Is Babbittry alive and well in twenty-first-century America? George F. Babbitt is novelist Sinclair Lewis’s protagonist in the novel of the same name. Babbitt is a real estate man, which is to say a salesman, but the newfangled 1920s term is “Realtor ™. “ Incurious, smug, self-satisfied, and utterly predictable, Babbitt is well pleased with his
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
How to Nurture Truth and Authenticity: A Metamodern Economic Reform Proposal by Justin Carmien Manticore Press, 2022; 272 pp. Neither I nor Justin Carmien, the author of How to Nurture Truth and Authenticity , is an economist. Carmien’s book, however, is not a work of economics but a philosophical attempt to apply Heideggerian metaphysics to
“To mount an effective response to the reigning egalitarianism of our age, therefore, it is necessary but scarcely sufficient to demonstrate the absurdity, the anti-scientific nature, the self-contradictory nature, of the egalitarian doctrine, as well as the disastrous consequences of the egalitarian program. All this is well and good. But it
In his ambitious new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery, 2022), the distinguished Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony poses a sharp challenge to the view that freedom is the highest political value, and in this week’s column, I’d like to address his challenge, which I find illuminating, though mistaken. By “freedom,” I mean what Rothbard,
Richard Arneson has been a major figure in political philosophy for the last few decades, and in this week’s article, I’d like to look at some points he raises in his article “Liberal Egalitarian Critiques,” his contribution to The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism , pp. 564–78. In the article, Arneson distinguishes between “hard”
While F.A. Hayek is known for his term “spontaneous order,” Mises saw institutional development as coming from growth in human understanding of things. Original Article: Mises versus Hayek on the Future of
Rothbard warned against the assumption that because democracies are “better” than dictatorships, they are necessarily more peace loving. Original Article: Rothbard on a Priori
“Effective altruism” has become a buzzword with modern progressives who seek to combine state power and billionaire-funded nonprofits to redirect resources. Original Article: A Rothbardian Critique of Effective
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.