Political Thought

Our titles in political thought encompass the ideals of the classical liberal tradition, such as self-government, the rule of law, and constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press. The collection includes foundational writings from such thinkers as John Locke, David Hume, Bernard Mandeville, and Alexis de Tocqueville, as well as twentieth-century perspectives from writers like Michael Oakeshott and Bertrand de Jouvenel. These titles represent thinkers from different times and contexts, offering the reader a variety of texts that have helped shape the ideas of liberty in today’s society.

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  • Envy

    by Helmut Schoeck

    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 sciences, Professor Schoeck— a distinguished sociologist and anthropologist—elucidates both the constructive and destructive consequences of envy in social life. Perhaps most…

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  • Essays on Economics and Society

    by John Stuart Mill

    Liberty Fund is pleased to make available in paperback eight of the original thirty-three cloth volumes of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill that were first published by the University of Toronto Press that remain most relevant to liberty and responsibility in the twenty-first century. Born in London in 1806 and educated at the knee of his father, the…

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  • Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society

    by John Stuart Mill

    Liberty Fund is pleased to make available in paperback eight of the original thirty-three cloth volumes of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill that were first published by the University of Toronto Press that remain most relevant to liberty and responsibility in the twenty-first century. Born in London in 1806 and educated at the knee of his father, the…

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  • Essays on Individuality

    by Felix Morley

    “Individuality is freedom lived,” wrote John Dos Passos in a passage that serves as a fitting introduction to this unusual volume dedicated to the critical examination of the place of the individual in contemporary society. Contributors are John Dos Passos; Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.; Milton Friedman; Friedrich A. Hayek; Joseph Wood Krutch; William M. McGovern; James C. Malin; Felix Morley;…

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  • Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary

    by David Hume

    This edition contains the thirty-nine essays included in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary that made up Volume I of the 1777 posthumous Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. It also includes ten essays that were withdrawn or left unpublished by Hume for various reasons. Eugene F. Miller was Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia from 1967 until…

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  • An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times and Other Writings

    by John Brown

    John Brown (1715–1766) was a clergyman who achieved great but transient fame as a writer and moralist. His attack on Shaftesbury and “moral sense” philosophy, against which he employed utilitarian arguments and also arguments deriving from God’s benevolent intentions toward his creation, was published in 1751 and was later praised by John Stuart Mill. The central text of this volume,…

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  • The Ethics of Redistribution

    by Bertrand de Jouvenel

    In this concise and elegant work, first published in 1952, Bertrand de Jouvenel purposely ignores the economic evidence that redistributional efforts sap incentives and are economically destructive. Rather, he stresses the commonly disregarded ethical arguments showing that redistribution is ethically indefensible for, and practically unworkable in, a complex society. Bertrand de Jouvenel was an author and teacher, first publishing On

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  • The Excellencie of a Free-State

    by Marchamont Nedham

    This edition brings back into print, after two and a half centuries, the pioneering work of English republicanism, Marchamont Nedham’s The Excellencie of a Free-State, which was written in the wake of the execution of King Charles I. First published in 1656, and compiled from previously written editorials in the parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Politicus, The Excellencie of a Free-State addressed…

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  • The Fable of the Bees

    by Bernard Mandeville

    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 of the Bees 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…

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  • Fame and the Founding Fathers

    by Douglass Adair

    The fifteen articles, essays, notes, and documents gathered in this collection are a permanent contribution to study of the American founding. As teacher, critic, and editor of the William & Mary Quarterly, Adair demonstrated what Trevor Colbourn—one of his principal students—describes as an “extraordinary ability to enter empathetically into the experience and ideology of the Founding Fathers while at the…

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  • The Federalist

    by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

    The Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, constitutes a text central to the American political tradition. Written and published in newspapers in 1787 and 1788 to explain and promote ratification of the proposed Constitution for the United States, which were then bound by the Articles of Confederation, The Federalist remains of singular importance to students of liberty…

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  • The Founders’ Constitution

    by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner

    A triumph of primary-source research, The Founders’ Constitution is a brilliant five-volume series that presents “extracts from all the leading works of political theory, history, law, and constitutional argument on which the Framers and their contemporaries drew and which they themselves produced.” The documentary sources and inspirations of The Founders’ Constitution reach to the early seventeenth century and extend through…

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