The state of anomie that has characterised and still characterises most Latin American countries, resulting from the fragmentation of the social fabric, has encouraged the rise of successful personalist leaderships in the '90s. This paper aims at investigating how neopopulism developed in Latin...

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was an economist and journalist. A member of the French Liberal School, he is best known for his free trade ideas and his philosophy of law. Mark Blaug ranks him as one of the 100 greatest economists before Keynes. Schumpeter called him a brilliant economic...

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist and journalist. One of his classic works is The Candlemakers' Petition, which uses the reductio ad absurdum philosophical technique to dismantle the arguments the French protectionists put forth to protect French industry in the mid-nineteenth...

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a journalist and economic theorist within the French liberal school. He is best known for his writings on free trade and protectionism. Although he has written several classic short treatises, his work has been ignored by most modern economists. This paper will...

In addition to its connection with ideas of freedom, the word “liberal” is an apt descriptor of Smith’s plan in politics. Smith’s plan evinces attributes that are liberal in a non-political sense. Salient among these attributes is generosity and charity. The liberal plan, on Smith’s...

On regular issues of policy reform—presupposing a stable integrated polity— Hume, Smith, and Burke were liberal in the original political meaning of “liberal.” Thus, on policy reform, although they accorded the status quo a certain presumption (as any reasonable person must), the more...

This paper applies Hayek's arguments in “The Road to Serfdom” to the case of Brazil in the first three decades of the twentieth century. We describe the Brazilian experiment under a liberal regime from 1892 and 1930 and the causes of its demise. We identify these causes as stemming from a...

During the '90s most Latin American countries were submitted to neoliberal structural reform policies. Neoliberal policies imposed market supremacy, reduced the State's role in the economy and deregulated the markets. This paper aims at describing how these policies affected the most important...

Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is an influential book more than seventy years after its publication. This paper examines his arguments and finds that they come up short in many ways and suggests that we have taken "another road to serfdom". Hayek's mind was completely closed to the...

Ordoliberalism differs from other liberal theories in not supporting the simplistic idea that the ‘government is the problem'. The aim of this chapter is therefore to explain the core features of ordoliberalism and distinguish it from other varieties of liberalism. We also show that...