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.

A collection of eighty documents which demonstrate how local government in colonial America was the seedbed of American constitutionalism. Most of these documents, commencing with the Agreement of the Settlers at Exeter in New Hampshire, July 5, 1639, and concluding with Joseph Galloway’s Plan of Union, 1774—”the immediate precursor to the Articles of Confederation”—have never before been accessible to the general reader or available in a single volume.

Thomas Gordon’s translation of Sallust’s histories with Gordon’s lengthy commentaries and his translation of Cicero’s Four Orations against Catiline, and other speeches. This copy was owned by John Adams and has his name on the title page and some annotations by him.

As professor of law at the College of William and Mary, St. George Tucker in 1803 published View of the Constitution - the first extended, systematic commentary on the United States Constitution after its ratification and later its amendment by the Bill of Rights. View was originally part of Tucker’s “Americanized” or “republicanized” edition of the multivolume Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone. Generations of American law students, lawyers, judges, and statesmen learned their Blackstone - and also their understanding of the Constitution - through Tucker. As Clyde N. Wilson notes, “Tucker is the exponent of Jeffersonian republicanism … in contrast to the commercial republicanism of New England that has since the Civil War been taken to be the only true form of American philosophy.” In addition to the entirety of View, the Liberty Fund volume includes seven other essays from Tucker’s renowned edition of Blackstone. These include “On the Study of Law,” “Of the Unwritten, or Common Law of England,” and “Of the Several Forms of Government.”

A selection of passages taken from Ghazzali’s longer works.

John Taylor of Caroline (1753-1824) was one of the foremost philosophers of the States’ rights Jeffersonians of the early national period. In keeping with his lifelong mission as a “minority man,” John Taylor wrote Tyranny Unmasked not only to assault the protective tariff and the mercantilist policies of the times but also “to examine general principles in relation to commerce, political economy, and a free government.” Originally published in 1822, it is the only major work of Taylor’s that has never before been reprinted. As an early discussion of the principles of governmental power and their relationship to political economy and liberty, Tyranny Unmasked is an important primary source in the study of American history and political thought.

Having lost his valuable estate in Pennsylvania during the American Revolution, the Loyalist Galloway spent the rest of his years in exile in Britain lobbying the government for compensation and writing books like this one to justifying his position.