Spend time with some of the world’s greatest minds and truest friends of freedom.

• Professionally prepared audio programs on the historical, philosophical, economic, legal, and moral foundations of individual liberty and limited government
• Developed by the Cato Institute, one of the nation’s leading nonprofit public-policy research foundations
• MP3 format on CD or by download
• Twelve programs you can enjoy at your own pace
• May be purchased as one complete package or in two separate parts
• Supplemental readings available

When was the last time you were truly energized by ideas? In our era of WiFi, high def, high res, compressed digital, podcast, and video clips of 24-hour news channels and sound bites, how can you gain calm perspective and thoughtful understanding? Whatever happened to real thinking?

For that, you can turn to the Cato University Home Study Course. It offers you the opportunity to deepen your perspectives, knowledge, and insight through exposure to some of the world’s most compelling thinkers. The growth of human freedom – and with it science, culture, and capitalist prosperity – are examined, explained, and clarified through the works and ideas of some of our civilization’s most brilliant thinkers. Mastering their ideas can make you a more effective advocate of freedom, a more informed and interesting member of your community, and someone more people will turn to for guidance and insights.

The Cato University Home Study Course immerses you in the thoughts and views of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Adam Smith, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Henry David Thoreau, Ayn Rand, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. You are stimulated and surrounded by their groundbreaking ideas on liberty, justice, property, constitutionalism, free trade, capitalism, toleration, and peace.

This is a self-paced, home-study program, enabling you to spend time with brilliant minds while in your home, office, or car, during a workout, while on vacation, or wherever and whenever you have an opportunity to listen and think. They definitely aren’t the type of dry lectures you may have nodded off to in school. Each program is presented by professional actors and broadcasters, and the content is lively, dynamic, and truly thought provoking.

The twelve home study course programs are:

PART 1

1. The Ideas of Liberty
2. John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government
3. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence
4. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (part 1)
5. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (part 2)
6. The U.S. Constitution
7. The Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments to the Constitution

PART 2

8. John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman
9. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience
10. The Achievement of 19th-Century Classical Liberalism
11. The “Austrian” Case for the Free Market
12. The Modern Quest for Liberty

Portions of the audio programs were originally produced by Knowledge Products and have been adapted for the Home Study Course. Additional material was created specifically for each program and is available only through the Cato University Home Study Course.

The twelve programs are distributed by Blackstone Audio, and all orders will be fulfilled through the online form below.

All full-course purchases will include a copy of the printed book, Learning about Liberty: The Cato University Study Guide, by Tom G. Palmer.

Recommended Reading

To enhance the Cato University Home Study Course, we have have assembled a special list of books to supplement the audio program material:

Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz
The Libertarian Reader by David Boaz, ed.
Freedom and the Law by Bruno Leoni
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
How the West Grew Rich by Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr.
From Magna Carta to the Constitution: Documents in the Struggle for Liberty by David Brooks, ed.