In The Poverty of Historicism (1957), the great philosopher of science Karl Popper claims, “I have shown that, for strictly logical reasons, it is impossible for us to predict the future course of human history.” By showing this, Popper thought he had fatally wounded Marxism and other varieties of what he calls “historicism.” As Popper uses the
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-fourth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend, whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect if investors
In my article of February 21, I discussed Susan Neiman’s important book, Learning From the Germans . She maintains that, owing to the crimes of the Nazis, Germans have a moral obligation to “work through” the past. They must acknowledge their responsibility for these crimes, even if they themselves had nothing to do with them. In like fashion,
In Human Action , Mises states a principle that a number of students of Austrian economics dislike. In the years I have taught Human Action at the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, the same objection to Mises’s principle often comes up. It is a valuable objection to discuss in a column about philosophy, because it rests on a logical fallacy. What is the
Some economists, such as the 2017 Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and his colleague Cass Sunstein, have proposed an unusual justification for government interference with people’s choices. They do not intend, they say, to override the preferences that people have. They don’t want to tell people what they “should” want, according to an external
Last week I discussed a new argument against paternalism in the important book of Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman, Escaping Paternalism . Today I’d like to give the other side a chance. Robert H. Frank is an economist at Cornell University, well regarded for his work on the emotions and usually anxious to stress the flaws of the free market. In his
The British philosopher Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was by no means a libertarian. So far as I know, his political views were conventionally leftist. But he destroys egalitarianism with his levelling down objection . If you say that equality of wealth or income is morally required, aren’t you committed to the following strange consequence? A
Sometimes critics of praxeology make this complaint about it. Praxeology is supposed to be logically deduced from the concept of action (Mises) or from the action axiom (Rothbard). If so, these deductions should be set down in rigorous form. We need to know what exactly follows from what. To do this, ordinary language isn’t adequate. Praxeology
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) had a great influence on Murray Rothbard’s An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought . (Incidentally, this is my favorite of Rothbard’s books—it’s enormously learned and insightful.) This at first seems surprising. Though people differ about what Kuhn meant, many take
The philosopher Robert Nozick raises some important criticisms of Austrian economics in his “On Austrian Methodology.” This paper came out in 1970 and it is conveniently available in Nozick’s Socratic Puzzles (Harvard, 1998). I’m going to talk about a couple of the criticisms here. You might think that I don’t have to do this. The libertarian
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.