Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism Available for Free on Amazon Kindle

The Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism is now available – for free! – on Amazon Kindle. I don’t know how long this generous offer will last, so interested readers should act fast. The volume is edited by big-name libertarian/classical liberal scholars Richard Epstein, Mario Rizzo, and Liya Palagashvili. Epstein, of course, is probably the most prominent living libertarian legal scholar in the world. There are chapters on a wide range of issues in law, economics, and political theory, including one by me on “Land-Use Regulation.” A version of my chapter is also available on SSRN here. Other contributors include such luminaries as Peter Boettke, Tom Merrill, Richard Wagner, Alex Nowrasteh, and many, many more.

Here is the publisher’s summary of the book:

The Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism provides a comprehensive analysis of classical liberal theory including a survey of the theory’s central ideas and arguments, and the application of these ideas to contemporary issues.

Chapters providing theoretical analyses are interwoven with coverage of wide‑ranging, concrete applications such as public health and healthcare, technology, policing, taxation and wealth, constitutional structures, and more. Across these areas, this handbook demonstrates how classical liberalism provides a unified approach over a divergent set of problems, providing a statement of modern classical liberalism serving as a research tool for a wide variety of individuals across the ideological spectrum. Classical liberalism is a systematic effort to ensure that the existence of the state does not abridge the fundamental rights and liberties of individuals, especially including property and contract rights. It holds that laws must satisfy the criteria of the Rule of Law so that stable relations between the individual and the state may develop.

The Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism is an authoritative and key reference text for students, academics, and researchers engaged in the study of political ideologies, political science, political economy, economics, law, social policy, and related fields.

And here is the abstract for my chapter:

Land-use regulation is a major function of virtually every government in the world. It raises many issues for classical liberalism. This chapter provides an overview of three of the most important areas of land-use policy: the use of eminent domain to forcibly take property for government-approved projects, regulations that restrict property owners’ use of their land, and the relationship between property rights in land and migration restrictions.

Section 2 covers the use of eminent domain to take private property and arguments for its limitation to genuinely “public” projects, as opposed to coerced transfers between private owners. Unconstrained use of eminent domain is a serious threat to property rights and hampers economic development.

Section 3 considers regulatory restrictions on land use that do not involve physical occupation of property. There is a long-standing debate about the value of such restrictions and whether the government should pay owners compensation. The most significant regulatory restrictions of this type in many nations are zoning rules restricting housing construction.

Finally, Section 4 provides a critical overview of property rights rationales for restricting mobility, particularly in the form of international migration. Such theories justify severely constraining the liberty and property rights of both migrants and natives.

Although I’m a contributor to both this volume and the earlier Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism, as well as the Cambridge Handbook of Classical Liberal Thought, I am still not sure whether there really is a meaningful difference between libertarianism and classical liberalism. See here for my analysis of possible distinctions between the two, and why I’m not convinced they work. I myself prefer the term “libertarian” to describe myself. But that’s mostly an aesthetic preference, not one based on substance.

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