Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Articles

07/23/2021 Mises Wire Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

The popular pastime of modern democracies of punishing the diligent and thrifty, while rewarding the lazy, improvident, and unthrifty, is cultivated via the State, fulfilling a demo-egalitarian program based on a demo-totalitarian ideology.

Portrait of an Evil Man: Karl Marx

07/21/2021 Mises Wire Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Destructive ideas almost unavoidably derive from a destructive and—in the case of Marxism—rather repulsive person.

The Roots of “Anticapitalism”

07/19/2021 Mises Wire Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Anticapitalism's origins are not found with the workers. Rather, it came from the aristocrats and middle-class intellectuals who harbored resentment and fear of the rising entrepreneurial and industrial classes.

Publications

The Cultural Background of Ludwig von Mises

07/31/2019 Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Writing for Americans about the cultural background of Ludwig von Mises, an eminent former compatriot of mine, poses some difficulties: how to present you with a world radically different from yours, a world far away, which in many ways no longer

Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time

03/02/1952 Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Sometime in the 18th century, the word equality gained ground as a political ideal, but the idea was always vague. In this treatise, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues that it reduced to one simple and very dangerous idea: equality of political power

Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse

07/15/1974 Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn gives us in Leftism a remarkable defense of classical liberal and libertarian thought, based on his enormous learning in the twenty languages he could read. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, an Austrian aristocrat, became in his long career

Media

The Cultural Background of Ludwig von Mises

12/02/2024 Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Originally published in the Mises Institute’s Studies in Classical Liberalism series in 1999. The text of this essay is available at https://mises.org/essays-political-economy/cultural-background-ludwig-von-mises

Chapter 3. Monarchy and War

06/06/2019 Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

From The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

The Mises and Hayek Critiques of Modern Political State

02/02/2005 Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Presented as part of the Austrian Workshop seminar series. Recorded at Pebble Hill (Auburn, Alabama) on 17 November 1997.

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.