This year is the bicentennial of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the most famous political commentators about America. Although not always a consistent thinker, he stands squarely in the classical liberal tradition of understanding the capacity of society to self organize in the absence of a controlling central state. Charles Eliot
Much of what we know is by analogy, because, as Jacob Bronowski put it, “at the basis of human thought lies the judgment of what is like and what is unlike.” Analogies are so important in extending understanding and expressing ideas that William James said, “A native talent for perceiving analogies is reckoned . . . as the leading fact in
Starting this year, every educational institution receiving federal aid must teach about the U.S. Constitution on the September 17 anniversary of its signing (September 16 in 2005, as the 17th is a Saturday). The requirement is ironic, given that it came from the Senate’s leading Constitutional scholar, yet clearly conflicts with the Constitution,
When I was an undergraduate math major, one of my classes tried to get the professor to show us his PhD dissertation, since many of us could not imagine what that entailed. Since the class involved lots of proofs, and his dissertation largely involved supplying a missing link in a proof, he showed us the condensed version of how he managed to
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.