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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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Explore the OLL Collection: Quotations About Liberty and Power Benjamin Franklin on killing and cooking a turkey with electricity (1748)

The polymath Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was not only a key figure in the founding of the American republic but an inveterate inventor. He was fascinated by the new science of electricity and spent much time trying to discover its properties. In 1748 he planned a series of “experiments” to amuse himself and some friends at a picnic on the banks of the Skuylkill river. This included killing an...

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Liberty Matters: A Forum for the Discussion of Ideas About Liberty Judge Glock, "Albert Venn Dicey and the Immunity of the Administrative State" (December 2020)

Welcome to our December 2020 edition of Liberty Matters.  In this month’s forum Judge Glock has written our lead essay on the A.V. Dicey.  Dicey was an English legal scholar at Oxford in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who is best known for having popularized the phrase “the rule of law”.  Dicey’s most famous work was Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution and was widel...

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Explore the OLL Collection: Images of Liberty and Power Presidents Day and the Apotheosis of Washington

John James Barralet, "The Apotheosis of Washington" (1802-1816) [See a larger version of the image as an engraved print for more details]. Unknown, "The Apotheosis of Washington and Lincoln" (1865)   Introduction The fir...

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Best of the OLL BOLL 25: Estienne de la Boétie, “The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude” (1552)

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. Boétie asks one of the most profound questions of political theory, why does the majority obey the commands of the small minority of people who run the state? His answer is that custom, education, state propaganda, and the promise of some material benefits encoura...

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