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The Economic Point of View (1976)

Thinking like an economist has been a point of pride since Adam Smith. What often seems to be an endless muddle of political and social perspectives, pseudo-scientific analysis, journalistic advocacies, and financial matters from daily household concerns to the stock market, is suddenly illuminated once one discovers the economic point of view. Kirzner’s The Economic Point of View is a thoughtful study of how and why economists are successful at sorting out certain issues but less successful at others, issues from welfare to wealth to human actions. Ludwig von Mises, for whom Kirzner once worked as a graduate assistant, wrote the Foreword to the first edition.

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The Ideal Element in Law

Roscoe Pound, former dean of Harvard Law School, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Calcutta in 1948. In these lectures, he criticized virtually every modern mode of interpreting the law because he believed the administration of justice had lost its grounding and recourse to enduring ideals. Now published in the U.S. for the first time, Pound’s lectures are collected in Liberty Fund’s The Ideal Element in Law, Pound’s most important contribution to the relationship between law and liberty. The Ideal Element in Law was a radical book for its time and is just as meaningful today as when Pound’s lectures were first delivered. Pound’s view of the welfare state as a means of expanding government power over the individual speaks to the front-page issues of the new millennium as clearly as it did to America in the mid-twentieth century. Pound argues that the theme of justice grounded in enduring ideals is critical for America. He views American courts as relying on sociological theories, political ends, or other objectives, and in so doing, divorcing the practice of law from the rule of law and the rule of law from the enduring ideal of law itself.

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Hobbes on Civil Association

Hobbes on Civil Association consists of Oakeshott’s four principal essays on Hobbes and on the nature of civil association as civil association pertains to ordered liberty. The essays are “Introduction to Leviathan” (1946); “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes” (1960); “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes” (1937); and, “Leviathan : A Myth” (1947). The foreword remarks the place of these essays within Oakeshott’s entire corpus.

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