[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

Two nifty recent releases from the Mises Institute:

First there’s Guido Hülsmann’s massive 1143-page Ludwig von Mises biography Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism. (Or the first of their return, as Francisco said of Hugh Akston.) It looks fascinating!

For a very funny video clip of Guido discussing the book and reading some passages from it, click here. And you can read the preface here.

Then there’s the new two-volume Bastiat Collection.

For a video clip of Mark Thornton being interviewed by Jeff Tucker on the Bastiat book, click here.

Unfortunately, this new collection does not completely supersede the older three-volume FEE collection; each has some material the other lacks. The FEE trilogy has “Property and Law,” “Justice and Fraternity,” “Property and Plunder,” “Protectionism and Communism,” “Plunder and Law,” “Academic Degrees and Socialism,” “Declaration of War Against the Professors of Political Economy,” “On the Suppression of Industrial Combinations,” “To the Democrats,” “Balance of Trade,” “The Utopian,” “Salt, the Postal Service, and the Tariff,” and the originally unpublished preface of Economic Harmonies, all of which are lacking from the Mises edition. The Mises edition has Capital and Interest and “What Is Money?,” both of which are lacking from the FEE edition; plus the Mises edition is prettier. (And of course there are many Bastiat works absent from both.) Hence the definitive Bastiat collection still lies in our future; but in the meantime both the FEE and the Mises editions are must-haves.

Roderick T. Long - 9/4/2007

Mark Thornton’s introduction to The Bastiat Collection is also online.