Literature Library

The most complete online offering of the literature of the Austrian School and libertarian ideas, including books, journal articles, and other writings, sorted by author or any method you choose.

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Source: Books: 306 records

Antitrust: The Case for Repeal

Dominick Armentano Updated 12/21/2011

This 100-page tour de force rips the intellectual cover off antitrust regulation to reveal it for what it is: a bludgeon used by businesses against their competitors. Unlike some critics, Professor Armentano carries the logic of his analysis to fulle...
Human Action

Ludwig von Mises Updated 12/20/2011

This spectacular edition of the great work has all the makings of a game changer. In a mere 24 hours after release, this became our all-time bestseller. The masterpiece first appeared in German in 1940 and then disappeared, only to reappear in E...
The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn Updated 12/20/2011

This exceeding rare book is by one of the great men of the 20th century. Written soon after his immigration to the United States, he signed the book "Francis Stuart Campbell" because he was a refugee from Austria and didn't want to enda...
The Conquest of Poverty

Henry Hazlitt Updated 12/19/2011

Long before Charles Murray took on the topic, Henry Hazlitt wrote an outstanding book on poverty that not only provided an empirical examination of the problem but also presented a rigorous theory for understanding the relationship between poverty an...
God's Gold: The Story of Rockefeller and His Times

John T. Flynn Updated 12/16/2011

In 1932, John T. Flynn had begun to rethink his old-style "progressivism" to develop intellectually into a defender of markets as against the regimentation of government management. A first product of these steps is this classic and extraor...
America's Great Depression

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 12/14/2011

Applied Austrian economics doesn't get better than this. Murray N. Rothbard's America's Great Depression is a staple of modern economic literature and crucial for understanding a pivotal event in American and world history. The Mises In...
Banking and the Business Cycle

Chester A. Phillips Updated 12/14/2011

This rare study by C.A. Phillips, together with T.F. McManus and R.W. Nelson, appeared in 1937 as an Austrian-style analysis of the stock market crash and the great depression that followed. It explores the many theories tossed about at the time,...
Essentials of Economics

Faustino Ballvé Updated 12/13/2011

A brief Survey of Principles and Policies Faustino Ballvé was a remarkable thinker and economist, educated in Spain and England and teaching and practicing law in Mexico City. He was here when Ludwig von Mises came to speak on a lecture tour....
Socialism and International Economic Order

Elizabeth Tamedly Updated 12/13/2011

This extraordinary book by Elisabeth Tamedly, as scholarly as it is passionate, argues that socialism, despite its internationalist aspirations, is not capable of accomplishing stable international peace and order. If we postulate a true democracy, s...
Elements of Libertarian Leadership

Leonard E. Read Updated 12/12/2011

Leonard E. Read Elements of Libertarian Leadership...
Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn Updated 12/9/2011

Sometime in the 18th century, the word equality gained ground as a political ideal, but the idea was always vague. In this treatise, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues that it reduced to one simple and very dangerous idea: equality of political power a...
The American Omen

Garet Garrett Updated 12/8/2011

Garet Garrett The American Omen...
Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War

George Morgenstern Updated 12/7/2011

NY: Devin-Adair, 1947...
Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard

Walter Block (ed.) Updated 12/6/2011

In 1986, a remarkable party was held on Murray Rothbard's sixtieth birthday, and papers written in his honor were presented. Two years later the book was released. It contained many wonderful essays--both scholarly and humorous--on his work and l...
Economics of Prohibition, The

Mark Thornton Updated 12/6/2011

It is conventional wisdom that alcohol prohibition failed, but the economic reasons for this failure have never been as extensively detailed or analyzed as they are in this study by Mark Thornton. The lessons he draws apply not only to the period...
Power and Market: Government and the Economy

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 12/5/2011

What can government do to enhance social and economic well being? Nothing, says Murray N. Rothbard. Power and Market contains the proof. It will inoculate the reader against even the slightest temptation to invoke the state as a solution to any socia...
Inclined To Liberty: The Futile Attempt to Suppress the Human Spirit

Louis E. Carabini Updated 11/30/2011

"No one should be allowed to own a yacht." "The salaries of company executives are too high" "No one should be allowed to inherit wealth." We are surrounded every day by anti-capitalist clichés. We encoun...
Efficiency and Externalities in an Open-Ended Universe

Roy Cordato Updated 11/29/2011

The problem of externalities and efficiency is cited relentlessly in mainstream literature as the great rationale for government intervention. The Austrian School, however, rooted in an understanding of the competitive process, takes another approach...
I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians

Walter Block (ed.) Updated 11/29/2011

Walter Block leaned on 82 of the world's most prominent libertarian thinkers and asked them to tell their life stories with an eye to intellectual development. The result is the most comprehensive collection of libertarian autobiographies...
Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt Updated 11/28/2011

A lone voice of economic sanity in the United States after World War II was Henry Hazlitt, who had moved in 1946 from the New York Times editorial page to Newsweek magazine, where he wrote until the late 1960s. He wrote a column every week on the mos...
The American Story

Garet Garrett Updated 11/23/2011

He was a defender of free enterprise who adored the magnificence of the American genius for progress. He was a champion of business who believed in profiting the old fashioned way. He was a libertarian who deplored the rise of big government....
A Treatise on Political Economy

Destutt Tracy Updated 11/22/2011

The neglect of Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) in the history of political economy is both strange and tragic. He was, after all, Thomas Jefferson's number one favorite economist, the thinker who influenced him and, ar...
Stock Market, Credit, and Capital Formation, The

Fritz Machlup Updated 11/21/2011

Economist Fritz Machlup was an early Misesian who wrote this book as an early study in the workings of the business cycle. In particular, he investigates and explains the relationship between expanding credit, monetary policy, and rising stock prices...
Away From Freedom

Vernon Orval Watts Updated 11/18/2011

Murray Rothbard writes the introduction to the reprint of this 1952 gem. It is by V. Orval Watts, one of the leading anti-Keynesians of his time. He is writing during the great entrenchment of the Keynesian perspective within the economics profession...
The Great Austrian Economists

Randall G. Holcombe (ed.) Updated 11/17/2011

The Austrian tradition began formally with Carl Menger's 1871 work, Principles of Economics. But its roots stretch back to the late-Scholastic period, when philosophers first began to think systematically about the relationship between human choi...
Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 11/3/2011

This fiery monograph shows a side of Murray Rothbard not seen in his theoretical treatise: his ability to employ "power elite" analysis to understand the relationship between money, power, and war. Rather than allow the left to dominate...
A Foreign Policy of Freedom

Ron Paul Updated 11/3/2011

There is one and only one voice in Congress for a foreign policy of freedom, and it belongs to Ron Paul, who has stood alone for freedom for many years. Ron is the seemingly impossible: a voice for reason and truth in a den of thieves. A Foreign Pol...
Walk Away: The Rise and Fall of the Home-Ownership Myth

Doug French Updated 11/3/2011

Housing, a central priority for government policy for many decades, collapsed in 2008; even in 2011, millions of homes are under water. This poses many economic and ethical issues. This elegant and fact-filled book by Mises Institute president Do...
The Case for Legalizing Capitalism

Kel Kelly Updated 10/26/2011

What's the "American system" of economics? Most people would say it is capitalism, which thereby deserves all fault when anything goes wrong. Well, Kel Kelly responds to this myth in this fast-paced and darn-near comprehensive treatment...
The Economics of Illusion

L. Albert Hahn Updated 10/7/2011

L. Albert Hahn was one of the most highly regarded economists and bankers in Germany before World War II, but he was unknown in the United States until this translation of The Economics of Illusion appeared in 1949. He immigrated to the United States...
Thinking as a Science

Henry Hazlitt Updated 10/3/2011

It's incredible that this 1916 tutorial on how to think, by none other than Henry Hazlitt, would still hold up after all these years. But here's why. Hazlitt was largely self-educated. He read voraciously. He trained himself to be a great int...
Fiat Money Inflation in France

Andrew Dickson White Updated 10/3/2011

In Fiat Money Inflation in France, Andrew Dickson White presents the still-largely-unknown story of a major factor behind the French Revolution. As John Mackay writes in the foreword, It records the most gigantic attempt ever made in the history...
The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 9/30/2011

The panic of 1819 was America's first great economic crisis. And this is Murray Rothbard's masterful account, the first full scholarly book on the topic and still the most definitive. It was his dissertation, published in 1962 but nearly impo...
Money, Method, and the Market Process

Ludwig von Mises Updated 9/29/2011

Edited by Richard M. Ebeling This volume might be called the Mises Reader, for it contains a wide sampling of his academic essays on money, trade, and economic systems. Some of them, like "Observations on the Cooperative Movement,"...
The Irrepressible Rothbard

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 9/26/2011

Summing up the work of libertarian economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) and noting its stunning range, philosopher David Gordon once wondered "if there are really three, four, or five geniuses writing under his na...
What Social Classes Owe Each Other

William Graham Sumner Updated 9/23/2011

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) was a sociologist at Yale University, a historian of American banking, and great expositor of classical liberalism. Yes, this is the man often dismissed today as an outmoded "social Darwinist&q...
The Case for Discrimination

Walter Block Updated 9/22/2011

Walter Block has been writing on the economics of discrimination - and in defense of discrimination, rightly understood - for more than 30 years. This large hardcover collects nearly all of this writing to present a radical alternative to the mainstr...
On Freedom and Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises

Mary Sennholz Updated 9/22/2011

This was the first Festschrift (1956) in Mises's honor, and the essays it contains have proven fruitful sources for decades. This reprint features a new introduction. Preeminently, it contains Rothbard's reconstruction of utility and welfare...
A Short History of Paper Money and Banking

William M. Gouge Updated 9/20/2011

"The bank was saved but the money was ruined." So says William Gouge (1796–1863), one of the best political economists of the American 19th century. He is speaking of the panic of 1819, but his sentence could sum up the w...
Organization of Debt into Currency and Other Papers

Charles Holt Carroll Updated 9/20/2011

Charles Holt Carroll defended sound money in a blazing series of essays appearing in the latter decades of the 19th century. They are all collected here, in The Organization of Debt into Currency and Other Papers. Little is known of Charles Holt Car...
Capital and Production

Richard von Strigl Updated 9/19/2011

Richard Ritter von Strigl (1891–1942) was one of the most brilliant Austrian economists of the interwar period. As a professor at the University of Vienna he had a decisive influence on Hayek, Machlup, Haberler, Morgenstern, and other fourt...
Economics for Real People

Gene Callahan Updated 9/16/2011

The second edition of the fun and fascinating guide to the main ideas of the Austrian School of economics, written in sparkling prose especially for the non-economist. Gene Callahan shows that good economics isn't about government planning or sta...
One Is a Crowd

Frank Chodorov Updated 9/15/2011

This is a treasure: One Is a Crowd. It collects Frank Chodorov's most profound essays on the topic of individualism, many of which have otherwise been unjustly lost to history. The reader will be riveted by his biographical essay on the meanin...
The Bubble that Broke the World

Garet Garrett Updated 9/15/2011

What caused the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed? This book blows away the conventional interpretations, not only in its contents but that the book exists at all. The Bubble that Broke the World was written in 1931....
The Quotable Mises

Ludwig von Mises Updated 9/13/2011

The Quotable Mises is 300-plus pages of some of the most thrilling words on economics and politics ever written. In some ways, it is the perfect introduction to Mises's thought, a collection of hundreds of attention-grabbing quotations that pro...
Rehabilitation of Say's Law, A

William H. Hutt Updated 9/9/2011

With A Rehabilitation of Say's Law, Professor William H. Hutt produced a magnificent work that Austrians would love to claim as one of their own, but that Hutt himself viewed as thoroughly classical in nature. The topic addressed here is Say&...
Capital in Disequilibrium

Peter Lewin Updated 9/7/2011

A theoretical treatise is a rare event, a moment to celebrate. This is what Peter Lewin has provided in his Capital in Disequilibrium. Taking capital seriously is a distinguishing mark of the Austrian School. The Austrians see capital as decisive in...
The Origins of the Federal Reserve

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 9/6/2011

Where did this thing called the Fed come from? Murray Rothbard has the answer here -- in phenomenal detail that will make your head spin. In one extended essay, one that reads like a detective story, he has put together the most comprehensive and fas...
Imperialism and Social Classes

Joseph Schumpeter Updated 9/5/2011

Joseph Schumpeter was not a member of the Austrian School, but he was an enormously creative classical liberal, and this 1919 book shows him at his best. He presents a theory of how states become empires and applies his insight to explaining many his...
The Myth of a Guilty Nation

Albert Jay Nock Updated 9/2/2011

This was Albert Jay Nock's first great anti-war book, a cause he backed his entire life as an essential component of a libertarian outlook. The book came out in 1922 and has been in very low circulation ever since. In fact, until this printing,...