Best of
Politics

1927

Liberalism: The Classical Tradition


Ludwig von Mises - 1927
    Liberalism is not a political party; it is a system of social organization. The liberal program aims at securing equality under law and freedom of opportunity for everyone to make their own choices and decisions, so long as they do not interfere with the equal rights of others; it offers no special privileges to anyone. Under liberalism, the role of government would be limited to protecting the lives, property, and freedom of its citizens to pursue their own ends and goals. Mises is more specific here than elsewhere in applying the liberal program to economic policy, domestic and foreign. Also in this book, Mises contrasts liberalism with other conceivable systems of social organization such as socialism, communism, and fascism.Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of Economics throughout most of the twentieth century. He earned his doctorate in law and economics from the University of Vienna in 1906. In 1926, Mises founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. From 1909 to 1934, he was an economist for the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. Before the Anschluss, in 1934 Mises left for Geneva, where he was a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies until 1940, when he emigrated to New York City. From 1948 to 1969, he was a visiting professor at New York University.Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar, trustee, and longtime staff member of the Foundation for Economic Education. She has written and lectured extensively on topics of free market economics. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Human Events, Reason, and The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. A student of Mises, Greaves has become an expert on his work in particular and that of the Austrian School of economics in general. She has translated several Mises monographs, compiled an annotated bibliography of his work, and edited collections of papers by Mises and other members of the Austrian School.

Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings


Pyotr Kropotkin - 1927
    An invaluable addition to the libraries of instructors, students, and anyone interested in history, government, and anarchist thought.

Notes on Democracy


H.L. Mencken - 1927
    . . and beyond! [Democracy] is based on propositions that are palpably not true

Look to the East: A Ritual of the First Three Degrees of Freemasonry


Ralph P. Lester - 1927
    The complete work of the Entered Apprentice, Fellow-craft and Master-mason's Degrees, with the ceremonies, lectures, etc.

Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan


Mao Zedong - 1927
    Comrade Mao Tse-tung spent thirty-two days in Hunan Province making an investigation and wrote this report in order to answer these criticisms. The Right opportunists in the Party, headed by Chen Tu-hsiu, would not accept his views and stuck to their own wrong ideas. Their chief error was that. frightened by the reactionary trend in the Kuomintang, they dared not support the great revolutionary struggles of the peasants which had erupted or were erupting. To appease the Kuomintang, they preferred to desert the peasantry, the chief ally in the revolution, and thus left the working class and the Communist Party isolated and without help. It was mainly because it was able to exploit this weakness within the Communist Party that the Kuomintang dared to betray the revolution, launch its "party purge" and make war on the people in the summer of 1917

History of European Liberalism


Guido De Ruggiero - 1927
    

Political Theories of the Middle Age


Otto Gierke - 1927
    W. Maitland's translation of a vital section from Otto Gierke's monumental Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht makes available once again one of the seminal texts in the historiography of political thought. Famed, inter alia, for the elegance and lucidity of Maitland's own expository introduction, Political Theories of the Middle Age is concerned in essence with the medieval development of the doctrine of State and Corporation - a concept which, as Maitland indicates, has been prone to misunderstanding by English minds versed in the tradition of the common law. Gierke identifies the peculiar characteristic of medieval political thought as its vision of the universe as one articulated whole, and every being, whether a joint-being (community) or a single-being - as both a part and a whole: his text examines the potentially revolutionary effect upon this of certain crucial intellectual intrusions, derived in part from Roman Law, described by Gierke as 'ancient-modern'.