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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 Reading Room

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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Liberty Matters

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 Adam Ferguson on Love, Self-Interest, and Pleasure

In Part 1, Sect. 2, of An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Adam Ferguson reflects on how love leads us to a sort of satisfaction which goes beyond what mere self-interested pleasures can give us:

Best of the OLL BOLL 64: James Mill, “Liberty of the Press” (1825)

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. This extract comes from a collection of supplementary articles written for the 1825 edition of the *Encyclopedia Britannica". It is a concise and influential statement of the utilitarian d...

Explore the OLL Collection: Images of Liberty and Power Bach, Music, and Liberty

Among the names engraved on the limestone walls of the Luther's Hymns and Bach's Chorals. We exhibit here some of the melodies from those works. A moving hymn by Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott, was put to Johann Sebastian Bach. The themes of faith and freedom have spoken powerfully to Protestants ever since: A st...

Liberty Matters: A Forum for the Discussion of Ideas About Liberty David French, "Can American Liberty Survive American Animosity?" (August 2021)

For this month's edition of Liberty Matters we invited David French to pen an essay commenting on the state of American liberty. His piece considers the relationship between domestic political polarization and the degradation of American norms and institutions aimed at safeguarding liberty. We hope that French's timely analysis will spark thoughtful conversation and reflection about how domesti...

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