Dr. David M. Hart

David Hart is an historian and a libertarian with interests in the history of the classical liberal tradition (especially the 19th century French political economists and the Levellers), libertarian class theory, war and culture, and film. He has a PhD from King’s College, Cambridge, a masters from Stanford University, and a BA Honours degree from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He taught in the Department of History at the University of Adelaide in South Australia for 15 years before moving to the US where he designed, built and managed the award-winning website “The Online Liberty of Liberty” for a non-profit educational foundation between 2001 and 2019. He is now an independent scholar and a keen observer of a large recreational waterway in the Northern Beaches region of Sydney.

Dr. David M. Hart

PhD (Cantab), M.A. (Stanford), B.A. (Hons) (Macquarie)

David M. Hart is a retired academic historian, editor, translator, and website designer and curator who has spent several decades working in the university and non-profit educational sectors in Australia, the U.K., and the United States. He is currently an Adjunct Research Fellow with the University of Western Australia Business School.

His research interests are primarily in the history of the classical liberal and libertarian traditions, the “Great Books” of the Western Tradition, the history of economic thought, the theory of class analysis, and the history of war and film, on which he has published academic papers, edited and put online hundreds of classic texts in these fields, and written scores of introductions, commentaries, and other study guides.

Before retiring at the end of 2019 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. In 2019 the site had online 1,778 books by 489 authors, had 1.8 million users, 4 million page views, and 216,000 books were downloaded.

He has spoken regularly across the U.S., the U.K., and Australia about the history of ideas and the classical liberal tradition to think tanks, research institutes, college economics departments, academic associations, and private groups, including the Cato Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Libertarian Scholars Conference, the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, the Southern Economic Association, the American Philosophical Society, the History of Economic Thought Society of Australia, the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona, the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, the Colloquium on Market Institutions & Economic Processes at NYU, the Association of Private Enterprise Education, the Philadelphia Society, many branches of the Bastiat Society across the US, the Institute of Economics Affairs in London, the Institute for Liberal Studies in Canada, the Centre for Independent Studies and the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation in Australia, and the University of the Third Age in Sydney.

For more details see:

• my full CV
• my website “The Digital Library of Liberty and Power” (http://davidmhart.com/wordpress/)
• a list of “Essays, Papers, and some Other Things“