The Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, constitutes a text central to the American political tradition. Written and published in newspapers in 1787 and 1788 to explain and promote ratification of the proposed Constitution for the United States, which were then bound by the Articles of Confederation, The Federalist remains of singular importance to students of liberty around the world.

George W. Carey was Professor of Government at Georgetown University and editor of The Political Science Reviewer.

James McClellan (1937-2005) was James Bryce Visiting Fellow in American Studies at the Institute of United States Studies, University of London.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont spent nine months in the U.S. studying American prisons on behalf of the French government. They investigated not just the prison system but indeed every aspect of American public and private life--the political, economic, religious, cultural, and above all the social life of the young nation. From Tocqueville's copious notes came Democracy in America.

This English-only edition of Democracy in America features Eduardo Nolla's incisive notes to James Schleifer's English translation of the French text, with extensive reference to early outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished fragments, and other materials: This new Democracy is not only the one that Tocqueville presented to the reader of 1835, then to the reader of 1840. . . the reader will see how Tocqueville proceeded with the elaboration of the main ideas of this book.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French writer and politician.

Eduardo Nolla is a Professor at the Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Madrid.

James T. Schleifer is emeritus Dean of the Library and Professor of History at the College of New Rochelle and has been a visiting lecturer at Yale University.

Documenting the process by which government and controlling majorities have grown increasingly powerful and tyrannical, Bertrand de Jouvenel demonstrates how democracies have failed to limit the powers of government. Jouvenel traces this development to the days of royal absolutism, which established large administrative bureaucracies and thus laid the foundation of the modern omnipotent state.

Bertrand de Jouvenel was an author and teacher, first publishing On Power in 1945.

In Human Action, Mises starts from the ideas set forth in his Theory and History that all actions and decisions are based on human needs, wants, and desires and continues deeper and further to explain how studying this human action is not only a legitimate science (praxeology) but how that science is based on the foundation of free-market economics.

Mises presents and discusses all existing economic theories and then proceeds to explain how the only sensible, realistic, and feasible theory of economics is one based on how the needs and desires of human beings dictate trends, affect profits and losses, adjust supply and demand, set prices, and otherwise maintain, regulate, and control economic forces.

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.

Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.

Carroll Quigley was a legendary teacher at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. His course on the history of civilization was extraordinary in its scope and in its impact on students.

Like the course, The Evolution of Civilizations is a comprehensive and perceptive look at the factors behind the rise and fall of civilizations. Quigley examines the application of scientific method to the social sciences, then establishes his historical hypotheses. He poses a division of culture into six levels from the abstract to the more concrete. He then tests those hypotheses by a detailed analysis of five major civilizations: the Mesopotamian, the Canaanite, the Minoan, the classical, and the Western.

Quigley defines a civilization as a producing society with an instrument of expansion. A civilization's decline is not inevitable but occurs when its instrument of expansion is transformed into an institution--that is, when social arrangements that meet real social needs are transformed into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs.

First published in 1776, the year in which the American Revolution officially began, Smith's Wealth of Nations sparked a revolution of its own. In it Smith analyzes the major elements of political economy, from market pricing and the division of labor to monetary, tax, trade, and other government policies that affect economic behavior. Throughout he offers seminal arguments for free trade, free markets, and limited government.

Criticizing mercantilists who sought to use the state to increase their nations' supply of precious metals, Smith points out that a nation's wealth should be measured by the well-being of its people. Prosperity in turn requires voluntary exchange of goods in a peaceful, well-ordered market. How to establish and maintain such markets? For Smith the answer lay in man's social instincts, which government may encourage by upholding social standards of decency, honesty, and virtue, but which government undermines when it unduly interferes with the intrinsically private functions of production and exchange.

The early political culture of the American republic was so deeply influenced by the religious consciousness of the New England preachers that it was often through the political sermon that the political rhetoric of the period was formed, refined, and transmitted. Political sermons such as the fifty-five collected in this work are unique to America, in both kind and significance. Political Sermons of the American Founding Era thus fills an important need if the American founding period is to be adequately understood.

Ellis Sandoz is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana State University.

The Law, The State, and Other Political Writings, 1843-1850, collects nineteen of Bastiat's pamphlets, or articles, ranging from the theory of value and rent, public choice and collective action, government intervention and regulation, the balance of trade, education, and trade unions to price controls, capital and growth, and taxation. Many of these are topics still relevant and debated today.

In addition, this edition also contains footnotes and glossary entries that help explain the political, economic, and intellectual context in which Bastiat lived and worked. Filling gaps on Bastiat and his philosophy, this volume features articles that have never before been translated in English.

Fr d ric Bastiat (1801-1850) was one of the leading advocates of free markets and free trade in the mid-nineteenth century.

Pascal Salin is Emeritus Professor of Economics, Paris University, and former president of the Mont Pelerin Society. He is the author of Lib ralisme; Fran ais, n'ayez pas peur du lib ralism; and Revenir au capitalisme, pour viter les crises.

Jacques de Guenin is founder of the Cercle Fr d ric Bastiat. He is a graduate of the cole des Mines in Paris and holds a Master of Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dennis O'Keeffe is Professor of Social Science at the University of Buckingham, Buckingham, England, and is Senior Research Fellow in Education at the Institute of Economic Affairs, London.

David M. Hart has a Ph.D. in history from King's College, Cambridge, and is the Director of Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty.

More than thirty years ago F. A. Hayek said of Socialism: It was a work on political economy in the tradition of the great moral philosophers, a Montesquieu or Adam Smith, containing both acute knowledge and profound wisdom. . . . To none of us young men who read the book when it appeared was the world ever the same again. This is a newly annotated edition of the classic first published in German in 1922. It is the definitive refutation of nearly every type of socialism ever devised. Mises presents a wide-ranging analysis of society, comparing the results of socialist planning with those of free-market capitalism in all areas of life.

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.

The early political culture of the American republic was so deeply influenced by the religious consciousness of the New England preachers that it was often through the political sermon that the political rhetoric of the period was formed, refined, and transmitted. Political sermons such as the fifty-five collected in this work are unique to America, in both kind and significance. Political Sermons of the American Founding Era thus fills an important need if the American founding period is to be adequately understood.

Ellis Sandoz is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana State University.

Rationalism in Politics established the late Michael Oakeshott as the leading conservative political theorist in modern Britain. This expanded collection of essays astutely points out the limits of reason in rationalist politics and criticizes ideological schemes to reform society according to supposedly scientific or rationalistic principles that ignore the wealth and variety of human experience.

Timothy Fuller is Professor of Political Science at Colorado College.

Many reference works offer compilations of critical documents covering individual liberty, local autonomy, constitutional order, and other issues that helped to shape the American political tradition. Yet few of these works are available in a form suitable for classroom use, and traditional textbooks give short shrift to these important issues.

The American Republic overcomes that knowledge gap by providing, in a single volume, critical, original documents revealing the character of American discourse on the nature and importance of local government, the purposes of federal union, and the role of religion and tradition in forming America's drive for liberty.

By bringing together key original documents and other writings that explain cultural, religious, and historical concerns, this volume gives students, teachers, and general readers an effective way to begin examining the diversity of issues and influences that characterize American history.

The result unquestionably leads to a deeper and more thorough understanding of America's political, institutional, and cultural continuity and change.

Bruce Frohnen is Associate Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University College of Law.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith's first and in his own mind most important work, outlines his view of proper conduct and the institutions and sentiments that make men virtuous. Here he develops his doctrine of the impartial spectator, whose hypothetical disinterested judgment we must use to distinguish right from wrong in any given situation. We by nature pursue our self-interest, according to Smith. This makes independence or self-command an instinctive good, and neutral rules as difficult to craft as they are necessary. But society is not held together merely by neutral rules; it is held together by sympathy. Smith argues that we naturally share the emotions and to a certain extent the physical sensations we witness in others. Sharing the sensations of our fellows, we seek to maximize their pleasures and minimize their pains so that we may share in their joys and enjoy their expressions of affection and approval.

The great eighteenth-century theorist of international law Emer de Vattel (1714-1767) was a key figure in sustaining the practical and theoretical influence of natural jurisprudence through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Coming toward the end of the period when the discourse of natural law was dominant in European political theory, Vattel's contribution is cited as a major source of contemporary wisdom on questions of international law in the American Revolution and even by opponents of revolution, such as Cardinal Consalvi, at the Congress of Vienna of 1815.

The significance of The Law of Nations resides in its distillation from natural law of an apt model for international conduct of state affairs that carried conviction in both the Old Regime and the new political order of 1789-1815.

The Liberty Fund edition is based on the anonymous English translation of 1797, which includes Vattel's notes for the second French edition (posthumous, 1773).

Emer de Vattel (1714-1767) was a Swiss philosopher and jurist in the service of Saxony.

B la Kapossy is Professeur Suppl ant of History at the University of Lausanne.

Richard Whatmore is a Reader in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex.

This classic study is one of the few books to explore extensively the many facets of envy--a drive which lies at the core of man's life as a social being. Ranging widely over literature, philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences, Professor Schoeck-- a distinguished sociologist and anthropologist--elucidates both the constructive and destructive consequences of envy in social life. Perhaps most important, he demonstrates that not only the impetus toward a totalitarian regime but also the egalitarian impulse in democratic societies are alike in being rooted in envy.

Published in 1944, during World War II, Omnipotent Government was Mises's first book written and published after he arrived in the United States. In this volume Mises provides in economic terms an explanation of the international conflicts that caused both world wars. Although written more than half a century ago, Mises's main theme still stands: government interference in the economy leads to conflicts and wars. According to Mises, the last and best hope for peace is liberalism--the philosophy of liberty, free markets, limited government, and democracy.

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.

Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.

This book presents the theoretical and practical arguments for liberalism in the classical tradition as defined by Mises as the liberal doctrine of the harmony of the rightly understood interests of all members of a free society founded on the principle of private ownership of the means of production. The foundation of liberalism, Mises says, rests on an understanding and appreciation of private property, social cooperation, the freedom idea, ethics and morality, democracy, and the legitimate role of government. Also in this book, Mises contrasts liberalism with other conceivable systems of social organization such as socialism, communism, and fascism.

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.

Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.

Almost a generation before Washington, Henry, and Jefferson were even born, two Englishmen, concealing their identities with the honored ancient name of Cato, wrote newspaper articles condemning tyranny and advancing principles of liberty that immensely influenced American colonists. The Englishmen were John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.

John Trenchard (1662-1723) devoted himself to writing on contemporary British politics and for one year was a Member of Parliament from Taunton.

Thomas Gordon (ca. 1695-1750) was a tutor in languages, a publisher, and a pamphleteer.

Ronald Hamowy was Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

In this anthology, Mises offers an articulate and accessible introduction to and critique of two topics he considers especially important: inflation and government interventionism. Mises believes inflation, that is monetary expansion, is destructive; it destroys savings and investment, which are the basis for production and prosperity. Government controls and economic planning never accomplish what their proponents intend. Mises consistently argues that the solution to government intervention is free markets and free enterprise, which call for reforming government. For that, ideas must be changed to let the market system work. There is no better planning for freedom than this.

The seventeen essays in Planning for Freedom: Let the Market System Work are tied together by one overarching idea, best expressed by Mises in the capstone essay Profit and Loss. The essays in the final section of the book summarize Mises's contributions to economic thought and emphasize his firm belief in the power of ideas.

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.

Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.

Reflecting Adam Smith's wide learning and varied interests, these essays shed considerable light on his place in the Scottish Enlightenment. Included are histories of astronomy, ancient logic, and ancient physics; essays on the imitative arts and the affinity between music, dancing, and poetry; and a critical review of Samuel Johnson's famous Dictionary, which Smith originally published in the Edinburgh Review (1755-1756).