Friedrich Hayek

Justifying liberal capitalism — flowchart

Reprising this chart which integrates the major answers to the question: What makes liberal capitalism good? The chart diagrams the positive claims about liberal capitalism by its defenders — John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. For elaboration, see my book Liberalism Pro and […]

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Review of Zelmanovitz on the philosophy of money

Review of Leonidas Zelmanovitz,The Ontology and Function of Money: The Philosophical Fundamentals of Monetary Institutions Lexington Books, 2015, 447 pp.Reviewed by Stephen HicksFirst published at Law and Liberty, edited by Richard Reinsch and Lauren Weiner. Money is funny, the old saying goes, both in the cognitive puzzles it generates and the motivational extremes of human

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Guerin’s travels in late Weimar and early Nazi Germany

I’m reading Daniel Guérin’s The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (​Duke University Press, 1994), based on the French journalist’s trips through Germany in the early 1930s. Guérin was then a young leftist whose thinking later evolved in a communist-anarchist direction. Germany both attracted and appalled him with its extremist politics. From

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Conservatives against Free-market Capitalism [Good Life series]

After beating up on some “left” icons (here, here, and here, for example), it’s time to give some grief to the “right.” American political vocabulary tends to sort people into liberals on the left and conservatives on the right. All are big-tent labels, and we argue continuously about how to place libertarians, progressives, socialists, theocrats,

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Os filósofos são ignorantes no que tange à política?

Esclarecimento inicial: eu sou um filósofo e essa nova coluna no site The Good Life tratará de tópicos como a natureza humana, o conhecimento, o sentido da vida e, é claro, a política. Permitam-me começar citando algumas das opiniões de meus colegas sobre a política. O jogo favorito dos filósofos é discutir qual foi o

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“What Justifies Liberal Capitalism: Are Hayek’s, Rand’s, and Friedman’s Answers Compatible?” My 2013 Atlas Summit lecture

The one-hour video of my lecture is at the Atlas Society site and at YouTube. The lecture starts at 3:40, after the introduction, and is about 45 minutes long, followed by a question-and-answer session. The sub-topics are: * 13 initial arguments for liberal capitalism. * Some quotations from Mises, Schumpeter, Jouvenel, Smith, Hayek, Mill, Rand,

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Video interview with Professor Nicholas Capaldi

Professor Capaldi lectured recently at Rockford University on the topic of “The Lockean Liberty Narrative versus the Rousseau Equality Narrative, and How These Narratives Explain Everything.” Afterward we discussed his themes — the conflict between the Lockean and Rousseauian narratives, enterprise and civil societies, the nature of the corporation, corporate philanthropy, cronyism, and more. Professor

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The Climate of Collectivism [EP audiobook]

This is the fourth chapter of the audiobook version of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes] From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics [mp3] [YouTube] The argument of the next three chapters [mp3] [YouTube] Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence [mp3]

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