The last books by our friends and faculty members:
Tom G. Palmer : Realizing Freedom : Libertarian Thoery, History and Practice , Cato Institute, 2009.
| What is freedom? How is freedom related to justice, law, property,
peace, and prosperity? Tom Palmer has spent a lifetime-as a scholar,
teacher, journalist, and activist-asking and answering these questions.
His best writings are now collected in Realizing Freedom: Libertarian
Theory, History, and Practice. Palmer's work ranges from the theory of
justice to multiculturalism, democracy and limited government,
globalization, the law and economics of patents and copyrights, among
many other topics. These essays have appeared in scholarly journals and
in such newspapers as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and
London Spectator. His work is accessible to scholars and thoughtful
citizens alike. Palmer has smuggled photocopiers and fax machines into
the Soviet Union; organized movements against the draft, taxes,
censorship, and victimless crime laws; and ceaselessly promoted freedom
in the most hostile locations, from communist Europe and China to Iraq
to the halls of academe. |
Sam Gregg : The Commercial Society, Lexington Books, 2007.
Tibor Machan (ed): Liberty and Justice, Hoover Institution, 2006.
| What
is justice? In this book, Tibor Machan (along with contributors Anthony
de Jasay, Jonathan Jacobs, and Jennifer McKitrick) answers that
question, examining the concept of justice from a libertarian and
Randian perspective and showing how justice relates to liberty and
freedom.
The authors
compare the libertarian approach of an equal right to liberty for all
to the modern liberal focus on capability or entitlements. De Jasay
questions whether justice requires fairness—and how simple bad luck
affects fairness. Jacobs looks at the moral psychology of justice.
McKitrick looks at feminism, arguing that liberty for all is compatible
with justice for women. Machan offers a natural rights approach to
justice. A very interesting read. |
Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl: Norms of liberty, Penn State Press, 2006.
| How
can we establish a political/legal order that in principle does not
require the human flourishing of any person or group to be given
structured preference over that of any other? Addressing this question
as the central problem of political philosophy, Norms of Liberty offers
a new conceptual foundation for political liberalism that takes
protecting liberty, understood in terms of individual negative rights,
as the primary aim of the political/legal order. Rasmussen and Den Uyl
argue for construing individual rights as metanormative principles,
directly tied to politics, that are used to establish the political/
legal conditions under which full moral conduct can take place. These
they distinguish from normative principles, used to provide guidance
for moral conduct within the ambit of normative ethics. This crucial
distinction allows them to develop liberalism as a metanormative
theory, not a guide for moral conduct. The moral universe need not be
minimized or morality grounded in sentiment or contracts to support
liberalism, they show. Rather, liberalism can be supported, and many of
its internal tensions avoided, with an ethical framework of
Aristotelian inspiration—one that understands human flourishing to be
an objective, inclusive, individualized, agent-relative, social, and
self-directed activity. |
Randy Barnett: Restoring the lost constitution, Princeton university Press, 2005.
| Barnett says the Constitution should be interpreted as contracts are interpreted, on the basis of its original meaning,
not the original "intentions" of its molders (whose intentions may have
varied markedly anyway). So let's stop cutting up holes in the
document, he urges in this superb explanation of the crucial importance
of constitutions in limiting government power. The book is also,
intriguingly, an answer to Lysander Spooner's radical 1870 essay "No
Treason" declaring the illegitimacy of the Constitution. Barnett half
agrees and half disagrees with Spooner, and dedicates his book to both
Spooner and James Madison. Much of the fun here is watching how Barnett
gets these two to shake hands (theoretically speaking). |
Greg Rehmke offers DVDS and will soon have online economics course to spread the liberal ideas. See Economic Thinking website.
