[ Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics • By Kenneth B. McIntyre • Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011 • Xv + 238 pages] Kenneth McIntyre has given us a deeply thoughtful and erudite account of one of the greatest 20th-century historians, Hebert Butterfield. I should like to concentrate on an aspect of Butterfield’s
[ Robert Nozick . By Ralf M. Bader. Continuum, 2010. Xii + 136 pages] Ralf Bader has given us an excellent guidebook to Anarchy, State, and Utopia , but he has done much more than this. He offers insightful arguments of his own, often in defense of Nozick against his nonlibertarian critics. His book is a major advance in libertarian political
[ Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow . By Peter J. Boettke. Independent Institute — Universidad Francisco Marroquin. xx + 435 pages] This notable book collects 22 articles by Peter Boettke; 8 of these have been written in collaboration with others, including Peter Leeson, Christopher Coyne, Steve Horwitz, David Prychitko, and
Although Leland Yeager calls himself a fellow traveler of the Austrian School (p. 100), rather than a full-fledged member of it — he is a fellow traveler of the Chicago School as well — no reader of his essays can fail to note one respect in which he resembles two quintessential Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard . Like
Murray Rothbard regarded Ronald Hamowy as the funniest person he had ever known, and when I met him in 1979, it was easy to see why. Once in a bookstore near UC Berkeley, he paid for a book by credit card, which wasn’t then as common as it is today. The sales clerk said, “This is all right, but personally I just use credit cards in emergencies.”
No one who met Jim Sadowsky could ever forget him. I first saw him at a conference at Claremont University in California in August 1979; his great friend Bill Baumgarth, a political science professor at Fordham, was also there. His distinctive style of conversation at once attracted my attention. He spoke in a very terse way, and he had no
Today is the 24 th anniversary of Murray’s Rothbard’s death. What did he stand for? In an outstanding recent article , Lew Rockwell, one of Murray’s closest friends and the founder of the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com, offers the best answer. Lew says: “If you want to understand Murray Rothbard, you need to keep one principle in mind. If you
I am sorry to have to report that Ralph Raico has passed away. His intellectual brilliance was evident from an early age, and while still in high school, he attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminar at New York University. There he met Murray Rothbard, who became his lifelong friend. Ralph was one of the most brilliant members of Rothbard’s Circle
Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economic Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations. One can be sure, then, that his new comprehensive book, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan , reflects an Establishment point of view. As if this were not enough to tell us where the book is coming
Today would have been the 89th birthday of Burt Blumert, one of the greatest personalities of the modern libertarian movement. Burt was the indispensable man behind the scenes and was a key figure in the Mises Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, and LewRockwell.com. He was one of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends; and when you met him,
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.