David Gordon

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He was educated at UCLA, where he earned his PhD in history. He is the author of Resurrecting Economics, An Introduction to Economic Reasoning, An Austro-Libertarian View (three volumes), and Resurrecting Marx. He is also editor of Secession, State, and Liberty and coeditor of H.B. Acton’s Morals of Markets and Other Essays.

Dr. Gordon is the editor of the Mises Review and the Journal of Libertarian Studies, and a contributor to such journals as Analysis, the International Philosophic Quarterly, the Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

Articles

Happy Birthday Murray!

03/02/2025 Power & Market David Gordon

Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-ninth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend, whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the...

Let’s Be Realistic

02/28/2025 Friday Philosophy David Gordon

[ The Lecturer’s Art: Gems of American History by Walter A. McDougall. Encounter Books, 2025. xxii + 291 pp.] The historian Walter McDougall is not a libertarian, but he criticizes the Progressives...

Do We Need a New English Translation of Marx’s Capital?

02/24/2025 The Misesian David Gordon

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 Edited by Paul Reitter and Paul North Translated by Paul Reitter Princeton University Press, 2024 In September, Princeton University Press released a new...

Publications

Deneen’s Common Good Statism

09/05/2023 David Gordon

It’s likely that many readers of The Austrian support the free market and also support “traditional” social values, but in Patrick Deneen’s opinion, this is an unstable amalgam. Deneen, a political theorist who teaches at Notre Dame, thinks that the

Review: Slouching Towards Utopia

07/13/2023 David Gordon

[ Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong, Basic Books, 2022 viii + 605 pp.] J. Bradford DeLong, who teaches economics at UC Berkeley and was a protégé of Larry Summer’s dislikes Austrian economics

Lost Continetti

07/22/2022 David Gordon

The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism By Matthew Continetti Basic Books, 2022 503 pp. Why should readers of The Austrian be interested in this book? At first glance, it appears that we shouldn’t be. Though the history of American

Media

The Inflationist View of History

02/08/2025 David Gordon

Perhaps John Maynard Keynes' best con job was convincing people that a growing economy needs inflation, lots of inflation. As David Gordon points out, however, Ludwig von Mises eloquently explained why inflation undermines the free market economy.

Ralph Raico: A Great Historian

01/23/2025 David Gordon

Ralph Raico presents the fundamental political problem of the twentieth century, which remains our fundamental political problem today: How can war—given its appalling destruction—be avoided?

The Missing Secret

01/15/2025 David Gordon

Modern academics are relentless in trying to find any nuances they can from the works of Karl Marx, but they miss the larger issues with his work. Marx was alive and active when the marginalists logically took apart his value theory, but hope springs eternal for Marx‘s supporters.