Mises Review 18, No. 2 (Summer 2012) MIND AND COSMOS: WHY THE MATERIALIST NEO-DARWINIAN CONCEPTION OF NATURE IS ALMOST CERTAINLY WRONG Thomas Nagel Oxford University Press, 2012, x + 130 pgs. To review Thomas Nagel’s new book for the Mises Daily seems at first sight a misplaced endeavor. The book has nothing to say about libertarianism or
Mises Review 18, No. 2 (Summer 2012) THE DIM HYPOTHESIS: WHY THE LIGHTS OF THE WEST ARE GOING OUT Leonard Peikoff New American Library, 2012, xvi + 378 pages Whatever the failings of this book, its author has a sense of humor. Peikoff writes of his unusual name for his main hypothesis, In order to refer to all three modes [of integration]
Mises Review 18, No. 3 (Fall 2012) LIBERTARIANISM: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW Jason Brennan Oxford, 2012, xvi + 213 pgs. Jason Brennan, an outstanding libertarian political philosopher who teaches at Georgetown University, has written Libertarianism as an introductory guide, and much of the material in it will be familiar to readers of the
Mises Review 18, No. 3 (Fall 2012) THE WAR ON DRUGS IS A WAR ON FREEDOM Laurence M. Vance Vance Publications, 2012, xvi + 103 pgs. The efforts, spurred by Mayor Bloomberg, to ban large cans of drinks deemed too sugary have been much in the news lately; and a peculiar point in the mayor’s defense of this measure is highly relevant to Laurence
Mises Review 18, No. 3 (Fall 2012) HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? MONEY AND THE GOOD LIFE Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky Other Press, 2012, x + 243 pgs. Robert Skidelsky is best known for his three-volume biography of Lord Keynes, and his son Edward is a philosopher who has written an excellent book on Ernst Cassirer. How Much Is Enough? contains
Mises Review 18, No. 3 (Fall 2012) LIBERTARIAN ANARCHY: AGAINST THE STATE Gerard Casey Continuum, 2012, ix + 195 pgs. Libertarian Anarchy would have delighted Murray Rothbard. In this book, a distinguished Irish philosopher defends forcefully and eloquently Rothbardian anarchism. Like Rothbard, Casey considers the state a criminal organization,
Mises Review 18, no. 3 (Fall 2012) THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE FREE MARKET CURE: WHY PURE CAPITALISM IS THE WORLD ECONOMY’S ONLY HOPE John A. Allison McGraw Hill, 2012, viii + 278 pgs. This book contains the oddest sentence I have ever read about the current financial crisis, or for that matter about any financial crisis. John Allison,
Mises Review 18, No. 3 (Fall 2012) UNDERSTANDING LIBERAL DEMOCRACY: ESSAYS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY By Nicholas Wolterstorff • Edited by Terence Cuneo Oxford University Press, 2012, xii+ 385 pgs. Most contemporary political philosophers, unfortunately, are not libertarians. Nicholas Wolterstorff, best known as a founder of “reformed epistemology”
Jason Sorens has posted a very thoughtful review of Ralph Raico’s outstanding recent book, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School. I admire the post and learned from it, but I’d like to differ with Sorens on two points. He suggests that methodological individualism is vulnerable to criticism. “We can know that firms try to maximize profit
The Circle Bastiat, which flourished from 1953-1959, was a group of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends and disciples. Ralph Raico and George Reisman, while still in high school, began to attend Ludwig von Mises’s famous seminar at New York University. There they met Murray Rothbard, then working on his doctoral dissertation at Columbia, who had
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.