“Thou sweet dictator of the human breast, as soon as we lose sight of thee, we forfeit our happiness here as well as hereafter.” Caroline Breashears is professor of English at St. Lawrence University.

Smith explains why benevolence is desirable but justice is essential to how we measure our behavior in the eyes of others. Adam Smith was a Scottish political philosopher and economist, considered one ...

Tocqueville warns of the dangers from a nurturing government “extending its arm over the whole community.” I had remarked during my stay in the United States that a democratic state of society, ...

I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other. If this be ...

Wollstonecraft argues the case for women’s rights entirely in libertarian terms of equal and natural rights.

Prosperity and property rights are inextricably linked. The importance of having well-defined and strongly protected property rights is now widely recognized among economists and policymakers. A ...

Libertarianism, and the classical liberalism from which it sprang, supports a strictly limited state, if indeed its adherents recognize the legitimacy of the state at all. The minimal state is a ...

Did Adam Smith—celebrated hero of free trade—make a big exception for reasons of national defense? Would he support the Jones Act of today? Caleb Petitt argues that a careful reading of Smith on the ...

Crypto- anarchism is a philosophy whose advocates think technology can assist them in creating communities based on consent rather than coercion.

Mchangama argues for the necessity of the right to own not just personal property, but all property, including the means of production.

Anarchism is a theory of society without the state in which the market provides all public goods and services, such as law and order. Although most anarchists oppose all large institutions, public or ...

The origin of the idea that liberty could be preserved through the separation of powers endures through the arguments of Polybius.