Humans are prone to envy, writes Helmut Schoeck in Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. Humans try to set up a society in which none is envious of another. George Stigler of the Chicago School saw man as always a utility maximizer.
Ralph Raico covers classical liberalism’s growth, development and possible future. Liberalism arose in Europe entwined with Christianity. Why Europe? The East lacked the idea of freedom from the state and never established the legal system that could protect wealth. Europe had multiple, decentralized competing powers, not a universal empire.
Germany surrendered conditionally in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. Everybody opposed the treaty, but it was forcibly implemented. Revisionism is necessary to combat state propaganda, e.g. the lie in WWII that FDR was surprised by Pearl Harbor.
Gustave de Molinari became the grand old man of classical liberalism, crediting Pareto. Molinari understood that the main issue in the Civil War was the tariff, not slavery. In Italy economists founded free market economics, crediting Bastiat.
Utopian socialism was a term created by Marx and Lenin to denigrate the enemies of Marx and Lenin. Henri de Saint-Simon’s ideology of the industrial class, opposed to the idling class, inspired and influenced utopian socialism.
For two years, we have been innudated with denunciations of "corporate greed" that has supposedly created scandal and led to prosecutions of CEOs, writes Gary Galles.
Did the EU bring free trade to Europe? Not at all, says Terry Arthur. The heyday of free trade was the 100 years between the Napoleonic Wars and World War 1.
For all the talk about the triumph of capitalism, write J. Stromberg and J. Tucker, the free market has few friends in politics or the world of ideas. Thus do the writings Murray Rothbard, the leading defender of the market economy of his generation, still shock and clarify.
Tzvetan Todorov’s career as a writer has taken a surprising course. A Bulgarian long resident in France, he acquired an international reputation as a structuralist literary critic.
Gertrude Himmelfarb is an intellectual historian of great distinction. She has specialized in British nineteenth-century history; and her book on Lord Acton, her study of nineteenth-century thought on poverty,
