Raised since early childhood to promote Jeremy Bentham's theory of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill both expanded on those ideas and developed many of his own regarding individual freedom and liberty.

John Dickinson led an active political life. He was a member of the Continental Congress, served as Governor of Pennsylvania from 1782 to 1785, and was a member of the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in 1856. He published his autobiography, Up from Slavery, in 1901. The word “up” implies rising from lower to higher. In his writings, Washington frequently ...

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 ...

Spontaneous order theory is properly located in the history of social science. Indeed, the only part of social theory that can genuinely be said to be scientific derives from it. This scientific ...

While Karl Marx hated Pierre- Joseph Proudhon and his philosophy of mutualism, a libertarian can find in it much to appreciate. Although Herbert Spencer has been rightly regarded as the most ...

Libertarianism and conservatism are frequently classified together as right- wing political philosophies, which is understandable given the content and history of these views. Both philosophies are ...

Crypto- anarchism is a philosophy whose advocates think technology can assist them in creating communities based on consent rather than coercion. Crypto- anarchists wish to be free from state ...

The origin of the idea that liberty could be preserved through the separation of powers endures through the arguments of Polybius. Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ...

A libertarian world won’t eliminate all poverty, but it offers powerful tools for greatly reducing it, and improving the lives of the poorest and least privileged. Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at ...

Blanks argues that there is no good libertarian reason to support the South’s secession prior to the Civil War. There is a strain of libertarian contrarianism that holds that the Confederate States of ...

Monroe was not a deep thinker, as were Jefferson and Madison, nor was he the charismatic leader that Washington was. “Everything Wrong with the Presidents” series focuses on, as the title suggests, ...