The Digital Library of Liberty & Power
incorporating the Guillaumin Collection of the Great Books of Liberty
Date: 6 July, 2023 A Summary View The Sovereign Power The Ruling Elite The Political Class The Bureaucratic or Functionary Class Force Wielding Institutions The Welfare State The Regulatory State The Plutocratic or “Crony Capitalist” Class State Privileged or Dependent Firms & their Employees State Owned Firms State Privileged Firms State Dependent Firms The Dependent … Read more
[Frontispiece to John Wade’s “Black Book” (1835) showing John Bull (i.e. the British people) who has been captured and tied down (like Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by the Lilliputians, who in this case are figures representing the army, the church, members of parliament, and the judiciary. The Lilliputians taunt him and rifle … Read more
Histories of the discipline of sociology usually give short shrift to the classical liberal tradition. ((See for example the massive and comprehensive (weighing in at 5 vols. and over 5,000 pages) The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Edited by George Ritzer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Second Edition. Neil J. Smelser and Richard … Read more
James Gillray (1756-1815) trained as an engraver but became best known for making hundreds of caricatures of British social and political life in the 1790s and 1800s. He satirized in particular King George III, William Pitt, the French Jacobins, Napoleon, and many others in the British political and military establishment. A recurring theme in his … Read more
James Mill (1773-1836), the father of John Stuart, has not been served well by editors of his writings, so I made my own anthology of 28 essays and articles written in the 1820s and 1830s. ((See this anthology of The Political Writings of James Mill: Essays and Reviews on Politics and Society, 1815-1836.)) They include … Read more
An Introduction to Classical Liberal/Libertarian Class Analysis In my long monograph on Libertarian Class analysis (Blog post and main paper) I have sections which deal with some of the themes which were common to most if not all CLs who wrote on class, as well as a chronological analysis of some of the key thinkers … Read more
Libertarian Class Analysis: An Historical Survey (M)en placed in society … are divided into two classes, *Ceux qui pillent,—et Ceux qui sont pillés* (those who pillage and those who are pillaged); and we must consider with some care what this division, the correctness of which has not been disputed, implies. The first class, *Ceux qui … Read more
As part of my “Farewell to America” tour in January 2020 I gave the following talks and papers on my way back to Australia: On Bastiat at the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire On Bastiat at the American Institute for Economic Research, Great Barrington, Massachusetts On classical liberal class analysis at the … Read more