Email: <dmhart@mac.com>
Website: <http://davidmhart.com/liberty>
Blog: <http://davidmhart.com/wordpress/>

David M. Hart is an independent scholar of the history of classical liberal thought and the Great Books program, and a consultant on the design and building of digital libraries.

He was the Director of Liberty Fund’s award winning Online Library of Liberty Project (2001-2019) which was recognised by the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the British Arts & Humanities Research Council for its contributions to the humanities and education.

He recently relocated to the Northern Beaches region of Sydney where he contemplates sailing and surfing, but actually engages in the physical work of trimming hedges and planting Liberty Trees.

Planning and design work for the Onine Library of Liberty began in 2001 and the site went live to the public in March 2004. It has since become an award winning source for resources in teaching, learning, and research in the humnanities and the social science. It has won numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Humanities "Best of the Humanities" Award. It was also selected by the Library of Congress to participate in its Minerva arching project of significant websites. [More].

For the past several years I have been working on a large translation project for Liberty Fund - the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat in 6 volumes, the first volume of which was published in March 2011. The title is "The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics." I have also lectured on the political and economic thought of Bastiat.

I began teaching in the Department of History at the University of Adelaide, South Australia in 1986, received the university teaching prize in 1992, and was tenured in 1994. For several years I coordinated the large first year introductory course modern European history.

Subjects taught and areas of graduate research supervised include modern European history, nineteenth-century classical liberal thought, the Enlightenment, war and culture, film and history, history and the Internet- all of which went online from 1996 onwards. My philosophy of teaching can be summed up in two basic principles - the Maoist principle of "let a thousand flowers bloom" and the idea that teaching is fundamentally an intellectually subversive process.

I am married with 17 year old twins and used to live on the beach in Adelaide (1986-2001). The twins, a boy and a girl, provide me with the scientific data to speak authoritatively on gender differences and the human being's natural proclivity towards liberty (and digging holes).

For many years I have lectured in summer programs run by organizations such as the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, and the Foundation for Economic Education. I have given lectures on economic history, the history of the classical liberal traditon, the state and class theory, war, and film.

I received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge (attending "King's College" - even though I am a Painite republican) for a thesis on Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and early 19th century French liberal thought. My thesis supervisor was Richard Tuck, the noted historian of 17th century political thought. I was able to use the marvellous collection of books in the Lord Action library at Cambridge and the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature at the University of London for my research.

While in Cambridge (1983-1986) we lived on the 4th floor of a narrow flat directly across the street from King's College and the Chapel. While working on my dissertation I could sometimes hear the chapel organist practising.

I earned an M.A. in history from Stanford University (1981-83) studying under Lewis Spitz, Gordon Craig, and others, and wrote papers on Nazi economic history using the resources of the Hoover Institution, and on French economic thought, most notably the Physiocrats. I also worked on student programs for the Institute for Humane Studies when it was located at Menlo Park, California where he was founding editor of Humane Studies Review.

I spent a year at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, in the then Federal Republic of Germany (1980-1981), studying the origins of the First World War and 19th century German liberalism.

I received a B.A. in history from Macquarie University in Sydney (1975-1979) where I wrote an Honours thesis on the radical liberalism of the Belgian political economist Gustave de Molinari). The theme of my studies at Macquarie was to take every course on offer which dealt with "revolution".

I attended a boys only private school in Sydney - Knox Grammar School - located in the leafy suburb of Wahroonga (1966-1974). The school motto is the rather criptic Latin "virile agitur", which can be translalted as "the manly thing is being done."