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Capitalism and Its Institutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2009

Harold Demsetz
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Summary

The end of the law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge, freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be where there is no law: and it is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists. (For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him?) But a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be the subject of the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.

John Locke
Type
Chapter
Information
From Economic Man to Economic System
Essays on Human Behavior and the Institutions of Capitalism
, pp. 63 - 64
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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