Hans Hoppe’s famous “argumentation ethics” has generated a great deal of attention among libertarians, and deservedly so. Has Hoppe produced an ironclad demonstration that people have libertarian rights? I don’t propose to contribute to that discussion on this occasion. Rather, I should like to focus on a preliminary issue. It is one to which
Eric Mack is one of the foremost contemporary philosophers who support the free market. He has for many years been concerned with the “anarchist-minarchist” dispute. In a “state of nature” in which people’s rights to self-ownership and private property are generally recognized, most individuals would find it in their interest to hire private
Leo Strauss is one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century, and like him or not, we need to understand his ideas. Murray Rothbard, by the way, had a mixed verdict on Strauss. He says, for example, [H]is work exhibits one great virtue and one great defect: the virtue is that he is in the forefront of the fight to
The historian Quinn Slobodian presents us in his article “ Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans: Race, Migration, and the Limits of Ludwig von Mises’s Globalism ,” Contemporary European History (2018), with a surprising interpretation of Ludwig von Mises. According to Slobodian, Mises was a racist who favored colonial wars of subjugation to open
I’d like to consider some criticisms of anarcho-capitalist theories of property acquisition raised by Jesse Spafford in his article “Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Private Property,” included in The Routledge Handbook of Anarchy and Anarchist Thought , edited by Gary Chartier and Chad Van Schoelandt (Routledge, 2021). Spafford, a research
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was a bestseller when it was published in 1944, and it has remained ever since one of the classic works in the literature of liberty. Many people, though, find it hard to understand. After Glenn Beck featured the book on his television show in 2010, resulting in a surge in demand for it, one noted speaker at
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. Many people think that a universal basic income (UBI) would be a good substitute for the welfare state. Under this proposal, each person resident in a country would receive a guaranteed income, sufficient to live at a modest level. People would get the money unconditionally. Unlike
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
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”
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.