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Quotations about Liberty and Power | Items
of Note | Recent
Additions | News | Structure
of the Site | Features | About
the OLL Website | Liberty
Fund's Other Websites | Copyright and Fair Use Statement
Quotations about Liberty and Power
The Australian barrister and radical individualist thinker Bruce Smith (1851-1937) warned that the new form of democracy sweeping the Enlgish-speaking world would introduce a new form of “class privilege” via the ballot box:
If there is any truth in these reflections, then the masses, having deprived kings of their despotic power, and the aristocracy and wealthy classes of any privileges they may have enjoyed, seem to be inclining now towards the creation of privileges for themselves, as against the propertied classes. To demand such advantages, or, if obtained, to persist in holding them, is simply to turn round on their own principles; for the author of “The Radical Programme” says that the “preservation of class privileges” is “the fundamental doctrine and uniform aim of Conservatism.”
In the last chapter I explained my reasons for believing that English-speaking communities will have yet to pass through a long period of well-meant but misconceived and abortive legislation—the inevitable “measles,” as it were, of democratic or popular government. I see no escape from the conclusion that, quite apart from the popular ignorance of the political science, so long as the masses pin their faith to the belief I have just mentioned, or to the bald principle of “majority” voting as a test of wisdom, the chances of legislation, beneficial to society as a whole, are well-nigh hopeless…
It is truly appalling to contemplate what life would become if each of these, and the hundred and one other wild and immature theories which are now in the air, were allowed to be carried into practice. Life would indeed be unbearable. Yet reflection will show that we are fast tending in that direction; for if we turn our eyes towards impending legislation, whether regarding commercial or social matters, we find that our individual liberty is being slowly but surely curtailed in a manner which will not for a moment stand the test of criticism, by the light of true principles.
See full quote and previous quotations about liberty. Read the full quote in context here. [More works by Bruce Smith (1851 – 1937) and on 19th Century English Radical Individualists] |
Items
of Note |
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Manuel Ayau (1925-2010)
Champion of Liberty
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Manuel Ayau (1925-2010) died on Wednesday August 4, 2010. He was the founder and former rector and teacher of economics
at Universidad Francisco Marroquin. Begun as an alternative to the prevailing
statist views of higher education in Guatemala, Francisco Marroquin is now
regarded as that country’s finest university. In addition to being a successful
businessman, Ayau is a former Chairman of the Guatemala Stock Exchange, was
a member of the Guatemala House of Representatives, and served as President
of the Mont Pelerin Society. He also served for many years on the Board of
Liberty Fund. For additional obituaries see this page.
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Library of Congress Web Archive Minerva |
The Online Library of Liberty website has been selected by the Library
of Congress to be archived as part of their Minerva
project to collect and preserve material "of historical importance
to the Congress and to the American people." The OLL website will
join a select group of websites which will be cataloged and preserved
for future generations of researchers. It will be part
of the "Single Sites" collection of thematic or event-based
web sites - presumably our theme of "liberty" is what
caught their attention. [More]
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Liberty Fund's 50th Anniversary |
In 2010 we are celebrating the 50th
anniversary of the founding of Liberty
Fund by Pierre
F. Goodrich (1894-1973).
The Foundation develops, supervises, and finances its
own educational activities to foster thought and encourage
discourse on the nature of individual liberty, limited
and constitutional government, and the free market. It
does this by publishing classic works on liberty, organizing
conferences, and hosting websites to promote the understanding
of individual liberty.
The 50th Anniversary
Edition of the books catalog is now available. You
can download the Autumn/Winter
2010 Books Catalog here in PDF format (8.2
MB), or visit our Online
Books Catalog where books can also be ordered.
The 50th Anniversary Edition of the Portable
Library of Liberty data
DVD is also available. It contains 1,002 full-text
books from the OLL collection and 34 hours of mp3 audio
from the Intellectual
Portrait Series and The
Legacy of Hayek lectures. The PLL DVD is available free of charge
upon request.
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Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835,
1840).
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Liberty Fund is pleased to announce a new definitive
translation of Alexis
de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835,
1840) by James T. Schleifer in 4 volumes. It is based
upon the critical French edition edited by Eduardo
Nolla who also edited the Liberty Fund edition. The
printed version is a bilingual edition with the French
on the left hand page and the English translation on
the right. For copyright reasons, the online version
contains only the English translation. Copies of the
bilingual edition can be ordered from our online
catalog. The online English version of the text can be found here.
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Recent
Additions |
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To the Library (1,244
items, 1,016 in HTML) (RSS):
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Liberty Fund Titles
added to the Library (203
items):
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News |
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The 5th edition of
the Portable Library of Liberty data DVD is now available. It contains
1,002 titles from the OLL in EBook PDF format and 36 hours of MP3
audio from our audio collection. Request a
complimentary copy and include your postal address and indicate
your browser preference (Firefox/Safari or IE8). If you have trouble
viewing the PLL in IE8 see this
page for help.
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2010 is the 50th
anniversary of the founding of Liberty Fund
by Pierre F. Goodrich in 1960. The Foundation develops, supervises,
and finances its own educational activities to foster thought
and encourage discourse on the nature of individual liberty,
limited and constitutional government, and the free market. It
does this by publishing classic works on liberty, organizing
conferences, and hosting websites to promote understanding of
individual liberty.
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Structure of the Site |
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The
Forum is the place where discussion about people,
the books,
and the ideas these
books contain take place. It contains articles, essays, biographies,
bibliographies, and other educational material about the texts.
Subscribe to the RSS feed
to be contacted when new material is added. [See the detailed
User
Guide].
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The
Library is
where electronic versions of classic books about individual
liberty are stored. They
are in a variety of formats - facsimile PDFs so scholars can
view the original text, HTML for ease of searching and attractive
layout, and text-based PDF EBooks for personal use. Subscribe
to the RSS feed
to be contacted when new material is added. [See the detailed
User
Guide].
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Authors - the OLL
contains works by hundreds of authors from Ancient Sumeria
to the present, and is organized by people, historical periods,
and schools of thought. Each author's bio page contains a brief
description of their life and works, a list of their owrks
online, and where possible a picture. [See Authors
(by Period) and Groups
& Collections]
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Titles - the OLL
contains over 1,200 titles which are organized by titles,
subject areas, and topics. Each title contains full bibliographic
information, a summary of its content, and copyright information.
[See Titles
(by Subject) and Groups & Collections]
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Features |
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The 5th edition of
the Portable Library of Liberty data DVD is now available. It
contains 1,002 titles from the OLL in EBook PDF format and 36
hours of MP3 audio from our audio collection. Request a
complimentary copy and include your postal address and indicate
your browser preference (Firefox/Safari or IE8). If you have
trouble viewing the PLL in IE8 see this
page for help.
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Search
Engine - our
powerful search engine allows you to search all titles in our
collection or books by a particular author. Filters allow you
limit your search to an historiacl period or topic. The search
results show the full paragraph in which the key words are
located and provide full bibliographic information. You can
also search the material in The
Forum, or do a quick
search for author or title.
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Liberty
Fund Books - many of the books published
by Liberty Fund are also available online at the OLL website.
You can also order copies from our
online book
catalog or download a copy of the current catalog
in PDF format.
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Quotations
about Liberty and Power - Each week we post a Quotation
about Liberty and Power which is taken from the collection
of titles in the OLL. Its aim is to explore what some key
thinkers have to say about some aspect of man’s struggle
for liberty. This collection of quotations provides a valuable
resource which shows the diversity and richness of these texts.
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Resources for Teaching
and Learning about Liberty - the OLL contains many resources
to use in teaching and learning about Liberty, such as biographies,
bibliographies, timelines, reading lists, essays, key documents.
Most of these can be found in The
Forum.
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User
Created Reading Lists is a tool for professors and teachers
to bring OLL books into the classroom. Create and annotate
your own customized collection of readings which can be posted
on the OLL website for use by your students. Or you can create
a list of your favorite titles to send to your friends. These
lists can be printed as a complete anthology of the Readings
you have selected. Subscribe to the RSS feed
to be contacted when new material is added. [See the detailed
User
Guide].
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We are pleased to announce the completion of the next
stage in our ePub
Pilot Project. About 700 of our titles
are now available in ePub format suitable for reading
on portable devices [from this page]. They can be also downloaded from the
title's main table of contents page. These titles are
still under development and have had all their footnotes
removed while we try to solve a formatting problem
on the iPad. Text based PDFs can also be read on some
devices such as the iPad. The OLL provides these kind of PDFs in two
forms: EBook PDFs (which are available from this site
or on the Portable
Library of Liberty data DVD) and Liberty
Fund Printer PDFs (which are high quality typeset PDFs used for printing
LF books).
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The Online Library of
Liberty Website |
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The Online Library
of Liberty (OLL) is a project of Liberty Fund, Inc., a private,
non-profit educational foundation based in Indianapolis, Indiana.
The aim of the OLL is to provide thousands of titles about
individual liberty, limited constitutional government, and
the free market, free of charge to the public, for educational
purposes. [See more on the history
of the OLL]
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The OLL has won
a number of international
awards for its outstanding collection
of online material in the humanities and social sciences. It
has been recognised by the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the British Arts & Humanities Research Council, and the
International Political Science Association
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Liberty Fund's Other Websites |
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Liberty Fund's main
website hosts an extensive online book catalog where the books
published by Liberty Fund can be purchased.
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In the Goodrich Seminar
Room in the Lilly Library at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana
the limestone walls are engraved with the names of the political
and legal documents and authors which Pierre Goodrich, the founder
of Liberty Fund, believed had most contributed to our understanding
of what it means to be free and responsible individuals. This website
contains a virtual
tour of the Seminar Room.
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The Library
of Economics and Liberty (Econlib) contains classic
economic books, an online encyclopedia of economics, articles
discussing current economic topics, a moderated blog (Econlog)
where economic issues are discussed, and a collection of
podcasts (EconTalk).
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Copyright and Fair Use
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There are four different types of texts which Liberty Fund has put online
as part of the Online Library of Liberty:
- public domain texts published before 1923. These texts are no longer
under copyright and are in the public domain. We have put them online in
order to further the educational aims of Liberty Fund.
- texts to which the
Liberty Fund has electronic rights, such as the books published by Liberty
Fund in both print and online formats
- other texts to which Liberty Fund has acquired the electronic rights from
third parties, such as the journal Literature of Liberty (from the Institute
for Humane Studies)
- titles which are put online under license from third parties, such as
the Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith (from Oxford University Press).
For titles in the first three categories listed above, no special permission
from Liberty Fund is required for quoting material in papers and essays, or
for limited photocopying and distribution for academic or other educational
or non-profit purposes. The only requirements are that you include proper attribution
on the first page of the document being distributed - e.g. for John Locke’s
The Two Treatises of Government you would say either of the following:
- if using the OLL website - "This material originally appeared on
the Online Library of Liberty hosted by Liberty Fund, Inc. URL: http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/222
and accessed on 2010-01-22." This information can be found in the "Citation" button
on the title’s table of contents page.
- or if using the copy on the PLL
DVD - "This material originally appeared
in the Portable Library of Liberty published by Liberty Fund, Inc. URL: http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/222
and PLL v5 (generated 22 January, 2010)." This information can be found
in the footer of the EBook PDF.
For titles in category two and three, any reprint of material "for profit",
such as a chapter or a substantial section of an online book for inclusion
in a book or other publication for sale, requires written permission from Liberty
Fund.
For titles in the fourth category you must follow the specific requirements
of the copyright holder whose work we publish online under license. In the
case of the Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith published under license
from Oxford University Press, for reprint or copying permission you need to
contact OUP directly. Under our contractual obligations with OUP we have placed
the following declaration on the front page of every book and section of the
online version of the Glasgow Edition of the Works of
Adam Smith:
The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence
of Adam Smith and the
associated volumes are published in hardcover by Oxford University Press. The
six titles of the Glasgow Edition, but not the associated volumes, are being
published in soft cover by Liberty Fund. The online edition is published by
Liberty Fund under license from Oxford University Press.
© Oxford University Press 1976. All rights reserved. No part of this
material may be stored transmitted retransmitted lent or reproduced in any
form or medium without the permission of Oxford University Press.
Thus, for reprint or copying permission you need to contact OUP directly.
Liberty Fund cannot grant you this permission because it is not the copyright
holder.
[For more information see this
page.]
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