The Digital Library of Liberty & Power
incorporating the Guillaumin Collection of the Great Books of Liberty
The Cover Art of Boétie’s Discourse I was drawn back to Étienne de la Boétie’s wonderful essay on “Voluntary Servitude” (written c. 1550, published 1576) because of recent events. Boétie asked perhaps the most fundamental question of political theory, namely, why does the majority allow itself, even asks for it , to be ruled by … Read more
Being a mischievous sort of chap, when I first came across the name Hearn gave his book I immediately thought it must have been a scientific study of Walt Disney’s cartoon character “Pluto the Pup”. The connection between Pluto and wealth or money was rather tenuous until I came across this image of Disney play … Read more
I first came across the name William Hearn in Rothbard’s history of economic thought where he discusses some early precursors of Austrian economics. ((Volume II: Classical Economics (2006), “14.8 Plutology: Hearn and Donisthorpe,” pp. 463-65. See Hearn’s bio page for an extract from this here.)) That he lived and worked in Australia at the University … Read more
While I was researching Murray Rothbard’s theory of class for a monograph I am writing on The Libertarian Theory of Class Draft I came across some of his other writings on the strategy/ies needed to bring about a free society, which I thought would be useful to gather together for further analysis and discussion. Some … Read more
The Mises Institute has made available an electronic version of Rothbard’s important “newsletter”, called The Libertarian for the first few issues, and then afterwards The Libertarian Forum, which played an important role in the early years of the modern libertarian movement. It can be found at its website in ePub and facsimile PDF versions here. … Read more