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Liberty and Liberalism (1888)

Smith was a follower of Herbert Spencer and the English Liberty and Property Defence League. His book is a critique of the growing intervention of the state in economic and civil matters in Australia and elsewhere in the late 19th century.

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Discourses Upon Trade

North ’s Discourses upon Trade is one of the earliest attempts to theorize as a whole the workings of a market economy in England. There are two discourses: one concerning “the abatement of interest” and the other on “coyned money”.

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In Praise of Folly

The personification of Folly comes to earth to expose the follies, foibles, and failings of humans. Illustrated with 77 woodcuts by Hans Holbein.

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An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature

An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature is a concerted effort to find a middle way between the two extremes that dominated the religious dispute of the English civil war in the seventeenth century. At one extreme end of the spectrum was the antinomian assertion that the elect were redeemed by God’s free grace and thereby free from ordinary moral obligations. At the other end of the spectrum was the Arminian rejection of predestination and assertion that Christ died for all, not just for the elect. Faced with the violence of these disputes, Nathaniel Culverwell attempted a moderate defense of reason and natural law, arguing, in the words of Robert Greene, that “reason and faith are distinct lights, yet they are not opposed; they are complementary and harmonious. Reason is the image of God in man, and to deny right reason is to deny our relation to God.”

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Pictures of the Socialistic Future

Pictures of the Socialistic Future is Richter’s satire of what would happen to Germany if the socialism espoused by the trade unionists, social democrats, and Marxists was actually put into practice. It is thus a late 19th century version of Orwell’s 1984, minus the extreme totalitarianism which Orwell had witnessed in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia but which was still inconceivable to 19th century liberals. The main point of the book is to show that government ownership of the means of production and centralised planning of the economy would not lead to abundance as the socialists predicted would happen when capitalist “inefficiency and waste” were “abolished”. The problem of incentives in the absence of profits, the free rider problem, the public choice insight about the vested interests of bureaucrats and politicians, the connection between economic liberty and political liberty, were all wittily addressed by Richter, much to the annoyance of his socialist opponents.

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State Papers and Speeches on the Tariff

Taussig has collected speeches and reports by Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, R.J. Walker, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster on the issue of free trade and tariffs. He used these documents in his course at Harvard University on the History of the Tariff.

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The Postulates of English Political Economy

Alfred Marshall, in his introduction to this book, argued that Bagehot provided a useful service to readers by removing the older and less understood Ricardian aspects from political economy and reworking them. Bagehot in turn in his introduction, thought that English political economy in the 100 years since Adam Smith had been misunderstood abroad by being exlsively identified with the cause of free trade and English business interests. He wished to remedy that situation. Another copy of this book can be found in HTML format at our sister website Econlib.

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The Theory of Money and Credit

In 1912, when Mises, at age thirty-one, wrote this landmark book, no monetary theory could be described as both securely founded on economic reality and properly incorporated into an analysis of the entire economic system. The Theory of Money and Credit opened new vistas. It integrated monetary theory into the main body of economic analysis for the first time, providing fresh new insights into the nature of money and its role in the economy. As the well-known “Austrian” economist Rothbard writes in his new foreword: “This book performed the mighty feat of integrating monetary with micro theory, of building monetary theory upon the individualistic foundations of general economic analysis.”

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