The Foundations of Morality

Here is Hazlitt’s major philosophical work, in which he grounds a policy of private property and free markets in an ethic of classical utilitarianism, understood in the way Ludwig von Mises himself understood that term. In writing this book, Hazlitt is reviving an 18th- and 19th-century tradition in which economists wrote not only about strictly economic issues but also on the relationship between economics and the good of society in general. Adam Smith wrote a moral treatise because he knew that many objections to markets are rooted in these concerns. Hazlitt takes up the cause too, and with spectacular results.