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The Director’s Favourites

This is a list of some of my favourite books which are in the Online Library of Liberty. I hope you will find them interesting and thought provoking. Let me know what you think of them.

David Hart

Director of the Online Library of Liberty

• 1. Desiderius Erasmus, The Complaint of Peace [1521]

  

  Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was a central figure in the Reformation in more than one way. He was a central player in the movement to reform the Christian religion particularly in editing and publishing an important bi-lingual edition of the bible which was the most textually accurate of its day. he was also “central” in that he was not as radical or outspoken as Martin Luther on one side, nor as conservative and opposed to change as the Catholic Church on the other side.

  I like this book because in is written in his typical fluent and witty style and has an important message. In it, the personification of Peace comes to earth and berates mankind for the folly and criminality of war. A timeless message in my view. Note that this edition was published in the US in 1917 just as it was about to enter “the war to end all wars.”

  Here is a passage near the beginning of the book:

  Now, if I, whose name is Peace, am a personage glorified by the united praise of God and man, as the fountain, the parent, the nurse, the patroness, the guardian of every blessing which either heaven or earth can bestow; if without me nothing is flourishing, nothing safe, nothing pure or holy, nothing pleasant to mortals, or grateful to the Supreme Being; if, on the contrary, war is one vast ocean, rushing on mankind, of all the united plagues and pestilences in nature; if, at its deadly approach, every blossom of happiness is instantly blasted, every thing that was improving gradually degenerates and dwindles away to nothing, every thing that was firmly supported totters on its foundation, every thing that was formed for long duration comes to a speedy end, and every thing that was sweet by nature is turned into bitterness; if war is so unhallowed that it becomes the deadliest bane of piety and religion; if there is nothing more calamitous to mortals, and more detestable to heaven, I ask, how in the name of God, can I believe those beings to be rational creatures; how can I believe them to be otherwise than stark mad; who, with such a waste of treasure, with so ardent a zeal, with so great an effort, with so many arts, so much anxiety, and so much danger, endeavour to drive me away from them, and purchase endless misery and mischief at a price so high?

  Desiderius Erasmus, The Complaint of Peace. Translated from the Querela Pacis (A.D. 1521) of Erasmus (Chicago: Open Court, 1917).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/87 on 2008-01-25

  The text is in the public domain.

• 2. John Locke, The Two Treatises of Civil Government (1689, Hollis ed. 1764)

  The Two Treatises of Government by John Locke (1632-1704) is an excellent example of a text that has acquired multiple layers of meaning and significance through the passage of time. It was originally written as part of debate against Sir Robert Filmer over the relative power of the monarch (divine right of kings) vis-a-vis the authonomy and sovereignty of the individual. It helped justify the Glorious Revolution’s overthrow of the Stuart monarchy and the creation of a constitutional monarchy under William of Orange in 1688-89. Locke’s book had a second life during the 18th century with its influence over the 18th century commonwealthmen who were waging their own battle against empire and high taxation in the mid-18th century. Thomas Hollis was a radical bookseller who sold and published Locke and other authors in the American colonies on the eve of the revolution. His 1764 edition of Locke was a part of the library of many “founding fathers” and his postcard-sized illustrations like this one of Locke were also very popular.

  

  I like this edition of Locke because it encapsulates ideas which influenced two important revolutions in the English-speaking world. I’m sure the founding fathers of the American revolution read with interest the following passage in Locke about the dissolution of government:

  1. In these and the like cases, when the government is dissolved, the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative, differing from the other, by the change of persons, or form, or both, as they shall find it most for their safety and good: for the society can never, by the fault of another, lose the native and original right it has to preserve itself, which can only be done by a settled legislative, and a fair and impartial execution of the laws made by it. But the state of mankind is not so miserable that they are not capable of using this remedy, till it be too late to look for any. To tell people they may provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative, when by oppression, artifice, or being delivered over to a foreign power, their old one is gone, is only to tell them, they may expect relief when it is too late, and the evil is past cure. This is in effect no more than to bid them first be slaves, and then to take care of their liberty; and when their chains are on, tell them, they may act like freemen. This, if barely so, is rather mockery than relief; and men can never be secure from tyranny, if there be no means to escape it till they are perfectly under it: and therefore it is, that they have not only a right to get out of it, but to prevent it.

  John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Hollis (London: A. Millar et al., 1764).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/222 on 2008-01-25

  The text is in the public domain.

• 3. Thomas Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted [1832]

  

  Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) was an English radical individualist and advocate of natural rights who in the mid-19th century worked with Herbert Spencer on The Economist magazine, a radical free trade paper. He was turned into an ardent defender of individual liberty by witnessing the brutality of the British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars first hand as a young naval officer. In the early 1830s he wrote a very strong defence of the natural right to property against the growing tendency of the utilitarian Benthamites to turn to the government to “improve” society, usually by confiscating or regulating other people’s property. In the Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted he warned that the utilitarian reformers were rapidly turning into a new ruling class who saw no theoretical or moral limits to their power to increase the “happiness” of the people.

  In his final letter to Lord Brougham Hodgskin sums up his argument about justly and unjustly acquired property thusly:

  The preservation of the power of the unjust appropriators has been called social order, and mankind have believed the assertion. To maintain their dominion is the object and aim of all human legislation. The great mass of the two hundred and odd statutes, which, up to a recent period, inflicted death on our people, had no other object than to enforce obedience to an unjust scheme of appropriation. That government is a great evil,—that laws to model and uphold it, imposing restraints on thought and commerce, on the press and locomotion, that taxes to pay its expenses, kings and judges to administer it, and armies and hangmen to carry their blood-stained decrees into execution—that Aristocra cies dazzling us with the display of gaudy magnificence, and hierarchies imposing on our senses by more solemn delusions—both intended to cheat us into admiration of their tinsel shew to which substantial happiness is sacrificed; that gaols and gibbets, and tread-mills, the instruments of legislative wrath, and the signs of its dominion, that they all inflict sharp pain in their first operation, and spread misery through society, is universally admitted; that I have convinced you of the unholiness of their origin, or their inability to answer the end proposed, I cannot assert; but I must express my sincere conviction, that the apparent necessity for maintaining them is altogether a consequence of our artificial and unjust right of property. Whether or not there be a natural right of property which would be generally respected, though no law guaranteed it, may be doubted; but it is nevertheless proper to make men aware that the price they pay for attempting to uphold the artificial right of property, is nothing less than the enormous sum of misery inflicted in the name of law and government.

  Thomas Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. A Series of Letters, addressed without permission to H. Brougham, Esq. M.P. F.R.S. (London: B. Steil, 1832).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/323 on 2008-01-25

  The text is in the public domain.

• 4. Gustave de Molinari, Les Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare: Entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété [1849]

  Gustave de Molinari, Les Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare: Entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété (Paris: Guillaumin, 1849).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1344 on 2008-01-25

  The text is in the public domain.

• 5. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics [1851]

  

  Herbert Spencer’s (1820-1903) Social Statics (1851) is one of the earliest efforts at creating a one volume, coherent account of individual liberty in all of its dimensions - philosophical, economic, civic, social, sexual, and international. We take this kind of survey for granted but in 1851 it was probably unique. In the late twentieth century we have Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Mises, Liberalism (1962), John Hospers, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow (1971), and Rothbard, For a New Liberty (1973) to mention just a few. Spencer’s book is also unusual for exploring the question of the rights of women and children some decades before it became a much more pressing issue with the suffragette movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

  One important passage among many in this volume is the following statement of the “law of equal liberty” which is the guiding principle which ties all of his thoughts together into a coherent whole:

  1. Thus are we brought by several routes to the same conclusion. Whether we reason our way from those fixed conditions under which only the Divine Idea—greatest happiness, can be realized—whether we draw our inferences from man’s constitution, considering him as a congeries of faculties—or whether we listen to the monitions of a certain mental agency, which seems to have the function of guiding us in this matter, we are alike taught as the law of right social relationships, that—Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man. Though further qualifications of the liberty of action thus asserted may be necessary, yet we have seen (p. 89) that in the just regulation of a community no further qualifications of it can be recognised. Such further qualifications must ever remain for private and individual application. We must therefore adopt this law of equal freedom in its entirety, as the law on which a correct system of equity is to be based.

  Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed, (London: John Chapman, 1851).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/273 on 2008-01-25

  The text is in the public domain.

• 6. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and The Subjection of Women (1859, 1869, 1879 ed.)

  

  John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) wrote two of the most important defences of individual liberty during the heyday of classical liberalism of the 19th century. His first was On Liberty (1859) which quite rightly is still read with great interest today. His other great work in the area was *The Subjection of Women *(1869) which was much more controversial as the mostly male classical liberal tradition was not yet ready to hear these arguments. Mill knew this as he repeatedly attempted but failed to get Parliament to seriously consider the right of women to vote. What is interesting about this 1879 edition is that, shortly after Mill’s death, it published the two pieces together in an obvious attempt to show how the two were linked in Mill’s mind. This was not to happen again until the 1970s when the issue of women’s rights became pressing.

  Mill makes his point very clearly in the opening paragraph of chapter 1 and in the very final paragraph of the book:

  THE object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of life: That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other…

  When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification—first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow creatures, (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.

  The University of Toronto Press edition of the Collected Works of J.S. Mill did not gather all of Mill’s writings on women into one volume (as they did with his writings on India). On this page we have done so, with links to the online edition.

  John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and The Subjection of Women (New York: Henry Holt and Co. 1879).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/347 on 2008-01-25

  The text is in the public domain.

• 7. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis [1922]

  

  I came across this book for the first time while browsing in a left wing bookshop in a rather shabby part of downtown Sydney in the mid-1970s. I’m not sure why it was on their shelves. Perhaps they thought it was a defence of socialism. I knew who Mises was and that he was a vigorous opponent of socialism, but what I didn’t know was what a devastating critique of central planning and all forms of socialist economic intervention this book would turn out to be. One needs to read the new intellectual biography of Mises by Guido Jorg Hulsmann Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007) to fully appreciate how hard it was for him to write this book in the aftermath of World War I.

  In Chapter 6 on “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Community” he develops his crushing arguments which destroy the very foundation of socialism in any large, organised community:

  The theory of economic calculation shows that in the socialistic community economic calculation would be impossible… The problem of economic calculation is the fundamental problem of Socialism. That for decades people could write and talk about Socialism without touching this problem only shows how devastating were the effects of the Marxian prohibition on scientific scrutiny of the nature and working of a socialist economy.

  To prove that economic calculation would be impossible in the socialist community is to prove also that Socialism is impracticable. Everything brought forward in favour of Socialism during the last hundred years, in thousands of writings and speeches, all the blood which has been spilt by the supporters of Socialism, cannot make socialism workable. The masses may long for it ever so ardently, innumerable revolutions and wars may be fought for it, still it will never be realised. Every attempt to carry it out will lead to syndicalism or, by some other route, to chaos, which will quickly dissolve the society, based upon the division of labour, into tiny autarkous groups.

  Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, trans. J. Kahane, Foreword by F.A. Hayek (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1060 on 2008-01-29

  The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc.

• 8. Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (1962, LF ed. 2005)

  Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, trans. Ralph Raico, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1463 on 2008-01-25

  The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc.