Introduction

Course overview

Freedom as a Social Project

Course overview

Welcome
What you will learn
Curriculum

Welcome

Welcome to this new course, glad you made it.

Why title this course Freedom as a Social Project? Because freedom is not an abstract utopia dreamed up by disconnected theorists. It is, first and foremost, a set of observable facts about human nature and the world we inhabit. The French liberal tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, from the Physiocrats and Turgot to Frédéric Bastiat, Gustave de Molinari, Benjamin Constant, and Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, built an extraordinary intellectual edifice on this very insight. Their works, long buried under decades of interventionist consensus, deserve to be rediscovered.

This course, developed by the Institut Coppet and presented by Benoît Malbranc, invites you on a journey through the foundations, the history, and the practical mechanics of liberty. We will not merely define freedom in the abstract; we will anchor it in the concrete realities of human existence, trace its gradual conquest across centuries, and confront the sophisms that have been deployed to justify its suppression.

What you will learn

Why invest your time in studying 18th and 19th century French liberal thinkers? Because the questions they answered are the questions you face every day:

Defend your economic choices. When someone argues that the state should regulate prices, protect industries, or redistribute wealth, you will be able to identify the hidden costs and the fallacies behind these proposals, using Bastiat's method of what is seen and what is not seen.
Understand the origin of your rights. Property, freedom of speech, freedom of work: these are not gifts from government. You will discover that they arise from observable facts about human nature, facts that no decree can override.
Recognize manipulation. Politicians and intellectuals have always used sophisms to justify expanding their power at your expense. This course catalogs the most common ones and teaches you to dismantle them.
Think historically. The march from slavery and serfdom toward individual liberty is the central story of human civilization. Understanding this trajectory allows you to evaluate whether a proposed policy moves us forward or backward.
Apply liberal principles in practice. From contract law and free banking to education and international trade, the thinkers in this course offered concrete alternatives that remain strikingly relevant today.

In short, this course equips you with an intellectual toolkit for navigating the political, economic, and social debates of our time, grounded not in ideology but in observed facts and rigorous reasoning.

Curriculum

The course is organized into five parts:

Part 1, Foundations of Freedom. We begin with the human facts that give rise to liberty and property: bodily existence, the finitude of resources, the individuality of perceptions, self-ownership, and the natural limits of reason. From these facts flow freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom of work, the non-aggression principle, and the internal contradictions of all constraint systems.

Part 2, History of Freedom. We then trace the long march of liberty from prehistoric communism through the abolition of slavery and serfdom, examining how technical and intellectual progress gradually replaced authority with contract. We will see why the history of civilization is, at its core, the history of emancipation.

Part 3, How Freedom Works. Here we explore the concrete mechanisms of a free society: self-governance, production and exchange, the role of profits and prices, the harmony of interests, and the structural failures of unfreedom, from taxation and protectionism to the programmed collapse of central planning.

Part 4, Sophisms of Unfreedom. Freedom's enemies do not rely on force alone; they rely on fallacies. We will dissect the intellectual, democratic, economic, social, and international sophisms that sustain systems of constraint, following Bastiat's devastating method of exposing what is seen and what is not seen.

Part 5, Philosophy of Liberalism. Finally, we outline a program of liberty: freedom of contract and employment, the reduction of state powers, liberal alternatives to the welfare state, individual autonomy, the right of secession, and the path toward international security founded on law rather than domination.

Throughout these lessons, we will let the great thinkers speak in their own words. Bastiat, Molinari, Constant, Tocqueville, Leroy-Beaulieu, Destutt de Tracy, their arguments remain as powerful today as when they were first written. The challenges they addressed, protectionism, excessive taxation, democratic despotism, the illusion of central planning, are precisely the challenges we face in the 21st century.

Let's dive in.