Reflections on Liberty and Power: a Collection of Quotations from Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty (2004-2009)
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REFLECTIONS ON LIBERTY & POWER A Collection of Quotations from Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty (2004-2009) oll.libertyfund.org Winter 2010 Edition CONTENTS 1. Front Page Illustrations 2. About the Online Library of Liberty 3. Three Awards for Excellence 4. About Liberty Fund, Inc. 5. Quotations about Liberty and Power 6. Key to the Illustrations 7. Table of Contents (Chronological) 8. Table of Contents (Thematic) Illustrations Illustrations on the front page (from left to right and then top to bottom): Algernon Sidney (1622-1683); Lord Acton (1834-1902) Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536); David Hume (1711-1776); Adam Smith (1723-1790) Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826); John Stuart Mill (1806-1873); Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) 2 REFLECTIONS ON LIBERTY AND POWER: A COLLECTION OF QUOTATIONS FROM LIBERTY FUND'S ONLINE LIBRARY OF LIBERTY (2004-2009) "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton (1834-1902) I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, like Ravaillac; but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science. 3 ABOUT THE ONLINE LIBRARY OF LIBERTY The Online Library of Liberty (OLL) is an educational project of Liberty Fund, Inc. Its aim is put online classic works in the classical liberal, free market, and conservative traditions of thought and make them freely available to the public for educational purposes. The OLL collection is made of three main groups of books: 1. the works identified by the founder of Liberty Fund, Pierre F. Goodrich, as comprising his notion of the Great Books about liberty. These titles and authors are listed in the Goodrich Seminar Room collection <http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=352&Itemid=268>. 2. books published by Liberty Fund to which it has electronic rights. The list of Liberty Fund published books which are also available online at the OLL can be found here <http://oll.libertyfund.org/collection/60>. 3. other works in the classical liberal, free market, and conservative traditions. The multi-award winning OLL makes available at no charge to the public outstanding resources for teaching and learning about the humanities and social sciences. The OLL has been completely redesigned and now has a powerful new search engine for full text searching. The site is divided into 2 sections: "The Forum" for educational aids about the books; and "The Library" where the books themselves are stored. The Forum The Forum has over 800 essays and study aids about the texts such as biographies, timelines, introductory essays, key documents, reading lists, and detailed bibliographical essays on key thinkers and topics. The essays and guides are fully searchable and are linked to the authors and books in the Library so you can read about the books then read the books for yourself. The Library The Library contains over 1,100 classic books about liberty by over 400 authors and are available free of charge to the public for educational purposes. The texts span 4,000 years of human history and cover the disciplines of economics, history, law, literature, philosophy, political theory, religion, sociology, and war and peace. New titles are added every week. Most books are available in 3 different formats: facsimile PDF so that scholars can see what the original text looked like; professionally proof-read HTML with detailed and linked table of contents to aid navigation; and downloadable, self-contained, and searchable PDF E-Books. All authors have a brief bio and are grouped into schools of thought, historical period, and nationality. All books have a brief description of their content and are organized into collections such as subject areas, topics, debates, and other special collections. Quickly find the author or title you are looking for by using the “Find Author/Title” search box. Do a full-text search of all the books by using the “Advanced Search” feature. Detailed bibliographical, copyright, and fair use information is provided about each book. View each book’s table of contents before you download it. The linked table of contents allows you to view the entire book or just a chapter or section. Powerful Search Engine Search all books in the library, all works in a given subject area, all the works by a particular author, all the works in a collection, or just one book! Search filters allow you to limit searches by historical period, school of thought, nationality of the author, subject area, topic, or combinations of these. Search results show the full paragraph in which the search term is located with a link to see where this paragraph is located in the entire book or just that chapter. The Portable Library of Liberty DVD (data) The Portable Library of Liberty (PLL) contains 900 titles in EBook PDF format drawn from the OLL and is available free of charge upon request. Downloadable MARC Records All new titles added to the OLL now come with downloadable MARC records so librarians can add the text to their own online catalogs in order to make them more accessible to their patrons. All OLL titles with MARC records are part of a collection at WorldCat known as “The Online Library of Liberty”. We are gradually working our way through our older titles adding their MARC records. These can be downloaded in larger batches of 50 as they become available. 4 Create Your Own Reading Lists Teachers and professors can now create their own customized reading lists for their classes using the resources of the OLL. Sign on and begin browsing the OLL website to select entire books or chapters to add to your list. When you are finished making your selections you can edit your list giving it a title, adding explanatory information about your course, adding links to your own institution’s websites, changing the order of the readings, and so on. When your reading list is finished you assign it to a subject area (e.g. “History”) and a suitable audience (e.g. “College Undergraduate”). If it is appropriate we will publish it on the OLL so your students can access it via the WWW. Browse our current reading lists for inspiration. See what other teachers are doing and how they are using the OLL to facilitate teaching and learning in the humanities. Content of Note The OLL is able to offer online special collections of significant scholarly value including: The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 7 vols. (Oxford University Press) The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, 11 vols. (Cambridge University Press). The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols. (University of Toronto Press) Liberty Fund’s Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics Series - a 40 volume collection of the most significant works on natural law, moral and political philosophy, and social theory from the late 17th and 18th centuries by authors such as Grotius, John Millar, Francis Hutcheson, Burlamaqui, Lord Kames, Pierre, Bayle, Samuel Pufendorf, and George Turnbull. the Federal Edition of the works of the following Founding Fathers of the American Republic: Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison the works of Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, Thomas Paine the Intellectual Portrait Series with 27 hours of MP3 audio of interviews with leading economists and political philosophers such as Armen Alchian, Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Ronald Coase, Milton Friedman, and Israel Kirzner the Portable Library of Liberty, a data DVD containing 900 titles from the OLL collection in EBook PDF format and the audio of the Intellectual Portrait Series History of the Site The OLL website went public in March 2004 and has achieved a number of milestones in its brief history: October 2004: the 1st edition of the Portable Library of Liberty appeared with 224 titles 2005-06: The OLL won a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities "Best of the Humanities on the Web" award September 2005: the 2nd edition of the Portable Library of Liberty appeared with over 500 titles and the Intellectual Portrait Series audios 2006: The British Arts and Humanities Research Council has chosen the OLL as one of the "the best and most relevant resources ... for education and research" in the arts and the humanities and has given it an "Editor's Choice" Award July 2007: the OLL website was fully redesigned and went public October 2007: the 1,000th title was added: Thornton's Enquiry into the Nature & Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) November 2007: