SHELF LIFE - Hits and Mises.(five books on various subjects)(Review)(Brief Article)

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has added a couple of impressive new volumes to its Library of Modern Thinkers series. Ludwig von Mises: The Man and His Economics (226 pp., $14.95) by Israel M. Kirzner is a lucid exposition of the work of this seminal classical-liberal thinker. "When Mises published his Human Action in 1949," Kirzner writes, "the [economics] profession considered it as perhaps the last gasp of a moribund tradition"; but the succeeding half-century saw the global triumph of Mises's principles. Notable among his ideas was the insight that the market is not a state of equilibrium, but a dynamic process of continual correction. This explains why freedom of entrepreneurship is so important to the success of a society: An entrepreneur is someone with the economic incentive to diagnose what a society is lacking, at least with regard to its material needs, and find a way to fill that need.

Kirzner's presentation is accessible to the lay reader; John Zmirak's Wilhelm Ropke: Swiss Localist, Global Economist (240 pp., $14.95) actually goes further in this direction, rising toward literature. This work offers a sensitive and nuanced account of another free-market hero, one who stressed the importance of the social and moral principles that provide the underpinning without which economic freedom and long-term prosperity cannot survive. Zmirak is at pains, however, to point out that while Ropke recognized the importance of traditional values, he had no illusions about the old order in Europe: "He dispensed with the paternalist nostalgia that such reactionaries [as Charles Maurras] . . . purveyed as an alternative to the utopias of the Left. Ropke pointed to infamous examples of aristocratic cruelty that were perpetrated and tolerated under the old, pre-revolutionary European system. These abuses were the inevitable effects, he argued, of feudalism-a system which he refused to romanticize, but instead saw as the calcified remnants of coercion and confiscation, hallowed only by the passage of time and the mystifications of ideology."

It's easy enough for conservatives to condemn the excesses of the French Revolution, but it's equally important to realize that it had deeper causes than the momentary thirst for blood of a Paris mob. To preserve the virtues of the old order, while giving no quarter to its excesses, was the life work of Ropke.

-- If you want to start a fight with music people, or anybody else for that matter, just bring up Wagner. British philosopher-and former member of Parliament-Bryan Magee has just weighed in with a full- throated-and utterly engaging-defense of this most reviled of 19th- century composers. In The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (Henry Holt, 398 pp., $35), Magee doesn't soft-pedal Wagner's virulent anti- Semitism, but does an excellent job of disentangling the greatness of his artistic achievement from his obvious failings as a human being.

A key to understanding Wagner's music, Magee contends persuasively, is that Wagner was not just influenced by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer but indeed saw himself as an evangelist ...