Anshen, Ruth Nanda (FML)

Anshen, Ruth Nanda (ed.). Freedom: Its Meaning. Harcourt. 1940. 686pp.

A symposium in which forty-one contributors have expressed their views on what freedom means to them. The volume runs to over a quarter of a million words. The contributions reflect little consistency with each other in viewpoint or philosophy.


BK: Faint praise indeed.

Angell Double Header (FML)

Angell, Sir Norman. After All: The Autobiography of Norman Angell. Farrar, Straus and Young. 1952. 370 pp.

"Although Sir Norman is wholly unconscious of this, the picture is of a rarely elevated and noble life. Besides the record of that life, this book is enriched by Sir Norman's reflections - veritable little essays in some cases - on a wide variety of topics ... [including] The Incredible Gullibility of Believers in Freedom under Socialism." - Max Eastman, in The Freeman.

Angell, Norman. The Public Mind. Dutton. 1927. 232 pp.

"A stimulating book. ... Its importance to Individualists lies in the emphasis it indirectly gives to the desirability of restricting State action to spheres in which popular passion and prejudice, and the ability of politicians to exploit them can have least effect." - PI.


BK: The capitalizing of State and Individualists in the second review is no accident; it is in the original. I have no idea when this convention passed, but I am sorry it did. It gives an element of style and emphasis without having to italicize or bold the entire word. In fact, used properly, it gives the word a certain Dignity.

The Purpose of Education

Much maligned, but seldom read, Herbert Spencer on education:

" How to live? - that is the essential question for us. Not how to live in the mere material sense only, but in the widest sense. The general problem which comprehends every special problem is - the right ruling of conduct in all directions under all circumstances. In what way to treat the body; in what way to treat the mind; in what way to manage our affairs; in what way to bring up a family; in what way to behave as a citizen; in what way to utilize all those sources of happiness which nature supplies - how to use all our faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and others - how to live completely? And this being the great thing needful for us to learn, is, by consequence, the great thing which education has to teach. To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge; and the only rational mode of judging of any educational course is, to judge in what degree it discharges such function." - Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical


BK: This is what liberal arts education has forgotten. Colleges struggle to find a mission. Departments focus on their disciplines and denigrate other fields as second class knowledge. This author has done it in his less thoughtful moments. To communicate how our specialties fit into the broader picture, though, is the task for the undergraduate educator. This is the challenge for Liberty Studies as well: to explore how and when liberty is essential for the good life, while acknowledging that it is not the only component of living completely.

Andrews & Angell (FML)

Andrews, Matthew Page. Social Planning by Frontier Thinkers. Richard R. Smith. 1944. 94 pp.

A Satire on Social Planning and planners by an historical scholar. It consists in large part of quotations from recent writings by so-called "advanced thinkers."


Angell, Norman. The Great Illusion. Putnam. 1911.

Several years before the outbreak of World War I, Norman Angell challenged the then almost universally accepted theory that military and political power give a nation commercial and social advantages. He contended that the wealth of our modern world is founded upon credit and commercial contract which vanishes before an invading host and leaves nothing to reward the conqueror, but involves him in its collapse. His theme, in brief, was that nobody wins a modern war. "It may be doubted whether, within it (sic) entire range, the peace literature of the Anglo-Saxon world has ever produced a more fascinating or significant study." - A.S. Hershey, in American Political Science Review, 1911.

FML: Allen, C.K.

Allen, C.K. Bureaucracy Triumphant. Oxford University Press. 1931. 156 pp.

"This little collection of essays is highly instructive to both the lawyer and legislator and while its references are solely to the situation as it exists in England, its lesson is one that might well be heard in the United States." - S.H. Hofstadter, in Columbia Law Review

Anderson, Benjamin M. Economics and the Public Welfare. Van Nostrand. 1949. 602 pp.

An economic and financial history of the United States from 1913 to a little beyond the end of World War II. I take the liberty of quoting from my own forward to the book: "[Anderson's] The Value of Money [1917] is one of the classics of American economic writing. ... The present work is destined to take a similar rank among American economic and financial histories. It is already the outstanding economic and financial history for the period it covers. ... Few economic histories have ever interlaced theory and interpretation so completely and successfully with the record of the facts. ... Its sense of drama, its unfailing lucidity, its emphasis on basic economic prinsiples, its recognition of the crucial roles played by oustanding individuals, its realistic detailed description of the disastrous consequences of flouting moral principles or of trying to prevent the forces of the market from operating, combine to give this book a sustained readability seldom found in serious economic writing."

FML: Allen, C.K.

Allen, C.K. Law and Orders. London: Stevens, 1946. 385 pp.

An Inquiry into the nature and scope of delegated legislation and executive powers in England. "In this scholarly study Dr. Allen, who holds to the liberal view of the state, wrestles with the problem of how a proper balance between the legislative and executive powers in Britain's government can be restored and maintained." Foreign Affairs. The book is valuable for Americans because this problem of balance has become even more serious for us than in Britain.


BK: Funny how old works can become current issues especially with the successful efforts of our current president to create a strong executive. Would GB be Jack McCoy if only he were more erudite? Unfortunately, Jerry Orbach does not star in this version. "In the U.S. political system the people are represented by two distinct branches - the legislative which makes the laws and the executive which enforces them. These are their stories."

John Adams (FML)

Adams, John. The Political Writings of John Adams. Edited by George A. Peek, Jr. Liberal Arts Press. 1955. 223 pp.

John Adam's enduring title to fame was his grasp of the principles of republican conservatism. He "vindicated with vigor and consistency such basic ideas of the American Constitution as the balanced and limited powers of the government, the right of the minority to protection against the tyranny of the majority and the inseparable connection between liberty and property. ... The heart of the second President's political philosophy is summed up in one brief sentence in his Defense of the American Constitution. 'Power is always abused when unlimited and unbalanced.'" - William Henry Chamberlin, in The Freeman.

The Free Man's Library (FML)

Recently, I had the good fortune of stumbling across Henry Hazlitt's The Free Man's Library in a used bookstore. I have checked, and the book is in the public domain. In Hazlitt's own words:

"This book is a descriptive and critical bibliography of works n the philosophy of individualism. I have applied the term "individualism" in a broad sense. The bibliography includes books which explain the process and advantages of free trade, free enterprise and free markets; which recognize the evils of excessive state power; and which champion the cause of individual freedom of worship, speech and thought" (p. 1).

Twice a week I will publish a few of the entries just as they are in the book. All entries will be archived under the heading "FML".

I love this book. It's starting point is W.H. Hutt's The Philosophy of Individualism: A Bibliography, published in 1927, with Hazlitt adding references to works published up until the mid 1950s. While many titles are familiar, many more are not. That's what I like. Hazlitt's bibliography provides a treasure map, if you will, to works that are in danger of being forgotten. No doubt, some books are better forgotten but these forgotten works perhaps deserve a second look before being relegated to the dustbin of history.

The first two entries, however, are by no means obscure:

Acton, Lord. Essays on Freedom and Power, Beacon Press. 1948. 452 pp.

Lord Acton (1834-1902) is chiefly remembered today through a single quotation: "All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." But he was one of the most deeply learned men of his time, and recognized as few have ever done the true nature and value of liberty. It is, he declared, "not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end."
His lifelong object was to write a great "History of Liberty," but he immersed himself so deeply in reading and research that he never lived to complete it. Only two essays resulted from all this laborious preparation: "The History of Freedom in Antiquity" and "The History of Freedom in Christianity." Both are included in this collection selected by Gertrude Himmelfarb, who contributes an excellent introduction. In the opinion of F.A. Hayek, the tradition of true individualism is most perfectly represented in the nineteenth century in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville in France and Lord Acton in England.

Acton, Lord. The History of Freedom and Other Essays. Macmillan. 1907. 638 pp.

An earlier collection of Acton's essays.


Tomorrow's question: Would Lord Acton have had a blog?

Connecting Great Books

In the September 8th, 2006, Chronicle of Higher education, Jonathan Brent tells us that "Freedom Depends on the First Person Singular". This also happens to be the title of his article. In this article Brent recounts teaching a class on Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The focus of the day's discussion was on Shukhov, a gulag prisoner who had basically most, if not all, of his animal desires satisfied for the day. Brent asked his class what was wrong with this and it took almost an hour for these students to hit on the idea that what was wrong was a lack of freedom and individuality.

What hit me about Brent's article was his surprise that bright students who had taken the college's First Year Seminar and had read "Locke, Rousseau, Kant and other great thinkers in the Western tradition" took an hour to come to this realization. Yet, is it so surprising? If these books are simply read in isolation from each other, then it is no wonder the students took so long to arrive at the idea that freedom may be important. One class meeting discusses natural rights, another the education of the young and the third the Categorical Imperative. Individually these are all reasonable aspects of the texts to teach, and in a survey course that concerns itself with great ideas these are the ones likely to be distilled and conveyed to students. Individually great, they do not tell the student why freedom is important.

This is not a repudiation of the great books, nor is it to say they are the alpha and omega of education. Rather, it is to ask what we want students to learn. If we don't at least ask this question, we will continue to be amazed that students who are reading difficult texts ,with no overarching guide, fail to see any connection between these authors let alone their connection with freedom.