The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency by John Mueller Cambridge University Press, 2021, 332 pp. The subtitle of John Mueller’s excellent new book suggests that something unusual is in store for the reader. If someone is called complacent, he is hardly being complimented; how, then, can there be a “case for
Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power, and Freedom by Philip Hamburger Harvard University Press, 2021, 320 pp. Philip Hamburger has made a revolutionary contribution to American constitutional law. He shows that what is often regarded as a narrow topic, “unconstitutional conditions,” of interest only to specialists, is in fact fundamental to
In his book Let’s Have Socialism Now! (Yale University Press, 2001), the French economist Thomas Piketty places great emphasis on “solidarity,” and his opposition to the free market rests to a large extent on its conflict with that purported value. In this week’s column, I’d like to examine what he says about solidarity, and, as you might expect,
Last month I reviewed Samuel Moyn’s Humane (New York, 2021) but discussed only a few topics in it. Owing to the book’s great importance, I’d like in what follows to address another issue as well, and this is something with which many readers will already be familiar. The principal theme of Moyn’s book, it will be recalled, is that efforts to make
In this week’s column, I’d like to continue discussing Graham Priest’s unusual book Capitalism : Its Nature and Its Replacement . Priest uses ideas he gets from Marxism and Buddhism to criticize capitalism. Last week, I said that Priest has interesting things to say about Marxism but I avoided Buddhism. This time I won’t avoid it, because the
This book offers an account of Hegel that will surprise many readers—at least it surprised me. The political philosopher Leo Strauss often criticized “historicism,” the view that human beings do not have a fixed nature or essence. Instead, as José Ortega y Gasset put it, “Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is—history.” G.W.F. Hegel was one
Most contemporary political philosophers view free market capitalism with suspicion, if not outright loathing, but one exception is Gerald Gaus, who taught for many years at the University of Arizona. Gaus was by no means a Rothbardian but rather worked within the framework of “public reason” set forward by John Rawls, though Gaus greatly modified
[ The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism . By Matthew Continetti. Basic Books, 2022. 503 pages, Amazon Kindle Edition.] Why should we be interested in this book? At first glance, it appears that we shouldn’t be. Though the history of American conservatism is of great importance, and the author has amassed a great deal of
Capitalism—Its Nature and Its Replacement: Buddhist and Marxist Insights by Graham Priest Routledge, 2021; 312 pp. The title of this book seems at first sight puzzling: what has Buddhism to do with Marxism? When we learn that the author accepts Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism and also wishes to replace capitalism with a type of socialism, we
The Conservative Sensibility by George F. Will Hachette Books, 2019 xxxix + 600 pp. The well-known Washington columnist George Will was long ago a libertarian, but he soon changed his mind, adopting instead a statist variety of conservatism. In The Conservative Sensibility , he returns to his libertarian roots, but the return is incomplete, and he
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.