A Libertarian Gem Available Again

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I’m pleased to recommend a brilliant, influential, and deeply radical essay on liberty that was first published 1832 and is now available on-line from the Online Library of Liberty. The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, by Thomas Hodgskin is available in PDF format and in searchable HTML format. Hodgskin was a naval officer who exposed the horrible mistreatment of sailors, became a writer for The Economist, and was a popular educator on economics. He was also a mentor to Herbert Spencer, who also wrote for The Economist. In addition to his insightful remarks about the institution of property, I think that Hodgskin offered one of the clearest statements of the relationship between individuality and property:

Mr. Locke says, that every man has a property in his own person; in fact, individuality–which is signified by the word own–cannot be disjoined from the person. Each individual learns his own shape and form, and even the existence of his limbs and body, from seeing and feeling them. These constitute his notion of personal identity, both for himself and others; and it is impossible to conceive–it is in fact a contradiction to say–that a man’s limbs and body do not belong to himself: for the words him, self, and his body, signify the same material thing.

As we learn the existence of our own bodies from seeing and feeling them, and as we see and feel the bodies of others, we have precisely similar grounds for believing in the individuality or identity of other persons, as for believing in our own identity. The ideas expressed by the words mine and thine, as applied to the produce of labour, are simply then an extended form of the ideas of personal identity and individuality. We readily spread them from our hands and other limbs, to the things the hands seize, or fashion, or create, or the legs hunt down and overtake.

(The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, (London: L B. Steil, Paternoster Row, 1832), “Letter the Second, The Natural Right of Property Illustrated,” pp. 28-29)

It was with great excitement that I first came across Hodgskin’s works some three decades ago. Now that it is available in other than crumbly old library copies, I hope that many others may be afforded similar pleasure today.

P.S. It’s my hope that the Liberty Fund will also make available another classic work that I encountered about the same time as I encountered Hodgskin: Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), one of the greatest of French historians, a passionate libertarian, and a talented and powerful writer. I have nineteenth century editions of his works in French and in English and they are brilliant, notably his Histoire de la conquÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?ªte de l’Angleterre par les Normands, which was translated into English by the famous English writer William Hazlitt. (I found the book rather by accident in the wonderful library at St. John’s College, where I did my undergraduate degree in liberal arts; the book had not been checked out in over fifty years; it had been there for all that time, just waiting.)