Historian Alice Felt Tyler once used the expression “Freedom’s Ferment” to characterize the antebellum period in American history.’ It was an apt phrase referring to the multitude of reform movements, religious enthusiasms, and social experiments which transformed American culture in fundamentally important ways. The modem abolitionist movement emerged out of this cauldron of ferment — a movement which called for immediate repentance from the sin of slavery, and denounced the South’s peculiar institution in thunderous, vituperative terms

Economists have been relatively silent about the legislation from the 1930’s which supports unionism and collective bargaining in the United States. A failure to apply economic analysis to the Norris-LaGuardia and Wagner acts has allowed a consensus about this legislation to develop among labor writers, basically by default.

Volume 6, Number 3 (1982)

Substantive due process refers to a judicial policy that substantively protects, under the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, activities that are not elsewhere secured in the Constitution. With reference to the protection of economic liberties, the doctrine is referred to as economic due process.

Volume 6, Number 3 (1982)

This paper is a consideration of whether there could be such universal and natural human rights, or whether such a suggestion is indeed “simple nonsense.” So on this occasion no attempt will be made definitively to establish what, if any, there actually are.

Volume 6, Number 3 (1982)

The central ideas of contemporary libertarianism have taken many centuries to evolve. The single most important aspect of libertarian theory to have emerged during this time is the concept of proprietary justice. The proprietary theory of justice is concerned with just one thing: the crucial determination of just versus unjust property titles of individuals in their own bodies and in the material objects around them. The determination of property titles is highly critical because, in the deepest sense, all property is ultimately private.

Volume 6, Number 3 (1982)

In his recent work, Tyranny and Legitimacy, James Fishkin advances an argument against Roben Nozick’s theory of, what Fishkin calls, “absolute rights” by trying to demonstrate that such a theory would legitimate tyranny.

Volume 6, Number 3 (1982)

Although historians had long missed the importance of religion in American politics, it has recently become a central topic. My focus will be on the late- nineteenth century, with particular concern for why voting and party affiliation were highly correlated with religious preferences. I will attempt to broaden the standard argument to include not merely denominational preferences but also moral or ethical views.

Volume 6, Number 3 (1982)

As we approach the centennial of the Second Anglo–Boer War (Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, or “Second War for Freedom”), reassessment of the South African experience seems in order. Whether the recent surrender by Afrikaner political leaders of their “central theme” and the dismantling of their grandiose Apartheid state will lead to heaven on earth (as some of the Soweto “comrades” expected), or even to a merely tolerable multiracial polity, remains in doubt.

In a long editorial entitled “Let the People See,” which appeared in the New York Tribune in 1852, Horace Greeley, the great editor and leader of the Whig party, gloomily evaluated his party’s chances at the polls that autumn. He believed that in any work place, a machine shop for example, fifteen out of twenty workmen supported Whig economic policies. However they would not vote for the patty. Why not?

Volume 6, Number 3 (1982)

Among the most popular and consequential beliefs of our age is the belief in collective security. Nothing less significant than the legitimacy of the modern state rests on this belief.

This article demonstrates that the idea of collective security is a myth that provides no justification for the modern state, and that all security is and must be private.

Volume 14, Number 1 (1999)