LIBERTY FUND

(P/B) THE FABLE OF THE BEES (TWO VOLUME SET)
It used to be that everyone read the "notorious" Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733). He was a great satirist and came to have a profound impact on economics, ethics, and social philosophy. The Fable begins with a poem and continues with a number of essays and dialogues. It is all tied together by the startling and original idea that "private vices" (self-interest) lead to "publick benefits" (the development and operation of society). From that simple beginning, Mandeville saw that orderly social structures (such as law, language, the market, a...
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(P/B) ON POWER
Documenting the process by which government and controlling majorities have grown increasingly powerful and tyrannical, Bertrand de Jouvenel demonstrates how democracies have failed to limit the powers of government. This development Jouvenel traces all the way back to the days of royal absolutism, which established large administrative bureaucracies and thus laid the foundation of the modern omnipotent state. On Power is an important work that Professor Angelo M. Petroni of the Luigi Einaudi Center for Research in Torino, Italy, has said ...
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(P/B) THE CONCISE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ECONOMICS
In this easily accessible, user-friendly volume, respected economist David R. Henderson brings together 152 of the most brilliant minds in economics to show how the analysis of economic topics can illuminate many aspects of the average person's daily life. Some of the noted contributors include Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker and George Stigler, and former presidential economic advisors, financial columnists, and economists such as Armen Alchian, Don Boudreaux, Deepak Lal, Anna Schwartz, Lawrence Summers, and Murray Rothbard. The entries c...
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PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTARY ON THESE WORDS OF THE GOSPEL, LUKE 14:23, "COMPEL THEM TO COME IN, THAT MY HOUSE MAY BE FULL" (P/B)
The topics of church and state, religious toleration, the legal enforcement of religious practices, and religiously motivated violence on the part of individuals, have once again become burning issues. Pierre Bayle' s "Philosophical Commentary" was a major attempt to deal with very similar problems three centuries ago. His argument is that if the orthodox have the right and duty to persecute, then every sect will persecute since every sect considers itself orthodox. The result will be mutual slaughter, something God cannot have intended. B...
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(P/B) TEMPORAL AND ETERNAL
Temporal and Eternal is a profound and poetic assessment of the relationship between tradition and liberty, between politics and society, and between Christianity and the modern world. The Liberty Fund edition includes a new foreword by Pierre Manent, professor of political science at the Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron in Paris. As the twenty-first century begins, the relationships this book explores are as relevant as they were in the last century, when French poet and essayist Charles Peguy addressed them in "Memories of Yo...
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(P/B) ON THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND TAXATION (VOLUME 1)
This volume provides analysis of the allocation of money between capitalists, landowners, and agricultural workers in Britain. Through this analysis, Ricardo came to advocate free trade and oppose Britain's restrictive "Corn laws". Here are his classic commentaries on certain points of contention and divergence with the political economic writings of Adam Smith and T. R. Malthus. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) GOOD MONEY (PART II)
This complementary volume provides five additional essays to expand our understanding of Hayek's ideas about money and monetary policy. Good Money, Part II: The Standard investigates the consequences of the "predicament of composition" which led to one of Hayek's most controversial proposals: that governments should be denied a monopoly on the coining of money. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) AREOPAGITICA
As poet, statesman, and pamphleteer, John Milton remains one of the singular champions of liberty in the annals of history. Even in his mediations on theology Milton strove to demonstrate that liberty-of conscience-is one of the inviolable rights of free peoples. In his theological writings he seeks to unite ancient philosophy and the authority of the Judeo-Christian scriptures to support the concept of free, republican government. During the crises that wracked English life and liberties during the seventeenth century, Milton's was one of...
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(P/B) ESSAYS

(P/B) THE WHOLE DUTY OF MAN ACCORDING TO THE LAW OF NATURE
In «The Whole Duty of Man» (1691), first published in Latin in 1673 as «De officio hominis et civis», Pufendorf elaborates his conception of ethics, which separates civil duties from religious hopes. Unlike many Christian political theologians of the seventeenth century, Pufendorf refused to ground his natural law ethics in the ideal of human perfection or holiness; rather, he grounded them in the need for sociability, which he regarded as simply a means to and end - that is, human self-preservation and civil peace. Like Grotius and Hobbes...
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(H/B) ECONOMIC SOPHISMS AND WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS NOT SEEN
This volume, the third in our Collected Works of Fr?d?ric Bastiat, includes two of Bastiat's best-known works, the collected Economic Sophisms and the pamphlet What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. We are publishing here for the first time in English the Third Series of Economic Sophisms, which Bastiat had planned but died before he could complete the project. Both Economic Sophisms and What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen share similar stylistic features and were written with much the same purpose in mind, to disabuse people of misperceptions t...
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(P/B) A HISTORICAL SKETCH OF LIBERTY & EQUALITY (0865972931)
A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality is a window to one of the most important historians of all time. This exclusive Liberty Fund edition of F. W. Maitland's classic includes a note on Maitland by Charles Haskins, and a general account of Maitland's life and work, "The Historical Spirit Incarnate: Frederic William Maitland," by Robert Schuyler. A historian's historian, F. W. Maitland was never to be caught indulging in fanciful speculation about times long past. Rather, he said, "We shall have to think away distinctions which seem t...
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(P/B?) A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION & OTHER WRITINGS
This volume opens with Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) and also contains his earlier Essay Concerning Toleration (1667), extracts from the Third Letter for Toleration (1692), and a large body of his briefer essays and memoranda on this theme. As editor Mark Goldie writes in the introduction, A Letter Concerning Toleration "was one of the seventeenth century's most eloquent pleas to Christians to renounce religious persecution." This Liberty Fund edition provides the first fully annotated modern edition of A Letter Concerning To...
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(P/B) THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF SIR EDWARD COKE (THREE-VOLUME SET)
Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) successfully defended English liberties against the royal prerogative of the Stuart kings and virtually single-handedly established the rule of law for the English-speaking peoples. Coke's view of English law has had a powerful influence on lawyers, judges, and politicians through the present day. It was Coke's astonishing task to set down the whole of the law - from Magna Carta to land law to criminal law, and the system of court procedure, from the High Court of Parliament down to the lowest courts of the real...
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(P/B) INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE LAW OF THE CONSTITUTION
The Law of the Constitution elucidates the guiding principles of the modern constitution of England: the legislative sovereignty of Parliament, the rule of law, and the binding force of unwritten conventions. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) OF THE NATURE AND QUALIFICATION OF RELIGION IN REFERENCE TO CIVIL SOCIETY
(. . .) «Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion» is thus a principled, but moderate, defence of toleration. Appearing at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Pufendorf's ideas on natural law and toleration were highly influential in both Europe and the British Isles. As Simone Zurbuchen explains in the introduction, «Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion» is a major contribution to the history and literature of religious toleration. (. . .) (ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΠΑΡΟΥΣΙΑΣΗ ΣΤΟ ΟΠΙΣΘΟΦΥΛΛΟ ΤΟΥ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΥ)...
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(P/B) THE RIGHTS OF WAR AND PEACE (3 VOLUMES)
Since the nineteenth century, Hugo Grotius's Rights of War and Peace has been the classic work in modern international law, laying the foundation for a universal code of law. However, in the seventeeth century and during the Enlightenment, it was considered a major defense of the rights of states and private persons to use their power to secure themselves and their property. Book I examines the question of whether any war is just and who may lawfully make war. The causes of war; the implications of contracts, oaths, and promises; and the m...
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AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS (VOLUMES 1 AND 2)
First published in 1776, the year in which the American Revolution officially began, Smith's Wealth of Nations sparked a revolution of its own. In it Smith analyzes the major elements of political economy, from market pricing and the division of labor to monetary, tax, trade, and other government policies that affect economic behavior. Throughout he offers seminal arguments for free trade, free markets, and limited government. Criticizing mercantilists who sought to use the state to increase their nations' supply of precious metals, Smith ...
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(P/B) HISTORY AS THE STORY OF LIBERTY
Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) is perhaps best known as the author, in 1902, of Aesthetics, a work of enduring influence. History as the Story of Liberty was written in 1938 when the Western world had succumbed to the notion that history is a creature of blind force. A reviewer at the time noted the importance of Croce's belief that "the central trend in the evolution of man is the unfolding of new potentialities, and that the task of the historian is to discover and emphasize this trend: the story of liberty." As Croce himself writes, "Even ...
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(P/B) THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith's first and in his own mind most important work, outlines his view of proper conduct and the institutions and sentiments that make men virtuous. Here he develops his doctrine of the impartial spectator, whose hypothetical disinterested judgment we must use to distinguish right from wrong in any given situation. We by nature pursue our self-interest, according to Smith. This makes independence or self-command an instinctive good, and neutral rules as difficult to craft as they are necessary. But society...
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