Biographies

Men of influential and privileged status are rarely inclined to toss all their privileges aside to engage in the lonely and dangerous task of worki

Whatever their motives may have been, whatever at any given moment they thought of themselves as doing, Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke advanced the libertarian idea, just as John Lilburne did. All three of them are part of the libertarian tradition.

For all these reasons, appealing to a monarch to impose laissez-faire from above can only be a losing strategy.

"The true end of man — not that which capricious inclination prescribes for him, but that which is prescribed by eternally immutable reason — is the highest and most harmonious cultivation of his faculties into one whole. For this cultivation, freedom is the first and indispensible condition."

Only such a spirit could succeed in building a movement, Austrian and libertarian, twice in his distinguished career.

Recorded at Mises University 2010.

"The more controls and taxation a State imposes on its people," Sam wrote, "the more they will evade and defy them.

Recorded at Mises University 2010. Includes an introduction by Mark Thornton. 

American libertarians would be particularly interested in Peake's great novel, since the perspective on the individual and society that pervades it is very libertarian in the broadest sense of that word.

What Thoreau was defending here, in 1849, was essentially the same concept the English philosopher Herbert Spencer defended two years later, in his book Social Statics, as "the right to ignore the State."