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sun_stealer
sun_stealer
09 August 2008 @ 09:57 pm
Libertarian Reading List: a first draft  
Greetings my brothers and sisters in the crusade for liberty. As some of you may noticed, Ron Paul has generated a lot of enthusiasm for the libertarian movement leading to an influx of new people joining the patriotic ranks of us, sons of Liberty. Unfortunately, a lot of these people are neophytes and know nothing about our righteous political philosophy. So in an effort to enlighten our newer brethren, I have compiled a reading list of libertarian materials. This list encompasses all ideologies falling under the libertarian banner and spans the history of libertarian political theory. Of course, this being my first attempt at compiling such a list, any suggestions to fill in the gaps would be greatly appreciated:

The Constitution of Liberty by F. A. Hayek

The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

Free to Choose by Milton Friedman

Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick

Common Sense by Thomas Paine

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

The Federalist Papers by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay

Cato’s Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon

Discourses on Livy by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu

Discourses Concerning Government by Algernon Sidney

Human Action by Ludwig von Mises

On the Republic by Cicero

De Regimene Principium by Thomas Aquinas

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson

Politics by Aristotle

Two Treatises of Government by John Locke

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock

The Machinery of Freedom by Michael Friedman

For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto by Murray Rothbard

Man, Economy, and State by Murray Rothbard

Power and Market by Murray Rothbard

The Structure of Liberty Randy Barnett

The Revolution: A Manifesto by Ron Paul

Speaking of Liberty by Lew Rockwell

A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

 

Democracy: The God that Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe*

The New Libertarian Manifesto by Samuel Edward Konkin III**

 

*warning: Hoppe is batshit insane. 

**warning: Be very wary of Konkin. His conflation of the Free Market and the Black Market is a lethal fallacy. (I will explain why in the comments section.) I included his manifesto simply because a number of libertarians subscribe to his deleterious ideology known as agorism.


update: for those of you reading this list here, please disregard everything listed in italics. I included them to be fair to the other types of libertarians and represent the entire libertarian community. Everything that is not italicized represents proper Whig Minarchism.

 
4 comments | Leave a comment
 
( 4 comments — Post a new comment )
sun_stealer[info]sun_stealer on August 10th, 2008 02:20 am (UTC)
Don't comment here, this was meant for the Libertarian community. Go there to comment.
Kirsten Anne[info]carbonelle on October 18th, 2008 05:47 pm (UTC)
"Libertarian Materials"
While the set of books in your list do (or have) all contribute(d) to libertarian political philosophy; they are not all libertarian. Many date to periods before a libertarian banner existed.

I write this in a spirit of friendliness: though I am no longer a properly registered Libertarian, I am very sympathetic to (most) of the philosophy. I merely noticed that I rolled my eyes at (what appeared to be) the appropriation of certain classically liberal documents.

Certainly, anyone who is interested in libertarian political philosophy would be well served by reading this list. But then, a good quarter of these titles ought to be read by every American1 citizen, whether conservative (classically liberal), liberatarian or progressive.


[1] Or any non-American hoping to understand our political experiment, for that matter.
whswhs[info]whswhs on October 24th, 2008 05:44 am (UTC)
It's a pretty good list, though not all works on it are equally suitable; Goldwater is of historical relevance to the emergence of libertarianism but can hardly be called an outright libertarian. And it has at least one important omission: David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, a minor classic of anarchocapitalism and much better to my mind than Rothbard's For a New Liberty.
sun_stealer[info]sun_stealer on November 1st, 2008 12:11 am (UTC)
The history and evolution of the libertarian movement is critical to the understanding of libertarianism. No ideology is immaculately conceived. Also, if we're getting into it, libertarianism was born when several different groups: classical liberals, individualist anarchists, and those deemed heretics by the Objectivists, all independently adopted the name libertarianism.
 
 

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