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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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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...

Liberty Matters: A Forum for the Discussion of Ideas About Liberty Hans Eicholz, "Understanding Jefferson: Slavery, Race, and the Declaration of Independence" (July 2021)

Welcome to the July 2021 edition of Liberty Matters. This month we convene a panel of distinguished scholars to ask, "Who was Thomas Jefferson, and how did his views--particularly those on race, slavery, and freedom--inform his writings, including the Declaration of Independence?" Lead essayist Hans Eicholz, an historian and Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund, kicks things off in our lead essay by s...

Explore the OLL Collection: Images of Liberty and Power Roman Virtues

These four depictions from a much larger collection of etchings, come from an illustrated work of ancient coins compiled by the famed cartographer and geographer of the Netherlands, Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598). They depict a number of late Roman virtues with an accompanying visage or head that was to depict the qualities or characteristics of the deity associated with that virtue. In these fou...

Explore the OLL Collection: Quotations About Liberty and Power Michel Montaigne on the danger of becoming accustomed to state power (1580)

The French Renaissance sceptic and humanist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) warned that those who are “inured to monarchy” do not hate “subjection itself” but crave any “master” they can find to live under:

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