But the most effective mechanism ever devised for making effective pooling of our faculties as easy as it can be — the free market — is also the natural result of reducing general laws to a bare minimum and leaving people free to make their own choices about their own values...

Whatever their motives may have been, whatever at any given moment they thought of themselves as doing, Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke advanced the libertarian idea, just as John Lilburne did. All three of them are part of the libertarian tradition.

As Barnes noted, there were a number of "middle-class writers" who took more or less this line, but "by far the most influential" of them "was the 17th-century English philosopher, John Locke. Many of his theories were taken up and popularized in America by Thomas Jefferson...

"The more controls and taxation a State imposes on its people," Sam wrote, "the more they will evade and defy them...

American libertarians would be particularly interested in Peake's great novel, since the perspective on the individual and society that pervades it is very libertarian in the broadest sense of that word...

What Thoreau was defending here, in 1849, was essentially the same concept the English philosopher Herbert Spencer defended two years later, in his book Social Statics , as "the right to ignore the State."...

No other woman in America ever had to suffer such persistent persecution.

"In 1982, Vince moved on to building a nonprofit organization to host a series of international libertarian conferences — the Libertarian International."

One doesn't have to read far into the works of George Orwell to discover that he had no understanding of economics whatsoever and was not personally a libertarian in the sense we have in mind when we use that word today...

Freethought, de Cleyre wrote, was "the right to believe as the evidence, coming in contact with the mind, forces it to believe. This implies the admission of any and all evidence bearing upon any subject."...