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[First published in The Libertarian Forum , May, 1973.] On the evening of Saturday, April 21, Dr. F.A. “Baldy” Harper died suddenly, of a heart attack, at the age of 68. To say that Baldy’s death is an irreparable loss, personally and in every other way, to the libertarian movement, would be a masterpiece of understatement. Ever since he came to

That Ludwig von Mises was the outstanding champion of laissez-faire and the free-market economy in this century is well known and needs no documentation. But in the course of refining and codifying his political views, Mises’s followers have unwittingly distorted them and made them seem at one with the modern conservative movement in the United

A. Introduction: Utilitarian Social Philosophy Economics emerged as a distinct, self-conscious science or discipline in the nineteenth century, and hence this development unfortunately coincided with the dominance of utilitarianism in philosophy. The social philosophy of economists, therefore, whether the laissez-faire creed of the nineteenth

One of the best-known and most influential present-day treatments of liberty is that of Sir Isaiah Berlin. In his Two Concepts of Liberty , Berlin upheld the concept of “negative liberty”—absence of interference with a person’s sphere of action—as against “positive liberty,” which refers not to liberty at all but to an individual’s effective power

[This article is taken from chapter 28 of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this chapter in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. You can listen and download the entire book here for podcast and download .] In his monumental work The Constitution of Liberty , F.A. Hayek attempts to establish a systematic political philosophy on behalf of individual

Introduction The Ahistorical State Nozick’s “Nonaggressive” State From “Ultra-minimal” to “Minimal” The Right to Be “Nonproductive” From Minimal State Back to Anarchism Conclusion Notes [This article is taken from chapter 29 of The Ethics of Liberty . [1] Listen to this chapter in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared

[This article is taken from the final chapter of The Ethics of Liberty . Listen to this chapter in MP3 , read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book has now been prepared for podcast and download .] The elaboration of a systematic theory of liberty has been rare enough, but exposition of a theory of strategy for liberty has been virtually

Introduction: Two Rights, Old and New In the spring of 1970, a new political term—”the hard hats”—burst upon the American consciousness. As the hard-hatted construction workers barreled their way around the Wall Street area, beating up college kids and peace demonstrators, earning the admiration of the right wing and a citation from President

[This article is excerpted from Murray Rothbard’s preface to the 1991 revision of The Betrayal of the American Right , now available in the store . See also Tom Woods’s introduction .] The manuscript of the greater part of this book, The Betrayal of the American Right , was written in 1971 and revised in 1973. Little of this original manuscript

[This article is taken from chapter 4 of The Betrayal of the American Right .] During the 1920s, the emerging individualists and libertarians — the Menckens, the Nocks, the Villards, and their followers — were generally considered Men of the Left; like the Left generally, they bitterly opposed the emergence of Big Government in twentieth-century