Not Thinking like a Liberal by Raymond Geuss, Harvard, 2022 xiv + 197 pp. Raymond Geuss, an American philosopher now retired from Cambridge, has in his many books emphasized narrative and the genealogy of concepts, and Not Thinking like a Liberal is, fittingly, an account of how various events in his life have shaped his conceptual framework. The
What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill Basic Books, 2022; 333 pp. William MacAskill, a philosophy professor at Oxford and a leading light of the effective altruism movement, has recently been in the news owing to the frenzied and fraudulent finance of his protégé Sam Bankman-Fried, who now awaits trial. The “effective altruists” took
Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John McWhorter Portfolio/Penguin, 2021, xv + 201 pp. John McWhorter is an eminent linguistics professor who teaches at Columbia. He is himself black, and he argues that “woke” racism does not help blacks and other minorities. It has, he says, become a religion, and those who question it
Melinda Cooper is professor of sociology at the Australian National University, and in her article “ The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation ” published in the journal Theory, Culture and Society in 2021, she has some remarkable things to say about Murray Rothbard, remarkable, I fear, in that they are grievously in
R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher, historian, and archaeologist who taught at Oxford in the first half of the twentieth century, was much esteemed by Ludwig von Mises, especially for his essay “Economics as a Philosophical Science” and, more generally, for his work in the philosophy of history. In this week’s column, I’d like to consider a point
Free Market: The History of an Idea by Jacob Soll Basic Books, 2022; viii + 326 pp. Jacob Soll is a distinguished historian, and Free Market contains much of value, but the book cannot be considered a success, and indeed as it reaches the twentieth century, it becomes a disaster. Even in the parts of the book worth reading, Soll is in the iron
Left-leaning economists often look back with nostalgia to the 1950s. Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty, for example, long for the 1950s, when the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor was less than it is now. True, people were less well-off then than now, but why does this matter? It is better to be equal in misery than unequal in
Rigged! How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway Regnery Publishing, 2021, 432 pp. Mollie Hemingway, an editor of the online magazine The Federalist , calls our attention in this well-researched book to a problem of vital significance. She is a supporter of Donald Trump, though not an uncritical one, and
No Free Lunch: Six Economic Lies You’ve Been Taught and Probably Believe by Caleb S. Fuller Freiling Publishing, 2021. 110 pp. Caleb Fuller, an economist who teaches at Grove City College, thinks that many people have a mistaken conception of economics. It is, they think, a dull and dry subject, the “dismal science,” of primary interest to
In The Broken Constitution , (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, argues that Abraham Lincoln criticized consent theories of government which allow the legitimacy of secession and defended in their stead majoritarian democracy. In this week’s column, I’d like to look at Lincoln’s argument against these
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.