The State

The Best of Bastiat (BOB) is a collection of some of the best material in Liberty Fund’s 6 volume edition of The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat (2011-). They are chapter length extracts and have been edited as pamphlets for… more

Originally published by Yale University Press in 1944, Bureaucracy is a classic fundamental examination of the nature of bureaucracies and free markets in juxtaposition to various political systems.

Vol. 7 of The Collected Works. The Limits of Liberty made James Buchanan’s name more widely known than ever before among political philosophers and theorists and established Buchanan, along with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, as one… more

Volume 2 of a collection of the works of the 19th century French political economist Frédéric Bastiat. This volume contains 19 essays on political theory, including “The State,” “The Law,” and “Property and Plunder.” A detailed… more

Interventionism provides Mises’s analysis of the problems of government interference in business from the Austrian School perspective. Written in 1940, before the United States was officially involved in World War II, this book… more

Smith was a follower of Herbert Spencer and the English Liberty and Property Defence League. His book is a critique of the growing intervention of the state in economic and civil matters in Australia and elsewhere in the late 19th… more

A facsimile edition of the four essays that Spencer published as The Man Versus the State in 1884. Spencer develops various specific disastrous ramifications of the wholesale substitution of the principle of compulsory cooperation -… more

Published in 1944, during World War II, Omnipotent Government was written and published after Mises arrived in the United States. In this volume Mises provides in economic terms an explanation of the international conflicts that… more

This is vol. 2 of the third revised edition of Herbert Spencer’s magnum opus on sociology which was first published in 1876. Here, he covers “ceremonial” institutions and political institutions (with his famous distinction between… more

Jasay refutes the common idea that we need a government as a provider of public goods. He argues that without taxation voluntary contributions to provide freely accessible benefits would be made by some members of groups adjusting… more

This is a newly annotated edition of the classic first published in German in 1922. It is the definitive refutation of nearly every type of socialism ever devised. Mises presents a wide-ranging analysis of society, comparing the… more

A pioneering historical analysis of the state from a sociological perspective which focuses on the changing nature of political power and the groups who wielded this power. One of his key insights is the distinction between the… more

The State is a brilliant analysis of modern political arrangements that views the state as acting in its own interest contrary to the interests of individuals and even of an entire society.

Read the Liberty Classic on this title from… more