Jefferson explains that the Declaration of Independence sought to capture a particular strain of political thought that was important and prevalent in the time leading up to the American Revolution.

Maria and Jo Ann Cavallo revisit François Truffaut’s 1966 Fahrenheit 451 film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel where they examine the depiction of surveillance and other forms of government ...

Prosperity and property rights are inextricably linked. The importance of having well-defined and strongly protected property rights is now widely recognized among economists and policymakers. A ...

George H. Smith was formerly Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for Humane Studies, a lecturer on American History for Cato Summer Seminars, and Executive Editor of Knowledge Products. Smith’s ...

Rutherford B. Hayes will forever be remembered as the president who ended Reconstruction. In the process he abandoned the Civil War Republican Party’s commitment to equal rights for the former slaves ...

Crypto- anarchism is a philosophy whose advocates think technology can assist them in creating communities based on consent rather than coercion. Crypto- anarchists wish to be free from state ...

The socialist calculation debate revolves around the question of whether central planners can, at least in principle, make the economic calculations necessary to achieve the rational, efficient ...

Anarchism is a theory of society without the state in which the market provides all public goods and services, such as law and order. Although most anarchists oppose all large institutions, public or ...

Libertarianism, and the classical liberalism from which it sprang, supports a strictly limited state, if indeed its adherents recognize the legitimacy of the state at all. The minimal state is a ...

Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ism .org, a project of the Cato Institute. Most of his work focuses on examining thinkers who predate classical liberalism but ...

A libertarian world won’t eliminate all poverty, but it offers powerful tools for greatly reducing it, and improving the lives of the poorest and least privileged. Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at ...

The origin of the idea that liberty could be preserved through the separation of powers endures through the arguments of Polybius. Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ...