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

How Diplomats Make War

Francis Neilson Updated 9/1/2011

Francis Neilson (1867–1961) was a member of the British Parliament, one of the last truly educated British aristocrats, a colleague and friend of Albert Jay Nock's, and an amazing historian and stylist. He is also the author of this his...
Understanding the Dollar Crisis

Percy L. Greaves, Jr. Updated 8/31/2011

In the year that President Nixon closed the gold window forever and the US government removed the last vestiges of the gold standard, nonstop dollar turmoil was unleashed. In that same year, Percy L. Greaves, a student of Ludwig von Mises's, rele...
The Merchants of Death

H.C. Engelbrecht Updated 8/30/2011

Here is the archetype of all post–World War I revisionism of a particular variety: the hunt for the people who made the big bucks off the killing machine. The Merchants of Death was, in many ways, the manifesto of a generation of people who...
The Ethics of Liberty

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 8/29/2011

Murray Rothbard's greatest contribution to the politics of freedom is back in print. Following up on Mises's demonstration that a society without private property degenerates into economic chaos, Rothbard shows that every interference with pr...
The Clash of Group Interests

Ludwig von Mises Updated 8/26/2011

In this thrilling essay written in 1945, Mises lays out a theory of social organization in response to the Marxist critique of the free society. He explains that the Marxist view is wrong concerning its claim that there is a clash of group interests...
The Kohler Strike: Union Violence and Administrative Law

Sylvester Petro Updated 8/26/2011

Are labor unions merely an example of "free association"? Perhaps in some dreamland, but the real history of American labor organizing tells a different story. This 1961 book by labor economist Sylvester Petro tells a story of the d...
The Privatization of Roads and Highways

Walter Block Updated 8/23/2011

The Mises Institute is pleased to introduce Walter Block's remarkable new treatise on private roads, a 494-page book that will cause you to rethink the whole of the way modern transportation networks operate. It is bold, innovative, radical, comp...
Study Guide to the Theory of Money and Credit

Robert P. Murphy Updated 8/22/2011

Consider the timing of this wonderful study guide to the best book ever written on money and credit. The book itself was written 100 years ago. The world economy is in the throes of another financial and debt crisis. Keynesianism has completely fai...
Free Banking: Theory, History, and a Laissez-Faire Model

Larry J. Sechrest Updated 8/22/2011

Free Banking: Theory, History and a Laissez-Faire Model by Larry Sechrest is a magnificent work, now rescued from undeserved obscurity with this new edition. Published in 1993, it is a formalization and extension of literature in the free banking are...
Requiem for Marx

Yuri N. Maltsev (ed.) Updated 8/19/2011

After the fall of communism, and certainly after this wide-ranging demolition of Marxism by Austrian scholars, who can possibly defend Marxism? Plenty of people, many of them smart otherwise but uneducated in economics. This book is the antidote, cov...
Praxeology and Understanding: An Analysis of the Controversy in Austrian Economics

George A. Selgin Updated 8/18/2011

George Selgin argues that what Mises called praxeology is ultimately rooted in a conception of economic logic that is undeniable and not subject to the claims of those who would extend the idea of "subjectivism" beyond its appropriate bound...
A Treatise on Currency and Banking

Condy Raguet Updated 8/16/2011

This remarkable hard-money treatise appeared in 1840. It is by Condy Raguet (1784-1842), a noted Pennsylvania politician and economist who worked as a merchant in several Latin American countries. He was wholly dedicated to free trade, the free marke...
Profit and Loss

Ludwig von Mises Updated 8/15/2011

In 1951, Mises gave an outstanding paper that made the summary case for the price system under capitalistic economic systems. In "Profit and Loss," he explains how cost accounting is the critical institution that ferrets out social waste, e...
Economic Controversies

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 8/12/2011

After Murray Rothbard finished his theoretical magnum opus - Man, Economy, and State - he turned his attention away from pure positive theory toward dealing with the opposition to Austrian theory. The result was a long series of fantastic scholarly a...
Deflation and Liberty

Jörg Guido Hülsmann Updated 8/12/2011

This monograph addresses a critically important issue: the prevailing view that deflation (falling prices and/or falling money stock) is a catastrophe that must be stopped. Jorg Guido Hulsmann shows that deflation is nothing to fear. The government s...
A Free-Market Monetary System and The Pretense of Knowledge

Friedrich A. Hayek Updated 8/11/2011

Here are two of Hayek's greatest essays in one small and beautiful volume at a very low price. It is a perfect way to introduce yourself and others to this giant of the 20th century. The book begins with Hayek's most excellent essay on mo...
The Strike-Threat System

William H. Hutt Updated 8/10/2011

The classic from the great labor economist W.H. Hutt argues that it is not the strike but the strike threat that makes unions so incredibly costly to American prosperity. It hangs over unionized companies like the sword of Damocles, intimidating prop...
Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance During the Great Depression

David T. Beito Updated 8/9/2011

David Beito has brought to light a remarkable and previously unknown chapter of the Great Depression: its tax revolts. They were widespread and systematic, and they made such huge progress that in some places they threatened to bring local and state...
Tiger by the Tail

Friedrich A. Hayek Updated 8/8/2011

F.A. Hayek said that his biggest regret in a lifetime of writing was that he never wrote a book-length refutation of Keynesian economics. He seriously doubted that Keynesian style planning would ever captivate governments, so he focused on differ...
Economics of the Free Society

Wilhelm Röpke Updated 8/5/2011

One year before the Nazi takeover of Austria, and after Mises had already accepted a research position in Geneva, a remarkable book began to circulate in what remained of Vienna's intellectual circles. It was Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft, The...
The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents

Nicholas Oresme Updated 8/3/2011

Nicole Oresme has been called the most brilliant scientist of the 14th century: mathematician, musicologist, physicist, philosopher, and economist. On top of that, he was a Bishop and a theologian. His writings of money bear much in common with Carl...
Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences

Carl Menger Updated 8/1/2011

Here is the book that gave the Austrian School its name. The famed Methodenstreit of the late 19th century was the battle of method. It pitted the emerging Austrian School against the German Historical School over a critically important question...
The German Question

Wilhelm Röpke Updated 7/29/2011

The German Question by Wilhelm Ropke is the book that inspired the postwar economic reform in Germany -- which Ropke himself did not believe had gone nearly far enough. It came out in 1945 in Switzerland, one year after Mises's Omnipotent Governm...
The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt Updated 7/28/2011

The master economics teacher, the author of Economics in One Lesson, moves his readers to a deeper knowledge of a range of topics in this outstanding collection of essays. In the late 1990s, Hans Sennholz carefully selected 30 of Hazlitt's art...
Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined

Friedrich A. Hayek Updated 7/28/2011

An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent Currencies What if the government let anyone use a currency of his or her choosing? What if the government permitted entrepreneurs to innovate in the monetary sector, such as by creating digital c...
The Essential von Mises

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 7/26/2011

A year following the death of Ludwig von MIses, Murray Rothbard wrote the book designed to inspire a new generation to take up the Misesian cause in economic theory and political action. His task was to provide an overview of Mises's writings and...
Choice in Currency

Friedrich A. Hayek Updated 7/24/2011

A path-breaking essay by Hayek, newly in print in cooperation with the Institute of Economic Affairs, this piece first appeared in 1976, during an inflationary bout in the U.S.. Hayek saw that it was crucial to bring the forces of competition to bear...
America's Money Machine: The Story of the Federal Reserve

Elgin Groseclose Updated 7/20/2011

The Story of the Federal Reserve Elgin Groseclose, an eminent monetary economist in the 20th-century, rips the roof off the Federal Reserve in this wonderful history that takes us from the Fed's founding to the 1960s. He shows that the gap bet...
The School of Salamanca

Marjorie Grice-Hutichinson Updated 7/19/2011

Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson's remarkable classic, The School of Salamanca, posed an extraordinary challenge when it first appeared in 1952. The book is not only a pioneering presentation of this lost school of monetary theory--fantastic thinkers of...
Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 7/18/2011

Need a short monograph on Austrian business cycle theory? This is the one to get. Murray Rothbard was the master of reducing complicated theories to their very essence while retaining theoretical rigor, and this essay is a case in point. It was writ...
Making Economic Sense

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 7/15/2011

Do you ever watch the business news and think: what would Murray Rothbard say about this? He remained a news junky all his life, even while working on his grand scholarly treatises. He was no academic snob; he believed, like Mises, that economics was...
Left, Right, and the Prospects for Liberty

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 7/14/2011

For many who have read this book-length essay, it marked a turning point in a new understanding. The mainstream will forever attempt to pigeonhole belief systems based on the left-right dichotomy. The right supposedly favors economic freedom plus...
Anatomy of the State

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 7/14/2011

Murray Rothbard was known as the state's greatest living enemy, and this is his most succinct and powerful statement on the topic, an exhibit A in how he came to wear that designation proudly. He explains what a state is and what it is not, acc...
Collectivist Economic Planning

Friedrich A. Hayek (ed.) Updated 7/14/2011

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises dropped a bombshell on the European economic world with his article called "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." It argued that socialism was impossible as an economic system. It set off two decad...
The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays

Richard M. Ebeling Updated 7/13/2011

New edition with an introduction by Roger Garrison and an index. Booms and busts are not endemic to the free market, argues the Austrian theory of the business cycle, but come about through manipulation of money and credit by central banks. In this m...
Prosperity and Depression

Gottfried Haberler Updated 7/12/2011

Are you serious about business cycle theory? In 1937, back when economists thought big and coherent thoughts about the boom-bust cycle, long before mainstream economists began to doubt the existence of theoretical universals, Professor Gottfried Habe...
The Inflation Crisis, and How To Resolve It

Henry Hazlitt Updated 7/9/2011

Prices are rising, as they inevitably must with an expansionary policy, and who is getting the blame? Not the Fed. Commentators claim it's the weather or foreigners with greedy appetites for goods. It has always been so: when the inflation ar...
The Theory of Idle Resources

William H. Hutt Updated 7/8/2011

W.H. Hutt’s Theory of Idle Resources was first published in 1939, surely one of the earliest responses to Keynes’s General Theory. Hutt goes for the heart of Keynes’s prescription for recovery, which was to get idle resources moving, whether that...
Gold and the Gold Standard

Edwin Walter Kemmerer Updated 7/8/2011

Edwin Walter Kemmerer is one of the unsung heroes of the 20th century. A professor of economics at Princeton, he was known as the "money doctor" between the wars, helping countries to establish and maintain strong currencies between 1923 an...
Capital, Interest, and Rent: Essays in the Theory of Distribution

Frank A. Fetter Updated 7/7/2011

Frank Fetter of Princeton University was one of the great American Austrians, and perhaps the most lucid defender of the "pure time preference" theory of interest in the history of economic ideas. Rothbard learned from him, and then col...
Value, Capital, and Rent

Knut Wicksell Updated 7/6/2011

Knut Wicksell was an important thinker of the second-generation marginalist school, and here is his detailed commentary on and elaboration of the capital theory of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. It was first published in 1893, but did not appear in Engl...
Resist Not Evil

Clarence Darrow Updated 7/5/2011

This remarkable book is the most comprehensive, sweeping, compelling, and unsettling case ever penned against what is laughingly called the criminal-justice system. It is a classic, devastating at its core, that is made newly available to speak to us...
It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes

Jeffrey A. Tucker Updated 7/4/2011

It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes from Mises Media on Vimeo. We are surrounded by miracles created in the private sector, particularly in the digital universe, and yet we don't appreciate them enough. Meanwhile, the...
Men Against the State: The Expositers of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908

James J. Martin Updated 7/1/2011

Talk about a suppressed intellectual tradition! America was home to the first full-blown movement of individualist anarchists in the 19th and early 20th century. The author of this book on the topic adds the adjective "individualist" to...
Interest and Prices

Knut Wicksell Updated 6/29/2011

It was this work by Swedish economist Wicksell that drew Mises's attention to the effects of interest rate manipulation on the capital structure. This was the first to present the idea of the natural rate of interest, which Wicksell argued can be...
The Private Production of Defense

Hans-Hermann Hoppe Updated 6/28/2011

Hans Hoppe takes on the most difficult subject in economic and political theory: the provision of security. He argues that the service is better provided by free markets than government, while addressing a hundred counter-arguments. Here we have an i...
The Production of Security

Gustave de Molinari Updated 6/27/2011

The introduction to this stunning work is by Murray Rothbard, who calls French radical Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) the great innovator in the market provision of security. Indeed, he might be regarded as the first proponent of what is called anar...
The Free Man's Library

Henry Hazlitt Updated 6/25/2011

Henry Hazlitt did an incredible thing with this book. He created in a mere 180 pages an anthology of short reviews of 550 books on economics and politics, old and new, from the point of view of an Austro-libertarian. Hazlitt wrote it because he bel...
Keynes the Man

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 6/23/2011

Here is Rothbard's mini-biography of Lord Keynes, one that makes use of all modern research to reconstruct Keynes's life and works in a way that is absolutely devastating. We read about his schooling, his secret societies, his political assoc...
The Way to Will Power

Henry Hazlitt Updated 6/22/2011

What a thrilling little treasure this is, a completely rediscovered book by Henry Hazlitt from 1922 This is Hazlitt before he became an advocate of the Austrian School, and here he is not writing on economics but personal ethics as informed by anc...