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Online Library of Liberty The OLL is a curated collection of scholarly works that engage with vital questions of liberty.

Spanning the centuries from Hammurabi to Hume, and collecting material on topics from art and economics to law and political theory, the OLL provides you with a rich variety of texts to explore and consider.

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Liberty Matters: A Forum for the Discussion of Ideas About Liberty Keith E. Whittington, "John C. Calhoun, Constitutionalism, and Slavery" (March 2021)

Welcome to our March 2021 edition of Liberty Matters. This month Keith Whittington has written our lead essay on John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was one of the most formidable political thinkers of his era as well as a former Vice President, a member of the House and Senate, and a Secretary of State and War during the first half of the 19th century. He was also a Southerner and a defender of the insti...

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Best of the OLL BOLL 47: Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Of the Individual Man” (1792)

This is part of “The Best of the Online Library of Liberty” which is a collection of some of the most important material in the OLL. A thematic list with links to HTML versions of the texts is available here. Humboldt’s book The Limits of State Action is one of the best works defending individual liberty and the limited state ever written and also one of the first book-length surveys of classic...

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Explore the OLL Collection: Quotations About Liberty and Power George Grote on the difficulty of public opinion alone in curbing the misuse of power by "the sinister interests" (1821)

The Philosophic Radical George Grote (1794-1871) wrote this defence of democratic reform of the British electoral system in 1821. He noted the special problem posed by the concentration of political benefits being concentrated in a few hands and the costs being dispersed over very many individuals:

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Explore the OLL Collection: Images of Liberty and Power Thomas Jefferson in the Cyclopedia

Images of Thomas Jefferson in the Jeffersonian Cyclopedia (1900) The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia: A Comprehensive Collection of the Views of Thomas Jefferson. Classified and Arranged in Alphabetical Order Under Nine Thousand Titles, Relating to Government, Politics, Law, Education, Political Economy, Finance, Science, Art, Literature, Religious Freedom, Morals, etc. Edited by John P. Foley (New...

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