Cato’s Letters: Liberty and Responsibility
Liberty and Responsibility in Cato's letters
Topic
The authors of this series of letters directed them against the ministry of Robert Walpole, who they claimed was a dangerous centralist, using corruption in government, government debt, and the development of a standing army in a plot against British liberties. These letters caused quite a stir in their time in England, but in America they were widely read as being descriptive of the colonial situation in dealing with the mother land in the years following the close of the French and Indian War.
Guide to the Readings
Edition used:
See also in the Online Library of Liberty:
- Collections: Founding Fathers' Library
- Collections: 18th Century Commonwealthmen
- John Trenchard (1662-1723)
- Thomas Gordon (1692–1750)
Session I: Legitimate Authority
Trenchard and Gordon, Cato's Letters
Session II: Liberty and Individual Rights
Trenchard and Gordon, Cato's Letters
Session III: The Abuse of Power
Trenchard and Gordon, Cato's Letters
Session IV: The Importance of Participation in Public Life
Trenchard and Gordon, Cato's Letters
Session V: The Benefits of Civil Liberty
Trenchard and Gordon, Cato's Letters
Session VI: Threats to Civil Liberty
Trenchard and Gordon, Cato's Letters
Reading Lists
- Addison and Smith: Freedom and Responsibility
- American Liberty in Political Documents before 1787
- An Introduction to the Major Writings of Ludwig von Mises
- Banned Books
- British and French Sources of American Constitutionalism
- Burlamaqui, Bayle: Freedom Tolerance, Natural Law
- Cato’s Letters: Liberty and Responsibility
- Cobden: Liberty and Peace
- Constant’s Principles of Politics
- Emerson on Anti-slavery
- Eric Mack, An Introduction to the Political Thought of John Locke
- Gibbon and the Rise of Christianity and Islam
- Homer’s Iliad: Liberty and Responsibility
- Hume, Smith, and Ferguson: Wealth, Commerce, and Corruption
- Hume: History of England
- James Tyrrell on Authority and Liberty
- Jefferson-Hamilton Debate
- John Milton: Liberty in his Prose and Poetry
- Major Political Thinkers: Plato to Mill
- Mandeville: Vice, Virtue and Liberty
- Mill-Macaulay Debate on Government
- Old Testament and English Political Thought
- Political Sermons of the Founding Era
- Readings from the OLL Reader
- Rousseau and Hume: Contrasting Views of Liberty
- Shakespeare and Marlowe: Liberty in Four Plays
- Shakespeare: Liberty and Responsibility
- Socialist Tracts
- Sophocles and Aeschylus: Blood Justice and the Founding of Legal Order
- Tacitus: Liberty and Tyranny in the Annals
- The Ruling Class and the State: An Anthology
- Thomas Paine and American Liberty
- Thucydides: War, Empire, and Liberty