In this excerpt from *Social Statics*, Spencer makes a radical claim: that an individual may sever all connections with the state. ##1. The Right to Voluntary Outlawry As a corollary to the ...

In this excerpt from The Rights of Man, here Thomas Paine argues that the order naturally observed in human society is not the result of government. Great part of that order which reigns among mankind ...

There is perhaps no writer better at articulating the economic way of thinking and exposing the myths that plague political debate than the Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat. During his short life (1801-1850 ...

Kant discusses his theory of the state, concluding, “Whatever a people cannot impose upon itself cannot be imposed upon it by the legislator either.” Immanuel Kant is considered to be one of the ...

Minocher Rustom “Minoo” Masani was an Indian politician, a leading figure of the erstwhile Swatantra Party, a three- time Member of Parliament, and was among the founders of the Indian Liberal Group ...

In this essay from What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1911), Sumner denounces social reformers who want to run other people’s lives. William Graham Sumner held a professorship in political economy ...

Emma Goldman discusses the nature of the state as an institution and how it is fundamentally at odds with the dignity of the individual. Emma Goldman was a socialist anarchist activist, writer, and ...

“The Church, indeed, taken as a whole, has been constantly changing—constantly advancing—her history is diversified and progressive.” [Church society] was almost completely organized before the close ...

For those interested in history, Menger’s Principles of Economics offers a way to unify gritty historical experience with pure economic theory. Carl Menger has played an interesting supporting role in ...

The Swatantra Party carried the torch of classical liberalism in India in the 1960s and 70s. C. Rajagopalachari was the final Governor- General of India, an associate of Gandhi, and the founder of the ...

Donisthorpe stakes his claim for democracy, both the general trend of history and the first step to a more individualistic world. In his first chapter of Individualism: A System of Politics, ...

Menger’s second chapter invokes knowledge and society to connect causal chains of productivity from the individual to larger economic processes. In the two preceding sections we have seen how separate ...