In his review of F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, Murray Rothbard takes issue with the Hayekian case for freedom, which rests solely on human ignorance. On this view, reason is dogmatic and tends to lead to totalitarianism, with arrogant despots claiming they have the knowledge to rationally and efficiently plan the social order. As Joe Salerno has shown, Ludwig von Mises took a different approach.In contrast to the Hayekian stress on “spontaneous order,” “evolved rules,” and the “unintended consequences of human action,” Mises was a strict rationalist, emphasizing the necessity of the public rationally grasping the benefits brought about by a free-market economy, along with the dangers and destructiveness of state interventionism. As good Misesians and rationalists, we’re free from

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.

There’s no shortage of ill-informed criticisms of libertarian theory across all sides of the political spectrum. To most leftists, the libertarian is selfish, greedy, elitist, disdainful of the poor, and a useful idiot for big-business interests. To most right wingers, the libertarian is atomized, nihilistic, a hedonist, a materialist, a moral relativist, an egalitarian, and a naïve utopian who scorns tradition and religion.But there’s a new, relatively overlooked angle from which libertarianism has come under attack—namely, the attempts to relate it to Marxoid critical theory or even to argue that libertarianism itself is a form of critical theory. Despite the obscurity of this idea, it would be valuable to take up the task of examining the arguments its proponents present to see if