• Roderick T. Long: EDITOR’S REMARKS . . . Today our numbers are rapidly growing, and our potential audience is as wide as the internet. I hope you will join us in making the Journal of Libertarian Studies the chief academic harbinger of the libertarian revolution.

• ROTHBARD’S TIME ON THE LEFT by John Payne. Murray Rothbard devoted his life to the struggle for liberty, but, as everyone who has made a similar commitment realizes, it is never exactly clear how that devotion should translate into action. Consequently, Rothbard formed strategic alliances with widely different groups throughout his career . . .

• ANDERSON, HAZLITT, AND THE QUANTITY THEORY OF MONEY by Jude Blanchette. Hazlitt, economist and journalist, played a decisive role in the postwar presentation and dissemination of Austrian ideas in America. He brought broad attention to the works and ideas of Mises and Hayek to an English-speaking world that might have otherwise disregarded these Austrian exiles . . .

• MERCHANTS OF DEATH REVISITED: ARMAMENTS, BANKERS, AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR by T. Hunt Tooley. First published in 1934 the authors presented a convincing historical argument that armaments manufacturers, working hand-in-hand with governments, have played a malign role in the modern world, in particular in the period of WW I . . .

• REJOINDER TO CAPLAN ON BAYESIAN ECONOMICS by Walter Block. To the best of my knowledge, there were three Methodenstreits (or debates in the literature over the proper method to use in economics) and a handful of “mini-Methodenstreits” in which Austrians took part . . .

• Book Review of BENJAMIN CONSTANT: PRINCIPLES OF POLITICS APPLICABLE TO ALL GOVERNMENTS, reviewed by Gary Galles. There was not a complete English translation of Constant’s 1810 work until 2003. This translation reveals that English speakers have been missing access to a major voice on behalf of liberty for almost two centures . . .

• EDITORIAL for the special symposium issue on “Austrian Law and Economics: The Contributions of Reinach and Rothbard.” The syposium was held to explore the common relationships between the Austrian approach to economic analysis and the legal realism of Adolf Reinach

• PITFALLS OF THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL OF CRIME by Laurent Carnis. Economic analysis can be applied to the phenomenon of crime. The approach explored here is built on the foundations of neoclassical welfare theory. . . .

• PRAXEOLOGY, ECONOMICS, AND LAW: ISSUES AND IMPLICATIONS by Larry J. Sechrest. Praxeology has been described as a process of deducing correct, universal, historically-invariant principles from one, or a few, axiomatic propositions; that is, from propositions which are self-evidently true. . . .

• THE A PRIORI FOUNDATIONS OF PROPERTY ECONOMICS by Jörg Guido Hülsmann. Court decisions and legislation have a profound impact on the economy because they define and modify property rights. Economists have therefore always been interested in analyzing this impact. In the past 70 years or so, the dominant way of doing this was to construct equilibrium models of the economy. . . .

• AUSTRIAN LAW AND ECONOMICS: THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ADOLF REINACH AND MURRAY ROTHBARD ON LAW, ECONOMICS, AND PRAXEOLOGY by Walter Block. Both Reinach and Rothbard have made many and important contributions to both law and economics. It is therefore of great interest to compare and contrast their eerily similar—but far from identical—ways of proceeding. . . .

• PROPERTY, CAUSALITY, AND LIABILITY by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Wherever there is scarcity of resources in relation to human demand, the possibility of conflict arises. The solution to such conflict is the assignment of private property rights—rights of exclusive control. . . .

• CAUSATION AND AGGRESSION by N. Stephan Kinsella and Patrick Tinsley. For libertarians, the purpose of a legal system is to establish and enforce rules that facilitate and support peaceful, conflict-free interaction between individuals. In short, the law should prohibit aggression. . . .

• TOWARD META-POLITICS by Leo Zailbert. If by political philosophy we understand the broad discipline that studies the relationship between the state and the individual then Robert Nozick’s remark that “the fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organized, is whether there should be any state at all” becomes immediately appealing. . . .

• William Graham Sumner: Against Democracy, Plutocracy, and Imperialism, by H.A. Scott Trask. Sumner was a prolific and astute historian of the early American republic whose work is informed by both his classical liberalism and his understanding of economics. Although not an anarchist, Sumner argued that even the best governments posed a constant threat to the liberty of individuals. Writing in the late 1800s, Sumner accurately predicted the course of the 20th century as being the most imperialistic and warlike in history, with the spread of social democracies leading to interest groups voting themselves plunder, and politicians squeezing plunder from their constituents.

• Sovereignty, International Law, and the Triumph of Anglo-American Cunning by Joseph R. Stromberg. Stromberg paints a picture of sovereignty spread over more than two millennia, from Greek, Roman, and Stoic notions of sovereignty to the modern notions. He reviews the Westphalian Order which established the modern nation-state, various theories of statehood and sovereignty, the American “exception” to these theories, post-1865 America, international law and international war, the rise of positive law, and notions including civilized warfare, the balance of power, and the use of international leagues to enforce peace by waging war. In modern practice, he points out, the idea of sovereignty is of little value, since the Bush doctrine claims that the U.S. can assert its own sovereignty while simultaneously denying everyone else’s.

• Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War by Robert B. Ekelund, Jr. and Mark Thornton. Reviewed by Thomas J. DiLorenzo. The U.S. “Civil War” was about a myriad of economic issues, including tariffs, central banking, wealth redistributions, land policy, international and interstate trading, and more. Yet, many Civil War books are written by “experts” with no understanding of basic economics, rendering their “scholarly” works of little value. As DiLorenzo points out, Ekelund and Thornton suffer no such problem. Indeed, their book explains the economic fundamentals, first by offering a primer on the economics of opportunity cost, specialization, trade, supply and demand, and rent seeking and interest groups, and then by applying these principles to explain the economic interests behind the war.

Summaries written by Scott A. Kjar