As I mentioned a little while ago, one of my plans for this blog is an occasional series on the history of libertarian thought.  I’m working on the first post now – on John Locke – and expect to put it up within the next week.  But before I get started with the series itself, I thought I’d say a few words about what I have in mind to do.

There are already plenty of good histories of the libertarian tradition out there, of course.  And I’ll say a bit more at the end of this post about some of the ones I’ve found to be most helpful.  But I hope my series will be useful and distinctive in a couple of ways. 

Most significantly, this series will view the history of libertarian thought through the lens of “Bleeding Heart Libertarianism.”  This means two things.  First, it is going give special focus to its subjects’ views on the relationship between individual liberty, limited government, and social justice.  Second, one of my goals in this series is to argue for a thesis, namely, that bleeding heart libertarianism is not new.  More specifically, I’m going to be arguing that bleeding heart libertarianism is actually more consistent with the libertarian intellectual tradition than the variety of libertarianism that rejects social justice outright.  It has already been suggested on this blog that several of the supposed exemplars of this latter version of libertarianism have views on social justice that are more nuanced than those imputed to them by popular interpretations.  This series will develop this line of argument further, and show that those few libertarians who really did hold such views are relative outliers.

Entries in the series will be somewhat longer than ordinary blog posts, but still relatively short and quite non-comprehensive in their coverage.  I'm going to try to keep them fairly accessible and not to presuppose much background on the subjects, though I expect many of you will already be familiar with at least the general outlines of the subjects' views.  Each entry will conclude with some recommendations for further reading.

I'll be focusing on figures who have had a major impact on the intellectual development of libertarianism: people like Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, etc.  I don't have a fully set agenda yet, and I won't be moving in chronological order.  So if you have requests, I'm happy to take them here in the comments thread or by email.

Finally, there is a strong likelihood that this series will be the first stage in a bigger project for me – more on that soon, I hope.  So I'll be watching the comments thread closely for your questions, clarifications, suggestions, etc., and will be taking these very seriously, even if I'm not always able to respond within the thread.

That said, here are a few other resources for those of you with an interest in the history of libertarian thought.  These are some good general introductions that have been useful to me.  I'll provide more specific bibliographies as the series progresses.  But I'm sure I've still omitted some important works – feel free to suggest your own in the comments.

• David Boaz's The Libertarian Reader contains important, short excerpts from Smith, Hayek, Rothbard, and a host of other major figures in the libertarian tradition.  A good place to start.
• Norman Barry's On Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism is, unfortunately, out of print.  But it was tremendously useful to me in providing a philosophically sophisticated overview of the different schools of libertarian thought and their intellectual origins.  A really terrific book.
• Ronald Hamowy's Encyclopedia of Libertarianism has relatively short entries on a number of important figures in the libertarian tradition, written by a set of leading libertarian scholars.
• Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism is more a history of the libertarian movement than of libertarian thought.  But it's an absolutely wonderful book, and you'll learn alot about the ideas by reading it.
• Jeff Riggenbach's podcast on "The Libertarian Tradition" covers a broad range of intellectuals and activists who have contributed to libertarianism in some way, from the relatively well-known like Friedrich Hayek, to the somewhat more obscure like Voltairine de Cleyre.  One of the many terrific, free resources made available from mises.org.