Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian Metropolitan Books, 2023; 336 pp. Quinn Slobodian, a professor of the history of ideas at Wellesley College, has a good deal to say about Murray Rothbard, and I have attempted to respond to that in a review that is to be published in the next issue
After the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union, many socialists, reluctant to abandon their socialist convictions, shifted to a belief in “market socialism.” The great Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen was not among them, and in this week’s column, I’d like to examine what he says about market socialism in his essay “The Future of a
The Moral Foundations of Civil Society by William Röpke Transaction Publishers, (1948) 1996; xxxvii + 235 pp. In an earlier column , I discussed Wendell Berry’s stress on land and locality, and. among Austrian school economists, Wilhelm Röpke is most sympathetic to these themes. In The Moral Foundations of a Civil Society , first published three
In the early decades of the Cold War, the Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr attracted a considerable following among American intellectuals who influenced foreign policy. People such as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who wanted to found a group called Atheists for Niebuhr, maintained that Niebuhr provided a new, realistic basis for
Not Thinking like a Liberal by Raymond Geuss, Harvard, 2022 xiv + 197 pp. Raymond Geuss, an American philosopher now retired from Cambridge, has in his many books emphasized narrative and the genealogy of concepts, and Not Thinking like a Liberal is, fittingly, an account of how various events in his life have shaped his conceptual framework. The
Free Market: The History of an Idea by Jacob Soll Basic Books, 2022; viii + 326 pp. Jacob Soll is a distinguished historian, and Free Market contains much of value, but the book cannot be considered a success, and indeed as it reaches the twentieth century, it becomes a disaster. Even in the parts of the book worth reading, Soll is in the iron
Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2020 By Thomas Piketty Yale University Press, 2021 352 pages Thomas Piketty has written a useful book. Readers need no longer plough their way through his vast Capital in the Twenty-First Century , not to mention his even vaster Capital and Ideology, to understand his message. This fairly
Critics of egalitarianism, meaning by that equality, or close to it, of income and wealth among the members of a society, often claim that it rests on envy. In response, defenders say that there are respectable reasons to favor equality. (I’m assuming that envy doesn’t count as a respectable reason.) For instance, it can be argued that inequality
Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman Polity Press, 2023; 155 pp. There is much to dislike in this book. Susan Neiman, a former philosophy professor who now heads the “Einstein Discussion Group” in Potsdam, is a socialist who has good things to say about Communist East Germany and parrots every anticapitalist cliché in the book. I have blasted some of
In his excellent new book In Defense of Capitalism (Republic Book Publishers, 2023), the historian and political scientist Rainer Zitelmann asks a vital question about inequality. In asking this question, he makes a move characteristic of his work. Demands to reduce inequality of wealth and income are widespread, and often debates about proposals
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.