Witch Doctoring, Good and Bad

The Province of Ontario’s New Democratic Party (NDP), which, for non-Canadian readers, is a “progressive” / left opposition party, has introduced a bill to ban gay conversion therapy (let’s call it GCT for short) for anyone under 18. The bill has found ready support from the province’s governing party and has now passed. It probably helps that Ontario’s premier, Kathleen Wynne, is herself a lesbian. It also helps that Ontario’s is possibly the most paternalistic government in what is left of the free world. But that’s a post for another day…

I will begin by saying that, in essence, I am a supporter of the ban, but not for the reasons I have heard offered for it by its sponsors, which for the most part range from the muddled, to the silly, to the downright dangerous.

Wynne herself objects to GCT because it “is based on the premise that being transgender or gay is wrong and needs to be corrected, adding it simply does not work.” The latter claim (of non-efficacy) is likely true, while the former claim is less clearly so. Rather than being based on the premise that being gay is bad, GCT could conceivably be based on the idea that there are some who would rather be straight than gay, for any number of reasons. It is conceivable that there are gay persons who  might rather not be gay, and not because they hate gays. But even assuming the truth of the claim that GCT assumes that being gay is bad (in the moral sense of “bad”), I’m not quite sure I understand how that in itself is grounds for a legal ban. After all, assuming that being gay is not bad, the most we can say here is that GCT is based on a false premise. Being based on a false premise is not good grounds for illegality. If we were to go around banning things that were based on mistaken beliefs, we’d have to ban an awful lot of things, religion for instance. Good luck with that.

There seems to be something muddled — and hypocritical, as I hope to show — about the justification for banning GCT.

The objections I’ve heard offered against GCT are typically variations of three main ones:

Objection #1:    GCT does damage to gay community.

I have heard (pardon the pun) a similar argument from some in the deaf community, who would like to see cochlear implants banned because helping deaf people to hear again would do damage to deaf culture (while implying that there is something “bad” or “less than” about being deaf). Aside from it being debatable whether or not this “damage” claim has any factual merit, it seems monstrous to me to deny some people the use of one of their senses so that others can continue to feel comfortable in their culture. By the same reasoning, should we consider a on ban any kind of intervention that seeks to reverse a physical disability? Jesus surely didn’t think of himself as killing whole communities when he helped the lame to walk and the blind to see. If your culture depends on denying others something so fundamental, then I submit that your culture is too weak or too vicious to deserve to be artificially kept afloat.

The point here is that if a particular person with homosexual inclinations views those inclinations as something they’d rather not have, why shouldn’t they have the right to seek to be relieved of that burden?

The gay community is strong enough and large enough to survive the existence of what amounts to a fringe element that seeks to convert them. There may be threats out there, but I don’t think GCT is one of them. The LGBT community has survived through times much more hostile than these. In recent times the gay community has gone from strength to strength; the same cannot be said for the gay conversion movement. With respect to the “damage to community” objection, a ban on GCT seems like a clumsy solution to a non-existent problem.

One more point: It is a fact that a number of people are born female who would rather be male (and vice versa). “Progressives” would presumably celebrate their decision to seek sex reassignment. After all, it seems that being a trans person is all the rage right now among progressives. Progressives certainly don’t prevent trans people from seeking to change their sex. After all, it’s about personal liberty, right? And progressives certainly do not complain that the choice such people make “does damage” to, say, women’s rights. Why is the same respect for liberty not accorded to people who’d rather not be gay? The example of trans people brings us to

Objection #2:    Gays are born that way.

Therefore stop “correcting” them, goes this objection. To this, I would point out that many people are born many different ways, including ways they’d rather not be and that can be changed. Again, does this mean that someone with a birth defect ought never to be allowed to correct that defect, because they were born that way?

And again, many are born male who would rather be female and vice versa. Should we prevent them from seeking to change this because they would be messing with the way they were born? Unless one is a theological hard head, one must be honest and admit that nature makes mistakes from time to time. If those mistakes can be corrected, why should they not be corrected?

To be honest, I've never quite understood the importance of the "born that way" argument to LGBT rights anyway. As I've said, one can often change the way one was born. But more fundamentally, to me the claim has always had a certain unpalatable undertone of apologetics: "I'm sorry, I can't help being gay. I was born this way. Please don't hate me." I suppose the idea here is that if it's not a choice I can't be held morally responsible for it. But the better route is simply to acknowledge that even if it were a choice, it is not one that is morally culpable. The "born that way" argument seems to cater to the intolerant enemy rather than refuting him, by accepting his premise that homosexual behaviour is sonehow prima facie morally wrong. If I have nothing to be ashamed  of for being gay, then I don't have to apologize for it, and I certainly don't have to "justify" it on a quasi-deterministic basis.

Objection #3:    GCT doesn’t work.

Correct. In most (but not all) cases, GCT doesn’t work. However, this in itself is no argument to ban GCT — though it may be an argument not to publicly fund it. To compare: most of the addiction therapies on the market have abysmal success rates, at least where statistics are even made available. By any standard, Alcoholics Anonymous is a joke, as judged by its outrageous recidivism rates. And yet few make the case for banning alcoholic treatment centres or stopping the funding of them. If anything, there is a strong lobby to expand them.

And let us not discount the fact that there are those who claim to have responded positively to GCT. Naysayers will claim that these people weren’t really gay in the first place, or that they were brainwashed, or that they’re not really happy. Personally, I don’t feel well-placed to make such judgments, because I am not them and I don’t have special access to their souls. I am willing to believe that there is a small subset of people for whom GCT “works”, even if only through a kind of placebo effect. As long as they’re willing to try the therapy out, who am I do deny them the opportunity?

And who knows? Maybe for some of those for whom GCT doesn’t work, it may nonetheless have an unlooked-for positive consequence in helping them come to terms with their homosexuality. When treatment fails, maybe you just have to live with it, even embrace it, and maybe join a community of fellow travelers.

For all these reasons, on balance, I am in disagreement with a general ban on GCT, even though I am an utter sceptic as to its efficacy. However, having said that, I would impose the following strictures on the practice:

(i) Unless it can empirically demonstrate its efficacy, GCT it should not be publicly funded.

I leave it as an open question whether, should it somehow prove its efficacy, it should still be refused state funding insofar as it is faith-based and violates the principle of the separation of church and state.

(ii) Nobody should be disadvantaged in any way on the grounds of having refused to undergo CGT.

This is nearly equivalent to saying that nobody ought to be disadvantaged on the grounds of being LGBT and is intended to assuage fears related to objection #1 above.

(iii) Nobody ought to be forced to undergo GCT.

With regard to the last point, I would also go so far as to say that this stricture ought to apply to minors too. In other words, a minor should never be forced by their parents or guardians to undergo GCT, even though in other areas we accept that parents or guardians can make decisions on behalf of their children and wards. Nay, further, I would say that the therapy ought not to be available to minors at all, not even should a minor request it in the absence of parental consent or knowledge. Here my reasoning is more controversial, in that I base it mostly on my reluctance to slap a label like “gay”, lesbian” or “straight” on any minor. They may have inclinations one way or the other, but I am not convinced that anything is set in stone until they have had more life experience. In resisting the urge to put sexual labels on minors, I partly wish to resist the societal trend towards sexualizing children. It is unhealthy and, to my mind, morally objectionable.

I think too that Premier Wynne was grasping at something like this explanation when in the article I linked to above, she said that “she had a lot of life experience when she came out in her mid-30s and understood her sexuality in a way an eight-or nine-year-old cannot.” (N.B. It seems that the Premier and I are both agnostic about whether gays are “born that way”. For most purposes I think it is a pointless debate anyway, much akin to 17th-century philosophical debates about the existence of innate knowledge.)

Unlike other parental decisions regarding medical interventions for their children, an intervention here (one way or the other) is largely unnecessary and can have serious long-term negative repercussions. To see this clearly, imagine a counter-example: What would your attitude be if a pair of gay parents decided to make their child undergo “straight conversion therapy” to make them gay, so that it would fit in better with its parents’ community and lifestyle? If you’re like me, you will find this morally objectionable, and not because it’s trying to make the child gay, but rather because it’s trying to impose a sexual identity on a being that should not be sexualized at all. It’s just creepy. Although trained philosophers will tell you otherwise, I believe that sometimes “creepy” can amount to a valid moral argument.

Looked at from another angle, I would view the decision to put one’s child through GCT as analogous to a decision to sterilize it. A parent should not have the right to make that decision, because there is no good reason to make it (barring some immediate life-threatening emergency) and because the consequences of the decision are so potentially dire and such a gross assault on a person’s future.

A child should be prevented from exercising the “voluntary” decision to undergo GCT because it cannot yet be said to have enough experience to make a considered decision about its sexual or reproductive future. There is no settled will in the agent that allows us to call such a decision “voluntary” in a substantive moral sense.

 It is specifically the limitation of the Ontario ban to minors only that gives it my approval, and it is for this reason only that I said at the beginning of the post that I am a supporter of it. Ne plus ultra. Thus far stretches my paternalism, but no further. Aside from the above three strictures, I see no reason why GCT shouldn’t be available to those who want it.

*        *        *        *

One of my main objections to a broader ban on GCT is that, besides being an unwarranted invasion of personal liberty, it smacks of hypocrisy. The progressives who advocate for such ban believe that they are being high-minded and are striking a blow for liberty and tolerance. They are doing the opposite on both counts. To see that this is the case, it may help to juxtapose this Ontario government decision with another concurrent one.

In addition to banning gay conversion therapy for minors, the Government of Ontario has also passed a law that will regulate the homeopathy industry in much the same way it regulates the medical profession in the province. So there will be some kind of government recognized college of homeopathic witch doctors just as there is a college of real doctors.

There is about as much empirical evidence for the efficacy of homeopathic “medicine” as there is for gay conversion therapy, maybe even less. And yet, the government encourages the former and even funds it. Of course, this rather undercuts the government’s own so-called “Patients First: Action Plan for Health Care”, which claims to be “making evidence based [sic.] decisions on value and quality, to sustain the system for generations to come”

The desire to ban one empirically bogus treatment while sanctioning another one seems incoherent unless understood in the context of one group (“progressives”) imposing an agenda on everyone else. This is paternalistic. And to demonize those who think differently on the issue of GCT, as is being done, strikes me as not particularly tolerant. Progressives take (mostly undue) credit for fighting paternalism and intolerance. Hence, my charge of hypocrisy.

To end, here’s a little piece to lighten the mood — sort of.

Administrative Unlaw?

This is not a court.

I recently read a newish book by Philip Hamburger called Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). The book is one in an ever-growing genre of roughly libertarian legal studies that defend a position that public law (in most cases specifically “administrative law”) as it is practiced today is either (i) degenerate law, or (ii) not really law at all. Usually these claims go along with an implicit or explicit claim that only the common law is “real” law — along with the US Constitution (as interpreted by originalists), if the writer happens to be American.

The genre is not a new one. I have more than once in this blog cited Lord Bury’s The New Despotism (1929) with approval. And I openly admit to being in sympathy with the idea that state action, in the guise of “administrative law”, tends towards overexpansion and poses a threat to liberty. However, when one descends to details, it is more difficult to say why administrative law is so different from other kinds of law in a way that makes it more dangerous/ illegitimate/ arbitrary or less law-like than common law and constitutional law.

Often it is argued that administrative law is a creature of executive power, and hence dangerous. But in a sense all law is the creature of executive power, at least insofar as laws require an executive for their enforcement. When the executive decides to neglect the enforcement of laws duly passed, this too is a form of arbitrary “tyranny” in which the executive usurps authority from the legislature. And yet this phenomenon curiously gets ignored by libertarians, though it happens all the time. My point is that, upon reflection, it is not always easy to draw a nice clear line between “executive” and “legislature”.

Similarly, it is also often argued that administrative law is undemocratic, because law-making power gets delegated to administrative bodies that are unelected. This may be true. But the argument loses some of its bite when we consider that the body doing the delegating is an elected legislature, and that the bodies to whom it is delegated are themselves created by that elected legislature. As such, administrative law clearly has at least some connection to a democratic process. And in theory it is always open to that democratic legislature to reverse the process, either dissolving such administrative bodies or taking back the law-making powers it delegated. (Of course, the public choice theorist in me recognizes that it is rarely that simple in practice.)

Furthermore, consider this: If it was a mistake for the elected legislature to have created such administrative bodies or to have delegated law-making authority to them, then who is to blame for this evil? Clearly the elected legislature. Which perhaps ought to make us wonder why we should hold these elected legislatures in such reverence.

Clearly articulating what is bad about administrative law is not as easy as many libertarian types would have us believe. I would like to present two more illustrations of this point, drawn from claims in Hamburger’s book.

At page 50, Hamburger notes that “extralegal legislation [i.e. administrative law] did much to provoke the development of constitutional law”. This is a historical claim. The point he is getting at is that what he calls “constitutional law” — but what I would prefer to call “constitutionalism” in order to sidestep the thorny issue of what exactly counts as “law” — arose as a defensive reaction to executive encroachment (think here of old King John at Runnymede or George III enforcing his horrific three penny tea tax at the point of redcoat bayonets.)

Hamburger’s point here raises a problem for his own larger position: If constitutional law arose as a reaction to administrative law, then the latter predates the former. Administrative law certainly predates any particular constitution that Hamburger is talking about — at least given his narrow definition of “constitution” as a form of government resulting from consent/agreement of the people (see p. 44). And yet throughout his book he relies on constitutional legal thought to undercut administrative law. He expects us to take for granted that the US Constitution acts as some kind of trump wherever it runs up against a practice, while he hasn’t really even bothered to defend this position. He is therefore begging the question. You can’t argue for the primacy or normative authority of constitutional law over administrative law by simply assuming the primacy of constitutional law. This is especially the case where it is open for one to argue at the very least that (i) administrative law is in many cases expedient and useful, and (ii) as a kind of law-making authority it pre-existed constitutional law.

However, to my mind, there is a deeper flaw in Hamburger’s book, and in most books like it. Hamburger has a tendency to slip back and forth between constitutional law and common law as if they’re somehow synonymous. They are not (especially, again, given his narrow view of “constitution”). There is almost nothing in the US Constitution that an Englishman living in the Middle Ages (the heyday of the common law) would find intelligible.

As it stands, this would just be a criticism about his loose use of language. But it has deeper ramifications. Hamburger offers a potted history of administrative law and its relation to common law and the rise of  constitutional law that is very selective, to say the least. For one thing, it only really covers developments from the Tudors on. This is problematic, because if he were to go further back, for example if he were to read Pollock and Maitland on English law before Edward I, he would find that the common law itself is mostly a creature of administration: the common law system of courts, etc. was created by the executive to solve administrative/ governmental problems. And what was the exchequer court but an administrative body? Yet it was considered a common law court. Therefore, historically, common law is (or at least was) administrative law.

The very term “common” law derives from the fact that it was the law as applied in all the King’s courts across the land, in what was a blatant usurpation of the local authority of his barons. In that sense the introduction of the common law was possibly the most audacious and far-reaching encroachment of state power in the history of the English-speaking peoples.

One might also mention the history of the Court of Chancery. In certain kinds of cases where it was found that the common law could provide no remedy or would work palpable injustice, appeal could be had to the Lord Chancellor. Now the Chancellor was an administrator par excellence, a minister appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the King, and to whom the King had delegated authority to grant remedies not otherwise available — to in effect make law. Would Hamburger therefore wish to say that equity (the law administered in the Court of Chancery) was mere administrative law, or that for that reason it was not law at all? If so, then we would have to jettison such areas of law as trusts and wills, and such remedies as injunctions and specific performance, which originated in Chancery. The simple fact is,

In the beginning, all law was administrative law.

And perhaps it is still so to a greater degree than we care to imagine.

Finally, Hamburger’s focus on post-Tudor developments leads him to overplay the role of Parliament (and hence elected legislatures) in the creation of law. In the first formative period of the common law, “parliament” would largely have consisted of what we call the House of Lords, in which there was no popular representation or participation. Even a little later, when the commons were allowed some representation, Parliament was essentially an advisory body, not a legislative one. Does that mean that there was no such thing as law in England before the struggles of the 17th century? Or that there was no constitution? The claim would be absurd, but it follows from just about everything Hamburger is arguing in this book.

Consider the Peacock

I’ve been reading a book by Richard Joyce called The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Now, I am far from a creationist (though I’m also far from a scientist), and in broad outlines I am a thorough believer in the theory of evolution and in some version of its mechanism of action, natural selection. Nevertheless, whenever I read a work in which the theory is applied to such complex human phenomena as our propensity to make moral judgments, I am usually left unsatisfied and sceptical.

I am left unsatisfied, because such explanations often seem beside the point: I’m never sure what purpose is served by an evolutionary explanation of how human morality arose. Is it somehow supposed to validate our moral judgments, by grounding them in our biology? If so, why is such validation necessary? Are we more apt to avoid theft if we are told that we are hardwired to find theft wrong? Or is it somehow supposed to debunk our moral judgments, by demonstrating that the experienced wrongness of theft is nothing more than a biological reaction that could have been otherwise if our evolution was just a little bit different, and that “theft” and “wrongness” are simply biological phenomena? Will this knowledge make me view my disapproval of theft as somehow contingent, parochial? In other words, I’m doubtful that an evolutionary “explanation” of morality would have much relevance for morality. It would simply be an entertainment for the curious, its entertainment value a function of aesthetic concerns such as the elegance, cleverness, and ontological economy of the explanation offered.

It must be said that Joyce’s book, to its credit, does a very good job of addressing (though not necessarily answering) the question of what purpose an evolutionary explanation of human morality is supposed to serve, or of what difference such an explanation would (or wouldn’t) make to morality itself, as practiced by humans. Indeed, this is probably the main strength of the book.

However, besides leaving me unsatisfied, evolutionary explanations of complex human phenomena also often leave me sceptical, because stories proffered to show how a certain faculty like morality arose almost always end up seeming just that — stories. Sometimes the stories are very clever, very elegant, very plausible, but for every such story on offer there is usually another writer with a different plausible story. With multiple just-so stories for sale, a reader can be excused for finding such stories dubious in general. And it seems the more complex the phenomenon being explained, the more alternative stories there are available to explain it.

Indeed, in some cases scepticism can result from explanations offered for quite simple phenomena. Take, for instance, the concept of sexual selection, as used to explain some of the more florid examples of seemingly maladaptive physical traits. Here is Joyce (p. 32) with a well-known example:

Consider the enormous and cumbersome affair that is the peacock’s tail. Its existence poses a prima facie threat to the theory of natural selection — so much so that Charles Darwin once admitted that the sight of a feather from a peacock’s tail made him ‘sick!’ Yet Darwin also largely solved the problem by realizing that the primary selective force involved in the development of the peacock’s tail is the peahen’s choosiness in picking a mate. If peahens prefer mates with big fan-shaped tails, then eventually peacocks will have big fan-shaped tails; if peahens prefer mates with triple-crested, spiraling, red, white, and blue tails, then (ceteris paribus) eventually peacocks will sport just such tails. Sexual selection is a process whereby the choosiness of mates or the competition among rivals can produce traits that would otherwise be detrimental to their bearer.

Now, at first sight nothing seems simpler than this explanation: peahens developed a sexual preference for males with large tails, and given this preference, peacocks with large tails were more likely to be chosen as reproductive partners, giving them a reproductive advantage over their smaller-tailed rivals. The story neatly answers a basic problem: why would an animal develop a trait that is so obviously an obstacle to its viability?

And yet, when we begin to inconveniently think too much about it, it doesn’t take long before the story starts to seem shaky. The problem to be solved by this story:

“Why do male peacocks have cumbersome tails that ought to make them less likely to survive long enough to reproduce?”

is not really solved at all, but rather is replaced by a different problem:

“Why do peahens have a preference for males with a seemingly maladaptive trait like cumbersome tails?”

Put another way, all we have done is shifted the focus from one maladaptive trait (massive tail plumage) to another (sexual preference for massive tail plumage). I fail to see that anything has been explained at all.

Let’s imagine a related but rival species to peafowl — related in the sense that they are physically similar in most relevant ways and (importantly) are eaten by the same predators, rival in the sense that they share the same ecological niche, relying on the same nesting places and food sources, etc.  Let us call this species “dandybirds”. Now, let us further imagine that dandyhens have developed a preference for dandycocks with small, light tails and fast running legs. Which species do you think is more likely to flourish in this ecosystem in the long run, peafowl or dandybirds?

We don’t even have to go so far as to imagine a different species; we can instead imagine a peafowl population with a subset of peahens who have a perverse sexual preference for peacocks with small, light tails and fast running legs. Which population subset is more likely to flourish?

And of course, we could also imagine an alternative kind of peafowl population in which females don’t get to choose mates at all, but are instead chased down and captured by peacocks for forced mating. This would necessarily favour strong and fast peacocks, who would be more likely to reproduce than their slower, fan-tailed brethren.

There are just too many competing possible roads natural selection could have gone down more plausibly.

Now I suppose the teller of the just-so sexual selection story could always come back with a reply to the effect that this is simply the road natural selection did in fact go down. Dandybirds never existed, nor did the alternative sorts of peafowl mentioned. Instead, there were in fact only peafowl whose females — through random mutation or whatever — prefer peacocks with extravagant tails. In other words, a highly improbable (but possible) state of affairs came about randomly. I suppose such an “explanation” is no better (or worse) than “explaining” a gambler’s run of good luck by simply recounting the series of lucky rolls he has shot.

The Spectacled Avenger's Reading List, 2014

In keeping with this blog’s traditional method of ushering in a new year, you will find below a list of books read by yours truly over the course of 2014. The final tally was 76 books, which is roughly in keeping with previous years’ totals.

In terms of content, as usual, it is extremely heavy on books written in the 18th century or earlier, perhaps somewhat more so this past year than in previous ones. I count only 20 books written in the 20th century or later, along with a smattering of 19th-century works.

Two notable things about this year's list are that there is more fiction than usual (Defoe, Dostoyevsky, Sterne, Smollett, and Swift), and that there is a large amount of English legal history. The latter is a predictable result of research I have been doing for a paper. Regarding Dostoyevsky, I will likely never read another Russian novel again, but I am proud of having managed to finish Crime and Punishment, which delivered precisely what its title promised, at least in terms of the reading experience.

I will take this opportunity to admit that The Spectacled Avenger has been more neglected that usual this past year. Without issuing an ironclad New Year’s resolution, it is my hope to do better in 2015.

Without more ado, here is the list (as in previous years, bolded items represent books I particularly enjoyed).

*    *    *    *    *

ADDISON, Joseph and Richard STEELE. The Spectator (Vol. V). Edinburgh: J. and J. Ruthven, 1809.

AURELIUS, Marcus. The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Francis Hutcheson and James Moor (trans.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008.

BLACKSTONE, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England (Vol. II). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1766 (facsimile, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

BLACKSTONE, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England (Vol. III). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1766 (facsimile, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

BURKE, Edmund. Further Reflections on the Revolution in France. Daniel E. Ritchie (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992.

BURKE, Edmund. Select Works (Vol. IV: Miscellaneous Writings). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999.

CAENEGEM, R. C. van. The Birth of the English Common Law (2^nd Edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

CHAUCER, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales. A. C. Cawley (ed.). New York: Everyman's Library, 1992.

CLARE, John. The Shepherd’s Calendar. Eric Robinson (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

CLARENDON, Edward Hyde, Earl of. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (Volume III, Part I). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1816.

COHEN, Warren I. The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Vol. IV: America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

COKE, Sir Edward. The Selected Writings and Speeches of Sir Edward Coke (Vol. II). Steve Sheppard (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003.

DEFOE, Daniel. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. London: W. Chetwood et al., 1722 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1970).

DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS. Roman Antiquities (Vol. V). Earnest Cary (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

DOSTOYEVSKY, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. David McDuff (trans.). London: Penguin Books, 2003.

DROLET, Jean-François. American Neoconservatism: The Politics and Culture of a Reactionary Idealism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

FELLTHAM, Owen. Resolves Divine, Moral, and Political. London: Pickering, 1840.

FINKELSTEIN, Norman G. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2^nd edition). London: Verso, 2003.

FRANKLIN, Benjamin. Silence Dogood, The Busy-Body, and Early Writings. New York: Library of America, 2002.

FRASER, Antonia. Cromwell: Our Chief of Men. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973.

GODWIN, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

GRANT, Michael. The Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire. London: Routledge, 1999.

GROTIUS, Hugo. De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres (Vol. 2: English Translation). Francis W. Kelsey (trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925.

HALE, Sir Matthew. The History of the Common Law of England. Charles M. Gray (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

HAMBURGER, Philip. Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

HAYEK, Friedrich A. Law, Legislation and Liberty (Vol. 1: Rules and Order). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

HAYEK, Friedrich A. Law, Legislation and Liberty (Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

HAYEK, Friedrich A. Law, Legislation and Liberty (Vol. 3: The Political Order of a Free People). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

HOBBES, Thomas. Writings on Common Law and Hereditary Right. Alan Cromartie and Quentin Skinner (eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.

HOWARD, A. E. Dick. Magna Carta: Text and Commentary (revised edition). Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

HUME, David. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Eugene F. Miller (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987.

HUTCHESON, Francis. Thoughts on Laughter, and Observations on the Fable of the Bees. Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1758 (facsimile, Bristol, UK: Thoemmes, 1989).

HUTCHESON, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Wolfgang Leidhold (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.

JEFFERSON, Thomas. A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Williamsburg: Clementina Rind, 1774.

JEFFERSON, Thomas. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1984.

KAMES, Henry Home, Lord. Historical Law-Tracts (2^nd edition). Edinburgh: A Kincaid and J. Bell, 1761.

KAMES, Henry Home, Lord. Principles of Equity. Michael Lobban (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2014.

LAWSON, F. H. and Bernard RUDDEN. The Law of Property (2^nd edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

LE BILLON, Philippe. Wars of Plunder: Conflicts, Profits and the Politics of Resources. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

LEMAY, J. A. Leo. The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 1: Journalist, 1706-1730. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

LOCKE, John. Epistola de Tolerantia: A Letter on Toleration. J. W. Gough (trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

MAITLAND, F. W. The Forms of Action at Common Law: A Course of Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

MARSHALL, Alfred. Principles of Economics (8^th edition). London: Macmillan, 1959.

MARSHALL, John. The Life of George Washington: Special Edition for Schools. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000.

MENDRAS, Marie. Russian Politics: The Paradox of a Weak State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

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