Lecture series · recorded 2004
History: The Struggle for Liberty
History: The Struggle for Liberty is a free lecture series (10 recordings, 14.8 hours) you can stream or download at freecapitalists.org, with Ralph Raico.
Ralph Raico, professor of European history at Buffalo State College and Schlarbaum laureate, presents a series of ten formal lectures on the history of Liberty: its origin, its development, its friends, and its enemies.
World HistoryWar and Foreign PolicyLegal System
Read the book: The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought by Ralph Raico, free to download here.
Cover painting: Martin Luther refuses to recant before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, 1521. See every painting in the art gallery.
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01
1:23:49 Download MP3
The European Miracle 2004
Ralph Raico covers classical liberalism’s growth, development and possible future. Liberalism arose in Europe entwined with Christianity. Why Europe? The East lacked the idea of freedom from the state and never established the legal system that could protect wealth. Europe had multiple, decentralized competing powers, not a universal empire.
Philosophy and MethodologyPolitical TheoryWorld History
Read the transcript 9,955 words
Read the book chapter 8,309 words
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02
1:28:05 Download MP3
Classical Liberalism 2004
Mises’ book, Liberalism, states that liberalism sufficed to change the face of the earth. The term liberal has since been hijacked by social democrats, so they don’t have to use the tainted word socialism. Raico defines liberalism to be civil society, minus the state, running itself within the bounds of private property.
Political TheoryWorld History
Read the transcript 10,987 words
Read the book chapter 9,187 words
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03
1:30:27 Download MP3
John Stuart Mill 2004
Mill played a crucial, but inflated, role in liberalism. Rothbard did not like Mill much. Mill was a disaster on economic freedom and international issues. Mill rejected that workers and capitalists shared interests. Mill was anti-capitalist.
Philosophy and MethodologyPolitical TheoryWorld History
Read the transcript 10,417 words
Read the book chapter 8,763 words
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04
1:13:09 Download MP3
Class and Conflict 2004
Gustave de Molinari became the grand old man of classical liberalism, crediting Pareto. Molinari understood that the main issue in the Civil War was the tariff, not slavery. In Italy economists founded free market economics, crediting Bastiat.
Philosophy and MethodologyPolitical TheoryWar and Foreign PolicyWorld History
Read the transcript 8,735 words
Read the book chapter 9,375 words
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05
1:31:08 Download MP3
War, Peace, and the Industrial Revolution 2004
It was thought that the ultimate antidote to war was universal democracy. It was not. Spencer defined liberal democracy as an individual free to control the product of his own efforts on the market. Welfare societies could not rationally be termed democracies.
Philosophy and MethodologyPolitical TheoryWar and Foreign PolicyWorld History
Read the transcript 11,104 words
Read the book chapter 8,538 words
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06
1:28:15 Download MP3
The New World of Capitalism 2004
In the face of overwhelming evidence of the prosperity of capitalism, Marxists were forced to rephrase their arguments from material provisions to quality of life. Robert Nozick, a brilliant philosopher of liberty, became a libertarian. Anarchy, State, and Utopia, his main book, dominates debate in political philosophy.
Philosophy and MethodologyPolitical Theory
Read the transcript 10,981 words
Read the book chapter 8,778 words
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07
1:33:43 Download MP3
The Anti-Capitalists 2004
Humans are prone to envy, writes Helmut Schoeck in Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. Humans try to set up a society in which none is envious of another. George Stigler of the Chicago School saw man as always a utility maximizer.
Philosophy and MethodologyPolitical TheoryWorld History
Read the transcript 11,142 words
Read the book chapter 9,424 words
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08
1:27:41 Download MP3
The Planned Society 2004
Utopian socialism was a term created by Marx and Lenin to denigrate the enemies of Marx and Lenin. Henri de Saint-Simon’s ideology of the industrial class, opposed to the idling class, inspired and influenced utopian socialism.
Philosophy and MethodologyPolitical TheoryLegal SystemWorld History
Read the transcript 10,632 words
Read the book chapter 9,279 words
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09
1:32:01 Download MP3
The First World War 2004
Intellectuals are pro-power and anti-market. Great presidents are war presidents who glorify power. The Costs of War and Reassessing the Presidency are recommended books on this topic. The First World War was a turning point which vastly extended state power, and vastly destroyed social power.
Philosophy and MethodologyPolitical TheoryWar and Foreign PolicyWorld History
Read the transcript 11,659 words
Read the book chapter 9,812 words
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10
1:39:25 Download MP3
Classical Liberalism and the Welfare-Warfare State 2004
Germany surrendered conditionally in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. Everybody opposed the treaty, but it was forcibly implemented. Revisionism is necessary to combat state propaganda, e.g. the lie in WWII that FDR was surprised by Pearl Harbor.
Philosophy and MethodologyPolitical TheoryWar and Foreign PolicyWorld History
Read the transcript 12,345 words
Read the book chapter 8,860 words
People in this series
Speakers
Recording dates, summaries and topics for 10 of these 10 lectures come from the Mises Institute's page for History: The Struggle for Liberty, checked 2026-09-25.
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About this series
- Is History: The Struggle for Liberty free to listen to?
- Yes. All 10 mirrored recordings stream in the browser or download as audio, at no cost and with no signup.
- How long is History: The Struggle for Liberty?
- 10 recordings, 14.8 hours in total.
- Who lectures in History: The Struggle for Liberty?
- Ralph Raico.
- When was History: The Struggle for Liberty recorded?
- 2004, per the recording dates recovered for this series.
- Is the book behind History: The Struggle for Liberty available here?
- Yes. The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought by Ralph Raico is in this archive as a free download, on its own page.
- Is there a transcript of History: The Struggle for Liberty?
- Yes. Every lecture in the series has one, 107,957 words in total, free to read on each lecture's page and searchable in the browser.
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