Mises Review

For the editors of The Changing Face of Economics, "cutting edge" is more than a phrase. They have an elaborate theory of how change takes place in economic theory.

Father Webster and Professor Cole have spoiled what could have been an excellent book; Laurence Vance, besides much else in his remarkable collection of essays, helps us see what is wrong with it.

Richard Posner here answers, at least in one respect, a question that has long puzzled his critics. Posner again and again declares himself a legal pragmatist.

Thomas Nagel’s valiant attempt to defend John Rawls’s restricted scope for global justice has a valuable, and I am sure unintentional, consequence.

Francis Fukuyama offers us a most peculiar argument, which as best as I can make out goes as follows. We have learned in the twentieth century that free-market economic systems work better than centrally directed ones.

Forrest McDonald takes no prisoners. He has been one of the leading American historians since the publication of We The People in 1958; and much of the present book is an engaging account of his life as a historian.

Thomas Woods’s superb new book delivers much more than it promises. Woods offers his book as a guide to "those who find the standard narrative or the typical textbook unpersuasive or ideologically biased." 

Reading Robert Higgs’s magnificent collection of essays leaves one puzzled. Higgs is the foremost American economic historian who writes from a free-market perspective.

Deepak Lal writes as a convinced advocate of American Empire. But in the course of the book, he undermines his own reasons for defending imperialism and offers a devastating criticism of democratic imperialism and of Woodrow Wilson’s Utopianism.

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a theorist much admired by Hitler, claimed in his book The Third Reich (1923) that liberalism and nationalism are necessarily at odds. 

Debate over Mises’s socialist calculation argument has been going on since 1920, and one might have thought that at this late date, it would be difficult to say something new. Bryan Caplan has done exactly that.

Among American political theorists and philosophers, Michael Walzer has won recognition as the foremost authority on just war theory. 

Thomas Szasz has long been the foremost critic of involuntary psychiatric commitment, and his many books on psychiatric tyranny have won for him a well-deserved reputation as a champion of liberty.

In a famous essay written in 1906, Werner Sombart asked, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Whether one agrees with his analysis, his premise cannot be disputed: 

In his An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Murray Rothbard toppled Adam Smith from his place as the founder of modern economics. 

The dedication of Restoring the Lost Constitution, "To James Madison and Lysander Spooner," at once alerts us that we confront an unusual book. 

Jean Bethke Elshtain thinks that I should not be reviewing this book. Of course, you may say, she thinks that I should not be writing at all. But I do not here refer to her views about me. 

Neoclassical economists often make matters more complicated than necessary; but, fortunately, the best of them manage to stumble close to the truth. Jagdish Bhagwati is by no means a committed supporter of the free market. 

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,

It was not to be expected that Earl Shorris would view Leo Strauss with favor. Shorris is decidedly a man of the left; and most, though not all, followers of Strauss are neoconservatives who support a militant foreign policy.