The OLL Blog

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!

Herbert Spencer, Slavery & Income Tax

By: Charles Amos October 29, 2025

In Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick recounted ‘The Tale of The Slave’ the theme of which is that income taxation is slavery. For a long time, I thought this was Nozick’s own idea; but upon visiting the footnotes it turns out the story is actually Herbert Spencer’s.

James Baldwin Shows We Have More to Learn About Liberty for All

By: Sabine Benoit October 15, 2025

James Baldwin was one of the greatest American writers, a civil rights activist, and someone who stood up for Black liberty. He was not a libertarian, but those interested in liberty should take heed of his words and the way he…

Charles Murray on Dignity and the American Dream

By: Anna Leman October 1, 2025

Mitch Daniels sings nothing but high praise of Charles Murray, for the social scientist says what no one else will. In this Future of Liberty episode, Daniels and Murray discuss some of Murray’s boldest claims about social welfare,…

Self-Help with Smiles

By: Caroline Breashears September 3, 2025

While self-help books have been around for millennia, the popularity of the genre owes a great deal to Samuel Smiles's Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct.

Reading is, and should always be, a pleasure

By: Carlos Alejandro Noyola Contreras August 22, 2025

I buy books. Lots of them. Lots of books. For years, if I remember correctly, I haven't spent a week without adding - at least - a new book to my library.

Marlowe, Goethe, and the Faust Legend

By: Gary McGath August 6, 2025

The Faust legend has held the imagination of Western culture for many years. Variants of the story have appeared as stage works, poems, novels, and even instrumental music. The man who makes a deal with the Devil sometimes achieves…

Why You Should Read Adam Smith

By: Amy Willis July 23, 2025

Our friends at the University of Louisville's McConnell Center launched an interesting program this year in which they are asking authors and experts to tell us why WE should read the books that helped shape them or those that have…

The Libertarian With the Guillotine

By: Janet Bufton July 9, 2025

Isabel Paterson's argument against government charity hasn't held up, but it still offers important lessons about liberal, and libertarian, politics.

George Washington’s Rules of Civility

By: Steve Ealy July 2, 2025

John Adams, in a letter dated April 22, 1812, confided to Benjamin Rush his belief that George Washington was “too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation.” This was not the first time that the…

The Satyr Play: The Friar’s Tale and the Summoner’s Tale

By: Nathaniel Birzer June 25, 2025

Geoffrey Chaucer’s attack on the clergy in his prologue to The Canterbury Tales takes on new life in the form of the rivalry between the Friar and the Summoner, who each take their turn following the Wife of Bath. In their…

Cato and George Washington

By: Walter Donway May 21, 2025

I suspect many admirers of the American Revolution fail to appreciate the influence that the history of ancient Rome, its philosophers and statesmen, and its fate exerted on our founders—almost all Age of Enlightenment thinkers in…