[ Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (2010)] Historian Hunt Tooley will be teaching World War One: A Revisionist Perspective , a Mises Academy online course, starting October 29. The changes wrought in America during the First World War were so profound that one scholar has referred to “the Wilsonian Revolution in government.”
[ Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (2010)] The war’s direct costs to the United States were: 130,000 combat deaths; 35,000 men permanently disabled; $33.5 billion (plus another $13 billion in veterans’ benefits and interest on the war debt, as of 1931, all in the dollars of those years); perhaps also some portion of the
In the popular academic mind, the doctrine of class-conflict seems to be inextricably linked to the particular Marxist version of the idea. Lip-service is often paid — especially by those eager to diminish the claims to originality of Marx and Engels — to the fact that these writers had precursors in this approach to social reality. Frequently a
Much of the confusion prevailing in the historical study of liberalism can be traced to John Stuart Mill, who occupies a vastly inflated position in the conception of liberalism entertained by English-speaking peoples. This “saint of rationalism” is responsible for key distortions in the liberal doctrine on a number of fronts. In economics, Mill’s
No one could have admired and respected Ludwig von Mises more than did Murray Rothbard, who dedicated his magnum opus in economic theory, Man, Economy, and State , to his great mentor. Yet Rothbard did not shy away from criticizing Mises when he believed such criticism to be called for. Thus, in The Ethics of Liberty , Rothbard subjects Mises’s
The third and final volume of Robert Skidelsky’s celebrated Keynes biography , John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (New York: Viking Press, 2001) has just been published, to rave reviews. Like its predecessors, this volume makes no mention of Keynes’s uncritical praise of Stalinist Russia in 1936, although I brought it to
The Second World War has been called the war that never ends. To a lesser degree, the same could be said of the First World War. It has been estimated, for instance, that the Yale library has 34,000 titles on that conflict published before 1977 and more than 5,000 since. What I propose to do in this all too brief is article to survey a few recent
[This article appeared in the New Individualist Review , Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 1964, pp. 29-36, and is reprinted here as a prescient look at the errors of the old conservative critique of libertarianism and conservatism’s vulnerability to the statist temptation.] The publication of a symposium on the question, “What is conservatism?” provides
In this essay, liberalism will be understood to mean the doctrine which holds that society — that is, the social order minus the state — more or less runs itself, within the bounds of assured individual rights. In the classical statement, these are the rights to life, liberty, and property. This is closer to the French meaning of libéralisme,
It is said that a number of years ago, when Bill Buckley was at the beginning of his career of college-speaking, and somewhat more tolerant of libertarians than he is today, he once wrote two names on the blackboard thereby nicely dramatized the point that students in his audience were being presented with only one side of the great world-forming
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.
