Book Shelf - Liberty Fund Books - Brief Article - Company Profile

National Review, July 23, 2001 by Mike Potemra

The specialization of academic life, along with the preponderance of the Left in colleges and universities, has had a baneful effect that has become so universal as to be almost unnoticeable: It has institutionalized a bias toward the unearthing (if not fabrication) of new truths, half-truths, and even "truths" at the expense of the older verities. One of the most important conservative projects, therefore, should be to restore a healthy focus on what is true, as opposed to what is "ground-breaking."

For this reason, Liberty Fund Books is one of the most valuable endeavors in American publishing. Its goal is to make available-at remarkably low prices-the key works that make up the patrimony of the conservative mind. The large-format, nicely produced two-volume paperback edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations still goes for only $15; the 1,700-plus pages of James Bryce's two-volume American Commonwealth for $16.50; political writings of Samuel Johnson, Lord Acton, Michael Oakeshott, Richard Weaver, and other conservative giants, all at similarly rock-bottom prices. This is an antidote to liberal indoctrination that any college student can afford.

Liberty Fund's backlist, then, is something to treasure; but some of its more recent projects are equally impressive. For example, The Founders' Constitution, edited by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, is a compilation of the writings of the Framers on key questions of philosophy and political science, arranged as a clause-by-clause commentary on the text of the Constitution. The paperback set-five huge volumes for $60-belongs in every library, but is physically cumbersome, so Liberty Fund helpfully directs readers to a website, http://press- pubs.uchicago.edu/founders, where the entire text can be read for free.

A couple of other recent Liberty Fund publications deserve mention. Some of historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's most interesting essays are collected in The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation & Social Change (451 pp., $12), originally published in 1967. In one essay, Trevor-Roper attempts to untangle the religious sources of the rise of capitalism. The conventional view is that a somnolent Catholicism, per se, was opposed to the free market, while Protestantism favored the industrious; Trevor-Roper draws a more nuanced picture, making it clear that the free market was already thriving before the Reformation-and that it was "the fatal union of Counter-Reformation Church and princely State" that made Catholic countries lag economically in the following centuries.

Conservatives who are gratified at the success of David McCullough's wonderful new biography of John Adams will find even more of the real Adams-Adams unplugged, one might say-in The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams (331 pp., $12), selected by C. Bradley Thompson. Adams has always suffered at the hands of Jefferson partisans, who like to portray Adams as a stick-figure stuffy aristocrat; but this new volume makes clear that Adams was a fiery polemicist who, while he valued politeness, valued truth more.

The new publications of Liberty Fund-including a just-released reprint, edited by George W. Carey and James McClellan, of the 1818 Gideon edition of The Federalist (656 pp., $12)-add to one of the publishing industry's most impressive catalogues. To that list-currently some 150 books-Liberty Fund is now adding volumes at the rate of more than 20 per year, original books as well as reprints. The publishing house also has visiting-scholar and postgraduate programs, and hosts more than 180 conferences a year over four continents.

Liberty Fund is approaching the status of a full-service intellectual resource: By making the great conservative works of the past so widely available, it is helping shape the character of the American people of the future.