He wrote a line-by-line commentary and refutation of one of the most destructive, fallacious, and convoluted books of the century. The target here is John Maynard Keynes's General Theory, the book that appeared in 1936 and swept all before it. In economic science, Keynes changed everything. He supposedly demonstrated that prices don't work, that private investment is unstable, that sound money is intolerable, and that government was needed to shore up the system and save it. It was simply astonishing how economists the world over put up with this, but it happened. He converted a whole generation in the late period of the Great Depression. By the 1950s, almost everyone was Keynesian. But Hazlitt, the nation's economics teacher, would have none of it. And he did the hard work of actually going through the book to evaluate its logic according to Austrian-style logical reasoning. The result: a 500-page masterpiece of exposition. Murray Rothbard was blown away.

    And so Chodorov set out to do something implausible: to rework the Nock book in his own style.Rothbard wrote of this book: "Frank's final flowering was his last ideological testament, the brilliantly written The Rise and Fall of Society, published in 1959, at the age of 72."One reason it was overlooked is that it appeared after the takeover of the American right by statists and warmongers. The Old Right, of which Chodorov was a last survivor, had died out, so there was no one to promote this work. It is amazing that it was published at all. But thank goodness it was!The book is short (194 pages) but pithy and enormously powerful. Indeed, for a book so overlooked, the reader will be surprised to find that it might be Chodorov's best work overall. Certainly it is suitable for classroom use, or as a primer on economics and society. Insight abounds herein.

    He begins with a fundamental question: how do we decide how much money to spend on research. The more we spend the less we have to spend on other things. The decision is best left to the free market. He shows that science best advances under the free market: the claims to the contrary of the centralizers are spurious.

    

    

    He defends sounds money, free trade, and attacks welfare.Those who have considered this author to be something of a doubter on free markets must deal with this book, which reveals him to be a passionate advocate of laissez-faire.