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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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Liberty Matters: A Forum for the Discussion of Ideas About Liberty Keith E. Whittington, "John C. Calhoun, Constitutionalism, and Slavery" (March 2021)

Welcome to our March 2021 edition of Liberty Matters. This month Keith Whittington has written our lead essay on John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was one of the most formidable political thinkers of his era as well as a former Vice President, a member of the House and Senate, and a Secretary of State and War during the first half of the 19th century. He was also a Southerner and a defender of the insti...

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Best of the OLL BOLL 15: Jasay, "Liberalism and Democracy" (1985)

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. This essay is by the Anglo-Hungarian economist Anthony de Jasay on the political economy of modern democracy in which he discusses the in-built tendency for democracies to expand the power and scope of the state into satisfy the needs of the dominant constituencie...

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Explore the OLL Collection: Quotations About Liberty and Power James Mill on the Nature of Those Who Govern

This quote from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century thinker and journalist, James Mill (1773-1836) expresses the essential point, one that extends back to ancient historical times, that those who are entrusted with setting the rules and protecting the peace of a community, must themselves be kept within the laws of that community.

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Explore the OLL Collection: Images of Liberty and Power Hobbes' Leviathan

In a mid-19th century edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes is reprinted the famous Hobbes's best known work of political philosophy Leviathan in which the all-powerful absolute monarch is depicted with sword and sceptre overseeing his domain.

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