[ The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, and the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson, Penguin Press, 2018.] Niall Ferguson has impeccable credentials as a member of the “Establishment” (a word that comes, he tells us, from the historian A.J.P. Taylor). He has taught history at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and NYU and is also a
It is hardly a secret that Pope Francis opposes the free market. On what grounds does he do so? Do any of these grounds have merit? What are the sources of his ideas? How similar are his views to those of previous Popes? These are among the questions addressed by the contributors to an important new book, Pope Francis and the Caring Society ,
[ The Road to Freedom and the Demise of Nation States . By Peter B. Bos. Free Trade Press, 2015. Xxv + 620 pages.] This remarkable book reflects the author’s enthusiasm for liberty and his vast intellectual curiosity. I propose to discuss only a few of the book’s central insights, but only reading the book will adequately convey Peter Bos’s
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl Princeton University Press, 2018 xii + 337 pages Radical Markets has at least one virtue. The book contains many unusual proposals, and I propose to concentrate on one of the strangest of these. Eric Posner, a legal scholar, and Glen Weyl, a
Nineteenth-century European liberalism stemmed from two main sources. First, John Locke developed traditional natural law theory in a new direction. In his Second Treatise on Government , he argued that everyone has a property in his own person; this is exactly the self-ownership principle of Murray Rothbard’s libertarianism. On this basis,
On April 13, the United States launched a missile attack on Syria, in response to an alleged chemical attack using chlorine gas by the Syrian government on the town of Douma. Was this attack justified? One way to answer this question appeals to the “just war” tradition, developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and further refined by Vitoria,
I am sorry to report that Leland Yeager passed away on April 23, at the venerable age of 93. Although he described himself as a “fellow traveler” rather than a full member of the Austrian School, he greatly admired Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard and made important contributions to Austrian theory. In his essay, “ Tautologies in Economics
[ Full issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 20, no. 4 (2017)] The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Economic Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, viii+ 221 pp. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Progressives
[ Full issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 20, no. 4 (2017)] Anti-Piketty: Capital for the 21st Century Edited by Jean-Philippe Delsol, Nicholas Lecaussin, and Emmanuel Martin Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2017, xxvii + 272 pp. When Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century was published in 2014 (the French edition had
Organizations named for someone often are accused of deviating from that person’s ideas, and the Mises Institute unfortunately is no exception. Recently, we have come under attack along the following lines: “Ludwig von Mises was a cosmopolitan, opposed to nationalism and racism. But the Mises institute, though named after him, has betrayed him.
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.