R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher, historian, and archaeologist who taught at Oxford in the first half of the twentieth century, was much esteemed by Ludwig von Mises, especially for his essay “Economics as a Philosophical Science” and, more generally, for his work in the philosophy of history. In this week’s column, I’d like to consider a point
Free Market: The History of an Idea by Jacob Soll Basic Books, 2022; viii + 326 pp. Jacob Soll is a distinguished historian, and Free Market contains much of value, but the book cannot be considered a success, and indeed as it reaches the twentieth century, it becomes a disaster. Even in the parts of the book worth reading, Soll is in the iron
Many readers will already know that Ludwig von Mises considers the Nazi economy to be a form of socialism. In the Nazi system, private property in production goods existed in name only. The ostensible owners were merely managers bound to follow the government’s directives. Rainer Zitelmann, the foremost authority on Adolf Hitler’s economic
The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future by Stephen Marche Avid Readers Press, 2022; 238 pp. In this important book, Stephen Marche has disquieting news for us. America may be headed toward a civil war. We are no longer a united country, and the political split between progressive Democrats and right-wing Republicans has widened to
Last week I wrote about Ludwig von Mises’s important letter to the New York Times in June 1942 about the Nazi economy. In the letter, Mises says that foreign trade poses a difficult problem for a socialist economy. Unlike the citizens of a country controlled by central planning, those in foreign countries don’t have to accept goods offered to
Today would have been the ninety-third birthday of Burt Blumert, one of the greatest personalities of the modern libertarian movement. Burt was the indispensable man behind the scenes and was a key figure in the Mises Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, the Rothbard Rockwell Report, and LewRockwell.com. He was one of Murray Rothbard’s
Lord Acton was one of the greatest classical liberal historians of the nineteenth century, but his view of the War between the States has in some circles occasioned dismay. Acton, in a letter of 1866 to Robert E. Lee, said , “I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity By David Graeber and David Wengrow Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021 Xii + 692 pages The Dawn of Everything , which has already attracted much scholarly attention and is a best seller as well, should be a warning to all academics: do not write about economics or the history of modern Europe if you
This year is the fortieth anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty , and although many topics in it have attracted attention, several of them have been neglected. I’m going to discuss one of these in this week’s article. Isaiah Berlin was one of the most influential and important political philosophers in the years after World War
It was a shock to learn last night that my dear friend Paul Cantor had passed away. He was a great Shakespeare scholar and in Shakespeare’s Rome and Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy he showed that Shakespeare had a profound knowledge of the reasons for the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. In the book, he compared Shakespeare’s interpretation of
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.