The CATO Institute Home Study Course

From The CATO Institute:

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
• Listen/Download at no cost
• Programs you can enjoy at your own pace
• Extensive topic summaries prepared on each major subject

When was the last time you were truly energized by ideas? In our WiFi, high def, high res, compressed digital, podcast and video clip era 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 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 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 ground-breaking 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 wherever and whenever you have an opportunity to listen and think. Each program is presented by professional actors and broadcasters, and the content is lively, dynamic, and truly thought-provoking.

Listen to the Cato Home Study Course

The 12 Home Study Course programs are:

1. The Ideas of Liberty
   Summary    Download audio
2. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government 
   Summary    Download audio
3. Thomas Paine's Common Sense and Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence
   Summary    Download audio - part 1    Download audio - part 2
4. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (part 1) 
   Summary    Download audio
5. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (part 2) 
   Summary    Download audio
6. The Constitution of the United States of America 
   Summary    Download audio
7. The Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments to the Constitution 
   Summary    Download audio
8. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman 
   Summary    Download audio - part 1    Download audio - part 2
9. Thoreau's Civil Disobedience and William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator 
   Summary    Download audio - part 1    Download audio - part 2
10. The Achievement of 19th Century Classical Liberalism 
    Summary    Download audio
11. The "Austrian" Case for the Free Market 
    Summary    Download audio
12. The Modern Quest for Liberty 
    Summary    Download audio

Recommended Reading

To enhance the Cato Home Study Course, these books have been selected 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.

Order this supplemental material from the Cato Bookstore