In this excerpt from Letter IX of John Rankin’s Letters on American Slavery, Rankin argues that slavery is incompatible with ...

During a time when enslaved Americans sought freedom through escape, Elizabeth Freeman challenged her legal status as property—and won.

Libertarians believe that, in politics, liberty is the most important value. Almost everyone wants freedom for themselves, but a libertarian also seeks to protect and expand the freedom of others.

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 ...

Throughout the first 150 years of America’s independence, political leaders and the public alike sought to keep the country out of armed conflicts that did not have direct relevance to the nation’s ...

Join host Dr. Anthony Comegna on a series of libertarian explorations into the past. Liberty Chronicles combines innovative libertarian thinking about history with specialist interviews, primary and ...

The non- aggression axiom is an ethical principle often appealed to as a basis for libertarian rights theory. The principle forbids “aggression,” which is understood to be any and all forcible ...

Étienne de La Boétie was a French jurist, poet, and political theorist who is best remembered as the subject of Michael de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” and for his own essay “The Discourse on ...

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 ...

Plato and Aristotle both embraced a vision of the good life which saw commercial activity as necessarily beneath political, academic, and artistic life. Darren Nah is a Ph.D. student studying ...

“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.” ...

Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ism .org, a project of the Cato Institute. Most of his work focuses on examining thinkers who predate classical liberalism but ...