Liberty Fund Inc imprint: 143 books

Adam Smith was an eloquent man of considerable philosophical and historical learning. His most incisive and enduring observations are collected here on subjects ranging from political and economic history to morals, art, education, war, and the American colonies. Throughout, notes an admirer in the...

Philosophical Commentary deals with church and state, religious toleration, legal enforcement of religious practices, and religiously motivated violence. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) was a Protestant philosopher and critic. John Kilcullen is Senior Research Fellow, Humanities, at Macquarie...

A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, originally titled De Legibus Naturae, first appeared in 1672 as a theoretical response to a range of issues that came together during the late 1660s. It conveyed a conviction that science might offer a more effective means of demonstrating both the contents and the...

This book presents the theoretical and practical arguments for liberalism in the classical tradition as defined by Mises as “the liberal doctrine of the harmony of the rightly understood interests of all members of a free society founded on the principle of private ownership of the means of production.”...

Francis Hutcheson’s first book, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, was published in 1725, when its author was only thirty-one, and went through four editions during his lifetime. This seminal text of the Scottish Enlightenment is now available for the first time in a...

First published in 1895, Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland’s legal classic The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I expanded the work of Sir Edward Coke and William Blackstone by exploring the origins of key aspects of English common law and society and with them...

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. A. V. Dicey (1835–1922) was an English jurist, Vinerian Professor of English Law...

Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution was a winner in the Scholarly/Reference category at the Chicago Book Clinic’s 2009 Book & Media Show. Germaine de Staël’s voice, which Napoleon Bonaparte tried to silence by censorship and banishment, is a unique and important...

In the vein of Charles Louis Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), De Lolme’s account of the English system of government exercised an extensive influence on political debate in Britain, on constitutional design in...

Drawing deeply from Aristotle and biblical teaching, Politica presents a unique vision of the commonwealth as a harmonious ordering of natural associations. According to Althusius, the purpose of the state is to protect and encourage social life. The family is the most natural of human associations,...

The Crisis was a London weekly published between January 1775 and October 1776. It was the longest-running weekly pamphlet series printed in the British Atlantic world during those years, and it used unusually bold, pithy language. Neither the longevity of the effort nor the colorful language employed...

This landmark collection of eighty documents created by the American colonists—and not English officials—is the genesis of American fundamental law and constitutionalism. Included are all documents attempting to unite the colonies, beginning with the New England Confederation of 1643. Donald...

Renowned for his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and Reflections on History, Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) has well been described as “the most civilized historian of the nineteenth century.” Judgments on History and Historians consists of records collected by Emil Dürr from Burckhardt’s...

Essential to Mises’s concept of a classical liberal economy is the absence of interference by the state. In World War I, Germany and its allies were overpowered by the Allied Powers in population, economic production, and military might, and its defeat was inevitable. Mises believed that...