From Dennis Nezic’s site (the Canadian Libertarian Party), a brief but useful reading list – this is for the young student who asked for one by email yesterday.
INTRODUCTION TO LIBERTY
- Bergland, David – Libertarianism in One Lesson – AMA ASG LF
- Burris, Allan – A Liberty Primer – AMA ASG FF
- Ruwart, Mary – Healing our World – AMA FF LF
- Sprading, Charles ed. – Liberty and the Great Libertarians LF
- Narveson, Jan – The Libertarian IdeaAZ
ECONOMICS
- Block, Walter & Michael Walker – A Lexicon of Economic Thought (FI)
- Hazlitt, Henry – Economics in One Lesson (ASG, LF)
- Friedman, Milton – Free to Choose (LF)
- Reisman, George – The Government Against the Economy (LF)
- von Mises, Ludwig – Human Action (FEE, FF, LF)
EDUCATION
- Boulogne, Jack – The Zoo (FF, FEE)
- Public Education and Indoctrination (FEE, FF)
- Richman, Sheldon – Separating School and State (LF)
ENVIRONMENT
- Anderson, Terry & Donald Leal – Free Market Environmentalism (FF)
- Anderson, Terry L. ed. – NAFTA and the Environment (FI)
- Bast, Joseph, Peter Hill & Richard Rue. – Eco-Sanity (LF)
- Block, Walter ed. – Economics & the Environment (FF, FI)
FICTION
HISTORY
- Lane, Rose Wilder – The Discovery of Freedom (LF)
- Paterson, Isabel – The God of the Machine (LF)
- Weaver, Henry Grady – The Mainspring of Human Progress (FEE,FF)
LAW & CRIME
- Bastiat, Frederic – The Law (FEE, LF)
- Epstein, Richard – Simple Rules for a Complex World (LF)
- Hamowy, Ronald ed. – Dealing with Drugs (FF)
- Lapierre, Wayne – Guns, Crime, and Freedom (LF)
PHILOSOPHY
- Locke, John – Two Treatises of Government (LF)
- Machan, Tibor – Individuals and their Rights (FF)
- Narveson, Jan – The Libertarian Idea (LF)
- Nozick, Robert – Anarchy, State, and Utopia (LF)
- Rand, Ayn – The Capitalist Manifesto (FF, LF)
- Smith, Adam – The Wealth of Nations (FF, LF)
POLITICS
- Peter Brimelow – Patriot Games (LF)
- Browne, Harry – Why Government Doesn’t Work (LF)
- Hayek, F.A. – The Road to Serfdom (FF, LF)
- Herbert, Auberon – The Right & Wrong of Compulsion by the State (FF)
- Horry, Isabella & Michael Walker – Government Spending Facts 2 (FI)
- Kendall, Frances & Leon Louw – Let the People Govern (FF)
- Nock, Albert Jay – Our Enemy, The State (FF, LF)
- Palda, Filip – Election Finance Regulation in Canada (FI)
SOCIAL POLICY
- Adie, Douglas K. – The Mail Monopoly (FI)
- Grant, R.W. – Rent Control and the War against the Poor (ASG)
- Hamowy, Ronald – Canadian Medicine: A Study in Restricted Entry (FI)
- Murray, Charles – Losing Ground (LF)
- Sarlo, Christopher – Poverty in Canada (FI)
WAR
My Comment
These are all from the right libertarian perspective. I’d like to add some people whom right libertarians wouldn’t recognize as libertarian, but I think are. That includes Gandhi (“My Experiments with Truth,” for example). I’d also like to add left-libertarians like Chomsky, Emma Goldman, some leftists who were dead on, like Orwell, and Catholic writers like Chesterton. I don’t think you can understand libertarianism as just a doctrinal creed. In fact, I think you will arrive at morally unsupportable positions if you do. I think you need to read across the spectrum and then try to see what is useful and helps from every perspective. Libertarianism isn’t (or shouldn’t be) an ideology.
It’s more a way of going on. I don’t mean that it should lack principles. I mean that we should try to understand things functionally (as they work) or in context (how they’ve developed in a particular situation) and figure out how they really work. We shouldn’t become fundamentalist in our understanding of language. Or we will end up like the neoconservatives, to whom liberty always seems to be pursued through the most illiberal means.
Off the top of my head, a couple of others:
Fiction: Germinal, Emile Zola
Politics: The Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff
Thanks very much.
Exactly my point. There are lots of non-ideological writers, or even people from outside canonical libertarian texts who are useful.
I think Mary Ruwart’s Healing Our World is more of a left-libertarian book: otherwise, your point is well taken.
Progressive Gabriel Kolko’s THE TRIUMPH OF CONSERVATISM on the big business origins of regulation in the early 20th century strikes me as another book by a non-libertarian that is immensely useful in persuading progressives to the merits of true free markets.
Kolko is great and he was a big influence on my thinking about corporations and regulations.
His foreign policy writing is worth reading too –
“The Roots of American Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Power and Purpose”
The very lands we all along enjoyed
they ravished from the people they destroyed …
All the long pretenses of descent
are shams of right to prop up government.
‘ Tis all invasion, usurpation all;
‘ Tis all by fraud and force that we possess,
and length of time can make no crime the less;
Religion’s always on the strongest side.
Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino (England, 1706)
Lots of fascists (like Rand) and pseudo-libs on that list.
How can a libertarian* reading list not include Thomas Paine (everything, but esp. “Agrarian Justice”), Lysander Spooner (everything, but especially the extremely timely “OUR FINANCIERS: THEIR IGNORANCE, USURPATIONS, AND FRAUDS”), and Henry George.
*=I mean of actual, REAL libertarians, rather than “REAL ESTATE” libertarians, those guys that are totally against everything about government except those handy-dandy land titles that governments distribute to parcel out the latest land they’ve stolen.
Hey –
I like Defoe a lot – “Moll Flanders” for eg.
Paine, sure.
The list was just a starting point and it was oriented toward the right.
I try to avoid using the word fascist unless about people who self-describe as such…
If government theft is behind all property claims, then it can be discounted in everything….
We can work toward modifying claims and laws that perpetuate unjust redistribution or takings, but to be above ethical suspicion, we must assume that contracts entered into without overt fraud are nonetheless valid…if for no other reason than as a means to go on…
Otherwise, you don’t own the computer you write on or the shirt you wear either….you see the problem?
Alan, would you consider Bakunin’s “God and the State” to be a libertarian text?
His thinking seems to mirror your own…
I (personally) am NOT saying that “government theft” is behind all property claims (though obviously others have); my view is that government OWNERSHIP is behind ALL property claims and that the “real owner” delegates apparent and sub-ownership as it feels best serves its quest to survive for as long as possible. The sub-ownership (of all of a government’s property) situation is analogous to a parent buying a bicycle and giving it to their child: the parent and child may act as if the bike belongs to the child, but the actual owner is always the parent.
The child doesn’t actually own the computer they work on nor do they own the shirt they wear, yet they act as if they do (and for all practical intents that is the case), but if they should spill some ink onto the shirt or soda/pop onto the computer’s keyboard, the true state of affairs may become more evident.
Likewise, people are allowed to act as if they are the actual owners of the government’s property until such time as they do something with that property that earns the government’s reproach: then the actual state of affairs becomes evident. If the government says the contracts between people are valid, then they are valid but only until the government decides they aren’t. Yes, “in order to go on” we do need to act as if the contracts are valid, and since that usually serves the government’s purposes, that’s what it lets us do (until it no longer suits its purposes).
From this point-of-view, the purpose of the U.S. government’s observation of “rights” was a pragmatic effort to forestall the overthrow of the government for as long as possible: “If we don’t add in a Bill of Rights to this Constitution, we will have another Revolution before you know it”, so they added it in.
Regards Bakunin, JC, I scanned through “God and the State” and didn’t see anything that “sounded like me”, so could you be more specific?
Hi Alan –
There’s some truth in that..especially these days.
But – correct me if I’m wrong – could you be confusing the government’s monopoly on enforcement of contracts with the government’s ownership of property?
I know that many decisions recently have gone that way.
But that’s not the way it should be….or was..
The courts HAVE struck down excessive government claims in takings cases.
That is precisely why we have a justice system and a judicial branch….to check the government.