in Peace and War. London: Macmillan. 1947. 86 pp.

Some reflections on objectives and mechanisms. “This authoritative recapitulation of the case for individualism by an illustrious economist, with a philosophical background, is most timely.”—London Times Literary Supplement.

ROBERTSON, D. H. The Control of Industry. London: Nisbet. 1924. 169 pp.

“A compact study of the physiology of modern industry and the forms of control to which it can be subjected by the capitalist, the State, the consumer and the worker. Mr. Robertson writes with toleration and detachment, although his conclusions do not favor undiluted Individualism. He believes that for some years to come ‘private enterprise will be the dominant form of industrial organization,’ but that ‘by its side there is plenty of room for collectivism in selected cases.’ Further, that as in the case of an alternative creed, the ‘philosophy of the academic Individualists does not fit all the facts.’ Written in an entertaining style, this book should be read by all Individualists because it is probably the fairest criticism of extreme Individualism that exists and deals directly with the difficulties involved.”—PI.

RÖPKE, WILHELM. International Economic Disintegration. Macmillan. 1942. 283 pp.

This book, a diagnosis of the long-run crisis in international economic relations, was finished in 1942, when World War II was still going on. It begins with a careful examination of the state of affairs at the time, and goes on to explain the powerful forces which created it—the disintegration of the framework of world economy, the military aspect of economic nationalism, the effort of industrial countries to “agrarianize,” the effort of agricultural countries to “industrialize,” the disturbances in the monetary and financial mechanism of the world economy, and the influence of policies that aim at national economic “stabilization.” It is the most thorough and penetrating analysis of international economic disintegration up to the time of its appearance, and is particularly impressive because it sees the problem in its wider implications.

RÖPKE, WILHELM. The Social Crisis of Our Time. University of Chicago Press. 1950. 260 pp.

This book, first published in Switzerland under the title Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart, is the first volume of a trilogy (though each of the volumes is self-contained), and it is the most available to American readers. Röpke is outstanding, not merely for the acuteness of his analysis, but for the breadth of his learning and the breadth of his view, which go much beyond the purely economic field.

Some readers are likely to have difficulties because Professor Röpke repudiates not only “collectivism,” but “capitalism,” and advocates a course that he has called “The Third Way.” This, however, does not mean a “middle-of-the-road policy” as commonly understood. When Röpke comes to specific issues he nearly always advocates the solution of “the free market economy.” But he makes a sharp distinction between a free market economy as an ideal, and its actual historical embodiment in “capitalism.” This seems to me a semantic separation which, in face of the established usage of the words, is likely to be more confusing than clarifying. Röpke quite properly contends that while economic liberty is a necessary condition of “the Good Society” it is not always a sufficient condition. This in itself is true enough, but it sometimes leads him into irrelevant or dubious recommendations. Yet every individualist and true liberal will profit from reading him. Frank H. Knight has rightly called this “a tremendously impressive book.”

RÖPKE, WILHELM. Civitas Humana. London: Hodge. 1948. 235 pp.

This is the second volume of the Röpke trilogy. It seeks to outline the requirements of “a humane order of society.” It discusses such questions as moral foundations, the place of science, the criteria of the healthy and the sick government, counterweights to the power of the State, the problem of “decongestion” and “deproletarianization,” the decentralization of industry, and the elimination of business-cycle fluctuations. It pleads for the maintenance of a “peasant agriculture” and briefly outlines the requirements of a new international order.

RÖPKE, WILHELM. Internationale Ordnung. Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch Verlag. 1945. 337 pp.

Although this volume has been translated into French under the title La Communauté Internationale (Geneva: Éditions du Cheval Ailé), no English translation is available. It is concerned, as its title implies, with international economic problems. It discusses the decay of a world economy, the general fear of competition, the fear of a “passive balance” of payments, and the steps necessary to establish a new world economy. Among these steps the author puts courageous emphasis, in view of present fashionable Keynesism, on the need of restoring an international gold standard. “If the existence of a neoliberal movement is known far beyond the narrow circles of experts, the credit belongs mainly to Röpke, at least so far as the German-speaking public is concerned.”—F. A. Hayek.

ROGERS, JAMES E. THOROLD. The Economic Interpretation of History. London: Unwin. 1888. 548 pp.

“Thorold Rogers was, perhaps, the most broad-minded of the Victorian economists who followed Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill; he refused to be tied by the abstractions of Ricardo, and unlike the majority of the economists, he had a command of pure and vigorous English. . . . The above work is most valuable. . . . The preface will repay careful study. It is the work of a strong Individualist. . . . The chapter on Laissez-faire (XVI) should be especially noted.”—PI.

ROGERS, SHERMAN. Why Kill the Goose? Irvington, N. Y.: Foundation for Economic Education. 1947. 78 pp.

A former socialist, converted to the benefits of the free private enterprise system, argues that we have in it a goose which lays golden eggs, and will continue to produce in abundance the economic necessities of life—if we do not kill it through impatient and ignorant policies. He presents a long list of popular misconceptions and fallacies and of the facts which correct them. Elementary, simple and very readable.

ROOT, E. MERRILL. Collectivism on the Campus. Devin-Adair. 1955.

The theme of this book is “the battle for the mind in American colleges.” Professor Root argues that American college faculties today are dominated by collectivists—whom he calls “State liberals”—and that conservatives, libertarians, or true individualists on those faculties are not only in a minority but have a difficult time.

ROSENBERG, ARTHUR. A History of Bolshevism. Oxford University Press. 1934. 250 pp.

This is a translation from the German. Dr. Rosenberg wrote the book as a disillusioned communist. “Theory dominates Russian politics to an extent almost incomprehensible to the ordinary, practical Englishman; and Professor Rosenberg analyzes, with skill and knowledge, the theoretical foundations of the struggles of the past seventeen years. They revolve, of course, round the interpretation of Marxism.”—John Hallett, in The Spectator. “One of the most instructive books yet published on the history of bolshevism.”—W. L. Langer, in Foreign Affairs.

ROSSI, ANGELO. The Communist Party in Action. Yale University Press. 1950. 301 pp.

“This analytical study of the French Communist Party is one of the most important books on political theory and practice that have appeared in recent years. . . . Professor Kendall is to be congratulated not only for his translation but for his thoughtful introduction which challenges some of the premises of Rossi’s own alternative position as well as those of its critics.”—Sidney Hook, in Annals of the American Academy.

ROSTOVTZEFF, MICHAEL IVANOVICH. Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. Oxford University Press. 1926. 696 pp.

Not a history in the ordinary sense, but a study of the social and economic life of the Roman Empire. “Unquestionably the most solid and also the most brilliant contribution which has ever been made toward the interpretation of the Roman Empire.”—R. P. Blake, in the American Political Science Review. “Professor Rostovtzeff’s book will probably rank among the most notable contributions to the subject since Gibbon’s.”—A. J. Toynbee, in the Nation and Athenaeum.

ROUGIER, LOUIS. Les Mystiques Économiques. Paris: Librairie de Médicis. 1938. 1949. 278 pp.

This is a penetrating study of the steps by which liberal democracies have been or can be transformed into totalitarian states. By “mystiques” the author refers to economic doctrines that are mere rationalizations of prejudice, passion or sentimentality, and rest neither on reason nor experience. Special chapters are devoted to an examination of the older liberal mystique, the mystique of a planned economy, of the corporative state, of Marxism, etc. M. Rougier advocates what he calls “le libéralisme constructeur,” which implies liberty within a carefully constructed framework of law, constantly safeguarding competition, and “is not to be confused with the theory of laisser faire, laisser passer, which ends in the suppression of liberty through the very excess of liberty.”

ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES. The Social Contract. 1762. Many editions. 227 pp.

There is a discussion of the great influence of Rousseau in the introductory essay to this list, “Individualism in Politics and Economics.” Although Rousseau’s ideas deeply colored subsequent development of the philosophy of individualism, his peculiar type of rationalistic individualism, as F. A. Hayek has pointed out, mainly led to the opposite of true individualism—i.e., socialism or collectivism.

RUEFF, JACQUES. L’Ordre Social. Paris: Recueil Sirey. 1945. 2 vols. 747 pp.

A profound and original book, which makes a searching analysis of fundamental economic, political, legal and moral concepts. It draws a constant contrast between a regime of economic liberalism with true rights, and a statist, socialist or authoritarian regime with its system of “false rights.” It is especially effective in demonstrating the demoralizing economic and political effects of the cycle of deficit financing, monetary inflation, exchange control and price control that has marked the policies of so many “free” countries of the West since World War II.

RUEFF, JACQUES. Épître aux Dirigistes. Paris: Gallimard. 1949. 120 pp.

This is a “letter” addressed in a conciliatory tone to the Economic Planners, and more particularly to those who think that they can halt inflation or control an economy largely through the control of prices. M. Rueff shows the many evils to which attempts at price-fixing lead, and points on the other hand to the benefits brought about by freedom of the markets and a policy of economic liberalism.

RUEFF, JACQUES. The Fallacies of Lord Keynes’ General Theory. Quarterly Journal of Economics. May, 1947. 24 pp.

An important analysis.

RUGGIERO, GUIDO DE. The History of European Liberalism. Oxford University Press. 1928. 476 pp.

The author defines liberalism as neither democracy, in the sense of the rule of the mere majority, nor authoritarianism, in the sense of the irresponsible rule of those who happen to be in power. “An excellent exposition of modern liberalism.”—Boston Transcript.

RUSSELL, DEAN. The TVA Idea. Irvington, N. Y.: Foundation for Economic Education. 1949. 108 pp.

“With surgical skill, Dean Russell dissects not only the Tennessee Valley Authority in operation, but the philosophy of industry socialization, which the TVA represents. In a mere 100 pages, packed with supporting data, Russell thoroughly debunks the blatant claims made for TVA by its starry-eyed supporters. He then raises a warning that the TVA is more than just dams and power plants—it’s an idea, the extension of which involves loss of individual freedom and drastic political, social and economic consequences.”—John Fisher, in the Chicago Tribune.

SALTER, F. R. Karl Marx and Modern Socialism. Macmillan. 1921. 260 pp.

“In some ways this is the most useful account and criticism of Karl Marx that we have. Prof. J. Shield Nicholson in his Revival of Marxism can hardly hide his complete contempt for Marx’s inconsistencies and confusions, and he admits that he finds him ‘hopeless and depressing.’ But Das Kapital has had an immense influence, and Mr. Salter is more sympathetic. In fact, one might almost say that he is clearly out to paint as favorable a picture of Marx as his conscience will allow. In spite of this and his constant attempts to explain away or minimize errors, he cannot avoid exposing the false assumptions and the structure of false reasoning on which Marxian theories are built.”—PI (1927).

SAMUELSON, BERNARD. Socialism Rejected. London: Smith, Elder. 1913. 330 pp.

“A satirical examination of Socialism, written in a mock heroic style.”—PI. The author considers “art” socialism, “Christian” socialism, political and ethical socialism, Utopian socialism, “natural” socialism, and syndicalist socialism, and rejects them all.

SANBORN, FREDERIC ROCKWELL. Design for War. Devin-Adair. 1951. 607 pp.

A study of secret power politics from 1937 to 1941. “The basic contention of the book is that a President of the United States ought to consult freely and publicly with the Cabinet and Congress before making foreign engagements of any consequence. The author expresses the belief that the U. S. should follow more nearly the pattern of Britain, where foreign policy decisions generally are made only after a thorough airing in Commons, and where the Prime Minister is always directly accountable to the elected representatives of the people. The book is heavily documented.”—Springfield Republican.

SAY, JEAN BAPTISTE. Treatise on Political Economy. 1803. (Philadelphia: Grigg & Eliot. 1834.)

Jean Baptiste Say (1767-1832) was the founder of the classical school in France. Although an ardent disciple of Adam Smith, he made it his mission to reduce the “vast chaos” of Smith’s ideas to more orderly and simplified form. Among his original contributions were the introduction of the famous term entrepreneur into economic terminology, his emphasis on and explanation of the role of the entrepreneur, and his theory of markets. Say was the originator of “Say’s Law,” which points out that ultimately goods and services must be bought and paid for with other goods and services. This is a truism. But many errors resulted from ignoring it, as Malthus and others did, in their theory that depressions are caused by a general overproduction. And many present-day fallacies result from actually denying Say’s Law, as the Keynesians do. In short—although this truth must, of course, be understood with the proper qualifications—supply creates its own demand.

SCHAPIRO, J. SALWYN. Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism. McGraw-Hill. 1949. 421 pp.

An admirable history of social and intellectual forces in England and France from 1815 to 1870. The book is unsatisfactory in its interpretation and understanding of economic developments and the contribution of the classical economists; but it is excellent in its shrewd and balanced judgments of the political, philosophical and literary currents of the period. It is distinguished by a ripe scholarship and is very well written.

“This book is devoted to a study of the formation of the pattern of liberalism in England and France, where its ideals and policies became a model, followed more or less by the other nations of Europe. It also treats of the origins of fascist ideology in these countries . . . Chapters 13 to 15, dealing with the Heralds of Fascism, aim to throw a new light on Louis Napoleon, Proudhon, and Carlyle—the light of the present on the past. The system established in France by the strange and enigmatic Emperor cannot be understood without its being seen as a historic preview of the fascist state with its popular, even socialist, appeals cloaking a ruthless personal dictatorship.”—From the Preface.

SCHATZ, ALBERT. L’Individualisme économique et social. Paris: A. Colin. 1907. 590 pp.

“This great work of 590 pages is one of the most exhaustive studies of Individualism that exists and probably the most complete history.”—PI. “An excellent survey of the history of individualist theories. . . . Deserves to be much more widely known as a contribution not only to the subject indicated by its title but to the history of economic theory in general.”—F. A. Hayek.

SCHNABEL, F. Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert. Freiburg i.B. 4 vols. 1929-37.

“A remarkable recent work on the modern history of Germany which is not so well known abroad as it deserves.”—F. A. Hayek.

SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Harper. 1942. 381 pp.

An attempt to compare the relative merits and defects of capitalism and socialism, explain their respective relations to democracy, and indicate the type of society probable or possible in the future. I include this book in the present list with misgivings. Much of it is deliberately paradoxical. Professor Schumpeter seems to me unduly pessimistic about the future prospects of capitalism. He airily grants to socialism a practicability that no complete socialism could possess; and he never seriously comes to grips with the main economic argument against it. Yet this is nonetheless a remarkable book, rich in scholarship, witty, and often penetrating and profound. At least one college professor of my acquaintance, who himself ardently supports the principles of free enterprise, tells me that this book more than any other has shaken some of his students out of previous pro-socialist leanings. It can probably be recommended, therefore, to advanced economic students already acquainted with the work of von Mises, and possessing analytical powers of their own.

SCHUMPETER, JOSEPH A. History of Economic Analysis. Oxford University Press. 1954. 1,260 pp.

“A monumental achievement of scholarship, without equal in its field. . . . Readers of this journal will probably be irritated by the unnecessary condescending, if not contemptuous, manner in which Schumpeter usually refers to nineteenth-century liberalism and laissez-faire. But they should remember that it comes from an author who knew as well as anybody ‘that capitalist evolution tends to peter out because the modern state may crush or paralyze its motive force,’ yet who seems to have had an irrepressible urge pour épater les bourgeois.”—F. A. Hayek, in The Freeman.

SCHWARTZ, HARRY. Russia’s Soviet Economy. Prentice-Hall. 1950. 592 pp.

A careful description of the historical and ideological background of Soviet Russia, its economic plan, its industry, agriculture, and transportation. “The true value of this book lies in its solidly informative presentation of the Soviet economic machine and its pernicious effects upon the individual human Russian. A lucid introductory essay is contributed by William Henry Chamberlin.”—David Hecht, in the Saturday Review of Literature.

SCHWARZ, SOLOMON M. The Jews in the Soviet Union. Syracuse University Press. 1951. 380 pp.

“In the first part of the book Dr. Schwarz exhaustively analyzes Communist doctrine on minority nationalities in general, and on the Jewish people in particular; the history of the Soviet treatment of the Jewish community since the coming to power of the Bolsheviks in 1917; the successive Soviet programs for solving the Jewish problem; the story of the province of Birobidzhan; and the present situation of the Jews in the Soviet Union. In the second part of the book, the author makes a study of the evidences of antisemitism in the USSR from the first years of Communist rule until today.”—From the Publisher’s Note. “For the time being, it can be called the definitive study on the subject.”—Hans Kohn, in The New Republic.

SCHWARZSCHILD, LEOPOLD. The Red Prussian. Scribner’s. 1947. 422 pp.

“A biography of Karl Marx, mostly based on the enormous Marx-Engels correspondence, along with a critique of Marx’s Capital and of the Marxian theory of value. Mr. Schwarzschild does not present a kindly portrait of his subject; he convicts Marx, by quoting him, of virulent anti-semitism, and makes him out to be a petty, dishonest, completely unscrupulous and opportunistic man, a loose thinker, and a very bad prophet—in other words, the archetype of the totalitarian exponent of power who has become such a common figure in our times. . . . In holding the Marxian economic theory up to a strong light, the author uncovers some grave flaws in it, which have been noted by other critics but rarely so sharply illuminated. An important and well-presented book.”—New Yorker.

SCOVILLE, JOHN W. Labor Monopolies or Freedom. Committee for Constitutional Government. 1946. 167 pp.

A vigorous criticism of “collective bargaining” as commonly interpreted in practice. The author contends that competition will ensure fair wages. His final conclusion is: “Employers and employees should be free to make voluntary agreements with each other. The employer should be free. The worker should be free. Neither should be subject to coercion, intimidation, or compulsion from any source.”

SCOVILLE, JOHN W., AND SARGENT, NOEL. Fact and Fancy in the T. N. E. C. Monographs. National Association of Manufacturers. 1942. 812 pp.

During the administrations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Temporary National Economic Committee was set up, held hearings, and published forty-three monographs, running to 12,400 pages, which attempted to prove the existence of great concentration of economic power. This is a documented answer. The authors declare: “Many, but not all, of these monographs are impregnated with hostility to corporations and individuals of wealth. These reviews expose those statements and conclusions which, in the opinion of the reviewers, are fallacious or unsupported by evidence. . . . The monographs vary greatly in quality; they run the gamut from scholarly and comprehensive exposition to political claptrap.”

SENNHOLZ, HANS F. How Can Europe Survive? Van Nostrand. 1955. 336 pp.

This is one of the very few books of recent years to give a realistic analysis of the numerous schemes for European and Western unification, and to show how virtually all of these schemes have been rendered futile by internal interventionist and socialist policies that inevitably intensify and perpetuate nationalism. The author points out that the only feasible alternative is international cooperation based on individual liberty and free enterprise.

SENNHOLZ, MARY (ed.). On Freedom and Free Enterprise. Van Nostrani 1956. 333 pp.

Essays in honor of Ludwig von Mises, on subjects ranging from “The Road to Totalitariansm” to “Progressive Taxation Reconsidered,” by nineteen authors from the United States, South Africa, Switzerland, Italy, Mexico, and France: Jacques Rueff, William E. Rappard, Henry Hazlitt, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Hans F. Sennholz, F. A. Harper, Wilhelm Röpke, Faustino Ballvé, Carlo Antoni, Louis M. Spadaro, Fritz Machlup, L. M. Lachmann, Leonard E. Read, W. H. Hutt, William H. Peterson, Murray N. Rothbard, F. A. Hayek, Percy L. Greaves, Jr., and Louis Baudin.

SERGE, VICTOR. The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Doubleday. 1950. 306 pp.

On a cold winter’s night a young clerk, on impulse, shot and killed a highly placed member of the Communist party in Russia, Comrade Tulayev. The young man escapes, but, in the far-flung investigations of the “plot,” three other men, of far greater importance, are pursued to their death, men who are not guilty of this crime, at least, but men who have roused the distrust and enmity of the rulers of Russia. The author, who died in 1947, was an old revolutionary who had lived in exile, in France and Mexico, after the mid-thirties. “This is a novel in the great Russian tradition. Its theme is the modern tragedy of the old Bolsheviks, faced with the insoluble problem of reconciling their abiding faith in the original Communist ideal with acceptance of the tyranny, injustice and misery of the Soviet world they made.”—Freda Utley, in Human Events.

SHADWELL, ARTHUR. The Socialist Movement, 1824-1924. London: Allan. 1925. 2 vols.

“Dr. Shadwell has been described as ‘the greatest authority on the Socialist movement,’ and outside the Socialist camp this is probably true. These volumes constitute the best short history of the movement, and the only one which brings the account up to 1924. . . . The work includes an excellent refutation of Marxism, and the errors and illusions of Socialism are constantly indicated.”—PI (1927).

SHADWELL, ARTHUR. The Breakdown of Socialism. Little, Brown. 1926. 272 pp.

“A valuable study of recent Socialist experiments in Europe.”—PI.

SHUB, DAVID. Lenin: a Biography. Doubleday. 1948. 438 pp.

“Mr. Shub’s biography is the book you must read if you want to know what Communism is. . . . You will learn that Lenin’s superiority as a politician lay in the fact that he alone realized that social democracy is not the ultimate state of liberalism, but its antithesis; and you will learn by that token—though not directly from Mr. Shub, who sticks to his job as the biographer of a doctrine—how to deal with Communism effectively.”—Asher Brynes, in The Saturday Review of Literature.

SIDGWICK, HENRY. The Principles of Political Economy. Macmillan. 1883. 592 pp.

“In economics Sidgwick tends to follow John Stuart Mill; but his was an independent type of mind and he is always anxious to unearth new truths. . . . In the second . . . section . . . he begins by referring to the ‘sweeping doctrine,’ mainly derived from the Physiocrats, that ‘the sole function of an ideal government in relation to industry is simply to leave it alone.’ While giving this a certain general approval, he holds that it postulates a large amount of human virtue and unselfishness, and that there must be cases ‘in which its optimistic conclusion is inadmissible.’ Monopolies, for instance, are often urgent matters for Government interference. He gives a list of the familiar exceptions, e.g., Government must interfere for the purpose of national defense, the preservation of public health, etc., etc. Much of what he lays down is too well recognized to need recapitulation.”—PI.

SIDGWICK, HENRY. The Elements of Politics. Macmillan. 1891. 665 pp.

“Henry Sidgwick was a thinker of very high ability; possibly his influence is below his merits, because he possessed a cautious and noncommittal mind which did not favor vivid and popular treatment of his subjects; and further, his style is dry. This book from Chapters III to XII has much to say about the respective provinces of the Government and the individual. He is too cautious to go much beyond empiric methods, and is content to allow the questions to be determined largely by the circumstances of each particular case. However, his bias is towards Individualism. He points out several dangers in Government interference—(1) That of overburdening the governmental machinery with work. (2) That of increasing the power capable of being used by governing persons oppressively or corruptly. (3) The danger that the delicate economic functions of government will be hampered by the desire to gratify certain specially influential sections of the community. He adds: ‘When, along with these dangers, we take into account that the work of Government must be done by persons who—even with the best arrangement for effective supervision and promotion of merit—can only have a part of the stimulus and enterprise which the independent worker feels, it will be easily understood that we are not justified in concluding that governmental interference is always expedient, even where laissez-faire leads to a manifestly unsatisfactory result; its expediency has to be decided in any particular case by a careful estimate of advantages and drawbacks, requiring data obtained from special experience.’”—PI.

SIMONS, HENRY C. Economic Policy for a Free Society. University of Chicago Press. 1948. 353 pp.

Reviewing this book in The New York Times of Aug. 1, 1948, I wrote: “As an economic theorist Simons was far from first-rate; his originality lay in the realm of phrase-making rather than in that of thought; and while his style was vigorous, epigrammatic and witty, it was also interrupted, discursive and often pedantic. . . . [But] no one could deny Simons’ disinterestedness, or the depth of his desire for a better and freer society. Though many of his ideas were eccentric and crotchety, and neither adopted nor expounded with the patient, step-by-step reasoning which mark the work of Adam Smith, Mill, Marshall and most of the others to whom he felt himself to belong, he shared with these great figures their deep concern for freedom and a suspicion everywhere of concentrated power.”

A more favorable verdict is given by F. A. Hayek: “One need not agree with the whole of this work and one may even regard some of the suggestions made in it as incompatible with a free society, and yet recognize it as one of the most important contributions made in recent times.”

SIMONSON, GUSTAVE. A Plain Examination of Socialism. London: Swan Sonnenschein. 1900. 155 pp.

“A short and handy criticism, written by an American, of the general Socialist position. The writer contends that it is based upon absurd postulates. It rests on the undemonstrable and untenable assumptions that we can possibly right in the present supposed wrongs of the past; that each one who is born has a ‘natural right to the free use of the instruments of production which others may own; that labor is the sole cause of the value of anything and everything produced; that all values in property are not founded on demand-and-supply; and that a large share of these values has been produced by, and wrongly withheld from, those who have created them—in other words, that most of the present private property is the accumulated plunder from unrewarded past labor, and that this plunder must go on forever as long as the instruments of production are in private ownership.’”—PI.

SMITH, ADAM. The Wealth of Nations. 1776. Many editions. (London: Methuen. Edited by Edwin Cannan. 1904.) (Modern Library. 1937.) 2 vols. 462 pp. 506 pp.

Adam Smith is not merely the founder of political economy, but the father of economic liberty. In the 180 years since The Wealth of Nations appeared, the case for free trade, for example, has been stated thousands of times, but probably never with more direct simplicity and force than in that volume.

Gide and Rist, in their History of Economic Doctrines, have admirably summarized the qualities that make The Wealth of Nations unique: It “instantly eclipsed the tentative efforts of [Smith’s] predecessors. . . . His discussion of . . . questions is marked by such mastery of detail and such balance of judgment that he convinces without effort. His facts are intermixed with reasoning, his illustrations with argument. He is instructive as well as persuasive. Withal there is no trace of pedantry, no monotonous reiteration in the work, and the reader is not burdened with the presence of a cumbersome logical apparatus. All is elegantly simple. . . . In addition to this, Smith has been successful in borrowing from his predecessors all their more important ideas and welding them into a more general system. He superseded them because he rendered their work useless. A true social and economic philosophy was substituted for their fragmentary studies, and an entirely new value given to their contributions.”

SMITH, BRADFORD B. Liberty and Taxes. Irvington, N. Y.: Foundation for Economic Education. 1947. 20 pp.

The author argues against the progressive income tax and in favor of proportional taxation. “The one thing always to dread is the laying of a tax burden on minorities by majorities which the majority itself escapes. That is tax despoliation.”

SMITH, WALTER BEDELL. My Three Years in Moscow. Lippincott. 1950. 346 pp.

An account of three years of the cold war in Russia as viewed by the former United States ambassador to Moscow in the period from March 1946 to March 1949. Among the subjects discussed are Soviet industry and agriculture, the cultural purge, slave labor, anti-Semitism, the Berlin blockade, the Yugoslav situation, and the possibility of war.

SNYDER, CARL. Capitalism the Creator. Macmillan. 1940. 473 pp.

“The thesis here presented,” writes the author, “is that there is one way, and only one way, that any people, in all history, have ever risen from barbarism and poverty to affluence and culture; and that is by that concentrated and highly organized system of production and exchange which we call capitalistic.”

In reviewing this book in The New York Times, I wrote: “It is frankly and belligerently a defense of capitalism, and as such it is one of the most original and interesting this reviewer has ever seen. Mr. Snyder is one of the country’s best known statisticians; he is full of all sorts of miscellaneous learning. . . . He uses epithets freely and he has a habit of deliberately leaving out the verbs in most of his sentences, so that the reader is bumped and jolted rather than carried along.

“Mr. Snyder has a profound faith in the probative value of statistics . . . Impressive are the statistics and reasoning by which Mr. Snyder contends that wages are determined primarily by the product per worker; and that the product per worker is determined in the long run by the capital investment per worker, which makes possible the use of new machinery, new processes and new methods of production.”

SOLOVIEV, MIKHAIL. When the Gods Are Silent. McKay. 1953. 506 pp.

“The author, a former editor of Izvestia, tells a moving story of the development of the Russian revolutionary movement from its beginnings before World War I until a period just after World War II. It depicts, through die eyes of members of a Russian peasant family deeply involved in the whole movement, the growing blind obedience and the final realization that Russia must be saved but cannot be by the Communists.”—Library Journal.

SOMARY, FELIX. Democracy at Bay. Knopf. 1952. 171 pp.

William Henry Chamberlin calls this “a profound and searching little book” which “deserves a place on the same shelf with Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.” Somary measures the ills of the modern world against the standards of old-fashioned liberal individualism. He condemns the contemporary erosion of property rights, the tendency of direct taxation to reach confiscatory levels, and the general abandonment of the gold standard for unlimited paper inflation. “The more functions the state assumes,” he contends, “the less it is possible to control the administration.”

SOUVARINE, BORIS. Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism. Alliance. 1939. 690 pp.

“This book is one of the most remarkable biographies of our times. . . . It is the best critical history of Bolshevism from Lenin to Stalin that has been written to date. . . . Lesser men would have been borne down by the weight of M. Souvarine’s vast erudition, but the author has a keen mind, a delightful sense of humor, and knows how to etch in acid.”—Sidney Hook, in Books.

SPENCER, HERBERT. The Man Versus the State. 1884. Many editions. (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers. 1940.) 213 pp.

One of the most powerful and influential arguments for limited government, laissez faire and individualism ever written. The prophetic insight of such essays as “The Coming Slavery,” pointing out the then unrecognized threat of socialism to the freedom of the individual, has led to a strong revival of interest in Spencer after long neglect.

“Dictatorial measures, rapidly multiplied,” he wrote in the preface to this volume in 1884, “have tended continually to narrow the liberties of individuals. . . . Regulations have been made in yearly-growing numbers, restraining the citizen in directions where his actions were previously unchecked, and compelling actions which previously he might perform or not as he liked; and at the same time heavier public burdens . . . have further restricted his freedom, by lessening that portion of his earnings which he can spend as he pleases, and augmenting the portion taken from him to be spent as public agents please.”

Spencer contended that the sphere of government should be “confined to the duty of preventing aggressions of individuals upon each other, and protecting the nation at large against external enemies.” It should, in other words, be confined to maintaining security of life and property, and the freedom of the individual to exercise his faculties. He warned against all efforts by the State to confer positive benefits upon citizens. He objected even to sanitary supervision. Even most individualists today would regard Spencer’s individualism as in many respects extreme. Yet no one concerned with individual freedom can afford to ignore his work. Every student of the subject should be familiar with it.

Hardly less important in its bearing on individualism is Spencer’s Social Statics, published in 1850. But the theme of individualism runs through all his writings—through The Study of Sociology, The Principles of Ethics, and the Autobiography.

SPERBER, MANES. The Burned Bramble. Doubleday. 1951. 405 pp.

A novel about the Communist party in Europe in the 1930’s. “An impassioned and profound picture of Communist experience in the years before Stalinism had fully shown its face—of the faith and exaltation; the monstrous erasure of human decency and truth; the incredible loyalty and self-sacrifice whose eventual reward was a disillusioned soul, a cheated mind, and a bullet in the neck.”—C. J. Rolo, in The Atlantic.

SPITZBERGEN, HENRY E. (Henry Plowdeeper). “Liberals” and the Constitution. Washington, D. C: Liberty & Freedom Press. 1950. 301 pp.

A defense of free enterprise, private ownership of property, limited government, and the doctrine of constitutional “separation of powers.”

SPRADING, CHARLES T. (ed.). Liberty and the Great Libertarians. Los

Angeles: The author. 1913. 540 pp.

An anthology on liberty. Among the authors from whom passages have been selected are: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Emerson, Thoreau, Ingersoll, Henry George, Bernard Shaw, Olive Shreiner, and Maria Montessori.

STAMP, SIR JOSIAH. Wealth and Taxable Capacity. London: King. 1922. 195 pp.

“An analysis of the fundamental factors determining the relation of price, taxation and public debt to the total national income and capital. . . . Like Prof. Bowley’s works on national income, this is a book with which all who are seriously concerned about the problem of distribution ought to be acquainted.”—PI.

STAMP, SIR JOSIAH. Inheritance as an Economic Factor. Economic Journal. September 1926.

“The best analysis of the economic significance of inheritance that has yet been made. Of the conclusions, the following is of fundamental importance in modern controversy. ‘I think it probable that, through the inequalities due to the system in which inheritance has a part, the average man has a slightly smaller proportionate share of the aggregate than he would have had if there had been no inheritance system, but a substantially larger absolute amount because he shares a larger aggregate. . . . Whether under the circumstances he is justified in having a sense of injustice . . . is a matter lying beyond economics.’”—PI.

STANNARD, HAROLD MARTIN. Two Constitutions. Van Nostrand. 1949. 210 pp.

A comparative study of the written American constitution and the unwritten British one. It attempts to show a unity of purpose underlying the two.

STEINBERG, JULIEN. Verdict of Three Decades. Duell, Sloan & Pearce. 1950. 634 pp.

“An integrated and well-edited collection of writings about Soviet Communism, drawn mostly from the works of men and women who have revolted against it and believe that Lenin and Stalin cynically betrayed a revolution that they did not start in the first place. . . . If there are any people around who still do not believe the accusations made against Lenin and Stalin, this book should dispel their doubts.”—New Yorker.

STEPHEN, SIR JAMES FITZJAMES. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. London: Smith, Elder. 1873. 350 pp.

“A considerable portion of the book is devoted to J. S. Mill’s essay On Liberty. Stephen was a utilitarian and an admirer of Mill’s earlier writings. Mill, he says, ‘is the only modern author who has handled the subject with whom I agree sufficiently to differ from him profitably.’ Stephen delights in logical controversy. Here is an example: ‘To force an unwilling person to contribute to the British Museum is as distinct a violation of Mr. Mill’s principle as religious persecution.’ Stephen emphasized the necessity for definitions and the difficulty of finding a satisfactory definition for liberty. It is an interesting and useful book by a clever and vigorous writer with a good legal brain, who leans to the individualistic side and despises sentimentalism in economics and politics.”—PI. There are chapters on “Equality,” “Fraternity,” and “The Doctrine of Liberty in Its Application to Morals.”

STEPHEN, SIR LESLIE. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. 1876. London School of Economics. 1950. 3 vols. 1,233 pp.

“No single work quoted will be more useful to a beginner than this. Chapter X, ‘Political Theories,’ and Chapter XI, ‘Political Economics,’ are indispensable, but the whole is very valuable, because a knowledge of the intellectual conditions of the eighteenth century is all important for an understanding of English Individualism.”—PI.

STEPHEN, SIR LESLIE. The English Utilitarians. Putnam. 1900. 3 vols. 326 pp. 382 pp. 525 pp.

“Written when Stephen’s health was failing, these volumes have less vigor and merit than the previous work. But almost every chapter bears on our subject, and much useful information and criticism may be extracted.”—PI.

STEPHEN, SIR LESLIE. The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart.

London: Smith, Elder. 1893. 504 pp.

“Stephen, who in later life became a judge, was long a busy journalist, writing much for the Saturday Review and Pall Mall Gazette. His brother and biographer says: ‘He had sat at the feet of Bentham and Austin, and had found the most congenial philosophy in Hobbes.’ He had two counts against Mill—(1) That he had forsaken the straightforward principles of utilitarianism and laissez-faire. (2) That though he had diverged into a sort of sentimental Socialism, he would not permit the State to use the force it had at its disposal, for the purpose of restraining evil. Stephen was a convinced Individualist. His creed was to allow as much scope as possible to liberty and the individual, under the protection of a strong Government for purposes of police and security.”—PI.

STIGLER, GEORGE J. Five Lectures on Economic Problems. Longmans, Green. 1949. 65 pp.

These lectures, delivered before the London School of Economics by a professor of economics at Columbia University, are distinguished for pithy wisdom and shrewd analysis. They discuss “equality,” monopolistic competition, classical economics, mathematical economics, and the status of competition in the United States. This last lecture is particularly notable for the deftness with which it punctures the popular myth that competition has been declining steadily (and in many versions, drastically) for a half century or more. Professor Stigler estimates that competitive industries were producing seven-tenths of the national income in 1939, and utilizing more than four-fifths of the labor force. In his lecture on the classical economists he shows how much more they knew, and how much more humane and realistic they were, than it has been fashionable for our generation to believe.

STOWE, LELAND. Conquest by Terror. Random House. 1952. 300 pp.

A study of the countries behind the Iron Curtain: Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria. The author, an American newspaperman, bases his work on his own knowledge, plus material gained from journalists in exile, recent refugees, former officers, specialists of various kinds, and the underground. “Mr. Stowe has written a book to alarm the West, to make it aware of the important changes which five to seven years of Soviet control have already produced, not in the satellites alone but also in the balance between East and West in Europe. It is a grim story and one which needs to be widely reflected on.”—Philip Mosely, in the New York Herald Tribune.

STRAUSZ-HUPÉ, ROBERT, AND POSSONY, STEFAN T. International Relations in the Age of the Conflict Between Democracy and Dictatorship. McGraw-Hill. 1950. 947 pp.

“The long title of this book suggests its massive character. The almost unlimited subject of international relations is examined in almost one thousand pages of text, buttressed with vast erudition and illuminated by many flashes of perceptive wisdom. The authors are scholars connected respectively with the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University. . . . However, the book is far from being a colorless collection of undisputed facts. It should be, but probably will not be, required reading for all Utopians. For much learning has made the authors profoundly skeptical about the value of one-idea panaceas. And they are ruthless with attempts to make platitudes a substitute for policy.”—W. H. Chamberlin, in Human Events.

STRIPLING, ROBERT E. Red Plot Against America. Drexel Hill, Pa.: Bell Publications. 1950. 282 pp.

“The author of this book was the chief investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities from 1938 to 1948. Mr. Bob Considine has ‘edited’ the story of Mr. Stripling’s adventures first for a newspaper syndicate, then for publication in the present book. The final 113 pages are lifted, by permission, from ‘primers’ against communism published by the committee in 1948 and obtainable from the Government Printing Office.”—The New York Times.

STRUNSKY, SIMEON. Two Came to Town. Dutton. 1947. 219 pp.

A fantasy, speculating on what Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, respectively (introduced under the thin disguises of “Mr. Alexander” and “Mr. Thomas”), would say and think about New York and the ideology of present-day America if they could pay us a visit from the grave. Under a surface of playful humor, the author conveys a wise and penetrating message on how recent fashionable ideas and phrases could cause us to surrender our liberties.

STYPULKOWSKI, ZBIGNIEW F. Invitation to Moscow. McKay. 1951. 359 pp.

The author, a Polish lawyer and political prisoner, describes his long session in the notorious Soviet Lubianka prison, and the methods used to obtain a confession of his non-guilt. “It would be unfortunate if this volume were catalogued as merely another book on Soviet political terror. It is much more than that. An important half of the book is devoted to the author’s experience in the Polish underground, fighting against the German invaders. . . . Finally, this book is valuable because it gives the detailed story of Soviet perfidy toward the Polish underground in the closing days of World War II.”—Harry Schwartz, in The New York Times.

SULLIVAN, LAWRENCE. Bureaucracy Runs Amuck. Bobbs-Merrill. 1944. 318 pp.

A study of the confusion and overlapping in hundreds of the United States war emergency bureaus and agencies.

SULZBACH, WALTER. National Consciousness. Washington, D. C.: American Council on Public Affairs. 1943. 168 pp.

“Whoever reads it should have a more lively and discerning understanding of contemporary nationalism,”—Garland Downum, in the American Political Science Review.

SULZBACH, WALTER. “Capitalistic Warmongers.” University of Chicago Press. 1942.

Punctures with facts and economic analysis the socialist superstition that “capitalism creates war.”

SUMNER, WILLIAM GRAHAM. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. 1883. (Yale University Press. 1927.) 169 pp.

Few men have ever exposed the fallacies of state paternalism with more gusto and devastating logic than the American sociologist and economist, William Graham Sumner (1840-1910). The lucidity of his style and the humor of his illustrations are comparable to those of Bastiat. This little book contains among others the famous essay on “The Forgotten Man”—a phrase later perverted by politicians to mean exactly the opposite of what Sumner meant by it: “The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. . . . I call C the Forgotten Man. . . . The state cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man.”

Sumner also wrote valuable essays on free trade, protectionism and laissez faire. He was more celebrated in his own lifetime for his sociological work—his Folkways (1907), and his monumental four-volume study, The Science of Society, with A. G. Keller, which appeared in 1927.

SWANSON, ERNST W., AND SCHMIDT, EMERSON P. Economic Stagnation or Progress. McGraw-Hill. 1946. 212 pp.

A critique of recent doctrines on the mature economy, oversavings, and deficit spending. It is also a critique of the Keynes-Hansen school of economic stabilization—which held that the American economy was stagnant because of “lack of investment opportunities,” and that therefore deficit spending by government on a more or less continuous basis was necessary to sustain prosperity. Basically, this is a book of readings from other economists, but these are linked together by commentaries and supplemented by the authors’ own summaries and conclusions. The book covers much of the same ground as George Terborgh’s The Bogey of Economic Maturity (q.v.).

TALMON, L. J. The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy. Beacon Press. 1952. 366 pp.

This study seeks to show how totalitarian ideas grew out of utopian-ism, and how the extreme democrats of the French Revolution turned into the most ruthless dictators. “A book of great wisdom which I recommend to anyone who not only wants to broaden his basic knowledge of the French Revolution but also wishes to understand the basic—that is the intellectual—causes of the modern world crisis. Dr. Talmon’s work meets the highest academic standards.”—S. T. Possony, in the Annals of the American Academy.

TANSILL, CHARLES CALLAN. America Goes to War. Little, Brown. 1938. 731 pp.

A study of the reasons why America went to war in 1917. “The great value of Professor Tansill’s book is that it shows with incontestable detail just how independent of Congressional check is the President’s control of foreign affairs, and how this control can lead to war.”—John Chamberlain, in Books. “Mr. Tansill’s book . . . is critical, searching and judicious. . . . It is presented in a style that is always vigorous and sometimes brilliant. It is the most valuable contribution to the history of the pre-war years in our literature, and one of the notable achievements of historical scholarship of this generation.”—H. S. Commager, in The Yale Review.

TANSILL, CHARLES CALLAN. Back Door to War. Regnery. 1952. 690 pp.

The author is professor of American diplomatic history at Georgetown University. This volume on the origins of World War II is based on extensive research, including access to the confidential files of the State Department. “Prof. Tansill sketches briefly American foreign policy from Versailles to 1933, then gives many details and biting comments on the actions and attitudes of F. D. Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, Ambassador Dodd, etc.”—Library Journal. “When he is at his best, he is unfolding a diplomatic narrative with considerable skill, and with an excellent command of his sources.”—Dexter Perkins, in The New York Times

TAUSSIG, F. W. Principles of Economics. Macmillan. 1911, etc. 2 vols. 545 pp. 576 pp.

“Characterized by an exquisite sanity. We do not recall any work in which these subjects are discussed with an equal degree of lucidity. Professor Taussig’s book from beginning to end is intensely readable.”—The New York Times, in 1925. “The reviewer is impressed anew with the maturity and breadth, as well as with the literary style, which are outstanding characteristics of Taussig’s Principles.”—R. T. Bye, in the Annals of the American Academy, 1940. “A fine picture of classical doctrines. . . . All in all, Professor Taussig’s Principles remains an important part of economic literature—as it has been for over a quarter of a century. That is a distinguished record, almost unique for textbook writers in the field.”—T. F. Haygood, in the Southern Economic Journal, 1940.

TAUSSIG, F. W. International Trade. Macmillan. 1927. 425 pp.

The outstanding exposition, after the period of Bastable, of the “classical” theory of international trade. “What gives this book its great value—apart from gifts of exposition which recall the seductive clarity of the best pages of Stuart Mill—is the analysis and description of a multitude of facts drawn from his practical experience and which, even if one does not accept his general theory, have a special flavor and provide rich information of all sorts.”—Charles Rist. “Clarity of exposition is perhaps the first of the characteristics that will make the book supersede other treatises on the subject.”—London Times Literary Supplement.

TAYLOR, REGINALD. The Socialist Illusion. 1920.

“A study of the illusions and delusions from which Socialists suffer. Ideas such as ‘surplus value’ and the ‘something for nothing attitude’ are attacked. It is pointed out how much worse off all classes would be under a Socialist regime than under one which is primarily individualist.”—PI.

TCHERNAVIN, MME. TAT’YANA. Escape from the Soviets. London: Hamilton. 1934. 320 pp.

“By all odds the most vivid and inspiring—and compassionate—human document that has come out of the whole Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent regime.”—F. H. Britten, in Books.

TCHERNAVIN, VLADIMIR. I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviets.

Boston: Hale, Cushman & Flint. 1935. 368 pp.

In Escape from the Soviets Mme. Tchernavin told the story of her escape to Finland with her husband and her young son. In this book Vladimir Tchernavin recounts what happened before the escape, of his work as a scientist in a northern fishing center, of his arrest and the long months during which the GPU tried to wring a “confession” out of him, of his sentence to five years hard labor, and of the conditions of the prisons and concentration camps in which he was held. “It is a book which no lover of human liberty can read without being moved to horror and indignation.”—J. D. Adams, in The New York Times.

TENNIEN, MARK A. No Secret Is Safe. Farrar, Straus, 1952. 270 pp.

“No book has yet appeared which compels more belief than does Father Mark Tennien’s account of the ordeal of contemporary China. Speaking as both observer and victim, Father Tennien, a Maryknoll priest, provides us with a model of dispassionate reporting.”—Julien Steinberg, in The Saturday Review.

TERBORGH, GEORGE. The Bogey of Economic Maturity. Chicago: Machinery & Allied Products Institute. 1945. 263 pp.

The doctrine of economic maturity was born in the depression years of the thirties. It held that the passing of the frontier, the tapering off of population growth, the improbability of any further revolutionary inventions, left a dearth of opportunity for private investment, and that therefore the government must either expand “public investment” through deficit financing, or tax out of existence the excess savings poisoning the economy. Reviewing this book in The New York Times of Aug. 27, 1945, I wrote: “One by one, with closely reasoned arguments, with historic illustrations, and with a wealth of statistical documentation, the author kicks all the props from under the mature economy doctrine. . . . A first-rate contribution.”

THOMAS, IVOR. The Socialist Tragedy. Macmillan. 1951. 254 pp.

“Mr. Ivor Thomas is a former member of the Labor government in Britain turned Conservative. . . . He attacks the ‘myth’ that socialism is a barrier against communism. He recalls the actions of the Socialist parties in Eastern Europe and France and Italy as examples of how the socialists were not only powerless against the Communists but allied with the Communists. Mr. Thomas believes the only difference between socialism and communism is in degree; adoption of either results in loss of civil liberties and in reduced standards of living.”—Current History.

THOREAU, HENRY D. Civil Disobedience. 1849. Many editions. 29 pp.

Thoreau (1817-1862) was an extreme nonconformist and individualist—so extreme that the doctrine of this essay (inspired by a night spent in jail for Thoreau’s refusal to pay his poll-tax) comes close to anarchism. “I heartily accept the motto,” he begins, “ ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—’That government is best which governs not at all.’”

He claims the right of personal secession. “The authority of government,” he declares, “can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.” If everyone claimed the right of withdrawal and noncooperation, and disobedience of whatever laws did not entirely accord with his own ideas of justice or wisdom, government would become impossible. (On the other hand, I do not mean to imply by this objection that the individual is never under any circumstances justified in refusing obedience to a government or a particular law: such refusal may sometimes be the only method of reducing injustice or preventing despotism.)

Thoreau’s case is powerfully argued in a taut and elevated prose. Although some of the conclusions at which he arrives are too sweeping, he gives us many pearls of truth along the way.

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE. Democracy in America. 1835. Many editions. (Knopf. 1945.) 2 vols. 452 pp. 518 pp.

This is by far the best book ever written about America, and the most penetrating book ever written about democracy. It won instant acclaim, not only in the writer’s native France, where Royer-Collard declared: “Nothing equal to it has appeared since Montesquieu,” but in England, where John Stuart Mill hailed it as “among the most remarkable productions of our time.” Its central theme is that democracy has become inevitable; that it is, with certain qualifications, desirable; but that it has great potentialities for evil as well as good, depending upon how well it is understood and guided. In the view of de Tocqueville, the greatest danger that threatens democracy is its tendency toward the centralization and concentration of power: “If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority.”

There is revived interest in Tocqueville today because of what seems like the uncanny clairvoyance of his prophecies. For example (this by a Frenchman in 1835): “There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. . . . The principal instrument of [America] is liberty; of [Russia] servitude. Their starting point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”

But the special reason for including Democracy in America in this bibliography is that, as John Bigelow wrote in his Introduction to the 1904 (Appleton) edition, it is “an intellectual arsenal in which the friends of freedom will long come to seek weapons.” F. A. Hayek has written of de Tocqueville and Lord Acton: “These two men seem to me to have more successfully developed what was best in the political philosophy of the Scottish philosophers, Burke, and the English Whigs than any other writers I know.”

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE The Old Régime and the French Revolution.

London: Murray. 1856. 511 pp. (Doubleday Anchor Books. 1955. 300 pp.)

This book appeared some twenty years after Democracy in America. It is marked by the same luminous logic and eloquence. “The peculiar object of the work I now submit to the public is to explain why this great [French] Revolution [of 1789], which was in preparation at the same time over almost the whole continent of Europe, broke out in France sooner than elsewhere; why it sprang spontaneously from the society it was about to destroy; and lastly, how the old French monarchy came to fall so completely and so abruptly. . . .

“Many will perhaps accuse me of showing in this book a very unseasonable love of freedom—a thing for which it is said that no one any longer cares in France. . . .

“[Yet] despots themselves do not deny the excellence of Freedom, but they wish to keep it all to themselves, and maintain that all other men are utterly unworthy of it. Thus it is not on the opinion which may be entertained of freedom that this difference subsists, but on the greater or the less esteem we may have for mankind; and it may be said with strict accuracy, that the taste a man may show for absolute government bears an exact ratio to the contempt he may profess for his countrymen.”—From the Preface.

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE. Recollections. Columbia University Press. 1949. 331 pp.

“No Nineteenth Century student of history and politics . . . better understood the direction in which European society was evolving than the Count de Tocqueville. He knew that he was living in an age of continuous revolution and that this process, if accompanied by further concentration of power, could lead nowhere but into a tyranny unrestrained by either custom or religion. . . . The Recollections begin with the February Revolution of 1848, and are continued until the end of Tocqueville’s ministry. . . . The book, however, is less valuable for its historical content than for the political and philosophic lessons abstracted by Tocqueville from his experience and observation. . . . His great passion was for the dignity of the human person and for the liberty necessary to its preservation. What he dreaded about democracy was the destruction of this dignity, not so much by violence as by the insidious regimen of mediocrity.”—J. M. Lalley, in Human Events.

TOLEDANO, RALPH DE. Spies, Dupes and Diplomats. Duell, Sloan & Pearce. 1952. 244 pp.

“The spies are those, American and non-American, who have served the Soviet Union so assiduously during the past decade and more. The dupes are a number of highly placed citizens of the United States who, through misguided liberalism, bad judgment, or just plain muddleheadedness, also have served to further Russian aims. The diplomats, for the most part, are in the Departments of State, Defense, and Justice, and, if we can believe what we read, they also showed a surprising lack of insight and vigor where Soviet intrigue was concerned. It is the author’s thesis that, taken together, these three categories of individuals have aided immeasurably the Russian design for world conquest. More particularly, he charges them with having made possible the Communist conquest of China, the present weakened state of Japan, and the tragic division of Korea.”—Christian Science Monitor.

TOLEDANO, RALPH DE, AND LASKY, VICTOR. Seeds of Treason. Published for Newsweek by Funk & Wagnalls. 1950. 270 pp.

The story of the Hiss-Chambers case and the Hiss trials, by two reporters—Ralph de Toledano of Newsweek and Victor Lasky of the New York World-Telegram—who covered the case for their respective journals. “A fine professional job. . . . A delightfully readable presentation of all the evidence required for the forming of a fair judgment on a most puzzling case. . . . To many, its outstanding excellence consists in the clear light it throws on the process by which an heir of the American tradition is turned into a traitor to his country.”—Catholic World.

TREVELYAN, G. M. Life of John Bright. Houghton Mifflin. 1913.

A portrait of the life and times of the great exponent of free trade, by an outstanding British historian.

TUCKER, JOSIAH. A Brief Essay, etc. 1750. Four Tracts. 1774. (A Selection from His Economic and Political Writings. Ed. by R. L. Schuyler. Columbia University Press. 1931. 576 pp.)

The PI refers to Tucker as “a racy forerunner of the Manchester School, especially on questions of colonial trade.” He is regarded by F. A. Hayek as one of the founders of true individualism. In his Elements of Commerce (1756) he wrote: “The main point is neither to extinguish nor to enfeeble self-love, but to give it such a direction that it may promote the public interest by promoting its own.”

UTLEY, FREDA. Lost Illusion. Philadelphia: Fireside Press. 1948. 288 pp.

The author has rewritten her book, The Dream We Lost, and now calls it Lost Illusion. It is “her account of herself as an English communist who was converted romantically, she now believes, to the Russian version of communism, lived for years in Russia, was progressively disillusioned by the change from original communism to ruthless industrialism, and got away to the United States.”—New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review. “A book like Miss Utley’s is a powerful educational instrument for democracy because of its honesty, its humility, its information, and above all for the unescapable moral issues it places before the intellectuals of the West.”—Sidney Hook, in The New York Times.

UTLEY, FREDA. Last Chance in China. Bobbs-Merrill. 1947. 408 pp.

This book proved to be prophetic. Reviewing it on its appearance in 1947, The New Yorker wrote: “A treatise on the situation in China, based on a trip the author, for many years a strenuous convert to anti-Communism, took through the East shortly after the war. Miss Utley views everything with alarm; she believes that the United States has badly mismanaged its Chinese affairs and, by hamstringing Chiang Kai-shek, has practically invited the Chinese Communists to overrun the East.”

UTLEY, FREDA. The China Story. Regnery. 1951. 274 pp.

“Immediately after the war the market was flooded with books favorable to the Chinese Communists. Miss Utley has presented the other side of the case more thoroughly and more ably than any other American publicist. Her story throws a good deal of light (if sometimes controversial light) on one of the most burning and tragic issues of American foreign policy.”—W. H. Chamberlin, in the Christian Century.

VALTIN, JAN. Out of the Night. Alliance Book. 1941. 841 pp.

“There is no better picture of the life of a secret agent floating about the Communist underworld of the twenties, and no more horrible and convincing account of conditions in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. But beyond all the things which make it more readable than any ‘thriller’ are the profound political morals of the decline into sordid intrigue, corruption, and mechanical obedience of the international Communist movement.”—A. P. W., in the Manchester Guardian.

VAN SICKLE, JOHN V., AND ROGGE, BENJAMIN A. Introduction to Economics. Van Nostrand. 1954. 746 pp.

This stands out as one of the few introductory college economic textbooks today that are frankly and positively liberal in the traditional meaning of the term. It is notable for the simplicity and skill of its exposition. While its own conclusions are conservative, it explains clearly and objectively, for example, what is meant by “Keynesian economics.” The authors place special stress on the importance of functionally correct wages to the performance of a private enterprise system. There is also a discussion of communism, socialism, and planning as alternatives to capitalism.

VENNARD, EDWIN, AND WINSBOROUGH, ROBB M. The American Economic System. Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson & Co. 1953. 96 pp.

The authors attempt to give a simple explanation of the American economic system. Their book contains over a hundred illustrations in one to four colors, and illuminating charts and tables. Their theme is that the American people are better housed, better clothed, and better fed than any other major group of people in the world because of their free, or comparatively free, market economy.

VERRIJN STUART, COENRAAD A. De Wetenschap der Economie en de Grondslagen van Het Sociaaleconomisch Leven. Haarlem, Holland: Erven F. Bohn. 1947. 319 pp.

A notable book by an eminent liberal Dutch economist.

VIERECK, PETER. The Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals. Beacon Press. 1953. 320 pp.

An eloquent and stimulating, although often confused, book. Its author preaches a “new conservatism” but wants to “take conservatism away from the conservatives.” His central argument is that it is our duty to fight the evil of totalitarianism in all its forms, and that the shame of the intellectuals lies in their failure to fight the terrorism of Stalin with the same vigor that they fought that of Hitler.

VLUGT, EBED VAN DER. Asia Aflame. Devin-Adair. 1953. 294 pp.

An historical survey, by a native of Holland, and an influential editor and lawyer, of the growth of Red Russia’s influence in the various countries and regions of Asia during the last three decades. “If in addition to the convincing text of this book, there were need of authoritative recommendation, it might be mentioned that the author’s views are fully in accord with those of General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who writes the Foreword.”—Joseph McSorley, in the Catholic World.

VOIGT, F. A. Unto Caesar. Putnam. 1938. 303 pp.

An analysis of political conditions in Europe—particularly the fundamentals of fascism and communism and Great Britain’s role in keeping the peace. The author was a member of the staff of the Manchester Guardian. “A brilliant, circumstantial and thought-provoking book.”—The [London] Economist.

VOLTAIRE. Works. Many editions.

Voltaire (1694-1778), particularly after his three-year visit to England from 1726 to 1729, became one of the great influences of the eighteenth century for toleration and personal liberty. But if any one-volume anthology devoted to the libertarian side of his thought has been selected and compiled from his voluminous works, I do not know of it. Such a selection should include much from his Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733). (See also Lord Morley’s Voltaire.)

WALSH, EDMUND A. Total Empire. Milwaukee: Bruce Publishers. 1951. 293 pp.

“Father Walsh, regent of the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University, is a lifelong student of geopolitics. . . . As director of the papal relief mission to Soviet Russia, Father Walsh witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution. These first-hand observations plus his own encyclopedic knowledge enable him to examine the grave question: Why has Russia’s attempt thus far succeeded where Germany’s failed?”—The New York Times.

WARREN, CHARLES. Making of the Constitution. Little, Brown. 1928. 832 pp.

“For the first time in a single volume all the contemporary material relating to the formation of the Constitution has been brought together and the history of the Constitutional Convention is presented, day by day. Mr. Warren has assembled the letters of the public men of the day, the delegates and others, and has printed also the editorials and articles from the contemporary newspapers, presenting thus not only the thoughts of the men who were at work upon the Constitution or were otherwise influential in the country, but the conditions and the public opinion of that time. . . . Making of the Constitution measures up to every demand of authoritative history, alike in its scholarly research, its liberal humanitarianism and its smoothly flowing style.”—The New York Times.

WASSON, R. GORDON. The Hall Carbine Affair. New York: Pandick Press. 1941. 1948. 190 pp.

The author, a vice president of J. P. Morgan & Co., seizes on an oft-told episode in the life of the elder Morgan, founder of the banking house, in which he is alleged to have sold to the government during the Civil War some condemned arms at a profit that would have been exorbitant for first-class weapons. Mr. Wasson delves into the contemporary records and reveals with very careful documentation exactly what took place. Then he turns to the spurious version of this episode, identifies its inventor as Gustavus Myers, tracks down its successive embellishments at the hands of later anti-capitalistic “economic historians,” and shows how the myth got itself firmly embedded into the American credo. The disclosure is important for the light it throws on how cynical hostility to present big business leads to the invention and acceptance of historic slanders. Allan Nevins calls the Wasson book “a capital piece of work.”

WATTS, V. ORVAL. Away From Freedom: The Revolt of the College Economists. Los Angeles: Foundation for Social Research. 1952. 105 pp.

A vigorous answer to Keynesism, from an uncompromising advocate of free enterprise. Dr. Watts takes off from the criticisms of Keynesism previously made by such writers as L. Albert Hahn, Ludwig von Mises, and the late Benjamin M. Anderson. His analysis of the technical aspects of Keynesism leaves something to be desired, but his discussion of its moral and political weaknesses is admirable. He points out in detail how it teaches disregard for property rights, disparages self-reliance, foresight, thrift and enterprise, puts its faith in bureaucracy and coercive authority, and is fundamentally hostile to free trade, free markets and individual liberty.

WATTS, V. ORVAL. Union Monopoly: Its Cause and Cure. Los Angeles: Foundation for Social Research. 1954. 88 pp.

Dr. Watts argues that present labor union monopolies are the product of a special government license granted to unions to use violence, coercion and compulsion, and that this state of affairs is further aggravated by denial to employers of what ought to be their legal right of choice. Dr. Watts also argues that, in spite of all their specially granted privileges and immunities, unions have not raised the over-all share of employees in the product of industry. The book is well organized and contains an excellent analysis of the defects of the Wagner Labor Relations Act of 1935, and of the subsequent Taft-Hartley Act.

WATTS, V. ORVAL. The United Nations: Planned Tyranny. Devin-Adair. 1955. 160 pp.

The author argues that the United Nations as presently constituted is “not liberal but reactionary,” and that it is “a blueprint for tyranny and perpetual war instead of an instrument of peace.”

WEAVER, HENRY GRADY. Mainspring. 1947. Irvington, N. Y.: The Foundation for Economic Education. 1953. 279 pp.

Contends that only free men can make effective use of their imaginations and creative abilities and that the purpose of government is to protect personal liberty. An excellent introduction to the history of human freedom and the resulting moral, social, and material benefits. “Down through the ages,” writes Mr. Weaver, “countless millions, struggling unsuccessfully to keep bare life in wretched bodies, have died young in misery and squalor. . . . Then suddenly, on one spot on this planet, people eat so abundantly that the pangs of hunger are forgotten.” The reason for this miracle, the author contends, is not any extraordinary inherent ability in the American people, but their system of economic freedom.

WEBER, MAX. General Economic History. Greenberg. 1927. 401 pp.

A history of the evolution of the capitalistic spirit from a sociological point of view. The book was prepared by German editors from notes left by Max Weber and the notebooks of his students.

WEISSBERG, ALEXANDER. The Accused. Simon & Schuster. 1951. 518 pp.

“This is not just one more book in the rapidly growing literature on the Chystka, the Great Purge, of 1936-1938. It is a landmark, a monument, and an inexhaustible source of penetrating insights into the souls of the men who confess and of those who make them confess; of a few political heroes and a number of political provocateurs; of real and fictitious spies; and of thousands of simple human beings, disoriented, frightened, and often going from prison cell to execution. . . . From this source a future Dostoevsky will draw the elements and inspiration for a new House of the Dead.”—D. J. Dallin, in The New York Times.

WEST, REBECCA. The Meaning of Treason. Viking. 1947. 307 pp.

A profound study of the motives that have led scientists and other “intellectuals” of the Western world to betray their own countries in the service of the communist conspiracy. “Wonderfully illuminating reports on William Joyce, John Amery, and other British traitors.”—The Atlantic. “A tour de force . . . told in memorable prose.”—Commonweal.

In the second edition published in 1952 Miss West added new chapters containing studies of two more traitors—Dr. Alan Nunn May and Dr. Klaus Emil Fuchs.

WHITE, ANDREW DICKSON. Fiat Money Inflation in France. 1896. (Irvington, N. Y.: Foundation for Economic Education. 1952.) (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers.) 69 pp.

Andrew Dickson White was an eminent historian, the first president of Cornell, and American ambassador to Russia and Germany. This is a brilliant history of inflation in France in the revolutionary period from 1789 to 1797. It shows by scrupulous citation of documented data how irredeemable paper money leads to soaring prices, price fixing, scarcity, the black market, the spy system, the invasion of privacy, immorality and tyranny. A little masterpiece.

WHITE, W. L. Report on the Russians. Harcourt, Brace. 1945. 309 pp.

The story of a six-weeks’ trip to Russia during the summer of 1944. Because it was one of the first books to break the conspiracy of silence about the shortcomings of our then “ally,” its appearance met a storm of denunciation and protest. “Mr. White makes little attempt to analyze the social processes at work in Russia or to generalize about her recent history. He simply tells what he saw, heard, and felt. But, as a journalist, he was in a position to enjoy certain unique advantages. He traveled about in a way that no regular correspondent in the Soviet Union had been permitted to do in years. . . . His book has thus a unique value and ought not to be confused with the ordinary correspondent’s book about Russia. Mr. White not only saw much more than most visitors, he is a better observer than most, and he tells you how things look and people behave, and how everything strikes an American, in a way that few other writers have ever done.”—Edmund Wilson, in The New Yorker.

WICKSELL, KNUT. Lectures on Political Economy. London: Routledge. 1934. 2 vols. 299 pp. 238 pp.

Knut Wicksell (1851-1926) was a Swedish economist most celebrated for his theory concerning the relations between money and natural rates of interest and movements in the general level of prices. This was of more than purely theoretical interest, because it pointed to the errors that governments make in bringing on inflation by trying to maintain artificially low interest rates. But his total contribution to economics was of much wider importance than this. Lionel Rob-bins writes: “There is no work in the whole range of modern economic literature which presents a clearer view of the main significance and interrelations of the central propositions of economic analysis than these lectures.”

WICKSTEED, PHILIP H. The Common Sense of Political Economy. 1910. (London: Routledge. 1933, etc.) 2 vols. 871 pp.

This brilliant book is as remarkable for the ease and lucidity of its style as for the penetration and power of its reasoning. Its real importance has only been recognized in recent years. In his Preface in 1910, Wicksteed wrote: “The Introduction will make it clear that the author makes no claim to originality or priority with respect to anything that it contains.” This modest disavowal was taken too literally, and for years Wicksteed was regarded mainly as a popularizer of Jevons. But in his Introduction to the 1933 edition, Lionel Robbins pointed out that the book is “the most exhaustive non-mathematical exposition of the technical and philosophical complications [implications?] of the so-called marginal theory of pure economics, which has appeared in any language. . . . The book was the culmination of Wicksteed’s life work. . . . Into it he poured all the subtlety and persuasiveness, all the literary charm, of which he was capable. It is a masterpiece of systematic exposition. . . . Wicksteed’s place in the history of economic thought is beside the place occupied by Jevons and the Austrians.”

WILCOX, THOMAS. The Anti-Bolshevik Bibliography. Distributed by Thomas Wilcox, 712 W. Second St., Los Angeles 12. 1955. 89 pp.

A bibliography of anti-Marxist literature.

WILLOUGHBY, CHARLES ANDREW. Shanghai Conspiracy. Dutton. 1952. 315 pp.

The report of General MacArthur’s intelligence chief on the Soviet military intelligence operations in Shanghai, as revealed through the confessions of Richard Sorge. Contains a chapter on “Agnes Smedley and the War Department.”

WILLOUGHBY, WESTEL W. The Ethical Basis of Political Authority. Macmillan. 1930. 460 pp.

The author has been professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University, and his work is distinguished for scholarship and clarity. His aim in this book is to examine political authority as viewed by the moralist. He believes that political coercion “is justified to the extent that it provides a more efficient and less oppressive form of control than would exist without it.”

WILSON, THOMAS. Modern Capitalism and Economic Progress. Macmillan. 1950. 274 pp.

“The position occupied by British liberals is defended by Mr. Wilson, and from it he directs a scathing fire against the Labor Government of his country. Like American critics of socialism, he fears the socialistic threat to human liberty, but he thinks of liberty as a fairly tough plant which can stand considerable doses of government guidance. . . . He shows that capitalism has been progressive, that it can continue so, and that the profit motive has been a safeguard to liberty.”—The New York Times.

WILTSE, CHARLES M. John C. Calhoun: Nationalist (1782-1828). Bobbs-Merrill. 1944. 477 pp. John C. Calhoun: Nullifier (1829-1839). Bobbs-Merrill. 1951. 511 pp.

Of the first volume, R. N. Current wrote in the American Historical Review: “This study of Calhoun’s earlier career, much the ablest and most thorough yet published, must take its place at once as the standard account.” Felix Morley calls the two books together “a great biography.” “It was time,” he writes, “for a sympathetic biographer to rescue Calhoun from the avalanche of tendentious smearing under which his name has long been buried. In Mr. Wiltse’s own words: ‘He seemed to me the most original and in many respects the keenest political thinker this country has produced, but few people had ever heard of him except as a defender of slavery. . . . Being of good Yankee stock, and brought up accordingly, I was a little surprised myself to discover that he didn’t wear horns.’” (See the entry under Calhoun’s A Disquisition on Government.)

WINDER, GEORGE. The Free Convertibility of Sterling. London: Batch-worth Press. 1955. 62 pp.

A lucid, thorough, and uncompromising protest against continuation of exchange control. It is not merely a polemic, but a sort of elementary textbook on foreign exchange. The author emphasizes that exchange control involves not only price-fixing in currencies, but arbitrary confiscation of the overseas earnings of a country’s own citizens. He also points out that the postwar overvaluation of sterling relative to the dollar brought about the so-called “dollar shortage” and discouraged British exports.

WITHERS, HARTLEY. Poverty and Waste. London: Smith, Elder. 1914. 180 pp.

“This book might have been called ‘The Case for the Poor.’ The author throughout is pleading for those in relative poverty. It is a frank discussion of some of the admitted faults of the Capitalistic system, and an examination of the more honest and enlightened criticisms that are made against the present order. He shows that ‘There is plenty of excuse for the bitterness on the part of the workers,’ and in his pleading on their behalf he sometimes seems to overstate their case and to understate the point of view of the employer and the wealthy consumer. As, however, he is mainly appealing to the wealthy and attacking extravagance, this is not necessarily a drawback. One would not get the impression from this book that Mr. Hartley Withers was an Individualist, and yet it is really one of the best arguments against Socialism that we have.”—PI.

WITHERS, HARTLEY. The Case for Capitalism. Dutton. 1920. 255 pp.

“As a writer of popular works on economics and finance, Mr. Hartley Withers stands alone. In this book he makes many undoubted complexities appear simple and almost obvious. That the Capitalist system is ‘more truly democratic and in favor of freedom than either of the rival systems’ has nowhere been more clearly argued. No mere pleading for the preservation of all aspects of Capitalist society as it exists is to be found here. There is much keen criticism of certain features of the Capitalist regime. Although published in 1920 it suffers less than the majority of books which appeared about that time from the false optimism that colored most thinking and writing in those days.”—PI.

WOLFE, BERTRAM D. Three Who Made a Revolution. Dial Press. 1948. 661 pp.

Studies of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. “This is one of those rare books which are obviously destined from the moment of publication to become a source and authority for the guidance of all later writers on the subject. It is to be hoped that Three Who Made a Revolution will also be discovered and widely studied by a general public which earnestly wants to understand why the Soviets behave the way they do.”—Hal Lehrman, in The Saturday Review of Literature.

WOLMAN, LEO. Industry-Wide Bargaining. Irvington, N. Y.: Foundation for Economic Education. 1948. 63 pp.

One of the country’s outstanding authorities on labor points out the consequences of industry-wide unions. He concludes: “The problem of labor monopoly cannot be dealt with effectively unless, and until, the immunity to the anti-trust laws which organized labor has enjoyed since 1914 is withdrawn. . . . Its perpetuation . . . will in time cause the break-down of our entire anti-monopoly policy. This is the first step toward a regulated or planned economy, as it has proved to be in other countries.”

WOODHOUSE, A. S. P. (ed.). Puritanism and Liberty. London: Dent. 1938. 506 pp.

Contains well-selected documentation of the Puritan Revolution in England.

WOODLOCK, THOMAS F. Thinking It Over. Declan X. McMullen Co. 1947. 292 pp.

A compilation of more than a hundred of the author’s articles which originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Woodlock was a wise and farsighted defender of the free enterprise system. The subjects covered here include: “Society: Isms and Idols,” “Democracy: Definition and Debate,” and “Economics: Order and Disorder.”

WRIGHT, DAVID MCCORD. Capitalism. McGraw-Hill. 1951. 246 pp.

One of the most vigorous and intelligent defenses of capitalism ever made by an American economist. It views its subject from a political and social as well as a purely economic standpoint.

WRIGHT, DAVID MCCORD. Economics of Disturbance. Macmillan. 1946. 115 pp.

A main thesis of this book is suggested by two sentences in it: “The socially tolerable rate of expansion likely to be demanded in a democratic society will probably be much faster than the ‘equilibrium’ rate which would ensure a permanent full employment adjustment” (p. 85). “Much of the insecurity and the instability we now decry is the result of the scientific achievement and the social democracy which we admire” (p. 98).

WRIGHT, DAVID MCCORD. Democracy and Progress. Macmillan. 1948. 220 pp.

“Professor Wright has written the best defense of private enterprise we have seen. . . . It is an argument, brilliant in many respects, for a flexible capitalism capable of adjustment to changing conditions.”—A. B. Wolfe, in The American Economic Review.

WRIGHT, DAVID MCCORD (ed.). The Impact of the Union. Harcourt, Brace. 1951. 405 pp.

This is a round-table discussion, by eight prominent economists, of the economic and political consequences of labor unions. The participants are John Maurice Clark, Gottfried Haberler, Frank H. Knight, Kenneth E. Boulding, Edward H. Chamberlin, Milton Friedman, David McCord Wright, and Paul A. Samuelson. Although it is impossible to summarize here their diverse conclusions, the papers and comments are often highly critical of labor union policies, and the discussion as a whole is in striking contrast with the political dogma that the influence of labor unions has been entirely beneficent, and that the chief aim of law should be to encourage the growth of their numbers and powers.

WRISTON, HENRY M. Challenge to Freedom. Harper. 1943. 240 pp.

The thesis of this book, according to its author, “is simple and may be stated explicitly: the principal duty of democratic government is the maintenance and expansion of freedom.” He declares in his conclusion: “The proposals of this book are all radical; none of them looks toward any reactionary policy whatever. We have been living in a world where, by a kind of double talk, the vocabulary of liberalism has been stolen by the real reactionaries. Only in a world where values have become topsy-turvy would it be possible for Hitler to describe tyranny as a ‘new order,’ or for bureaucracy to masquerade in the habiliments of liberalism, or for the planned economy to make a pretense of ‘economic democracy.’ Government by bureaucracy, control of business by administrative regulation, manipulation of the economy for political reasons—these are stark reaction. Not all the cascades of beautiful words about ‘new social goals,’ ‘bold social engineering,’ ‘security from the cradle to the grave’ can wash away that ineradicable fact.” One of the best works in the recent literature of individualism.

ZAMIATIN, EUGENE. We. Dutton. 1924. 286 pp.

A sometimes obscure but haunting and powerful novel of life in a totalitarian society. It is a remarkable anticipation in some respects of Huxley’s Brave New World (q.v.), or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (q.v.)—and of the realities of Soviet Russia. The last is not so surprising, as Zamiatin was a Russian writer living in Soviet Russia. His book, however, was published only in translation, outside of Russia. At the climax of the novel the authorities order a brain operation on everyone to remove the Imagination as a danger to the State. Totalitarian communist governments today perform the moral equivalent of this operation: it has come to be known as brainwashing.