Category
Socialism. Communism. Anarchism
Thomas Hodgskin
The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted
In this series of letters to Lord Braugham, Hodgskin distinguishes between the natural right of property (based upon Lockean principles of natural law) and the artificial right of property (which is decreed by parliament). He associated the doctrine of the artificial right of property with Benthamite reformers who were attempting to reform the English state.
Open the reader →Thomas Mackay
A Plea for Liberty: An Argument against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation (LF ed.)
This collection of essays was originally published in 1891 in response to a collection of *Fabian Essays on Socialism* which advocated policies which would eventually lead to the modern welfare state. The theoretical and empirical contributions are fine examples of the classical liberal tradition in British thought.
Open the reader →Yves Guyot
The Tyranny of Socialism
One of several books Guyot wrote attacking socialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this volume, in the tradition of Bastiat, he criticises what he calls “socialistic sophisms,” socialistic legislation, strikes, subsidies to business, and the connection between militarism, protectionism, and socialism.
Open the reader →Thomas Hodgskin
Popular Political Economy. Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution
Thomas Hodgskin, an officer in the British Navy who later worked for *The Economist,* was one of the earliest popularizers of economics for audiences of non-economists. He gave lectures on free trade, the corn laws, and labor to “mechanics institutes” (adult education groups). Hodgskin passionately cared about the concerns of laborers. His discussions of the labor theory of value followed up on David Ricardo and pre-dated John Stuart Mill’s expositions on similar themes.
Open the reader →George Bernard Shaw
Fabian Essays in Socialism
This collection of essays by the so-called "Fabian Socialists" (who advocated socialism by means of gradual political and economic reform instead of by revolution as preferred by the Marxists) prompted a vigorous defense of laissez-faire economic policies by leading English classical liberals in the early 1890s. Two volumes of these rebuttals of Fabian socialism were edited by Thomas Mackay. The 3 volumes together make interesting reading.
Open the reader →Eugen Richter
Pictures of the Socialistic Future
*Pictures of the Socialistic Future* is Richter’s satire of what would happen to Germany if the socialism espoused by the trade unionists, social democrats, and Marxists was actually put into practice. It is thus a late 19th century version of Orwell’s <i>1984,</i> minus the extreme totalitarianism which Orwell had witnessed in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia but which was still inconceivable to 19th century liberals.
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