An Austro-Libertarian View, Vol. III An Austro-Libertarian View ESSAYS BY DAVID GORDON VOLUME III CURRENT AFFAIRS • FOREIGN POLICY AMERICAN HISTORY • EUROPEAN HISTORY Mises Institute 518 West Magnolia Avenue Auburn, Alabama 36832-4501 334.321.2100 www.mises.org An Austro-Libertarian View: Essays by David Gordon. Vol. III: Current Affairs, Foreign Policy, American History, European History. Published 2017 by the Mises Institute. This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 4.0 Interna- tional License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. ISBN: 978-1-61016-673-7 Table of Contents by Chapter Titles Preface . xiii Foreword . 1 Current Affairs A Propensity to Self-Subversion . 5 “Social Security and Its Discontents” . 9 Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th-Century America . 11 The Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard . 17 While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today . 23 The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission . 29 Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism . 35 Speaking of Liberty . 39 Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society . 45 No Victory, No Peace . 51 Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 . 57 In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State . 63 World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism . 71 Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement . 77 The Meaning of Sarkozy . 85 The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free . 91 The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy’s Only Hope . 97 At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge? . 103 Fascism vs. Capitalism . 107 • V VI • AN AUSTRO-LIBERTARIAN VIEW, VOL. 3 Foreign Policy Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy For a New Century . .115 Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post, 1939–1942 . 121 The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now . 127 War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning & What Every Person Should Know About War . 135 “Is There Still a Terrorist Threat? The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy” . 141 Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism: A Call to Action . 145 American Empire: A Debate . 151 American History Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985 . 159 Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution . 165 Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays of John T. Flynn . 169 Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy . 175 The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and The French Revolution 1785–1800 . 179 Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II . 185 A Necessary Evil . 191 When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession . 195 Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream . 201 A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War . 207 Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus . 215 The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit . 221 The New Dealers’ War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War within World War II . 227 Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy . 233 The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I . 239 Recovering the Past: A Historian’s Memoir . 245 The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method . 253 Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning . 261 Table of Contents by Chapter Titles • VII The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History . 269 New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America . 275 The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism . 281 Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State . 287 Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century . 293 “Is Secession a Right?” ........................................... 299 European History Literature Lost . 307 The Roosevelt Myth . 311 The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order . 317 Property and Freedom . 323 Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941 . 329 Making Patriots . 333 Guns and Violence: The English Experience . 339 Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek . 343 Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century . 351 The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals —Revised Edition . 357 Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge: A Reader . 365 The Political Sociology of Freedom: Adam Ferguson and F. A. Hayek . 373 Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933 –1939 . 379 Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order . 383 “Walter Starkie and the Greatest Novel of All” . 391 Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect . 397 Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture . 405 Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School . 411 Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics . 423 “Judaism and Capitalism: Friends or Enemies?”—Part 1 ............. 429 “Judaism and Capitalism: Friends or Enemies?”—Part 2 ............. 435 Index . 443 Table of Contents by Review Titles Tea for One . 5 The Ultimate Bailout . .. 9 Deconstructing Rorty . 11 The Roots of Rothbard . 17 The Bomber Caucus . 23 The Violent State . 29 Blood for Unity . 35 Truth to Power . 39 The State Eviscerated . 45 Mass Execution as Public Policy . 51 A State of Ignorance . 57 A Man, A Plan, A Flop . 63 Four Cheers for War . 71 It Usually Began with Murray Rothbard . 77 Continental Drift . 85 The Dangers of Militarism . 91 You Call That Austrian? . 97 Obamacare, Stimulus, and Other Disasters . 103 Fascism Is a Current Political and Economic System . 107 The Return of Anti-Imperialism . 115 Against Preemptive Strike . 121 The Case for Dictatorship . 127 Why They Love Bloodshed . 135 The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy . 141 Onward Christian Soldiers . 145 Shall It Be War Again? . 151 • IX X • AN AUSTRO-LIBERTARIAN VIEW, VOL. 3 Up From Buckleyism . 159 America’s Many Propositions . 165 Warfare vs . American Liberty . 169 The Merchants of Death . 175 The Jefferson Revisionism Hoax . 179 Charmed Into Bloodshed . 185 Fabrication . 191 Adams’s Stunning Achievement . 195 The Truth-Splitter . 201 The Indefensible Abe . 207 Barry’s War . 215 Does Liberalism Lead to Absolutism? . 221 The Truth About the “Good War” . 227 Inadvertent Ammunition . 233 Presidential Hubris and War . 239 The New History: A Cover For War . 245 New Support for Revisionist History . 253 History in Wonderland . 261 Philosophy and History . 269 The Errors of Roosevelt . 275 The Fallacies of Collective Security . 281 The Atomic Presidency . 287 Freedom and Federalism . 293 Island of Sanity . 307 Power Mad . 311 A Manifesto Without Evidence . 317 An Intrinsic Right . 323 The Truly Great Generation . 329 A God Before Thee . 333 Disarmed and Wholly Dependent . 339 The Hayekian Prism . 343 The Essence of Political Evil . 351 Can History Do Without Theory? . 357 Blunders, Lies, and Other Historicist Habits . 365 The Real Meaning of Hayek . 373 They Loved Each Other’s Politics . 379 Eric Voegelin: A Philosopher of Crisis . 383 The Dangers of the Tutlary State.