OLL Titles

Acton never completed his projected History of Liberty. The collection contains two chapters from this planned history - on liberty in antiquity and Christianity - and many book reviews where one can piece together Acton’s approach… more

A volume in the collection Studies in Economic Theory, first published by the Institute for Humane Studies. This is a collection of papers given at a conference on Austrian economics in June 1974. They cover the uniqueness of the… more

A 5 volume edition of Plato by the great English Victorian Greek scholar, Benjamin Jowett. The scholarly apparatus is immense and detailed. The online version preserves the marginal comments of the printed edition and has links to… more

Cannan’s justly famous early 20th century edition of Smith’s Wealth of Nations with his introduction and notes.

Grotius’s magnum opus on international law and the laws of war and peace. He wrote this volume while the Thirty Years’ War raged around him in the hope that rational human beings might be able to agree to legal limits on war’s… more

The American Republic is an excellent textbook for classroom use which provides, in a single volume, critical, original documents revealing the character of American discourse on the nature and importance of local government, the… more

One of the first responses to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Wollstonecraft later lived in France during the Terror and wrote a history of the events she witnessed.

Vol. 6 of The Collected Works. A short work in which Buchanan develops his ideas on opportunity cost. He takes an individualist and subjectivist perspective and attempts to integrate this into the orthodox classical and neoclassical… more

The Code of Hammurabi is a collection of the King of Babylon’s laws which were inscribed on stone columns towards the end of his reign. The 282 case laws include economic provisions (prices, tariffs, trade, and commercial… more

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.

Shakespeare’s Henry VIII may be best known not for its plot or poetry, but because during one of its earliest performances a cannon, shot for special effects, caught the theater’s thatched roof on fire, and the Globe burned to the… more

George was not just an advocate of the single tax on the unimproved value of land, but also a strong defender of free trade, as this work demonstrates.

Read the Liberty Classic on this title from Econlib

A 12 volume collection of the works of Alexander Hamilton.

A 4 volume collection of the works of Thomas Paine.

A five volume translation by Dryden.

The Liberty Fund edition of Characteristicks presents the complete 1732 text of this classic work of philosophy and political theory. Also included are faithful reproductions of the stirring engravings that Shaftesbury created to… more

Martineau writes short “tales” to show ordinary readers how the free market operates.

The Pacificus–Helvidius Debates of 1793–1794 matched Hamilton and Madison in the first chapter of an enduring discussion about the proper roles of the executive and legislative branches in the conduct of American foreign policy. The… more

A 9 volume collection edited by Gaillard Hunt in 1900-10.

Douglass’s third and last autobiography of his life as a slave, runaway, and then campaigner for the abolition of slavery. This edition is interesting because of the introduction by one of Britain’s leading classical liberal… more

The Shih Ching (The book of poetry) predates Confucius by some three centuries, although he is often credited with arranging it into its current form sometime around 520 B.C. This work is a compilation of some three hundred verses of… more

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… more

Legge provides lengthy introductions to leading Chinese philosophical works and is own translations.

A thought-provoking collection highlighting individual liberty, personal responsibility, and the unintended consequences of social policies. Sumner’s timeless insights challenge conventional wisdom and offer fresh perspectives on… more

My Thoughts provides a unique window into the mind of the author of The Spirit of the Laws. From the publication of his first masterpiece, Persian Letters, in 1721, until his death in 1755, Montesquieu maintained notebooks in which… more

A foundational work in sociological theory that applies evolutionary principles to the study of human societies. Spencer argues that societies, like biological organisms, evolve from simple to complex structures through… more

Constant worked on this study of humanity’s religious forms and development throughout his life, publishing five volumes between 1824 and 1831. He sought to relate religious forms to historical contexts and civilizational… more

This classic study is one of the few books to explore extensively the many facets of envy—“a drive which lies at the core of man’s life as a social being.” Ranging widely over literature, philosophy, psychology, and the social… more