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The History of Freedom and Other Essays

John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton (author)

Acton never completed his projected History of Liberty. The collection contains two chapters from this planned history - on liberty in antiquity and Christianity - and many book reviews where one can piece together Acton’s approach…

The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics (1976)

Israel M. Kirzner (author)

A volume in the collection Studies in Economic Theory, first published by the Institute for Humane Studies. This is a collection of papers given at a conference on Austrian economics in June 1974. They cover the uniqueness of the…

The Dialogues of Plato, in 5 vols (Jowett ed.)

Plato (author)

A 5 volume edition of Plato by the great English Victorian Greek scholar, Benjamin Jowett. The scholarly apparatus is immense and detailed. The online version preserves the marginal comments of the printed edition and has links to…

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Cannan ed.), in 2 vols.

Adam Smith (author)

Cannan’s justly famous early 20th century edition of Smith’s Wealth of Nations with his introduction and notes.

The Rights of War and Peace (1901 ed.)

Hugo Grotius (author)

Grotius’s magnum opus on international law and the laws of war and peace. He wrote this volume while the Thirty Years’ War raged around him in the hope that rational human beings might be able to agree to legal limits on war’s…

The American Republic: Primary Sources

Bruce Frohnen (editor)

The American Republic is an excellent textbook for classroom use which provides, in a single volume, critical, original documents revealing the character of American discourse on the nature and importance of local government, the…

A Vindication of the Rights of Men

Mary Wollstonecraft (author)

One of the first responses to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Wollstonecraft later lived in France during the Terror and wrote a history of the events she witnessed.

Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory, Vol. 6 of the Collected Works

James M. Buchanan (author)

Vol. 6 of The Collected Works. A short work in which Buchanan develops his ideas on opportunity cost. He takes an individualist and subjectivist perspective and attempts to integrate this into the orthodox classical and neoclassical…

The Code of Hammurabi

Hammurabi (author)

The Code of Hammurabi is a collection of the King of Babylon’s laws which were inscribed on stone columns towards the end of his reign. The 282 case laws include economic provisions (prices, tariffs, trade, and commercial…

Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (1927) (LF ed.)

Ludwig von Mises (author)

The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises provides a concise and tightly-argued one volume defense of classical liberalism, focusing on the core concepts of private property, limited government, peace, and the free market.

The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth

William Shakespeare (author)

Shakespeare’s Henry VIII may be best known not for its plot or poetry, but because during one of its earliest performances a cannon, shot for special effects, caught the theater’s thatched roof on fire, and the Globe burned to the…

Protection or Free Trade

Henry George (author)

George was not just an advocate of the single tax on the unimproved value of land, but also a strong defender of free trade, as this work demonstrates.

Read the Liberty Classic on this title from Econlib

The Works of Alexander Hamilton, (Federal Edition), 12 vols.

Henry Cabot Lodge (editor)

A 12 volume collection of the works of Alexander Hamilton.

The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols.

Thomas Paine (author)

A 4 volume collection of the works of Thomas Paine.

Plutarch’s Lives (Dryden trans.)

Plutarch (author)

A five volume translation by Dryden.

Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (author)

The Liberty Fund edition of Characteristicks presents the complete 1732 text of this classic work of philosophy and political theory. Also included are faithful reproductions of the stirring engravings that Shaftesbury created to…

Illustrations of Political Economy 9 vols.

Harriet Martineau (author)

Martineau writes short “tales” to show ordinary readers how the free market operates.

The Pacificus-Helvidius Debates of 1793-1794

Alexander Hamilton (author)

The Pacificus–Helvidius Debates of 1793–1794 matched Hamilton and Madison in the first chapter of an enduring discussion about the proper roles of the executive and legislative branches in the conduct of American foreign policy. The…

The Writings of James Madison, 9 vols.

James Madison (author)

A 9 volume collection edited by Gaillard Hunt in 1900-10.

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: From 1817-1882

Frederick Douglass (author)

Douglass’s third and last autobiography of his life as a slave, runaway, and then campaigner for the abolition of slavery. This edition is interesting because of the introduction by one of Britain’s leading classical liberal…

The Shi King, the Old “Poetry Classic” of the Chinese

Confucius (author)

The Shih Ching (The book of poetry) predates Confucius by some three centuries, although he is often credited with arranging it into its current form sometime around 520 B.C. This work is a compilation of some three hundred verses of…

“Are Economists Basically Immoral?” and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion

Paul Heyne (author)

Heyne’s writings are unique in that he takes the critics of the free market order seriously and addresses their arguments directly, showing how they are defective in their understanding of economics and in their ethical and…

The Chinese Classics

Confucius (author)

Legge provides lengthy introductions to leading Chinese philosophical works and is own translations.

The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (corrected edition)

William Graham Sumner (author)

A thought-provoking collection highlighting individual liberty, personal responsibility, and the unintended consequences of social policies. Sumner’s timeless insights challenge conventional wisdom and offer fresh perspectives on…

My Thoughts (Mes Pensées) (1720, 2012)

Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (author)

My Thoughts provides a unique window into the mind of the author of The Spirit of the Laws. From the publication of his first masterpiece, Persian Letters, in 1721, until his death in 1755, Montesquieu maintained notebooks in which…

The Principles of Sociology, 3 vols. (1898)

Herbert Spencer (author)

This is a 3 vol. set of the third revised edition of Herbert Spencer’s magnum opus on sociology which was first published in 1876.

On Religion Considered in Its Source, Its Forms, and Its Developments

Benjamin Constant (author)

Constant worked on this study of humanity’s religious forms and development throughout his life, publishing five volumes between 1824 and 1831. He sought to relate religious forms to historical contexts and civilizational…

Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour

Helmut Schoeck (author)

This classic study is one of the few books to explore extensively the many facets of envy—“a drive which lies at the core of man’s life as a social being.” Ranging widely over literature, philosophy, psychology, and the social…