Both Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard thought highly of Alfred Schutz, an Austrian philosopher and sociologist who studied with Mises in Vienna and worked as both an academic and an investment banker in Austria and later in the United States. (He spelled his last name “Schűtz” in Austria but Anglicized it to “Schutz.”) In today’s column, I’m
Last week I wrote about Alfred Schutz, an excellent philosopher who has much to teach us. This week I’d like to talk about another philosopher, David Stove, who falls into the same category. He has a big advantage over Schutz. He writes with great vigor, is easy to follow, and has an immense capacity for satiric wit. Murray Rothbard would have
Bertrand Russell is one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century but isn’t usually studied as a social or political philosopher, though I am hardly the first to think that his contributions to these areas are underrated. He did not support the free market but nevertheless had much to say about the state that readers of the Mises page
The recent school shootings have led many people to want to restrict or deny altogether our right to own guns, and in these troubled times, it is all the more essential to bear in mind the reasons for that right. To that end, I’d like in this week’s column to discuss the excellent essay by the philosopher Lester H. Hunt “Guns and Self-Defense,”
People usually don’t study the philosopher George Santayana very much today, and he was not a libertarian, but rather a “skeptical conservative.” Ludwig von Mises took him seriously, though, and often quotes him, though sometimes to disagree; and in this week’s article, I’d like to look at what he says about the state in Human Society , the second
How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How US and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe by Benjamin Abelow Siland Press; 75 pp. The Ukraine war has generated great controversy, but of one point there can be no doubt, and Benjamin Abelow, a physician with a longstanding interest in public affairs, has
Jedediah Purdy is a legal academic probably best known for his work in environmental law, and his just-published Two Cheers for Politics (Basic Books, 2022) shows his wide knowledge of political philosophy. But a central argument of the book is a textbook case of a fallacy to which Ludwig von Mises was keen to call our attention. Purdy says that
In last week’s column, I criticized Jedediah Purdy for the ignorance of economic theory on display in his Two Cheers for Politics . Fortunately, the book contains much of interest, reflecting the author’s wide knowledge of the history of political philosophy. I have to say, though, that the main argument of the book strikes me as utterly
Michael Munger, a political scientist and economist who teaches at Duke University, argues in his excellent essay “Libertarianism and Public Choice,” included in The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism , that public choice offers a more persuasive defense of free-market libertarianism than natural rights. In this week’s article, I’m going to
Robert Nozick is probably most familiar to readers of this column as a libertarian political philosopher, but this week I’d like to look at another issue, relevant not only to libertarians but to anyone interested in moral and political thought, which he discusses in his last book, Invariances (Harvard, 2001.) This is whether our beliefs about
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.