Murray Rothbard views the eighteenth-century French economist and administrator Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot as a great and admirable figure, but David Graeber and David Wengrow do not agree. In their recently published The Dawn of Everything (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), they present Turgot as a force for evil. His ideas provided a
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden University of Chicago Press, 2020 xvii + 227 pages McCloskey and Carden endeavor to explain one of the most striking facts of world history. Since about 1800, there has been an enormous increase in the average standard of
During the eighteenth century, capitalism in Europe “took off” in a way it had not done before, and as a result the West surpassed all other areas of the world in economic growth. What led to this transformation? Max Weber offers the most famous answer. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), he traces the new system to the
The Nuremberg prosecutors wanted to indict the Nazis on trial for crimes, but at the same time they wanted to preserve the dogma that the modern European nation-state is the culmination of moral progress. This created a conundrum. Original Article: “ Double Standards, Reparations, and War Crimes “ This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by
“These days most people tend to equate freedom with the possession of inalienable individual rights, rights that demarcate a private sphere no government may infringe on. But has this always been the case?” Original Article: “ What Does “Freedom” Mean? There Are Many Different Answers. “ This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher
Manent insists that if political leaders don’t lead society, we will have a society that isn’t led by political leaders. So what? Original Article: “ A World without Political Leaders? “ This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. On the Judgment of History by Joan Wallach Scott Columbia University Press, 2020 xxiii + 117 pages Joan Wallach Scott, a historian who is a professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has come up with a most valuable insight. She is decidedly not “one of us,” but
In a famous lecture delivered in August 1819, the great classical liberal Benjamin Constant contrasts the ancient and modern conceptions of liberty. By the “ancient conception,” Constant means the liberty of the citizens of a state to rule themselves, as opposed to rule by despots, whether foreign or domestic. He has primarily in mind the ancient
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Freedom: An Unruly History by Annelien de Dijn Harvard University Press, 2020 426 pages Those of us who follow Mises and Rothbard think that freedom means “freedom from.” In Rothbard’s view, rights are negative. People aren’t at liberty to use force or threats of force against you or your
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. The French political philosopher Pierre Manent has a view of politics that my readers are likely to reject, and rightly so. He has written a great deal about the French classical liberals, especially Tocqueville, but his heart lies more in the study of the classics. In his books, such as
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.