Join us in promoting liberty and freedom by educating the public on thier rights and thier history.
Your Rights Matter
Join us in promoting liberty and freedom by educating the public on thier rights and thier history.
Empowering Through Education
Our Mission
At Liberty Hall Academy, our mission is to educate citizens about the principles and history of liberty, freedom and their individual rights. We believe that informed citizens are essential for a thriving community.
Readings On Liberty
Core Concepts
These help you get clear on what people mean by freedom (negative vs positive, liberty vs license, freedom vs power).
- Isaiah Berlin — Two Concepts of Liberty (short, essential framing)
- Philip Pettit — Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (freedom as non-domination)
- Gerald C. MacCallum — “Negative and Positive Freedom” (a precise analytic map of the concept)
Ancient & Classical Roots
- Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War (power, empire, and what “freedom” means between states)
- Aristotle — Politics (citizenship, virtue, regimes, and the city’s claim on the person)
- Cicero — On Duties (natural law, moral obligation, and public life)
- Epictetus — Discourses (or Enchiridion) (inner freedom: mastery of self vs external control)
Natural Rights
The backbone of rights and limited government.
- John Locke — Second Treatise of Government (property, consent, legitimate authority)
- Algernon Sidney — Discourses Concerning Government (a major republican counterpoint to monarchy)
- Thomas Paine — Rights of Man (popular sovereignty and democratic liberty)
- Mary Wollstonecraft — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (liberty applied consistently)
Liberty, Coercion, and Individuality
The "classic" case for free speech, toleration, and personal autonomy.
- Bastiat — The Law (Do no harm, the proper use of force and thus the law)
- John Stuart Mill — On Liberty (harm principle; individuality)
- Mill — Considerations on Representative Government (institutions for a free society)
- Alexis de Tocqueville — Democracy in America (soft despotism, civil society, habits of freedom)
American Constitutional Liberty
How freedom gets engineered into a political system—plus the arguments around it.
- The Virginia Declaration of Rights (George Mason)
- The Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson)
- The U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights (read them slowly, with notes)
- The Federalist Papers (esp. 10, 51, 78) (factions, checks and balances, judicial power)
- Anti-Federalist writings (e.g., Brutus essays) (the case against consolidated power)
Economic Freedom
Why markets, property, and institutions matter—and the best critiques of that view.
- Adam Smith — The Wealth of Nations + Theory of Moral Sentiments
- F. A. Hayek — The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty
- Milton Friedman — Capitalism and Freedom
- Douglass North — Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (why rules shape freedom)
- Karl Polanyi — The Great Transformation (a powerful critique of market society and “disembedded” economies)
- Amartya Sen — Development as Freedom (capabilities: freedom as real opportunity)
Modern theories of justice, rights, and the state
This is where contemporary arguments about liberty usually land.
- John Rawls — A Theory of Justice (liberty + equality; modern benchmark)
- Robert Nozick — Anarchy, State, and Utopia (libertarian response; entitlement theory)
- Ronald Dworkin — Taking Rights Seriously (rights as trumps)
- H. L. A. Hart — The Concept of Law (how legal systems work; coercion and rule-following)
Power, totalitarianism, and the enemies of freedom
Useful both historically and as “warning literature.”
- George Orwell — 1984 (surveillance, language, psychological control)
- Aldous Huxley — Brave New World (comfort as control)
- Hannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism (how mass politics can destroy liberty)
- Václav Havel — “The Power of the Powerless” (truth, conformity, moral resistance)
Civil liberties in practice
- Thomas Emerson — The System of Freedom of Expression (free speech as a system)
- Anthony Lewis — Freedom for the Thought That We Hate (U.S. free speech tradition)