Concepts Index
Curated concepts articles.
Last updated: 2026-05-18
Contents
| File | Summary | Tags | Updated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Power Hierarchies | Lowery’s term for belief-based, rule-based, or software-defined control systems that allocate authority through abstract power rather than directly through physical-cost competition, now compared with Arendt’s account of total domination. | abstract-power, state, hierarchy, bitcoin, software, power-projection, national-security, political-means, totalitarianism | 2026-05-12 |
| Austrian Business Cycle Theory | The Austrian theory that booms and busts are caused by credit expansion lowering interest rates below their natural level, distorting the structure of production, and forcing an inevitable corrective downturn. | business-cycle, austrian-economics, monetary-theory, capital-theory, great-depression | 2026-05-09 |
| Banality of Evil | Arendt’s thesis from Eichmann in Jerusalem: Eichmann’s evil was not demonic depth but a terrifying normality rooted in bureaucratic compliance, cliche, law-abiding self-presentation, and an inability to think morally from another standpoint. | banality-of-evil, hannah-arendt, eichmann, bureaucracy, thoughtlessness, moral-judgment, totalitarianism, state | 2026-05-12 |
| Biopower | Foucault’s concept of modern power addressed to life and population: health, birth, death, risk, security, and the power to make live and let die. | michel-foucault, biopower, population, sovereignty, state-racism, public-health, non-libertarian | 2026-05-12 |
| Citizenship and State Bargaining | Tilly’s account of citizenship as a byproduct of rulers’ bargaining with subjects for taxes, manpower, credit, and compliance in the course of war-making and direct rule. | charles-tilly, citizenship, state-formation, bargaining, taxation, rights, war-and-state-formation | 2026-05-12 |
| Council System | Arendt’s account of the recurring revolutionary council tradition as a lost form of local, federated public participation. | hannah-arendt, council-system, revolution, public-freedom, self-government, republicanism | 2026-05-12 |
| Credit and Deferred Payment | The Austrian definition of credit as the exchange of a present good for a claim on a future good — distinguishing cash from credit by whether the transaction is finished, and treating book/trade/commercial credit, monthly billing, and consumer loans as instances of the same underlying structure. Mises states the definition canonically in The Theory of Money and Credit (1912, p. 268), and Rothbard restates it in catallactic terms in Man, Economy, and State. Mises (Human Action), Rothbard (The Ethics of Liberty), and Hoppe (EEPP) apply or re-use the framework rather than re-stating it as a definition. Hayek (Prices and Production) presupposes it while contributing the book-credit / commercial-credit category. | credit, time-preference, debtor-creditor, book-credit, austrian-economics, money-and-banking | 2026-05-09 |
| Disciplinary Power | Foucault’s concept of power that trains bodies through surveillance, partitioning, examination, normalization, schedules, institutions, and possible visibility. | michel-foucault, disciplinary-power, panopticism, surveillance, normalization, prison, non-libertarian | 2026-05-12 |
| Economic Calculation Problem | The Misesian argument that a socialist commonwealth without private ownership of capital goods cannot perform the economic calculations needed to allocate resources rationally. | calculation-problem, socialism, austrian-economics, central-planning | 2026-05-05 |
| Evolution of the State | Historical-evolution layer for the libertarian state critique: Oppenheimer’s conquest-origin thesis, Nock’s American application, Hoppe’s monarchy-to-democracy regime comparison, Tilly’s war-and-state-formation sociology, Arendt’s totalitarianism preconditions, and adjacent consent, abstraction, and private-security counterfactuals. | state, evolution-of-the-state, conquest-theory, political-means, regime-theory, consent, legitimacy, war-and-state-formation, totalitarianism, mass-society | 2026-05-12 |
| Enemy Distinction | Schmitt’s criterion of the political: the public distinction between friend and enemy as the highest-intensity form of association and dissociation. | carl-schmitt, friend-enemy-distinction, political-theory, sovereignty, war, non-libertarian | 2026-05-12 |
| Hayek on the Rule of Law | Hayek’s Road to Serfdom claim that the rule of law means government action is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand, and that substantive economic planning necessarily replaces that constraint with administrative discretion. | hayek, rule-of-law, central-planning, classical-liberalism, arbitrary-government, discretion | 2026-05-17 |
| Hillebrand on Central Bank Digital Currencies | Hillebrand’s Ch. 10 §10.5 claim that CBDCs are not digital cash but programmable money that combines Rothbard’s autistic, binary, and triangular intervention types into a single architecture for observation and control. | cbdc, central-bank-digital-currency, hillebrand, programmable-money, financial-surveillance, total-intervention | 2026-05-18 |
| Knowledge Problem | Hayek’s argument that economic knowledge exists only as dispersed, tacit, time-and-place-specific knowledge, now cross-linked to Arendt’s separate critique of total ideology and reality-denying political deduction. | hayek, knowledge-problem, central-planning, spontaneous-order, austrian-economics | 2026-05-10 |
| Late-Twentieth-Century State Forms | Tilly’s Chapter 7 extension from European state formation to late-twentieth-century military rule, postcolonial states, soldiers in power, and the limits of exporting Europe’s path. | charles-tilly, state-formation, military-rule, postcolonial-states, national-state, late-twentieth-century | 2026-05-12 |
| Market Anarchism and Private Law | Concept article on non-state courts, protection, insurance, and title systems in the current libertarian book set. | market-anarchism, private-law, arbitration, defense-agencies, classical-liberalism | 2026-05-10 |
| Mass Society and Atomization | Arendt’s account of the social preconditions of totalitarianism: class and community breakdown produce isolated, interchangeable masses available for total mobilization. Eichmann adds the thoughtlessness layer; Solzhenitsyn documents the Gulag as both product and enforcer of atomization. | mass-society, atomization, hannah-arendt, totalitarianism, loneliness, thoughtlessness, gulag, social-power, state, civic-association | 2026-05-10 |
| Mises on Capital Consumption | Mises’s claim in Liberalism that antiliberal policy — redistribution, confiscatory taxation, suppression of capital accumulation — is technically a policy of capital consumption: present abundance bought at the expense of future productive capacity. | mises, capital-consumption, antiliberalism, redistribution, austrian-economics, liberalism | 2026-05-17 |
| Mises on Credit Expansion | Mises’s claim in Human Action that monetary credit expansion lowers the gross market rate of interest below the rate originary time preference would set, induces a boom in projects the underlying savings cannot sustain, and forces a corrective crisis whose only choice is sooner-and-smaller versus later-and-larger. | mises, credit-expansion, business-cycle, interest-rate, austrian-economics, central-bank | 2026-05-16 |
| Mises on Rent Ceilings | Mises’s claim in Liberalism that a residential-rent ceiling produces an immediate housing shortage, with Vienna under Social Democratic rent abolition as the worked example. | mises, rent-control, price-control, housing, vienna, austrian-economics | 2026-05-18 |
| Nationalism and State Formation | Tilly’s treatment of nationalism as both ruler-driven identification with state ends and minority claims to separate statehood, intertwined with direct rule and national-state formation. | charles-tilly, nationalism, state-formation, citizenship, national-state, war-and-state-formation | 2026-05-12 |
| Nonaggression and Property Rights | Normative core of the current corpus: self-ownership, property, contract, and the rule against initiated force — defended on natural-rights grounds by Rothbard and Hoppe and on consequentialist grounds by Mises. | nonaggression, property-rights, ethics, liberty, classical-liberalism, political-means | 2026-05-10 |
| Political Means and Economic Means | Oppenheimer’s distinction between the economic means of production-and-voluntary-exchange and the political means of coercive appropriation, later adopted by Nock, Rothbard, and Hoppe and empirically illuminated by Tilly’s capital/coercion account of European state formation. | political-means, economic-means, state, exploitation, production, exchange, nonaggression, war-and-state-formation | 2026-05-12 |
| Power Projection | Lowery’s analytic frame for comparing physical-cost power projection with abstract, rule-based power projection, then applying that distinction to proof-of-work and Bitcoin in cyberspace. | power-projection, bitcoin, proof-of-work, physical-cost, national-security, cyberspace | 2026-05-10 |
| Praxeology | The Misesian general theory of human action: a deductive science whose first principle is that humans act purposefully, from which the laws of economics are derived without empirical assumption. | praxeology, methodology, austrian-economics, action-axiom, mises | 2026-05-10 |
| Praxeology of Privacy | Hillebrand’s theoretical claim that privacy is a structural feature of human action: deliberation, subjective valuation, and controlled disclosure are built into action, and surveillance attacks the conditions under which rational exchange and coordination occur. | privacy, praxeology, action-axiom, austrian-economics, property-rights, surveillance, bitcoin, power-projection | 2026-05-10 |
| Private Security and Insurance | Concept article on how the current libertarian corpus imagines private security: defense agencies, insurance, arbitration, and competitive checks on abuse. | private-security, insurance, defense-agencies, protection, classical-liberalism | 2026-05-06 |
| Public Happiness | Arendt’s term for the joy and dignity of participating in public freedom, especially in her account of the American revolutionary experience. | hannah-arendt, public-happiness, revolution, public-freedom, american-revolution, action | 2026-05-12 |
| Resistance Axiom | Voskuil’s axiom, as used by Hillebrand, that systems can be designed to resist external control; unlike the action axiom, it is a methodological assumption about resistant systems, not a self-evident truth. | resistance, privacy, cryptography, bitcoin, cypherpunk, praxeology | 2026-05-10 |
| Rothbard on Fed-Induced Booms | Rothbard’s claim in America’s Great Depression that the ‘boom-bust’ cycle is generated by monetary intervention — bank credit expansion engineered by the Federal Reserve — and that interest-rate-sensitive durable sectors are where the resulting capital-structure distortion shows up first. | rothbard, federal-reserve, business-cycle, malinvestment, housing, austrian-economics, monetary-policy | 2026-05-16 |
| Rothbard on Price Controls | Rothbard’s Power and Market claim that an effective maximum price creates a shortage that worsens as supply has time to shift, and that elastic supply aggravates the shortage. | rothbard, price-control, intervention, shortage, austrian-economics, power-and-market | 2026-05-18 |
| Rothbard on War and the State | Rothbard’s claim in Anatomy of the State that war pushes state power to its ultimate, and that every modern war leaves a permanent legacy of increased state burdens on society. | rothbard, war, state, defense, conscription, militarism, anatomy-of-the-state | 2026-05-18 |
| Rothbard on the Wealth Tax | Rothbard’s claim in Power and Market’s “A Tax on Individual Wealth” section that a wealth tax cannot be capitalized or shifted, falls directly on accumulated capital, and therefore promotes capital consumption and general impoverishment. | rothbard, wealth-tax, taxation, capital-consumption, accumulated-capital, power-and-market, austrian-economics | 2026-05-17 |
| Sales Tax Incidence | Rothbardian account of who ultimately bears a general sales tax: not consumers via higher prices, but original-factor incomes through backward shifting. | sales-tax, taxation, incidence, rothbard | 2026-04-25 |
| State of Exception | Schmitt’s concept that sovereignty is revealed in the decision on the exception: the authority to determine when normal legal rules are suspended and what must be done. | carl-schmitt, state-of-exception, sovereignty, emergency-power, decisionism, non-libertarian | 2026-05-12 |
| State Power and Intervention | Libertarian account of the state as legalized privilege: conquest origin, political means, taxation, monopoly law, intervention, war-making, organized-crime/protection-racket sociology, abstract authority, regime incentives, bureaucracy, Gulag testimony, totalitarian pathology, and dependence on habit or consent. | state, intervention, anti-statism, taxation, central-planning, abstract-power, evolution-of-the-state, political-means, war-and-state-formation, protection-racket, banality-of-evil, gulag, totalitarianism | 2026-05-12 |
| The Rise of the Social | Arendt’s diagnosis that the modern social realm blurs public and private by treating shared life as collective household administration, often displacing public action. | hannah-arendt, social-question, public-private, administration, modernity, political-philosophy | 2026-05-12 |
| Total Domination | Arendt’s term for the totalitarian aim beyond ordinary tyranny or extraction: domination of human beings as such, attacking spontaneity, plurality, reality, and moral agency. Solzhenitsyn’s abridged Gulag Archipelago supplies concrete Soviet documentation. | total-domination, hannah-arendt, totalitarianism, gulag, concentration-camps, ideology, terror, mass-society | 2026-05-12 |
| Tilly on Protection Rackets | Tilly’s 1985 claim that war making and state making are quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy, and that governments that produce both the danger and the shield against it qualify as racketeers. | charles-tilly, protection-racket, war-and-state-formation, organized-crime, extraction, historical-sociology | 2026-05-18 |
| Totalitarianism | Arendt’s account of totalitarianism as a novel form of government distinct from tyranny, despotism, dictatorship, and authoritarianism: rule through ideology and terror, pursuit of total domination, ordinary bureaucratic participation, and the camp system documented by Solzhenitsyn. | totalitarianism, hannah-arendt, ideology, terror, mass-society, nazism, stalinism, gulag, total-domination, banality-of-evil, state, central-planning, evolution-of-the-state | 2026-05-12 |
| Violence vs Power | Arendt’s distinction between power as action-in-concert and violence as instrumental means; violence can destroy power but cannot create the consent-grounded power it replaces. | hannah-arendt, violence, power, authority, force, action, totalitarianism | 2026-05-12 |
| Vita Activa | Arendt’s framework for active life: labor sustains biological life, work fabricates a durable world, and action appears among plural persons through speech and deed. | hannah-arendt, vita-activa, labor, work, action, public-realm, political-philosophy | 2026-05-12 |
| War and State Formation | Tilly’s historical-sociological thesis that European war-making, extraction, coercive consolidation, capital, and interstate competition jointly produced the national state. The article now rests on the expanded 1990/1992 book ingest plus Tilly’s 1985 organized-crime essay for the protection-racket formulation. | war-and-state-formation, charles-tilly, state, coercion, capital, taxation, protection-racket, organized-crime, evolution-of-the-state, political-means, historical-sociology, totalitarianism | 2026-05-12 |
Categories
- concept: abstract-power-hierarchies.md, austrian-business-cycle-theory.md, banality-of-evil.md, biopower.md, citizenship-and-state-bargaining.md, council-system.md, credit-and-deferred-payment.md, disciplinary-power.md, economic-calculation-problem.md, evolution-of-the-state.md, friend-enemy-distinction.md, hayek-on-rule-of-law.md, hillebrand-on-cbdcs.md, knowledge-problem.md, late-twentieth-century-state-forms.md, market-anarchism-and-private-law.md, mass-society-and-atomization.md, mises-on-capital-consumption.md, mises-on-credit-expansion.md, mises-on-rent-ceilings.md, nationalism-and-state-formation.md, nonaggression-and-property-rights.md, political-means-and-economic-means.md, power-projection.md, praxeology.md, praxeology-of-privacy.md, private-security-and-insurance.md, public-happiness.md, resistance-axiom.md, rothbard-on-fed-induced-boom.md, rothbard-on-price-controls.md, rothbard-on-war-and-the-state.md, rothbard-on-wealth-tax.md, sales-tax-incidence.md, state-of-exception.md, state-power-and-intervention.md, the-rise-of-the-social.md, tilly-on-protection-rackets.md, total-domination.md, totalitarianism.md, violence-vs-power.md, vita-activa.md, war-and-state-formation.md
Recent Changes
- 2026-05-18: Rewrote
mises-on-rent-ceilingsandrothbard-on-price-controlsfocused author-on-topic articles as X-thread citation targets for the news-lens fourth-instance Argentina rent-decontrol post; trial directory had stale index entries but no on-disk files. - 2026-05-17: Added
hayek-on-rule-of-lawas focused author-on-topic citation target for the news-lens X thread on the ECB digital-euro launch (paired with the existinghillebrand-on-cbdcsfocused article). - 2026-05-17: Added
rothbard-on-wealth-taxandmises-on-capital-consumptionas focused author-on-topic citation targets for the news-lens X thread on the May 2026 EU wealth-tax directive. - 2026-05-18: Rewrote
tilly-on-protection-racketsandrothbard-on-war-and-the-statefocused author-on-topic articles as X-thread citation targets for the news-lens second-instance NATO 2026 defense-spending-floor post; trial directory had stale index entries but no on-disk files. - 2026-05-16: Added
tilly-on-protection-racketsandrothbard-on-war-and-the-stateas focused author-on-topic citation targets for the news-lens X thread on the NATO 2026 defense-spending floor. - 2026-05-16: Added
hillebrand-on-cbdcsas focused author-on-topic citation target for the news-lens X thread on the ECB digital-euro launch. - 2026-05-16: Added
mises-on-credit-expansionandrothbard-on-fed-induced-boomas focused author-on-topic citation targets for the news-lens X thread on the May 2026 Fed rate cut. - 2026-05-16: Added
mises-on-rent-ceilingsandrothbard-on-price-controlsas focused author-on-topic citation targets for the news-lens X thread on the Argentina rent-decontrol post. - 2026-05-12: Added Arendt power/action/public-freedom concepts, Schmitt exception/friend-enemy concepts, Foucault discipline/biopower concepts, and Tilly citizenship/nationalism/state-form concepts.
- 2026-05-10: Added
banality-of-evilandtotal-domination; updated totalitarianism, mass society, state power, war formation, political means, road-to-serfdom, and libertarianism links for Eichmann, Gulag, and Tilly 1985 - 2026-05-10: Added
totalitarianismandmass-society-and-atomization; updated state-evolution, state-power, abstract-power, war-formation, and Hayek links for Arendt - 2026-05-10: Added
war-and-state-formation; updated state-evolution, state-power, political/economic means, and libertarianism pages for Tilly links - 2026-05-10: Refreshed
political-means-and-economic-means,praxeology,evolution-of-the-state, andstate-power-and-interventionafter Hoppe full-text OCR upgrade - 2026-05-10: Added
evolution-of-the-stateandpolitical-means-and-economic-means; updated state, property, and abstract-power concepts for the historical state-evolution thread - 2026-05-10: Added
power-projectionandabstract-power-hierarchies; updated privacy/state/private-law/resistance articles for Lowery/Softwar cross-references - 2026-05-10: Added
praxeology-of-privacyandresistance-axiom; updatedpraxeology,nonaggression-and-property-rights, andstate-power-and-interventionfor privacy and Nietzsche state-critique sources - 2026-05-09: Added
credit-and-deferred-paymentconcept article drawing the present-for-future-good definition from MES, Human Action, and Prices and Production - 2026-05-05: Compile pass added new concepts articles from the Mises and Hayek ingest