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• May 7: Molinari's Soirees Chaps. 3 & 4
• May 4: Draft Preface, Chapter 1 & 2 of Molinari's Soirées (1849)
• April 28: ANZAC Day address to the Indy Aussies.
• April 22: A paper and video of my remarks about the history of the Workers Party in Australia circa 1975
• April 22: some videos of my talks on Bastiat at FEE (February 2011); San Jose State (April 2011); Cato Book Forum (October 2011); the Mises Seminari in Sydney (December 2011) (and now with an HTML version of the lecture)
• April 10: A French language anthology of 19thC Fr. Classical Liberal Thought
• April 3: A paper on Bastiat's Theory of Legal Plunder
• March 27: an Anthology of 19thC French Liberalism
• March 25: a translation of Molinari on"Ulcerous Government"
• March 23: a new French edition of Les Soirées.
• March 23: an extract from the 12th concluding chapter of Molinari's Soirées in which Molinari waxes lyrical about liberty
• March 3: My favourite war films
• March 3: For Molinari's birthday we have a draft chapter of our translation of Les Soirées
• [archive]

Upcoming & Recent Lectures & Talks

I regularly lecture about the 19th century French political economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850).

Upcoming:

• [tba]

Recent:

• April 28: ANZAC Day address to the Indy Aussies [to come soon]
• April 7: "Frédéric Bastiat’s Distinction between Legal and Illegal Plunder" - A Paper given at the Molinari Society Session “Explorations in Philosophical Anarchy” at the Pacific Meeting of the American Philosophical Society, Seattle WA, 7 April, 2012.
• December 2-4: Centre for Independent Studies Liberty & Society Seminar - Study Guide [HTML] A History of the Classical Liberal Tradition - Lecture Overhead [PDF 18.8 MB]
• December 1: Bastiat Forum, Sydney - Why Broken Windows and Candles Matter: The Continuing Importance of Frédéric Bastiat - Lecture Overhead [PDF 4.1 MB]
• November 29: Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney - public lecture on Images of Liberty & Power [PDF 41.2 MB]
• November 26: Mises Seminar, Sydney - the Wokers Party Platform [PDF 3.1 MB] and now in HTML at economics.org.au - Lecture Overhead "How Austrian were the French?" [PDF 6.7 MB]

[Lectures & Talks given in 2010-2011] [Archive]

Institute for Humane Studies Summer Seminar on Liberty and Society: Wake Forest University (May 28 - June 3, 2011) and Bryn Mawr Uinversity, Philadelphia (July 16-22, 2011).

[A Schematic Diagram showing the Institutions and Class Structure of the State - see a larger version in JPG or PDF]

Lecture topics:

• The State and the Ruling Class
• A Brief History of Bills of Rights
• The State and Modern War
• The Culture of Liberty vs. the Culture of Authority

This is a "concept map" I developed for a series of lectures on the history of the classical liberal tradition. [See a larger version in PDF]. There are 2 parts: the "Foundations" and "Liberties". The Foundations concern the basic principles, the grounds for believing in liberty, and the processes which make living freely possible. The section on Liberties deals with political, economic, and social liberty and their inter-relationship.

I have created a number of other schematics which you might find interesting:

• the spectrum of state power from communism to a fully free society
• the spectrum of state power advocated by a variety of classical liberal theorists
• the institutions and class structure of the state [and key]

[See my Study Guide on the State and the Ruling Class for more details]

[Image Archive I and Archive II]

GUSTAVE DE MOLINARI (1819-1912) Commemorating the Centennial of his death at 92 years of age on 28 January, 1912 in Adinkerke, Belgium. [Obit]
Richard Cobden & Frédéric Bastiat urged us to demand "free trade in everything" Gustave de Molinari dared to think about "free trade" in just one more thing... free trade in government services. John Locke's motto was "Pax ac Libertas". Molinari's was "La Liberté et la Paix". Mine is "In vino libertas".
	"(A)u risque d'être qualifiés d'utopistes, nous dirons que cela n'est pas contestable, et qu'un attentif examen des faits résoudra de plus en plus, en faveur de la liberté, le problème du gouvernement, de même que tous les autres problèmes économiques. Nous sommes bien convaincus, en ce qui nous concerne, que des associations s'établiront un jour pour réclamer la liberté de gouvernement, comme il s'en est établi pour réclamer la liberté du commerce." [Molinari, "The Production of Security" (1849)]. [See our Molinari page for more].
	[(A)t the risk of being considered utopian, we affirm that this is not disputable, that a careful examination of the facts will decide the problem of government more and more in favor of liberty, just as it does all other economic problems. We are convinced, so far as we are concerned, that one day groups will be established to agitate for free government, as they have already been established on behalf of free trade.] [Molinari, "The Production of Security" (1849)]. [See his seminal papers from which anarcho-capitalism sprang, which are part of an anthology I have edited of his writings on the State (1846-1912) (en français)].

Stendhal on power & "the empire of ridicule": "Voilà le sens dans lequel moi, poète comique, je dois travailler pour être utile à la nation, en détruisant la prise des tyrans sur elle, et la rapprochant par-delà de la divina libertà. [This is the direction in which I, as a comic poet, must work in order to be useful to the nation, by annihiliating the power of the tyrants over her, and hence bringing her to the divina libertà.] (Stendhal, Pensées, 12 August 1804).

Béranger on ringing the bell of power: "Dans mes petites guerres avec le pouvoir... (j'ai conclu) que le pouvoir est une cloche qui empêche ceux qui la mettent en branle d'entendre aucun autre son." [In my small warfare with Power... (I have come to the realisation) that power is a bell, that hinders those who ring a peal on it, from hearing any other sound.] (Béranger, Preface to his edition of 1833).

Bastiat on the State as a great fiction: "L'État, c'est la grande fiction à travers laquelle Tout Le Monde s'efforce de vivre aux dépens de Tout Le Monde." [The state is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.] (Bastiat, L'État [The State] (1848)).

One purpose of this website is to gather important but not well known works of the classical liberal and radical individualist traditions which are scattered across the web into a single location so that scholars and students can make better use of them. It is named after the 19th century bookseller and publisher Gilbert-Urbain Guillaumin (1801-64) whose bookshop and publishing firm was the focal point for the liberal movement for nearly three quarters of a century in France. As an "intellectual entrepreneur" he facilitated the development of the movement through the publication of journals (such as the Journal des Economistes), encyclopedias (such as the Dictionnaire de l'Économie Politique), and scores upon scores of books. The building which housed his publishing firm was also the meeting place for the Society of Political Economy which welcomed academic economists, people in law, politics and business, and the steady stream of visitors who came to one of the most important European capitals in the 19th century. The books which Guillaumin published were in many cases original pieces of research on all aspects of theroretical, historical, and contemporary political economy. He also fostered the republication or translation of classic works from the 17th and 18th centuries, especially the works of the Physiocrats. It is thus in the spirit of Guillaumin that we offer this collection of classics from a previous age.

The picture above shows some of the difficulties we face in putting a collection like this together. Most of the texts were found at the Bibliothèque nationale de France Gallica digitization project and Google Books. The latter has very poor bibiographical records for the titles and the quality control is also lacking as the above picture indicates. Many titles have missing pages (usually two pageshave been turned over together), fingers of the operators cover some pages, and other pages are blurred or otherwise unreadable. We have checked every page of every title in our collection and indicate where pages are missng. We have also compiled tables of contents of some journals into single PDF files to aid researchers in finding material.