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.

We recommend Adobe Reader for PDF files and Adobe Digital Editions for desktop reading of ePub (ebook) files.

For an ePub reader, we recommend the iBook app, O'Reilly's Bookworm, or the Stanza Catalog.

Has the Mises.org Literature section changed your life? We want to hear from you!

Source: Online Books: 510 records

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...
Frederic Bastiat: A Man Alone

George Charles Roche III Updated 8/1/2011

Bastiat struggled his entire life to teach economic truths to every living person. His legacy is monumental and speaks to us today as clearly as it did France in the 19th century. He would certainly be thrilled by this biography of his life...
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...
Planning for Freedom; and Twelve other Essays and Addresses

Ludwig von Mises Updated 7/18/2011

An enduring collection of Mises's essays, some popular and others scholarly, but always engaging and provocative. The first edition came out in 1952, and headlined the essay "Planning for Freedom," which makes the point that the choice...
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...
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 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...
The Essential Rothbard

David Gordon Updated 6/22/2011

Here is the book for the Age of Rothbard, precisely the primer that is needed at a time when his influence—as the most radical and compelling intellectual force in the second half of the 20th century—is higher than during any time during his lifeti...
The Development of Economic Doctrine: An Introductory Survey

Alexander Gray Updated 6/21/2011

Alexander Gray was a British economist with a particularly keen appreciation of the Austrian contribution to the history of ideas. As with others of his generation, he was super well-educated and an outstanding stylist of the English language. Even b...
On the Origins of Money

Carl Menger Updated 6/20/2011

Written in the same year that he testified before the Currency Commission in Austria-Hungary, and published in English in 1892, Carl Menger explains that it is not government edicts that create money but instead the marketplace. Individuals decide wh...
Ludwig von Mises on Money and Inflation

Ludwig von Mises Updated 6/17/2011

In the 1960s, Ludwig von Mises lectured often on money and inflation. Bettina Bien Greaves was there taking shorthand. She has been working to transcribe them for a very long time. At last the results are here and they are fantastic. To have this w...
Exchange, Prices, and Production in Hyper-Inflation: Germany 1920-1923

Frank D. Graham Updated 6/15/2011

This large-scale study of the German hyper-inflation is definitive in the English language. Written by a professor at Princeton University, and published in 1930, Frank Graham's treatment was so accurate and incisive that Ludwig von Mises himse...
Recent Literature on Interest

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk Updated 6/14/2011

This book by Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk is a supplement to his two great books, Capital and Interest and The Positive Theory of Capital. Here he takes on alternatives to the Austrian theory he had previously presented, and thereby clarifies the case. It...
Control or Economic Law

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk Updated 6/10/2011

Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk was a giant of the Austrian School. Finally, here is an approachable book by him. His masterworks on interest and capital run up to 1000-plus pages. Everyone should read them, as Mises said, but of course it is a bit much t...
Karl Marx and the Close of His System

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk Updated 6/10/2011

The great economist takes on Karl Marx, and his fundamental failure to understand the workings of the capital market and its relationship to value. The criticism was devastating, so much so that a leading Marxist responded, and thus herein is Rudolf...
The Positive Theory of Capital

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk Updated 6/9/2011

This is the second book in the series of Boehm-Bawerk translations by Scottish economist William Smart, originally published in 1891. It is, as the title suggests, the positive theory of capital. It begins with full front matter by Smart himself,...
Capital and Interest

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk Updated 6/8/2011

The great economist and finance minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is a pillar of the Austrian School. As a champion of the new marginalist school, this great work brought him more fame than even Carl Menger had in his day. Here is the origi...
On Doing the Right Thing

Albert Jay Nock Updated 6/7/2011

This wonderful collection of essays by Albert Jay Nock, first published in 1928, includes his "Anarchist's Progress," "Thoughts on Revolution," "The Decline of Conversation," and other classics by this great American...
The Vampire Economy

Günter Reimann Updated 6/3/2011

Here is a study of the actual workings of business under national socialism. Written in 1939, Reimann discusses the effects of heavy regulation, inflation, price controls, trade interference, national economic planning, and attacks on private propert...
Snoring as a Fine Art, and Twelve Other Essays

Albert Jay Nock Updated 6/2/2011

Here is that passage that explains why Albert Jay Nock called his book Snoring as a Fine Art: "Snoring should be regarded as a fine art and respected accordingly. If this be admitted, I might suggest further that our civilization does not s...
The Market for Liberty

Morris and Linda Tannehill Updated 6/1/2011

Some great books are the product of a lifetime of research, reflection, and labored discipline. But other classics are written in a white heat during the moment of discovery, with prose that shines forth like the sun pouring into the window of a time...
Principles of Economics

Carl Menger Updated 5/31/2011

Principles of Economics: Pocket Edition from Mises Media on Vimeo. This edition is absolutely gorgeous - handy, economical, and beautifully printed. We've never had an edition of this core work that is so nicely done. In the beginning, ther...
The Theory of Education in the United States: The Page-Barbour Lectures for 1931 at the University of Virginia

Albert Jay Nock Updated 5/30/2011

It is hard to say what is most notable about this book published first in 1931: 1. Albert Jay Nock's incredible disquisition on the real meaning of education and its role in a free society. 2. That these lectures were given at a universi...
The Decline of the American Republic

John T. Flynn Updated 5/26/2011

In 1955, John T. Flynn saw what few others journalist did: the welfare-warfare state conspired to bring down American liberty. The New Deal combined with World War Two had fastened leviathan control over a country born in liberty. This early analy...
Capital and Its Structure

Ludwig M. Lachmann Updated 5/24/2011

Ludwig Lachmann in 1956 set out to correct the problem that the economics profession had no coherent and working understanding of capital, a concept so integral to economic science and yet not explored at length since the takeover of macroeconomics b...
Prosperity Through Competition

Ludwig Erhard Updated 5/24/2011

In postwar Germany, one great statesman led the fight for freedom: Ludwig Erhard. He was deeply influenced by Wilhelm Ropke, and drew heavily on the case for free markets made by Ludwig von Mises. He received his PhD from Franz Oppenheimer, th...
Money, Sound and Unsound

Joseph T. Salerno Updated 5/24/2011

Ludwig von Mises said that there can never be too much of a good theory. Salerno proves it in this sweeping and nearly comprehensive book on applied Austrian monetary theory. He uses the Mises/Rothbard theory of money to reinterpret historical epis...
The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton

Ralph Raico Updated 5/24/2011

The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton Forty years ago, historian Ralph Raico completed his dissertation under the direction of F.A. Hayek at the University of Chicago. Its title masks its power a...
Income Tax: Root of All Evil

Frank Chodorov Updated 5/23/2011

Frank Chodorov was an extraordinary thinker and writer, and hugely influential in the 1950s. He wrote what became an American classic arguing that the income tax, more than any other legislative change in American history, made it possible to violate...