Murray Rothbard is widely known for his vast literary output, but a great deal of his work has never been published until now. During the late 1950s and early 60s he worked for the William Volker Fund, one of the few organizations willing to fund classical liberal scholars at the time. In that capacity, he wrote memos and reviews that offer
Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time by Noam Chomsky, edited by C.J. Polychroniou Haymarket Books, 2023; x + 330 pp. Noam Chomsky is universally respected for his contributions to linguistics and to the philosophy of mind, but he is a “public intellectual” as well, and it is in the public arena that opinion about him is
In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace by Christopher J. Coyne Independent Institute, 2022; xxii + 217 pp. Christopher Coyne, an economics professor at GMU, forcefully attacks America’s foreign policy, claimed by its defenders to aim at a peaceful international order under benevolent American
In last week’s column, I discussed Christophers Coyne’s excellent book In Search of Monsters to Destroy , a cogent account of America’s endeavor to build a “liberal” informal empire. Coyne shows the inherent contradiction of using brutal means to achieve humane values. This week, I’d like to discuss an even more deplorable part of American foreign
Nigel Biggar, a recently retired professor of theology at Oxford University, has never shunned controversy, as the title of one of his books, In Defence of War , suggests. In this week’s column, I’d like to examine an article of his, “ A Christian Defense of American Empire ,” that appeared in the October 2022 issue of First Things . As you might
In the early decades of the Cold War, the Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr attracted a considerable following among American intellectuals who influenced foreign policy. People such as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who wanted to found a group called Atheists for Niebuhr, maintained that Niebuhr provided a new, realistic basis for
In last week’s column, I discussed Christophers Coyne’s excellent book In Search of Monsters to Destroy , a cogent account of America’s endeavor to build a “liberal” informal empire. Coyne shows the inherent contradiction of using brutal means to achieve humane values. This week, I’d like to discuss an even more deplorable part of American foreign
Left-leaning economists often look back with nostalgia to the 1950s. Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty, for example, long for the 1950s, when the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor was less than it is now. True, people were less well-off then than now, but why does this matter? It is better to be equal in misery than unequal in
Robert Kagan is a well-known neoconservative historian who believes that America ought to exercise a “benevolent hegemony” over the rest of the world. In his just-published book, The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941 (Knopf, 2023), he presents an odd argument for America’s takeover of the Philippines after the
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp. Samuel Moyn is a distinguished intellectual historian who teaches both history and law at Yale. His earlier books were written for an academic audience, but in Humane he has an urgent message that he wishes to convey to the general
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.