Economic Freedom and Human Flourishing

Is economic liberty necessary for individuals to lead truly flourishing lives? Whether your immediate answer is yes or no, this question is deceptively simple. What do we mean by liberty? What constitutes the flourishing life? How are these related? How is economic liberty related to other goods that affect human flourishing? To answer these questions-and more-this volume brings to bear some of history's greatest thinkers, interpreted by some of today's leading scholars of their thought. How might Aristotle have understood the relationship between economic liberty and human flourishing? Hobbes and Locke, Mill, Rousseau, Burke, Adam Smith, Kant, de Tocqueville, and Marx? So much of the policy and political debates around issues of economic liberty are often cast in somewhat narrow terms. What is the precise magnitude of this elasticity? Is a certain policy popular among key constituencies? Of course, economic and political analysis have a vital role to play in shaping and understanding public policy. But it is

Contents Preface vMichael R. Strain and Stan A. VeugerAristotle on Economics and the Flourishing Life 1Harvey C. MansfieldHobbes, Locke, and the Problems of Political Economy 9Peter B. JosephsonRousseau on Economic Liberty and Human Flourishing 30John T. ScottAdam Smith and Human Flourishing 46Ryan Patrick HanleyEconomic Liberty and Human Flourishing: Kant onSociety, Citizenship, and Redistributive Justice 58Susan Meld ShellEdmund Burke's Economics of Flourishing 84Yuval LevinCapitalism as a Road to Serfdom? Tocqueville onEconomic Liberty and Human Flourishing 96Steven BilakovicsJohn Stuart Mill on Economic Liberty and HumanFlourishing 108Richard BoydEconomic Liberty as Anti-Flourishing:Marx and Especially His Followers 129Deirdre Nansen McCloskeyAbout the Authors 150