Murray Rothbard inherited the praxeological system of Ludwig von Mises while substantially altering its philosophical foundation. Mises developed his conception of economic knowledge within a post-Kantian intellectual environment, treating praxeology as an a priori science whose propositions are not derived from historical observation. Rothbard preserved the action axiom and the…

The Austrian School is normally introduced through its economic doctrines: marginal utility, subjective value, methodological individualism, market process, spontaneous order, and, in the Misesian tradition, praxeology. Beneath these doctrines, however, lies a philosophical history that is considerably more complicated. Austrian economics emerged within a Central European intellectual environment in which…

Hegel is usually presented as the great successor to Kant and one of the central figures of German Idealism. That is true, but it only explains part of his philosophical project. Hegel also drew heavily from Aristotle, particularly his ideas of actuality, form, teleology, and the intelligibility of reality. In…

Distributism and Austrian economics share an intellectual source in the School of Salamanca, but they do not belong to the same lineage. The Salamancans combined Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law with sophisticated analyses of private property, prices, money, scarcity, and exchange. Because their thought contained both a moral philosophy of economic life…

Although they came from very different intellectual traditions, Oswald Spengler, Jean-Claude Michéa, and Samuel Edward Konkin III converge on a striking insight: state capitalism and state socialism are not genuine opposites but products of the same liberal civilization. For Spengler, both liberal capitalism and Marxism belong to the same English…

Being “transcendental” on the political compass means operating outside its usual categories. The term has nothing to do with metaphysics, theology or spirituality. It is used only as a political label for a perspective that rejects the standard divisions between left and right, authoritarian and libertarian. The political compass assumes…

Samuel Edward Konkin III had a naming problem that he could hardly have anticipated. During the early 1970s, while breaking intellectually and strategically with the emerging Libertarian Party, he began developing what he called New Libertarianism. Counter-Economics supplied its method, agorism its destination, and the rejection of electoral politics its…

Imagine four neighbours living on the same street. One is an individualist anarchist, one is a mutualist, one is an anarcho-capitalist, and the fourth is an anarcho-distributist. They share the same physical space, but they disagree about property, credit, firms, exchange, and economic organization. The individualist anarchist prefers personal autonomy…

Modern political philosophy is commonly understood as a debate within the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment. Liberalism, socialism, constitutional democracy, secular humanism, positivism, and many forms of modern conservatism define themselves in relation to the transformation that began in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. More recently, another current has emerged in…