The Digital Library of Liberty & Power
incorporating the Guillaumin Collection of the Great Books of Liberty
See my longer “illustrated essay” on this topic. In a recent post on the cover art of the French thinker Étienne de la Boétie I remarked about one cover that: This edition by Payot (2016) shows the classic illustration from Thomas Hobbes’ book *Leviathan* (1652). The “leviathan” monarch’s body is composed of thousands of small … Read more
Institut Coppet, Oeuvres complètes The Institut Coppet is a fabulous resource for material on the very rich and fascinating French classical liberal tradition. It was founded in 2010 by Damien Theillier, a philosophy teacher in Paris, its current president is Mathieu Laine, and its very active publishing program is headed by the indefatigable Benoît Malbranque. … Read more
An outstanding resource for students and teachers of the classical liberal / libertarian tradition is the Cato Institute’s Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (2008) which, in its 600 pages of double-columned type, has articles on the key ideas, important figures, and historical movements of this tradition. After a very long wait it is available online. The Encyclopedia … Read more
When I think about the great free trade movement in England in the 1840s, what drove its supporters to oppose protectionism was not a deep knowledge of the intricacies of comparative advantage or the geographical specialisation of production, but a moral sense which we lack today. This moral sense cuts in two different directions. On … Read more