[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Libertarian Science Fiction II”] This essay is about four writers, none of whom was a libertarian, but each of whom wrote something back in the 1960s that made a significant contribution to the libertarian tradition. The first of the four was a science-fiction writer, though only
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “The Tea Party’s Revolution”] Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and a journalist whose work appears in the major mainstream media. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are on the list of publications to which she contributes, as is The New Yorker , where she’s
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Clarence Darrow”] Clarence Darrow is best known today as the Chicago lawyer who defended John T. Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. A character based loosely on him is played by Spencer Tracy in the 1960 movie version of the classic play about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind .
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Stephen Pearle Andrews”] Suppose you decided to spend a little time boning up on the individualist anarchists of 19th-century America. There are four names you’d be likely to run across repeatedly in your reading — Benjamin R. Tucker , Lysander Spooner , Josiah Warren , and Stephen Pearl
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Friedrich Hayek and American Science Fiction”] Friedrich August von Hayek was born in Vienna on the eighth day of May 1899. When he graduated from the University of Vienna in 1921, at the age of 22, he applied for a job with the Austrian Office of Claims Accounts, the government agency
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Ambiguous Utopias”] The mid-1970s — meaning, let us say, the five-year period encompassing the years 1973, ‘74, ‘75, ‘76, and ‘77 — was a heady time for the modern American libertarian movement. To those of us who were involved back then, it seemed we were on the verge of a major
[This article is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “William Graham Sumner (1840–1910)” and was originally published April 2011.] It was 101 years ago on April 12, 1910, that William Graham Sumner died. He had been born nearly 70 years earlier on October 30, 1840, almost 30 years to the day before the birth of another
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Jane Jacobs”] When Jane Jacobs died five years ago (the exact date was April 25, 2006), there was a brief flurry of interest in a couple of libertarian publications — one brief obit ran on Mises.org , for example — but the flurry died down pretty quickly. And since then, apart from a
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “ America Aflame “] The early publicity I saw on David Goldfield’s new book, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation , certainly made it seem like something a revisionist history buff like me would want to read. The review in the New York Times , for example, which ran on
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode “Randolph Bourne (1886–1918)”] Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual journalist who flourished for a few years in the second decade of the 20th century — in the Teens, the decade that ran from 1910 to 1920. Bourne wrote mostly for magazines during this period. His byline was
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.
