World History

This talk was delivered to the Auburn University Libertarians on February 16, 2006.

We are living through a revolutionary moment, seeing the collapse of socialism at the end of the Twentieth Century.  Socialism lost its moral legitimacy. The force of modern technology required markets.

History is not an inevitable march upward, as concluded in the 1830s. That determinist view put the stamp of approval on everything past and present. It permeates economic history. It ignores the great moral choices. History is a race between state power and social power.

Carl Menger, 1840-1921, founded Austrian economics. Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk was the most important student.  Weiser was his brother-in-law, but was fairly pre-Keynesian. Mises was the great successor to Bohn-Bawerk.

The roots of Marxism were in messianic communism. Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial point.  Violent, worldwide revolution, in Marx’s version made by the oppressed proletariat, would be the instrument of the advent of his millennium, communism.

Richard Cantillon was quite Misesian before Mises. He wrote of utility theory and the entrepreneur’s uncertainty in the 1970s. Cantillon was a great money practitioner. He became a bank and banker to the Jacobite Stuart line and to John Law who launched paper money inflation.

Originally published as chapter 16 in An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Vol. I

Recorded at the Mises Institute, 7–8 October 2005. 

In Iraq, much public support for the invasion was lost when American television vividly depicted life in Baghdad after its fall.