No one could have admired and respected Ludwig von Mises more than did Murray Rothbard, who dedicated his magnum opus in economic theory, Man, Economy, and State , to his great mentor. Yet Rothbard did not shy away from criticizing Mises when he believed such criticism to be called for. Thus, in The Ethics of Liberty , Rothbard subjects Mises’s
The third and final volume of Robert Skidelsky’s celebrated Keynes biography , John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (New York: Viking Press, 2001) has just been published, to rave reviews. Like its predecessors, this volume makes no mention of Keynes’s uncritical praise of Stalinist Russia in 1936, although I brought it to
The Second World War has been called the war that never ends. To a lesser degree, the same could be said of the First World War. It has been estimated, for instance, that the Yale library has 34,000 titles on that conflict published before 1977 and more than 5,000 since. What I propose to do in this all too brief is article to survey a few recent
[This article appeared in the New Individualist Review , Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 1964, pp. 29-36, and is reprinted here as a prescient look at the errors of the old conservative critique of libertarianism and conservatism’s vulnerability to the statist temptation.] The publication of a symposium on the question, “What is conservatism?” provides
In this essay, liberalism will be understood to mean the doctrine which holds that society — that is, the social order minus the state — more or less runs itself, within the bounds of assured individual rights. In the classical statement, these are the rights to life, liberty, and property. This is closer to the French meaning of libéralisme,
It is said that a number of years ago, when Bill Buckley was at the beginning of his career of college-speaking, and somewhat more tolerant of libertarians than he is today, he once wrote two names on the blackboard thereby nicely dramatized the point that students in his audience were being presented with only one side of the great world-forming
Albert Jay Nock, distinguished man of letters and philosophical anarchist, was an inspiration to thinkers as diverse as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nisbet, Frank Chodorov and Russell Kirk. A personal friend of the father of William F. Buckley, Jr., he was a kind of guru to the young Buckley as well. In April, 1945, Nock wrote a cheery letter to two
Churchill as Icon Opportunism and Rhetoric Churchill and the “New Liberalism” World War I Between the Wars Embroiling America in War—Again “First Catch Your Hare” War Crimes Discreetly Veiled 1945: The Dark Side The Triumph of the Welfare State Churchill as Icon When, in a very few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great question:
I. Introduction Classical liberalism — which we shall call here simply liberalism — is based on the conception of civil society as, by and large, self-regulating when its members are free to act within very wide bounds of their individual rights. Among these the right to private property, including freedom of contract and free disposition of
[from The Independent Review , v. 13, n. 2, Fall 2008, pp. 165–188.] Keynes and Neomercantilism It is now common practice to rank John Maynard Keynes as one of modern history’s outstanding liberals, perhaps the most recent “great” in the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson. Like these men, it is generally held, Keynes was a
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.