Literature Library

The most complete online offering of the literature of the Austrian School and libertarian ideas, including books, journal articles, and other writings, sorted by author or any method you choose.

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Literature Library: free books from the Ludwig von Mises Institute: 1843 records

One Is a Crowd

Frank Chodorov Updated 9/15/2011

This is a treasure: One Is a Crowd. It collects Frank Chodorov's most profound essays on the topic of individualism, many of which have otherwise been unjustly lost to history. The reader will be riveted by his biographical essay on the meanin...
The Bubble that Broke the World

Garet Garrett Updated 9/15/2011

What caused the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed? This book blows away the conventional interpretations, not only in its contents but that the book exists at all. The Bubble that Broke the World was written in 1931....
The Quotable Mises

Ludwig von Mises Updated 9/13/2011

Ludwig von Mises was the greatest economist of the twentieth century, but often readers are reluctant to tackle his major works. They fear that they will be unable to follow that abstract and relentless theoretical progression of, e.g., Human Action...
Rehabilitation of Say's Law, A

William H. Hutt Updated 9/9/2011

With A Rehabilitation of Say's Law, Professor William H. Hutt produced a magnificent work that Austrians would love to claim as one of their own, but that Hutt himself viewed as thoroughly classical in nature. The topic addressed here is Say&...
Capital in Disequilibrium

Peter Lewin Updated 9/7/2011

A theoretical treatise is a rare event, a moment to celebrate. This is what Peter Lewin has provided in his Capital in Disequilibrium. Taking capital seriously is a distinguishing mark of the Austrian School. The Austrians see capital as decisive in...
The Origins of the Federal Reserve

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 9/6/2011

Where did this thing called the Fed come from? Murray Rothbard has the answer here -- in phenomenal detail that will make your head spin. In one extended essay, one that reads like a detective story, he has put together the most comprehensive and fas...
Imperialism and Social Classes

Joseph Schumpeter Updated 9/5/2011

Joseph Schumpeter was not a member of the Austrian School, but he was an enormously creative classical liberal, and this 1919 book shows him at his best. He presents a theory of how states become empires and applies his insight to explaining many his...
The Myth of a Guilty Nation

Albert Jay Nock Updated 9/2/2011

This was Albert Jay Nock's first great anti-war book, a cause he backed his entire life as an essential component of a libertarian outlook. The book came out in 1922 and has been in very low circulation ever since. In fact, until this printing,...
How Diplomats Make War

Francis Neilson Updated 9/1/2011

Francis Neilson (1867–1961) was a member of the British Parliament, one of the last truly educated British aristocrats, a colleague and friend of Albert Jay Nock's, and an amazing historian and stylist. He is also the author of this his...
Understanding the Dollar Crisis

Percy L. Greaves, Jr. Updated 8/31/2011

In the year that President Nixon closed the gold window forever and the US government removed the last vestiges of the gold standard, nonstop dollar turmoil was unleashed. In that same year, Percy L. Greaves, a student of Ludwig von Mises's, rele...
The Merchants of Death

H.C. Engelbrecht Updated 8/30/2011

Here is the archetype of all post–World War I revisionism of a particular variety: the hunt for the people who made the big bucks off the killing machine. The Merchants of Death was, in many ways, the manifesto of a generation of people who...
The Clash of Group Interests

Ludwig von Mises Updated 8/26/2011

In this thrilling essay written in 1945, Mises lays out a theory of social organization in response to the Marxist critique of the free society. He explains that the Marxist view is wrong concerning its claim that there is a clash of group interests...
The Kohler Strike: Union Violence and Administrative Law

Sylvester Petro Updated 8/26/2011

Are labor unions merely an example of "free association"? Perhaps in some dreamland, but the real history of American labor organizing tells a different story. This 1961 book by labor economist Sylvester Petro tells a story of the d...
Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume III

Carl Menger Updated 8/24/2011

London School of Economics, 1934...
Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume I

Carl Menger Updated 8/24/2011

London School of Economics, 1934...
Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume IV

Carl Menger Updated 8/24/2011

London School of Economics, 1934...
Collected Works of Carl Menger (in German) Volume II

Carl Menger Updated 8/24/2011

London School of Economics, 1934...
The Privatization of Roads and Highways

Walter Block Updated 8/23/2011

The Mises Institute is pleased to introduce Walter Block's remarkable new treatise on private roads, a 494-page book that will cause you to rethink the whole of the way modern transportation networks operate. It is bold, innovative, radical, comp...
Study Guide to the Theory of Money and Credit

Robert P. Murphy Updated 8/22/2011

Consider the timing of this wonderful study guide to the best book ever written on money and credit. The book itself was written 100 years ago. The world economy is in the throes of another financial and debt crisis. Keynesianism has completely faile...
Free Banking: Theory, History, and a Laissez-Faire Model

Larry J. Sechrest Updated 8/22/2011

Free Banking: Theory, History and a Laissez-Faire Model by Larry Sechrest is a magnificent work, now rescued from undeserved obscurity with this new edition. Published in 1993, it is a formalization and extension of literature in the free banking are...
Requiem for Marx

Yuri N. Maltsev (ed.) Updated 8/19/2011

After the fall of communism, and certainly after this wide-ranging demolition of Marxism by Austrian scholars, who can possibly defend Marxism? Plenty of people, many of them smart otherwise but uneducated in economics. This book is the antidote, cov...
Praxeology and Understanding: An Analysis of the Controversy in Austrian Economics

George A. Selgin Updated 8/18/2011

George Selgin argues that what Mises called praxeology is ultimately rooted in a conception of economic logic that is undeniable and not subject to the claims of those who would extend the idea of "subjectivism" beyond its appropriate bound...
A Treatise on Currency and Banking

Condy Raguet Updated 8/16/2011

This remarkable hard-money treatise appeared in 1840. It is by Condy Raguet (1784-1842), a noted Pennsylvania politician and economist who worked as a merchant in several Latin American countries. He was wholly dedicated to free trade, the free marke...
Profit and Loss

Ludwig von Mises Updated 8/15/2011

In 1951, Mises gave an outstanding paper that made the summary case for the price system under capitalistic economic systems. In "Profit and Loss," he explains how cost accounting is the critical institution that ferrets out social waste, e...
Economic Controversies

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 8/12/2011

After Murray Rothbard finished his theoretical magnum opus - Man, Economy, and State - he turned his attention away from pure positive theory toward dealing with the opposition to Austrian theory. The result was a long series of fantastic scholarly a...
A Free-Market Monetary System and The Pretense of Knowledge

Friedrich A. Hayek Updated 8/11/2011

Here are two of Hayek's greatest essays in one small and beautiful volume at a very low price. It is a perfect way to introduce yourself and others to this giant of the 20th century. The book begins with Hayek's most excellent essay on mo...
The Strike-Threat System

William H. Hutt Updated 8/10/2011

The classic from the great labor economist W.H. Hutt argues that it is not the strike but the strike threat that makes unions so incredibly costly to American prosperity. It hangs over unionized companies like the sword of Damocles, intimidating prop...
Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance During the Great Depression

David T. Beito Updated 8/9/2011

David Beito has brought to light a remarkable and previously unknown chapter of the Great Depression: its tax revolts. They were widespread and systematic, and they made such huge progress that in some places they threatened to bring local and state...
Gertrude Coogan's Bluff: Greenback Populism as Conservative Economics

Gary North Updated 8/8/2011

...
Tiger by the Tail

Friedrich A. Hayek Updated 8/8/2011

F.A. Hayek said that his biggest regret in a lifetime of writing was that he never wrote a book-length refutation of Keynesian economics. He seriously doubted that Keynesian style planning would ever captivate governments, so he focused on different...
Economics of the Free Society

Wilhelm Röpke Updated 8/5/2011

One year before the Nazi takeover of Austria, and after Mises had already accepted a research position in Geneva, a remarkable book began to circulate in what remained of Vienna's intellectual circles. It was Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft, The...
The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents

Nicholas Oresme Updated 8/3/2011

Nicole Oresme has been called the most brilliant scientist of the 14th century: mathematician, musicologist, physicist, philosopher, and economist. On top of that, he was a Bishop and a theologian. His writings of money bear much in common with Carl...
Frederic Bastiat: A Man Alone

George Charles Roche III Updated 8/1/2011

Bastiat struggled his entire life to teach economic truths to every living person. His legacy is monumental and speaks to us today as clearly as it did France in the 19th century. He would certainly be thrilled by this biography of his life by...
Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences

Carl Menger Updated 8/1/2011

Here is the book that gave the Austrian School its name. The famed Methodenstreitof the late 19th century was the battle of method. It pitted the emerging Austrian School against the German Historical School over a critically important question: wha...
The German Question

Wilhelm Röpke Updated 7/29/2011

The German Question by Wilhelm Ropke is the book that inspired the postwar economic reform in Germany -- which Ropke himself did not believe had gone nearly far enough. It came out in 1945 in Switzerland, one year after Mises's Omnipotent Governm...
The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt Updated 7/28/2011

The master economics teacher, the author of Economics in One Lesson, moves his readers to a deeper knowledge of a range of topics in this outstanding collection of essays. In the late 1990s, Hans Sennholz carefully selected 30 of Hazlitt's art...
Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined

Friedrich A. Hayek Updated 7/28/2011

An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent Currencies What if the government let anyone use a currency of his or her choosing? What if the government permitted entrepreneurs to innovate in the monetary sector, such as by creating digital c...
The Essential von Mises

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 7/26/2011

A year following the death of Ludwig von MIses, Murray Rothbard wrote the book designed to inspire a new generation to take up the Misesian cause in economic theory and political action. His task was to provide an overview of Mises's writings and...
Choice in Currency

Friedrich A. Hayek Updated 7/24/2011

A path-breaking essay by Hayek, newly in print in cooperation with the Institute of Economic Affairs, this piece first appeared in 1976, during an inflationary bout in the U.S.. Hayek saw that it was crucial to bring the forces of competition to bear...
America's Money Machine: The Story of the Federal Reserve

Elgin Groseclose Updated 7/20/2011

The Story of the Federal Reserve Elgin Groseclose, an eminent monetary economist in the 20th-century, rips the roof off the Federal Reserve in this wonderful history that takes us from the Fed's founding to the 1960s. He shows that the gap bet...
The School of Salamanca

Marjorie Grice-Hutichinson Updated 7/19/2011

Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson's remarkable classic, The School of Salamanca, posed an extraordinary challenge when it first appeared in 1952. The book is not only a pioneering presentation of this lost school of monetary theory--fantastic thinkers of...
Planning for Freedom; and Twelve other Essays and Addresses

Ludwig von Mises Updated 7/18/2011

An enduring collection of Mises's essays, some popular and others scholarly, but always engaging and provocative. The first edition came out in 1952, and headlined the essay "Planning for Freedom," which makes the point that the choice...
Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 7/18/2011

Need a short monograph on Austrian business cycle theory? This is the one to get. Murray Rothbard was the master of reducing complicated theories to their very essence while retaining theoretical rigor, and this essay is a case in point. It was writ...
Left, Right, and the Prospects for Liberty

Murray N. Rothbard Updated 7/14/2011

For many who have read this book-length essay, it marked a turning point in a new understanding. The mainstream will forever attempt to pigeonhole belief systems based on the left-right dichotomy. The right supposedly favors economic freedom plus mi...
Collectivist Economic Planning

Friedrich A. Hayek (ed.) Updated 7/14/2011

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises dropped a bombshell on the European economic world with his article called "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." It argued that socialism was impossible as an economic system. It set off two decad...
The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays

Richard M. Ebeling Updated 7/13/2011

New edition with an introduction by Roger Garrison and an index. Booms and busts are not endemic to the free market, argues the Austrian theory of the business cycle, but come about through manipulation of money and credit by central banks. In this m...
Prosperity and Depression

Gottfried Haberler Updated 7/12/2011

Are you serious about business cycle theory? In 1937, back when economists thought big and coherent thoughts about the boom-bust cycle, long before mainstream economists began to doubt the existence of theoretical universals, Professor Gottfried Habe...
The Inflation Crisis, and How To Resolve It

Henry Hazlitt Updated 7/9/2011

Prices are rising, as they inevitably must with an expansionary policy, and who is getting the blame? Not the Fed. Commentators claim it's the weather or foreigners with greedy appetites for goods. It has always been so: when the inflation ar...
The Theory of Idle Resources

William H. Hutt Updated 7/8/2011

W.H. Hutt’s Theory of Idle Resources was first published in 1939, surely one of the earliest responses to Keynes’s General Theory. Hutt goes for the heart of Keynes’s prescription for recovery, which was to get idle resources moving, whether that...
Gold and the Gold Standard

Edwin Walter Kemmerer Updated 7/8/2011

Edwin Walter Kemmerer is one of the unsung heroes of the 20th century. A professor of economics at Princeton, he was known as the "money doctor" between the wars, helping countries to establish and maintain strong currencies between 1923 an...