Although this is entitled volume 1 and a proposed list of contents for a volume 2 was appended to the work, no volume 2 ever appeared. Spooner takes a strong position on the perpetual property right of an author to his ideas in perpetuity with no government defined limit. The opening chapter has an interesting defence of property rights in general.

This collection of essays was originally published in 1891 in response to a collection of Fabian Essays on Socialism which advocated policies which would eventually lead to the modern welfare state. The theoretical and empirical contributions are fine examples of the classical liberal tradition in British thought.

One of two books by the French liberal Destutt de Tracy which were translated and published by Thomas Jefferson.

This is part of Spencer’s most extensive treatment of sociology, The Principles of Sociology. It is the section dealing with the nature of political institutions such as political heads like chiefs and kings, consultative bodies, the military, and the judiciary. It also contains his most important discussion of the difference between the militant and the industrial types of societies.

Erasmus’s very popular 16th century guide book on how to live a moral, Christian life while avoiding formal ritual and observances.

A letter which first appeared in Benjamin Tucker’s journal Liberty in 1882. Bayard was a Democratic Senator from the state of Delaware who believed that enlightened people like himself were the fittest to govern in the US. Spooner rejected this idea.

Nisbet examines the role of the United States in the world since World War I focusing on the threats that the unprecedented militarization of American life in the decades after 1914, bureaucracy, centralization, and creeping conformity pose to liberty and individual independence in the western world.

There are two versions of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. The first, published anonymously in 1798, was so successful that Malthus soon elaborated on it under his real name. The rewrite, culminating in the sixth edition of 1826, was a scholarly expansion and generalization of the first. In this work Malthus argues that there is a disparity between the rate of growth of population (which increases geometrically) and the rate of growth of agriculture (which increases only arithmetically). He then explores how populations have historically been kept in check.

“Cato” (of Cato’s Letter’s) continues his attack on the waste and militarism of the British Empire which this critique of the idea of permanent “standing” armies.

Marcet was self-taught in many fields and became a successful popularizer of several demanding fields (such as chemistry and economics) in spite of being discriminated against as a women. This book is one of her works of popularizing economic theory, as seen through the eyes of honest John Hopkins, a poor laborer on low wages.