I’ve pointed out Austin Bramwell’s list of books most influential on him before, but I’m doing so again because I found that two of them are available online. John Henry Newman’s “The Grammar of Assent” is at a site dedicated to him, and Chateubriand’s “The Genius of Christianity” is available at archive.org and google books. The latter also has it in the original French, in case you can read that. Joseph de Maistre’s St. Petersburg dialogues on theodicy were only completely translated into English in 1993. You can read it all in French (volume 1, volume 2) or English excerpts online.
I recently finished Joseph Schumpeter’s “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” and just picked up David Gress’ “From Plato to NATO”. Email me if you’d like a pdf copy of the former. Razib has name-checked the latter a number of times. Its author corresponds with Sailer at VDARE on Scandinavia here. His book seems to be arguing against people like Stephen Davies.
Now a rather different angle: a number of people in the Austrian camp look favorably on Axel Leijonhufvud as their kind of Keynesian. I never really ingested Post-Keynesian econ despite resources pointed out by others and myself. But no use in asking if there’s a Leijonhufvud (or Post-Walrasian econ generally) for dummies guide out there.
Entitled to an Opinion 
May 18, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Bill Hutt, whom I knew, admired Leijonhufvud, which seems to me to bear out your remark.
I only heard Leijonhufvud speak once, at the 1986 Nobel Lectures held at Gustavus Adolphus College, a little Swedish Lutheran institution in Minnesota. At one point in his remarks he referred to the economic consequences of decolonization, which, he observed, began “when Sweden laid down the white man’s burden in 1905.” Given the venue, this brought the house down.
He is a member of a distinguished Swedish noble family, the surname (meaning ‘lion’s head’) referring to its armorial bearings – ‘canting arms.’ Margareta Leijohnufvud was the paternal grandmother of Gustavus II Adolphus.
May 18, 2010 at 10:42 pm
Speaking of Hutt, just today I was looking over this in which Leijonhufvud sends a little criticism his way. I found with some googling after Beefcake the Mighty reference Gertchev, but I never did find out what arguments Beefcake was referring to.
May 19, 2010 at 12:26 pm
I think Hutt is right in that what he says about the money wage is a direct response to Keynes. Keynes held that the downward rigidity of the money wage was the cause of disequilibrium and went on to propose a whole set of remedies that did nothing to deal with this cause, but rather attempted to palliate its consequences.
Here is where the discipline of economics really comes to deserve its old-fashioned name, “political economy.” For the causes of the downward rigidity of the money wage are political, and not economic. Keynes’s preference to avoid dealing with those political causes was itself political, as is the whole set of policy initiatives commonly called “Keynesian.” There is no reason – apart from politics – why Keynes’s observation about the consequences of downward rigidity in the money wage should not suggest a completely different set of policies. Hutt’s virtue is that he made this clear.
Keynes’s politics would make an interesting study if only they could be discussed without hagiography and political correctness. Stephen Dorril’s biography of Sir Oswald Mosley contains a few obiter dicta about Keynes’s sympathy for Mosley during the latter’s ILP and NP phases.
May 19, 2010 at 6:24 pm
The Garrison/Meltzer interpretation of Keynes has sticky wages being a recommendation rather than an existing impediment. I recommend checking out that link for a study of Keynes’ politics, even if Meltzer tries to give the impression only his monetary perspective is being discussed.