Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley Random House, 2018 xix + 218 pages Jason Stanley, a noted philosopher of language who teaches at Yale, wishes to render to the public a great service. He will tell us how fascism works, and, as the present tense in his title
I’ve often argued against John Rawls’s theory of justice, and readers who see my title might be thinking to themselves, “Not another post on Rawls!” These readers can rest easy; this is not another post attacking Rawls. (It isn’t, of course, a post that says Rawls was right.) Instead, I want to use an argument someone directed against Rawls to
Murray Rothbard was a polymath, and philosophy is one of the fields to which he made important contributions. When people think of him as a philosopher, though, they often have in mind only his work in ethics and political philosophy, found, for example, in The Ethics of Liberty . His work in this area is of great significance, but he wrote about
Capitalism is increasingly under attack these days by people who claim that it promotes a collapse of moral values, subordinating all else to the pursuit of individual wealth and pleasure. Often these critics demand either the strict supervision of the free market by elite government administrators or its outright replacement by socialism. In this
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter Random House, 2021 [2020] xxii + 628 pages For many people, though not, to be sure, readers of The Austrian , John Maynard Keynes ranks as the greatest economist of the twentieth century; but for Zachary D. Carter, this is a restrained understatement.
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Senator Josh Hawley’s just-published The Tyranny of Big Tech (Regnery, 2021) raises important issues. Hawley asks, for example, Do Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube censor views that that their managers do not like? It seems clear that the answer is yes. Many people who have tried to post
Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government, 1776–1865 by Luigi Marco Bassani Abbeville Institute Press, 2021 356 pp. Marco Bassani is a historian of European political thought and it is from the perspective of his discipline that he looks at the American political system that came to an end in 1865. As he sees matters, the
Economy, Society, and History by Hans-Hermann Hoppe Mises Institute, 2021 191 pp. In 2004, Hans Hoppe delivered a series of lectures at the Mises Institute about his theory of social evolution, and we are fortunate to have this volume, based on a transcript of those lectures, now available. As one would expect, the book contains much of interest,
Students often ask me to recommend a good introduction to philosophy, and now the question can be answered more easily than in years past. Michael Huemer’s Knowledge, Value, and Reality , published last April, contains a profusion of arguments on important topics and is written in a conversational style that is easy to follow, and is often very
After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed By Andrew Bacevich Metropolitan Books, 2021 Xiv + 206 pages Andrew Bacevich, a history professor at Boston University for twenty-three years, has written an excellent book on American foreign policy, but it is embedded within a larger and more questionable book. Fortunately, the merits
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.