A collection of Mill’s writings on economics, including his early essays on The Impolicy of a Bounty on the Exportation of Grain, Commerce Defended, and selections from his Elements of Political Economy and his History of British India.
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. Liberty Fund’s edition of the work in the collection “The Works of Ludwig von Mises.” See also the Reading Guide for this title available at #EconlibReads.
Originally published by Yale University Press in 1944, Bureaucracy is a classic fundamental examination of the nature of bureaucracies and free markets in juxtaposition to various political systems. Bureaucracy contrasts the two forms of economic management—that of a free market economy and that of a bureaucracy. In the market economy entrepreneurs are driven to serve consumers by their desire to earn profits and to avoid losses. In a bureaucracy, the managers must comply with orders issued by the legislative body under which they operate; they may not spend without authorization and they may not deviate from the path prescribed by law. Writing in an age of exuberant socialism, Ludwig von Mises here lucidly demonstrates how the efficiencies of private ownership and control of public good production ultimately trump the guesswork of publicly administered “planning” through codes and “officialdom.” Although Mises aptly critiques bureaucracy and expounds thoroughly upon the immense power of law-like codes of commissions and administrations, he does not condemn nor dismiss bureaucracy but rather frames its proper bounds within constitutional democratic governments.
The history of Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty is complex. When Grotius’s personal papers were auctioned in The Hague in 1864, scholars discovered that Mare Liberum was just one chapter in a manuscript of 163 folios, written in justification of the capture of the Portuguese merchantman Santa Catarina in the Strait of Singapore in February 1603. Robert Fruin persuaded the scholar H. G. Hamaker to transcribe and publish it in 1868. The Liberty Fund edition is based on the one prepared by Gwladys L. Williams and Walter H. Zeydel for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It combines the original text and new material.
Although The Present State of Germany was first made available in English over three centuries ago, it has been virtually unavailable in English since the period of the American Founding. By 1696, Pufendorf was well known in England as a staunch defender of the Protestant cause and as one of the renovators of natural law. His writings were familiar to such luminaries as Locke and figured prominently in James Tyrell’s Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681). The editor of this volume, Michael J. Seidler, describes this work of Pufendorf as “an account of German constitutional law detailing the historical relations between the Emperor and the Estates as well as an examination of the legitimating foundations of Imperial authority, a general analysis of the nature and requirements of political sovereignty, and a reconceptualization of the different forms of political order… . Its central distinction between so-called regular and irregular states, resting on the question of the locus of sovereignty, demotes the traditional political categories into mere administrative possibilities and thereby creates a more general problematic of freedom and authority with which we are still wrestling today. That is, it raises, at a very early stage in the contractarian tradition which we have inherited, the basic question of how effective political unity is compatible with competing values of diversity and individual liberty.”
A double page broadside pamphlet in which Spooner appeals to the non-slave owning population of the South to support the abolition of slavery.
The three treatises in On the Manipulation of Money and Credit were written in German between 1923 and 1931. Together they include some of Mises’s most important contributions to monetary and trade-cycle theories. In the first essay, “Stabilization of the Monetary Unit from the Viewpoint of Theory,” written during the period of German hyperinflation, Mises discusses the consequences of the fluctuating purchasing power of paper money. The second essay, “Monetary Stabilization and Cyclical Policy,” written in 1928, presents Mises’s business-cycle theory. The third piece, “The Causes of the Economic Crisis,” is a speech Mises delivered in 1931 exploring the nature and role of the market and cyclical changes in business conditions.
A path-breaking British Parliamentary report, primarily written by Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick, into the state of public charity in Britain. It was one of the key pieces of reformist legislation during the Victorian era.
Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern explores the very roots of liberty by examining the development of modern constitutionalism from its ancient and medieval origins. Derived from a series of lectures delivered by Charles Howard McIlwain at Cornell University in the 1938–39 academic year, these lectures provide a useful introduction to the development of modern constitutional forms.
Many of the essays in this volume are published here for the first time. The editors, Geoffrey Brennan and A. M. C. Waterman, have divided Heyne’s essays thematically to cover three general areas: the ethical foundations of free markets, the connection between those ethical foundations and Christian thought, and the teaching of economics—both method and substance. 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 theological underpinnings.
