Is Babbittry alive and well in twenty-first-century America? George F. Babbitt is novelist Sinclair Lewis’s protagonist in the novel of the same name. Babbitt is a real estate man, which is to say a salesman, but the newfangled 1920s term is “Realtor ™. “ Incurious, smug, self-satisfied, and utterly predictable, Babbitt is well pleased with his
Critical race theory (CRT) has become the cultural wedge issue of 2021. An important question is what will be CRT’s effect on the future of freedom. Because CRT assumes a finite economic pie and posits all economic interactions as zero-sum, the continuing adoption of CRT in American society will necessarily lead the US away from free markets and
Signs of incipient totalitarian impulses have been evident since the rise of political correctness. Yet, warnings from those who saw the character of contemporary “social justice” went largely unheeded. Nevertheless, even before degenerating into “wokeness,” social justice bore the seeds of civilizational decline and the simultaneous rise of
Over the past half decade, there has been a growing trend signaling a shift in the perceived and accepted role of science. It is not uncommon to see slogans and mottos such as “ the science is settled ” and “ believe in science .” Statements like this present two major problems: first, science is determined to be final and indisputable; second, it
This book offers an account of Hegel that will surprise many readers—at least it surprised me. The political philosopher Leo Strauss often criticized “historicism,” the view that human beings do not have a fixed nature or essence. Instead, as José Ortega y Gasset put it, “Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is—history.” G.W.F. Hegel was one
The Economist reported on August 14, 2023, that “Argentina could get its first libertarian president .” They added that Javier Milei, the winner of Argentina’s election primary was, imagine this, a “free-market radical.” The problem, as I see it, is that few people actually know what a libertarian is, just like few people in America who call
Most contemporary political philosophers view free market capitalism with suspicion, if not outright loathing, but one exception is Gerald Gaus, who taught for many years at the University of Arizona. Gaus was by no means a Rothbardian but rather worked within the framework of “public reason” set forward by John Rawls, though Gaus greatly modified
How to Nurture Truth and Authenticity: A Metamodern Economic Reform Proposal by Justin Carmien Manticore Press, 2022; 272 pp. Neither I nor Justin Carmien, the author of How to Nurture Truth and Authenticity , is an economist. Carmien’s book, however, is not a work of economics but a philosophical attempt to apply Heideggerian metaphysics to
On we go, further and further into the era of post-journalism, where outlets survive not on the accuracy and honesty of their reporting but on the appeal of their narrative. —Fred Skulthorp, The Critic Nobody has missed that the West suffers from a credibility problem. Its institutions—by which we mean the media, government officials, academia,
When justifying the airing of opinion, particularly of unpopular opinion, interlocutors have often pointed to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty for support. Mill’s classical liberal tome is regarded as one of the greatest defenses of individuality, free thought, and free speech ever written. Raised by the free market economist and utilitarian James
What is the Mises Institute?
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.