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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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The OLL blog explores the fascinating, vital, and often surprising texts and people that fill our library. Come talk in our library!

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The OLL brings people together to debate and discuss important texts and big ideas about liberty.

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Explore the OLL Collection: Quotations About Liberty and Power David Ricardo, Paper Money, and the Abuse of Power

It is commonly accepted that modern finances started with the establishment of the Bank of England (BoE) in 1694. In exchange for securing a loan from a group of merchants, the Crown asked Parliament to give the bank a charter that would allow them to issue banknotes that would be accepted in payment of taxes owed to the crown. Those banknotes would be redeemable in gold coins on demand by the ...

Liberty Matters: A Forum for the Discussion of Ideas About Liberty Adam Smith’s Emergent Rules of Justice (June 2023)

June 2023 marks the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith's birth. Celebrations of this tercentenary abound, notably at our sister site, AdamSmithWorks. Most often known as the father or modern economics, OLL readers know that Smith's thought was much broader than just that. In fact, political economy as we know it did not quite exist yet in Smith's time; Smith was in fact a professor of Moral Philos...

Explore the OLL Collection: Images of Liberty and Power Shays’s Rebellion

In 1786, the United States government was young in its development and still finding its way. The country was governed by the Articles of Confederation, its first constitution, which many felt wasn’t strong enough. Shays's Rebellion would end up proving their point. After the American Revolutionary War, many citizens in Massachusetts were struggling to survive. The state was res...