From Locke to Satoshi · 35 people
The people who shaped the ideas of liberty, from John Locke to Satoshi Nakamoto, and how they connect to the guides, books and glossary on this site.
Voice of peaceful disobedience
French judge and a close friend of Montaigne. In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, written as a young man, he argued that every tyrant rules only because the many obey, and that a people can be free simply by refusing to serve.
Key ideaResolve to serve no more, and you are free.
Philosopher of natural rights
English philosopher and physician. In his Second Treatise of Government (1689) he argued that people have rights to life, liberty and property before any government exists, and that a government which violates them loses its legitimacy.
Key ideaYou own yourself, and by mixing your labor with unowned things you make them your property.
Father of economics
Scottish moral philosopher. The Wealth of Nations (1776) showed how the division of labor and free trade make nations rich, and how people pursuing their own interest are led, as if by an invisible hand, to serve others.
Key ideaProsperity grows from free exchange, not from the plans of rulers.
Economist and pamphleteer
French economist and member of parliament. In The Law (1850) he called it legal plunder when the law takes from some to give to others, and in That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen he taught readers to look for the hidden costs of every policy.
Key ideaLook not only at what a policy visibly does, but at what it silently prevents.
Abolitionist and critic of the constitution
American lawyer, abolitionist and entrepreneur. His private mail company competed with the US Post Office until a new law shut it down. In No Treason (1867–1870) he argued that a constitution nobody signed cannot bind anyone.
Key ideaA contract binds only those who agreed to it.
First theorist of private defense
Belgian-born economist who worked in France. In his 1849 essay The Production of Security he asked why security should be the only service left to a monopoly, and proposed that competing companies provide it.
Key ideaSecurity is a service like any other and can be produced by competition.
Sociologist of the state
German sociologist and economist. In The State (1908) he traced states back to conquest, not contract, and named the two ways to wealth: the economic means of work and trade, and the political means of taking what others produced.
Key ideaThe state is the organization of the political means.
Founder of the Austrian school
Austrian economist. His Principles of Economics (1871) explained prices by the subjective value people place on goods, and he showed how money arises spontaneously from barter, without any government.
Key ideaValue is not in things but in the minds of the people who use them.
Theorist of capital and interest
Austrian economist born in Brno and three times Austrian minister of finance. He explained interest through time preference: people value goods now more than the same goods later. His critique of Marx's theory of exploitation is still read today.
Key ideaInterest is the price of time, not the fruit of exploitation.
Dean of the Austrian school
Austrian economist who left Europe ahead of the Nazis and spent his last decades in New York. In 1920 he showed that socialism cannot calculate without market prices; in Human Action (1949) he built economics on the logic of human action and explained the boom and bust caused by cheap credit.
Key ideaWithout private property there are no prices, and without prices no rational economy.
Nobel laureate of the knowledge problem
Austrian-British economist, a student of Mises and winner of the 1974 Nobel prize. The Road to Serfdom (1944) warned that central planning leads to tyranny; The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) showed that prices carry knowledge no planner can ever collect.
Key ideaPrices coordinate millions of people who never meet.
Journalist who taught economics in one lesson
American journalist who wrote for The New York Times and Newsweek. Economics in One Lesson (1946) turned Bastiat's idea of the seen and the unseen into the most widely read introduction to free-market economics.
Key ideaJudge a policy by its long-run effects on everyone, not only on one group.
A founding mother of libertarianism
American journalist and writer, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Discovery of Freedom (1943) told human history as the struggle of individuals against authority. With Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand she is counted among the founding mothers of the libertarian movement.
Key ideaEvery person is self-controlling; no one can give up that responsibility to anyone else.
Critic of the planned society
Canadian-American novelist and literary critic. The God of the Machine (1943) compared a free society to an electric circuit that works only while energy flows freely, and warned that the welfare state ends in tyranny.
Key ideaGood intentions backed by force do the most harm.
Novelist of individualism
Russian-born American novelist and philosopher. In The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (1957) she celebrated the creative individual and rational self-interest. She rejected anarchism and wanted a minimal state, but her novels brought many people to libertarian ideas.
Key ideaYour life belongs to you, not to the collective.
Chicago economist and popular voice of markets
American economist of the Chicago school and winner of the 1976 Nobel prize. Capitalism and Freedom (1962) proposed school vouchers and an end to the military draft, and his TV series Free to Choose brought markets to millions. He remained a defender of a limited state and did not share the Austrian view of money.
Key ideaEconomic freedom is a precondition of political freedom.
Law without legislators
Italian legal philosopher and lawyer. Freedom and the Law (1961) compared laws written by parliaments with law found by judges and in private disputes, as in Roman law and English common law, and argued that the second protects liberty better.
Key ideaLaw, like language, can grow from the people who use it.
Nobel laureate of the commons
American political economist and the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics (2009). She studied communities that run forests, fisheries and water with their own rules and showed that the tragedy of the commons is not fate and needs neither a state nor a fence around every plot.
Key ideaPeople can govern shared resources themselves, if they can make and enforce their own rules.
Father of anarcho-capitalism
American economist and historian, a student of Mises. He joined Austrian economics with natural-rights ethics and concluded that no state is legitimate. For a New Liberty (1973), Anatomy of the State (1974) and The Ethics of Liberty (1982) are the core of modern anarcho-capitalism.
Key ideaApply to the state the same moral rules you apply to everyone else.
Philosopher of the minimal state
American philosopher at Harvard. Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) defended a minimal state against both the welfare state and anarchism, and gave libertarian ideas a place in academic philosophy.
Key ideaOnly a minimal state, limited to protecting rights, can be justified.
Economist of private law
American economist, son of Milton Friedman. The Machinery of Freedom (1973) argues for anarcho-capitalism on practical rather than moral grounds, and his study of medieval Iceland showed how law can work without a state.
Key ideaJudge institutions by their results, and private law would win.
Founder of agorism
Canadian-born activist who lived in the United States. In the New Libertarian Manifesto (1980) he rejected political parties and proposed counter-economics: living and trading outside the state's reach until it withers away.
Key ideaFreedom is built in the market, not won at the ballot box.
Dissident of the parallel polis
Czech Catholic philosopher and mathematician, a spokesman of Charter 77, imprisoned by the communist regime from 1979 to 1983. His 1978 essay The Parallel Polis called on people to build independent culture, education and economy beside the state instead of waiting for it to change.
Key ideaDo not wait for the regime to reform: build a parallel society beside it.
Historian of the ratchet
American economic historian. Crisis and Leviathan (1987) showed how wars and emergencies expand government, and how after each crisis it never shrinks back to its former size.
Key ideaEvery crisis leaves the state bigger than it found it.
Philosopher of property and critic of democracy
German economist and philosopher, a student of Rothbard. He formulated argumentation ethics, and in Democracy: The God That Failed (2001) he argued that democratic politicians, as temporary caretakers, think in shorter time horizons than owners do.
Key ideaWhoever argues against self-ownership is already using it.
Historian of private law
American economist. The Enterprise of Law (1990) documents how much of law, from medieval merchant law to modern arbitration, was created and enforced privately, and how compensation for victims gave way to punishment by the state.
Key ideaLaw grew from below long before states took it over.
Philosopher who questions political authority
American philosopher at the University of Colorado. The Problem of Political Authority (2013) tests every theory of why we should obey the state and finds that none of them works.
Key ideaThe state has no right to do what no private person may do.
Critic of intellectual property
American patent attorney and libertarian legal theorist. Against Intellectual Property (2008) argues that only scarce things can be owned, so patents and copyright are not property rights but limits on how people may use their own things.
Key ideaIdeas are not scarce, so they cannot be property.
Father of digital cash
American cryptographer. In the 1980s he invented blind signatures and founded DigiCash, whose eCash let people pay online without revealing who they are. The company failed, but it proved that digital money can be private.
Key ideaPrivacy in payments is a precondition of a free society.
Crypto-anarchist
American engineer at Intel who wrote The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto in 1988 and in 1992 co-founded the cypherpunks mailing list, where the ideas that led to Bitcoin took shape.
Key ideaCryptography can protect privacy and trade from the state.
Inventor of Hashcash
British cryptographer. His Hashcash (1997) asked the sender of an e-mail for a small proof of work, to make spam expensive. Satoshi Nakamoto cited it in the Bitcoin whitepaper, and the same idea now secures Bitcoin mining.
Key ideaMake sending cost a little work, and abuse becomes expensive.
Cypherpunk and the first Bitcoin user
American cryptographer who worked on PGP and in 2004 built reusable proofs of work, a forerunner of Bitcoin mining. He was among the first to run Bitcoin and received its first payment from Satoshi in January 2009. He kept working on Bitcoin while ALS paralyzed him, and died in 2014.
Key ideaEncryption in the hands of ordinary people protects them from those who would watch and control them.
Inventor of Bitcoin
The pseudonymous author of the Bitcoin whitepaper (2008) and of its first software (2009). Satoshi stopped communicating in 2011, the coins attributed to them have never moved, and nobody knows who they are: a network with no founder to arrest.
Key ideaElectronic cash sent directly from person to person, with no trusted third party.
Teacher of Bitcoin
British-Greek technologist and one of the best-known Bitcoin educators. His book Mastering Bitcoin (2014, now in its third edition) explains the technology to programmers and is free to read online; in The Internet of Money and hundreds of talks he explained to the public why open, neutral money matters.
Key ideaNot your keys, not your coins: real ownership means holding your own private keys.
Founder of Liberland
Czech politician and activist. In 2015 he proclaimed the Free Republic of Liberland on an unclaimed strip of land on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia, as a state with voluntary taxes. No country has recognized it so far.
Key ideaA state can be small enough that paying for it is voluntary.
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