David Hart

David Hart was born and raised in Sydney, Australia and has degrees from Stanford University and King’s College, Cambridge. He taught history at the University of Adelaide from 1986-2001 and was the Director of the Online Library of Liberty Project at Liberty Fund in Indianapolis from 2001-2019. His research interests include the history of classical liberal thought in general, and the French classical liberal tradition in particular. He is the Academic Editor of Liberty Fund’s translation of the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. Recent publications include a chapter on “The Paris School of Liberal Political Economy, 1803-1853” for the Cambridge History of French Thought (2019) and the anthology Social Class and State Power (Palgrave, 2018) on classical liberal class analysis. In his spare time, he has also written a screenplay for a film on the activities of Frédéric Bastiat during the 1848 Revolution in Paris.
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Articles

What is to be Done? The Rise of Hygiene Socialism and the Prospects for Liberty

"When one lines up the groups which are now appearing to come together in a 'united front' against individual liberty – environmental, monetary, cultural, and hygiene socialism – with talk of the need for a “global reset” one wonders 'what is to be done?'. This was the title of an important pamphlet Lenin wrote in 1901 which inspired Rothbard to ask the same question in 1977." ~ David Hart

Pandemic Policy in One Page

"All the sound reasons why central planning does not and cannot work in the case of the general economy apply equally in this case, along with a few other reasons which are specific to epidemics." ~ David Hart

Pandemic Policy in One Page

The Urgent Need for Intellectual Change

The rebuilding of a free society after this chaos is over will require a great deal of work in the above four areas: mathematics, moral philosophy, history, and economics. In my darker moments I think that in fact we have gone back to ground zero in all these areas.

Books

Research Publications

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