"...to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals"

About the Site

The Online Library of Liberty (OLL) is a project of Liberty Fund, Inc., a private, non-profit educational foundation based in Indianapolis, Indiana. The aim of the OLL is to provide thousands of titles about individual liberty, limited constitutional government, and the free market, free of charge to the public, for educational purposes. [Above is our "amagi" logo - the earliest written expression of the word "freedom".]

The OLL is divided into two parts: The Forum which contains educational material about the books and authors (see the User Guide), and The Library which contains classic books about liberty (see the User Guide). This week there are 1,037 volumes in The Library and 641 essays and other items in The Forum.

Featured Author - John Adams (May, 2008)

John Adams (1735-1826) was active during the American Revolution and the second president of the new United States of America. He was a scholarly man who defended the way the British "constitution" had evolved to protect liberty and defended the American Constitution from its European critics. Liberty Fund is pleased to offer a collection of his Revolutionary Writings (2001) which are available in book form and on the web. We also have online his collected works edited by his grandson in the early 1850s. This collection has all of his major writings on history and constitutions, including his 3 volume Defence of the Constitutions of the United States. It is hoped that those who found the recent PBS series on John Adams interesting will read some of his works for themselves in order to appreciate his role in the founding of the American republic.

Visit our Portrait Gallery of great economists and political philosophers or browse our list of authors alphabetically or by historical period.

[See the collection of Founding Fathers of the American Republic and other authors published by Liberty Fund]

[See archive] 

User Created Reading Lists

This is a great new feature for professors and teachers to bring OLL books into the classroom. Create and annotate your own customized collection of readings which can be posted on the OLL website for use by your students. Or you can create a list of your favorite titles to send to your friends.

1. Sign up to begin
2. Log in to create another one
3. See the Reading Lists we have now
4. Consult the User's Guide for more information

Featured Author - John Milton's Quartercentenary (1608-1674)

John Milton (1608-1674) ranks among the greatest poets of the English language. He is best known for the epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), but he also wrote prose works on history, religion, and contemporary politics (in support of freedom to divorce, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and republican government). Although his academic talents marked him for a career in the Anglican church, Milton turned away from the Church of England at an early age and was a consistent supporter of the Puritan cause. He spent most of his life in academia or as a civil servant working for the Puritan Commonwealth.

[See the timeline of Milton's life and works and the reading list on his political thought]

[For further reading see The English Revolution]

[See archive] 

A Multi-Award Winning Website

The OLL has been recognized internationally as one of the best websites for teaching and research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences (see flyer):

1. NEH Best of the Humanities on the Web Award
2. Arts and Humanities Research Council Editor's Choice Award
3. The International Political Science Association's Top 300 Websites 

Quote of the Week: John Adams and the American constitution

In the conclusion to his 3 volume Defence of the Constitutions of the U.S. John Adams looks forward to the very great promise the new American republican experiment offers the world:

All nations, from the beginning, have been agitated by the same passions. The principles developed here will go a great way in explaining every phenomenon that occurs in the history of government. The vegetable and animal kingdoms, and those heavenly bodies whose existence and movements we are as yet only permitted faintly to perceive, do not appear to be governed by laws more uniform or certain than those which regulate the moral and political world. Nations move by unalterable rules; and education, discipline, and laws, make the greatest difference in their accomplishments, happiness, and perfection. It is the master artist alone who finishes his building, his picture, or his clock. The present actors on the stage have been too little prepared by their early views, and too much occupied with turbulent scenes, to do more than they have done. Impartial justice will confess that it is astonishing they have been able to do so much. It is for the young to make themselves masters of what their predecessors have been able to comprehend and accomplish but imperfectly.

A prospect into futurity in America, is like contemplating the heavens through the telescopes of Herschell. Objects stupendous in their magnitudes and motions strike us from all quarters, and fill us with amazement! When we recollect that the wisdom or the folly, the virtue or the vice, the liberty or servitude, of those millions now beheld by us, only as Columbus saw these times in vision, are certainly to be influenced, perhaps decided, by the manners, examples, principles, and political institutions of the present generation, that mind must be hardened into stone that is not melted into reverence and awe.

[Previous Quotes of the Week]

New to the Library: Our 1,000th Book

The OLL is pleased to announce the 1,000th book in our collection. It is a work by the early 19th century English merchant banker and philanthropist Henry Thornton (1760-1815). Thornton was a member of the Clapham Sect of evangelical social reformers who were active in movements such as the abolition of the slave trade. His book, An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) was regarded by Friedrich Hayek as one of the most important books on money and banking in the 19th century.

[See latest additions]

Teachers and Librarians

We would like to assist teachers and librarians to make better use of our online resources:

Teachers: You can help us by giving feedback on our current Teaching Resources and by suggesting new items which we could create for your students. Or try your hand at creating your own Reading List of material in the OLL.

Librarians: Henceforth, all new titles which go online will include down-loadable MARC records. We will be gradually adding MARC records of our other titles. See the Online Library of Liberty Series at WorldCat for a current list of our titles.

Read more about our future plans. Contact us.

[At left a picture of Erasmus at his desk by Hans Holbein.]

New to the Forum

Additions to the Forum include:

1. Bibliographies: American Political Writing in the Founding Era 1760-1805
2. Biographies: A Biographical Memoir of Lord Acton
3. Reading Lists: See our new feature, user created reading lists, such as this one for a semester-length course on Ancient Political Philosophy
3. Essays: William Findley and the American Constitution
4. Timeline: the life of David Ricardo (1772-1823)
5. Key Documents: this section has been greatly expanded with the addition of 60 important new primary sources and an improved table of contents to the Founders' Constitution collection.
6. Images of Liberty: Acton and the Gladstone family.

New Liberty Fund Book (March 2008) - Jean Louis De Lolme, The English Constitution (1771)

The Constitution of England is one of the most distinguished eighteenth-century treatises on English political liberty. In the vein of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), De Lolme’s account of the English system of government exercised an extensive influence on political debate in Britain, on constitutional design in the United States during the Founding era, and on the growth of liberal political thought throughout the nineteenth century. Originally published in French in Amsterdam in 1771, The Constitution of England was the first book-length analysis of the “separation of powers” proposed in book XI of Spirit of the Laws, which sketched an institutional distinction between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government.

[Order a copy from the online catalog] 

[See other works on the American Constitution] 

[See the latest releases]

Though usually Edmund Burke is identified as the first to articulate the principles of a modern conservative political tradition, arguably he was preceded by a Scotsman who is better known for espousing a brilliant concept of skepticism. As Laurence Bongie notes, "David Hume was undoubtedly the eighteenth-century British writer whose works were most widely known and acclaimed on the Continent during the later Enlightenment period. Hume's impact [in France] was of undeniable importance, greater even for a time than the related influence of Burke, although it represents a contribution to French counter-revolutionary thought which, unlike that of Burke, has been almost totally ignored by historians to this day." The bulk of Bongie's work consists of the writings of French readers of Hume who were confronted, first, by the ideology of human perfection and, finally, by the actual terrors of the French Revolution. Offered in French in the original edition of David Hume published by Oxford University Press in 1965, these vitally important writings have been translated by the author into English for the Liberty Fund second edition. In his foreword, Donald Livingston observes that "If conservatism is taken to be an intellectual critique of the first attempt at modern total revolution, then the first such event was not the French but the Puritan revolution, and the first systematic critique of this sort of act was given by Hume."

[See other works on the French Revolution]

 [Order a copy from the online catalog]. [See archive]

The Portable Library of Liberty DVD

A subset of the OLL is also available for off-line browsing. It contains 750 of our titles in a searchable E-Book PDF format.

Request a complimentary copy of the Portable Library of Liberty DVD which contains 750 titles from the OLL in EBook PDF format.

Please include your snail mail (i.e. postal) address.