The Liberty Archive

900+ free books and courses on Austrian economics: Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and the rest of the canon.

Every book, journal, and lecture from the Mises.org library, open-sourced starting in 2009: searchable, transcribed, and downloadable as PDF, EPUB, or audio. No signup, no paywall, no dead formats.

Browse the library Download everything

Carl Menger · 1840–1921

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk · 1851–1914

Ludwig von Mises · 1881–1973

Rose Wilder Lane · 1886–1968

Murray N. Rothbard · 1926–1995

Featured this week

Week of August 3, 2026

A rotating pick of gems from the archive, books and courses, refreshed each week.

Books

Bureaucracy

Ludwig von Mises

Mises's case that bureaucratic management can't calculate or improve the way market prices do, aimed at every reform movement that promises efficient government.

Making Economic Sense

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard's running commentary on the economic headlines of his day, collected into one volume. The issues he took on in the 1980s and 90s are the same ones back in the news now.

I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians

Walter Block

Eighty-two libertarian thinkers tell their own life stories in their own words, collected by Walter Block. A rare look at how each of them actually arrived at their ideas.

Human Action

Ludwig von Mises

Mises's treatise on economics as a science of human choice, first published in English in 1949. Still the fullest single case for a free economy in print.

The Great American Land Bubble: The Amazing Story of Land-Grabbing, Speculations, and Booms from Colonial Days to the Present Times

A. M. Sakolski

A. M. Sakolski's 1932 history of American land speculation, from the colonial era through the Depression. Proof that real estate manias are nothing new.

History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard's history of American money and banking, tracing paper money, loose credit and central banking through two centuries of financial crises.

For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard's manifesto for a consistent libertarianism, built from natural-law first principles and applied to war, welfare and the state itself.

The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories

John V. Denson

John Denson's essays on the warfare state, arguing it threatens liberty as much as the welfare state does, and that freedom and empire don't mix.

Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn traces leftist thought as one continuous lineage, from the French Revolution through the twentieth century.

America's Great Depression

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard's Austrian account of what caused the 1929 crash, first published in 1963 and still the main alternative to the mainstream story.

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.

01Books

949 works, from short pamphlets to multi-volume treatises

02Journals

3,374 PDFs across 18 periodicals

03Courses

165 lecture series, 1,520 hours

04By author

320 names, from Bastiat to Rothbard

Why this exists

A century of Austrian economics, kept free and readable

In 2009, as Mises.org webmaster, I open-sourced this library: roughly 140 GB of books, journals, and recorded lectures, released for anyone to copy, host, and rebuild.

What the release could not include was a way to read it. Scanned books were image-only PDFs no search engine could index, lectures were WMV files no browser plays, and almost nothing carried a transcript or usable metadata.

This archive is the rebuild. Nearly every recording is transcribed now, 12 million words of lectures, searchable for the first time. Every book carries its own rights record, read off the work itself rather than inherited from a blanket claim, and the scans that were page images with no text at all were OCR'd until a search engine could read them. Read online or download PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and audio at no cost. The statistics page states every total, and every gap, with its denominator.

Start with the foundational writers: Ludwig von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, Friedrich A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Frédéric Bastiat, Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Or take the short road in: Economics in One Lesson, Anatomy of the State, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, then browse all 949 books, 18 journals, and 165 lecture series.

For the ideas behind the texts, the companion The Austrian Economics Wiki covers the concepts these authors fought over: the business cycle theory, the economic calculation problem, praxeology, the gold standard, and the classical liberalism they wrote out of.

For current work, my economic research and policy comparisons connect these primary texts to modern data, explicit measures, and source-backed comparison methods.

Questions

Frequently asked

Is this the Mises Institute?

No, but it is not a stranger's mirror either. I am the former Mises.org webmaster who open-sourced this library starting in 2009. This archive is independent, rebuilt from those releases, with rights recorded per item.

Are the books really free?

Yes. Every book, journal issue, and lecture is free to read online and to download. Reuse rights vary by item and are shown separately. My own site text, source code, and documentation are CC BY 4.0.

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.