The death of historian Ralph Raico on December 13, 2016, robbed us of an erudite and insightful scholar whose long life made him witness to (and analyst of) massive changes in American society involving state building, imperialist wars, and ...
In Ex Parte Quirin (1942) the U.S. Supreme Court justified the trial by military commission of eight German soldiers “captured” on American soil. Edward S. Corwin called the case “a ceremonious detour to a predetermined goal” (Total ...
After 1865, rapid industrial consolidation and concentration of wealth, aggravated by the Panics of 1873 and 1893, provoked the Populist farmers’ movement, the labor strife characteristic of the mid-to-late 19th century, and the anti-trust movement. As historian Nancy Cohen ...
Part 1 | Part 2
As noted in part 1, the New Deal was in serious political trouble by 1937. (See Frederic Sanborn, “Collapse of the New Deal,” in W.A. Williams, ed., Shaping of American Diplomacy, II.) ...
Part 1 | Part 2
Today, few Americans are left from the Greatest Generation (a phrase which my father, born in 1912, would have seen as obvious propaganda). There are more, perhaps, who experienced the New Deal ...
Praxeology according to Mises
Ludwig von Mises saw praxeology — “the general theory of human action” — as the foundation of proper economic reasoning. Starting from the self-evident fact that men “act” so as to substitute more satisfactory states of ...
The Italian Renaissance politician and writer Nicolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) remains controversial. His defenders see him as a tough-minded “realist” and the founder of proper political science. Some writers find two Machiavellis: an advisor to aspiring despots, or (alternatively) a ...
Few thinkers have ever set forth (much less developed) the rather straightforward idea of purely defensive war, i.e., war limited to repelling invaders — and otherwise doing nothing at all. The term “defensivism” would suit the case, but since ...
Many of us have brushed up against public-goods theory once or twice, in an economics class or in various policy arguments. In the 1970s the concept took off in international-relations studies and we hear much these days about global ...
Constant American bombing of much of the world ought to raise questions about the morality (if any) of air power, even if few Americans bother to confront them. (Indeed, many moral theorists would rather apply their theorizing and “intuitions” ...
