The Independent Review

Publisher David J. Theroux, Independent Institute Founding Editor Robert Higgs Co-Editors Christopher J. Coyne, George Mason University Michael C. Munger, Duke University Robert M. Whaples, Wake Forest University Managing Editor Robert M. Whaples, Wa

The Independent Review aims to be an “interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of political economy and the critical analysis of government policy,” which covers “economics, political science, law, history, philosophy, and sociology.”1 This iss

On my way to an evening class, my eye caught an interesting poster on the hall bulletin board. In its most recent efforts to rehabilitate my retrograde moral sensibility, Fordham University advertised that it would now provide full vegan menus to the

Jane Austen, in her six novels published between 1811 and 1817, provides us with a picture of human nature that is grounded in classical liberalism. In particular, her interpretation illuminates Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which p

For hundreds of years, authors of economic treatises and textbooks have begun their analysis with a discussion of the economics of the isolated individual. They often choose the protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) as their meta

“Ministers, general managers, commissars, prefects should purchase a copy … of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed to be read in idle moments, to be kept on their desk or on their nightstand at night, to be at hand when they cannot sleep. It is one of

Upon finishing reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (hereafter UTC),1 Lord Cockburn claimed that it “has done more for humanity than was ever before accomplished by any single book of fiction” (qtd. in R. R. 1896). It has more work to d

What can Joseph Conrad tell us about the political and economic arrangements that make for a flourishing society? I argue in this essay that Conrad presents the England of his time as embodying the institutional and cultural arrangements that make fo

This essay is about the implications of Franz Kafka’s work for those of us interested in classical liberalism in relation to politics, law, and economics; it is not an exercise in literary criticism in any conventional sense. The quest aims to unpick

In his presidential address to the Southern Economics Association in 1963, the future Nobel laureate James Buchanan suggested the economics profession ought to turn its attention away from technical conditions of optimization and toward institutions

Fiction writer Flannery O’Connor would strike economists as someone engaged in a positive, rather than normative, examination of human nature. She observes the conditions arising from systemic racism, xenophobia, and inequality of opportunity in Amer

By John M. Ellis New York: Encounter Books, 2020. Pp. ix, 209. $25.99 paperback. Since by now nearly everyone who cares about American universities knows that leftists have taken over most of them, why do we need another book on the subject? For seve

It is difficult for truth to emerge anywhere. History, politics, science, medicine, crime and punishment, any academic subject, neighborhood gossip—wherever one looks, falsehood abounds. It is no different for supply-side economics. It has been four

By Noah Rothman Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 2019. Pp. xvi, 272. $28.99 hardcover. Social justice is all the rage nowadays. And all the rage is about social justice. Students are taking to university quads to demand action be taken on behalf of