I, Pencil
Leonard E. Read
Leonard E. Read's essay from the December 1958 Freeman, told in the first person by a pencil. It lists what goes into making one, from cedar and graphite to the many people involved, down to the sweeper in the factory.
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.
New to Austrian economics?
Start here: four short books, in order
Leave the thousand-page treatises for later. These four take a weekend between them and set up everything else on the site.
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1. The 10-minute hook I, Pencil 10 minutes
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2. The core mindset Economics in One Lesson About 5 hours
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3. The money problem What Has Government Done to Our Money? About 3 hours
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4. The philosophy The Law About 90 minutes
Ready for the treatises? Human Action and Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market. Prefer to listen? 165 lecture series, nearly all transcribed.
Featured this week
Week of October 5, 2026
A rotating pick of gems from the archive, books and courses, refreshed each week.
Books
The Socialist Tradition: Moses to Lenin
Alexander Gray
Alexander Gray's history of socialist ideas, written by a British economist who appreciated the Austrian contribution. Rothbard named it his favorite book on socialism after Mises's own.
The Ethics of Liberty
Murray N. Rothbard
Murray Rothbard's 1982 argument that every interference with property is an invasion that diminishes liberty and prosperity. It follows Mises's case that a society without private property decays into economic chaos.
The Merchants of Death
H.C. Engelbrecht
H.C. Engelbrecht's study of who profited from the killing machine, a founding text of post-World War I revisionism. It was coauthored by the founder of Human Events, so it is not a left-wing attack on profiteering.
Exchange, Prices, and Production in Hyper-Inflation: Germany 1920-1923
Frank D. Graham
Frank D. Graham's 1930 study of the German hyperinflation, which Mises recommended time and again. It explains what the inflation did to business.
My Years with Ludwig von Mises
Margit von Mises
Margit von Mises on her life with Mises, from their first days in Vienna to his death in New York in 1973. She includes anecdotes about encounters with famous economists and philosophers in Europe and the U.S.
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays
Murray N. Rothbard
Murray Rothbard's essays exposing and refuting wrong-headed ideology, arguing that the libertarian ideal of private property, capitalism and free trade is held back by philosophical error.
Introduction to Economics
John V. Van Sickle
An introductory economics text by John V. Van Sickle.
A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru
Louis Baudin
Louis Baudin's study of the Incas of Peru as a socialist empire.
Essays on Freedom and Power
Lord Acton
Lord Acton's most important writings on the corruptions of power and on liberty as a creative force in culture and society. First published in 1948.
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.
Books in paintings
Great books, in paintings
Original paintings of scenes from the text, each one linked back to the page it came from.
Companion in paintings
Conceived in Liberty
Murray N. Rothbard
Explore authority, belief, and resistance through selected scenes inspired by Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty. Begin a short exploration with paintings, historical context, and discussion questions.
140 paintings · 1619 to 1788
Browse the stacks
Four ways into the collection
Three document types, plus every author in one index. Every count is taken from the catalog when the site is built.
1,215
Books
From short pamphlets to multi-volume treatises, as PDF, EPUB, and MOBI
Browse books 3,374 Journal PDFsIssues and articles across 18 periodicals, each one downloadable
Browse journals 165 Lecture series1,520 hours of audio and video, streamed in the browser or downloaded
Browse courses 375 AuthorsOne page per writer, books and lectures together, from Bastiat to Rothbard
Browse authorsBooks by subject
Where to begin
Start with the foundational writers
Seven names carry most of the canon. Each page lists everything by that author held here, books and lectures together.
Why this exists
A century of Austrian economics, kept free and readable
In 2009 Jeffrey Tucker led the Mises Institute in open-sourcing this library and putting its books under Creative Commons. As Mises.org webmaster, I was the technical side of that release: roughly 140 GB of books, journals, and recorded lectures, published 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.
For current work, my economic research and policy comparisons connect these primary texts to modern data, explicit measures, and source-backed comparison methods.
From the community
Live from the forum
Recent threads on Mises Community, fetched live from the forum.
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 handled the technical side when Jeffrey Tucker led the Institute in open-sourcing 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.
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