Anatomy of the State
Murray N. Rothbard
Rothbard's short, sharp account of what the state actually is and how it keeps itself alive. The best hour you can spend on political theory.
The open library
990 free books and lectures on Austrian economics: Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and more.
Foundational texts on free markets, sound money, and individual liberty, from Bastiat to Rothbard. Read online or download PDFs, EPUBs, and audiobooks free, no signup, no paywall.
990Books
2,461Journal issues
1,518Course hours
324Authors
Featured this week
Week of July 21, 2026
A rotating pick of gems from the archive, books and courses, refreshed each week.
Books
Economics in One Lesson
Henry Hazlitt
Hazlitt reduces sound economics to a single lesson, then turns it loose on a dozen popular fallacies. Still the fastest way in.
The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
Etienne de la Boetie
A sixteenth-century essay on a dangerous question: why do people obey rulers at all? Withdraw consent and the state has nothing left to stand on.
Theory of Money and Fiduciary Media
Jörg Guido Hülsmann
Essays revisiting Mises's monetary theory a century on, written for an age of central banks running the printing press hot.
Courses
Economy, Society, and History
10 lectures · Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Hoppe's ten lectures run from language, property and production through the division of labor, the parasitic origin of the state, monarchy and democracy, and the case for secession.
Introduction to Austrian Economic Analysis
15 lectures · Joseph T. Salerno
Salerno builds Austrian price theory in order: scarcity and choice, exchange and demand, the pricing of factors, capital and interest, monopoly, and the business cycle. Several lectures are on video.
History The Struggle for Liberty
10 lectures · Ralph Raico
Raico on the European miracle and the rise of classical liberalism, its anti-capitalist critics, and the wars and planned societies that displaced it.
The History of Political Philosophy From Plato to Rothbard
10 lectures · David Gordon
David Gordon takes the tradition one thinker at a time, from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau to Mill, Spooner, Rawls, Nozick and Rothbard.
Browse the stacks
Four ways into the collection
Three document types, plus every author in one index.
About the archive
A century of Austrian economics, kept free
This is the complete library of Austrian economics and classical liberalism, open-sourced from Mises.org between 2009 and 2014. Every title is free: read it online or download the PDF, EPUB, or MOBI at no cost.
Start with the foundational writers and read their collected works: Ludwig von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, Friedrich A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Frederic Bastiat, Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. The shelf above gathers short classics like Economics in One Lesson, Anatomy of the State, and The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, or you can browse all 990 books, 17 journals, and 161 lecture series.
For the ideas behind the texts, the companion The Austrian Economics Wiki explains the concepts these authors argued over: the Austrian business cycle theory, the economic calculation problem, praxeology, and the gold standard.
Questions
Frequently asked
Is this the Mises Institute?
No. This is an independent archive of the Creative Commons library that was published on Mises.org and open-sourced between 2009 and 2014. The works are redistributed under their original Creative Commons licenses.
Are the books really free?
Yes. Every book, journal issue, and lecture is free to read online and to download. The collection is Creative Commons, so you may copy, share, and re-host the works with attribution.
What formats can I download?
Books come as PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and HTML where those editions exist. Journals are PDF. Courses include MP3 audio and MP4 video that you can stream in the browser or download.
What is Austrian economics?
Austrian economics is a school of economic thought founded by Carl Menger and developed by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard. It stresses human action, subjective value, and the role of prices in coordinating an economy. This archive collects its primary texts.
Prefer bulk? The whole library is a torrent.
View torrentsWant the ideas explained? 1,415 encyclopedia articles on Austrian economics.
The Austrian Economics WikiLooking for discussion? The legacy Mises community forums are archived.
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