Reading List

New to free market principles? Your education starts here. Interested in expanding your knowledge of the “liberal” tradition? There is always more to learn and new ideas to explore. To get you started, here is a list of books and other reading material recommended by Cascade Policy Institute.

Classical Liberal Literature

• The Second Treatise on Government — John Locke (1689)
• Common Sense — Thomas Paine (1776)
• The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith (1776)
• The Declaration of Independence — Thomas Jefferson (1776)
• The Constitution of the United States & The Bill of Rights (1787 – 1789)
• On Liberty — John Stuart Mill (1859)
• The Libertarian Reader — David Boaz (1998), a collection of literature fundamental to libertarian thought

Modern Foundations

• The Road to Serfdom — Friedrich Hayek (1944)
• Animal Farm — George Orwell (1945)
• The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand (1946)
• Economics in One Lesson — Henry Hazlitt (1946)
• 1984 — George Orwell (1949)
• Human Action — Ludwig Von Mises (1949)
• The Law — Frederick Bastiat (1950)
• Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand (1957)
• I, Pencil — Leonard Read (1958)
• Capitalism and Freedom — Milton Friedman (1962)
• Man, Economy, & State — Murray Rothbard (1962)
• Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal — Ayn Rand (1966)
• Libertarianism — John Hospers (1971)
• The Machinery of Freedom — David D. Friedman (1973)
• Free to Choose — Milton & Rose Friedman (1980)
• Restoring the American Dream — Robert Ringer (1980)
• Crisis and Leviathan — Robert Higgs (1989)

Current Free Market Thought

• The Myth of the Robber Barons — Burton Folsom (1991)
• Persuasion Versus Force — Mark and Jo Ann Skousen (1992)
• The Commanding Heights — Daniel Yergin & Joseph Stanislaw (1992)
• The Vision of the Anointed — Thomas Sowell (1996)
• What it Means to be a Libertarian — Charles Murray (1997)
• How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World — Harry Browne (1998)
• Libertarianism — David Boaz (1998)

• The Twenty-First Century City — Stephen Goldsmith (1999)

• Restoring the Lost Constitution — Randy Barnett (2003)
• The Mystery of Capital — Hernando De Soto (2003)
• Secrets of Libertarian Persuasion — Michael Cloud (2004)