World History

Modern historians rarely have told the truth about the history of capitalism, and especially in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. It is time to set the record straight.

The intellectual path from Ancient Greece to modernity is littered with the path of numerous philosophers, movements, and events, both peaceful and violent that have shaped thinking throughout the ages.

Despite attempts to whitewash its past, progressivism was a poisonous ideology from the beginning. One of its worst legacies is eugenics, which not only created social strife in the US, but also was exported to Germany, where the Nazis embraced it.

When Thales of Miletus asked what underlying principle governed the cosmos, he inaugurated something far greater than a theory about nature. He introduced the conviction that reality possesses an intelligible order accessible to human reason.

Despite attempts to whitewash its past, progressivism was a poisonous ideology from the beginning. One of its worst legacies is eugenics, which not only created social strife in the US, but also was exported to Germany, where the Nazis embraced it.

Ryan McMaken takes a look at Rothbard's seminal 1963 essay "War, Peace, and the State." 

Those who use Catholic social teaching to defend socialism forget Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, published in 1891, which strongly condemned socialism and defended private property.

The current strain of illiberalism running through western thought conflicts with the themes of individual liberty and liberalism that also came from western thinkers. We need to recover those best ideas from antiquity to the present.

John Stuart Mill is a study in contrasts. He wrote On Liberty, yet many of his ideas and theories promoted anything but liberty.

In this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken looks at Rothbard's essay "Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation State."