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By Peter G. Klein

David Theroux has penned a lovely tribute to Bob Higgs, who recently stepped down as founding editor of the very fine Independent Review. Aside from being a great scholar, writer, and speaker, Bob is a terrific editor — academics are not known for their sparking prose, and Bob has a knack for molding even the most pedantic, turgid paragraphs into a readable, engaging story.

Included is the story of Murray Rothbard’s legendary 26-page referee report on the draft that become Bob’s landmark book Crisis and Leviathan. “I can still recall the deflated feeling I had after finishing the letter. I knew that I did not have sufficient life expectancy to accomplish what Murray had indicated needed to be done.”

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE

By Mises Updates

Mises Scholar Paul Cantor’s The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture is reviewed in The Independent Review:

Against the cultural elite and their promotion of patrician—and mostly European—standards for the arts, Cantor maintains that the marketplace enables creative and experimental forms of expression that aren’t so different from earlier aesthetic media such as the serialized novel or popular plays. He reminds us that “nineteenth century critics tended to look down on the novel as a popular form, thinking it hardly a form of literature at all,” and adds that it “was not viewed as authentic art, but rather as an impure form, filled with aesthetically extraneous elements whose only function is to please the public and sell copies” (p. 7). This once “vulgar” medium has lately been celebrated as one of the highest and most impressive categories of art. The form and content of great American novels—whether by Twain or Cooper or Salinger or Pynchon—should remind us that popular novels have been elevated as canonical even though they have rejected the standards and conventions that highbrow critics insisted were necessary for a work to constitute “literature.” Twain and Cooper recognized that highbrow presuppositions and expectations for novels derived from influential Europeans, so they set out to forge a uniquely American literature free from Old World constraints.

For more on Cantor and his book, see this interview.

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE

By Mises Updates

Mises University, which accepts only one in three applicants, welcomed an extremely talented group of 150 graduate and undergraduate students this year who had the opportunity to learn from some of the finest scholars of the Austrian school in the world, including more than one best-selling author. (Thanks to our donors, there is no charge for students to attend.)

Why should you sponsor a student at Mises U? Watch this video.

Below are some photos from this year’s event. For the full photo album, see here.

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE

By Mises Updates

David Gordon’s Mises Academy course, History of Anarchist Thought, begins on Tuesday, September 10, and continues for six weeks. Register here. 

Dr. Gordon, a philosopher and intellectual historian, has covered a wide range of political theorists from Plato and Aristotle to Nozick and Rothbard.

For History of Anarchist Thought, Gordon will cover a variety of anarchist theorists from Boetie to Proudhon and Rothbard.

Here is a sampling of Gordon’s previous lectures on political theorists: including talks on Mill, Spooner and Spencer and Nozick and Rothbard.

For a 10-lecture course on the history of political philosophy with David Gordon, see here. 

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE

By Mises Updates

Mises Institute Associated Scholar Paul Gottfried writes today in The American Conservative:

Although the president should never have expressed his intention to intervene militarily if Assad employed chemical weapons, and although he may now be losing additional credibility by appearing to waver, I am delighted that the neoconservative foreign policy, which my late friend the economist Murray Rothbard described as “perpetual war for the sake of perpetual peace,” is falling into disrepute.

Rothbard borrowed the phrase form Harry Elmer Barnes whose 1953 collection of essay Perpertual War for Perpeual Peace became a seminal work of revisionist historical analysis.

Barnes wrote in Chapter 1:

While the First World War headed the United States and the world toward international disaster, the Second World War was an even more calamitous turning point in the history of mankind. It may, indeed, have brought us — and the whole world — into the terminal episode of human experience.

It certainly marked the transition from social optimism and technological rationalism into theNineteen Eighty-Four pattern of life, in which aggressive international policies and war scares have become the guiding factor, not only in world affairs but also in the domestic, political, and economic strategy of every leading country of the world. The police state has emerged as the dominant political pattern of our times, and military state capitalism is engulfing both democracy and liberty in countries which have not succumbed to Communism.

For more, see Chapter 1 here, and the final chapter here.

Here is the

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Source: MISES INSTITUTE