Search results for ""Liberty Fund""

Part of a three-volume set, this text presents selected work of Edmund Burke on English history and political thought. This first volume contains Burke's defence of the American colonists' complaints of British policy and includes "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents"(1770), "Speech on American Taxation"(1774), and "Speech on Conciliation"(1775). Volume Two in the set consists of Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France". Volume Three presents his "Letters on a Regicide Peace"(1795-1796). The text includes notes and introductory essays by E. J. Payne.

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"When democracy turns, as it often does, into a corrupt plutocracy, both national decadence and social revolution are being prepared." So wrote the Irish-born historian, W E H Lecky (1838-1903) in this devastating assault on mass democracy. Lecky spoke for the landed gentry and the upper middle classes of late Victorian England when he warned his countrymen that an unfettered democracy would destroy the balance of interests in the community and thereby undermine the Constitution. "A tendency to democracy," said Lecky, "does not mean a tendency to parliamentary government, or even a tendency toward greater liberty." Indeed, the type of democracy emerging in Britain seemed to be the rudiment of socialism.

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Though almost forgotten today, Herbert Spencer ranks as one of the foremost individualist philosophers. His influence in the latter half of the nineteenth century was immense. Spencer's name is usually linked with Darwin's, for it was he who penned the phrase: survival of the fittest. Today in America he is most often admired for his trenchant essays in 'The Man Versus the State'. But Spencer himself considered THE PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS to be his finest work. In the second volume, under 'Justice', is his final statement on the role of the state. His formula for justice is summed up in these words: "Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man."

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