Mises Media

Why Marxism spread so widely while going long unchallenged, how its slogans slipped into everyday speech, and the Marxian urge to “organize” society by treating individuals as raw material to be arranged.

How Marxism claims that truth itself is attainable only in a classless society, and how the cult of “action” and violence—by way of Georges Sorel and French syndicalism—fed into Leninism, fascism, and Nazi racial doctrine.

The liberal ideal of the individual and rational, welfare-serving law, and a defense of the Industrial Revolution against the myth that early capitalism degraded the common man.

Marx’s doctrine of class and class conflict: the claim that class interests determine how people think and set the classes in irreconcilable conflict—with Mises noting that Marx never actually defined what a class is.

Mises opens the philosophical half of the course by arguing that Marx’s materialism—the claim that a person’s economic class shapes his very ideas and logic—dominates modern thought, and he begins to dismantle it.

Richard M. Ebeling recalls the world of 1952, when socialism seemed ascendant everywhere, summarizes Marx’s system of historical materialism and class struggle, and introduces Mises as one of its most formidable critics.

Mises defends his use of the word: true liberalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production, and he explains why he keeps the name despite its distorted modern usage.

Mises's guided reading list of the essential works of liberal thought, from Hume, Smith, and Bentham onward, for readers who want to study the tradition in depth.

Mises argues that modern civilization rests on liberalism and capitalism, and can be destroyed only from within—by the spread of antiliberal ideas, not by any outside enemy.

Why liberalism differs from interest-based parties, the crisis of parliamentary government, and the misleading charge that liberalism is merely the “party of capital.”