Ralph Raico

Articles

Remembering the Crimes of Totalitarian States

06/12/2025 Mises Wire Ralph Raico

One of the most pernicious legacies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao is that any political leader responsible for less than, say, three or four million deaths is let off the hook. This hardly seems right, and it was not always so.

The Dutch Model of Secession, Commercial Freedom, and Religious Tolerance

06/11/2025 Mises Wire Ralph Raico

The old Dutch republic was a case of commerce producing tolerance, producing harmony, producing a willingness to interact for the mutual benefit.

The Medieval Origins of the European Miracle

04/05/2025 Mises Wire Ralph Raico

“The critical point was, again the Middle Ages, and there you had an adversarial position between the church and the state that was, in fact, crucial.”

Publications

The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

03/13/2025 Ralph Raico

The Struggle for Liberty gives us vintage Ralph Raico in his roles of lecturer and professor. In these lectures he weaves together the daily life of the past, competing intellectual traditions, the history of the modern state, and the international

The World at War

Ralph Raico

To understand war, you also have to understand economics. Ralph Raico’s lecture “The World at War” is a masterpiece. Recorded in 1983, it remains perhaps the best introduction to the classical-liberal interpretation of the two world wars of the

Why Do So Many Intellectuals Hate Free Markets?

08/24/2020 Ralph Raico

[This article is excerpted from chapter 3 of Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School. Footnote numbering differs from the original.] Hayek on the Intellectuals and Socialism F.A. Hayek was acutely concerned with our problem, since he, too, was

Media

The “Old” vs. the “New” Liberalism

07/16/2020 Ralph Raico

The enemies of the system of free enterprise paid liberalism an unintended compliment when they applied the name "liberal" to their own creed, historically the opposite of what liberalism stood for from the start.

How Historians Changed the Meaning of “Liberalism”

07/13/2020 Ralph Raico

Liberalism was the most popular and influential ideology during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. So, every new socialist and authoritarian movement defined itself as "liberal" to capitalize on liberalism's popularity and importance.

Ralph Raico: Liberalism Defined

12/30/2016 Ralph Raico Jeff Deist

Ralph Raico delivers a witty, razor-sharp exposition of what liberalism really means.

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.