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The State Is Rolling Back, the second volume of Liberty Fund’s The Collected Works of Arthur Seldon, brings together a comprehensive collection of fifty-four articles reflecting Arthur Seldon’s scholarly development. By the late twentieth century, Arthur Seldon was one of the most powerful exponents of classical liberalism, helping to stimulate its revival, through both his own writings and the publications of the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, of which he was Editorial Director for more than 30 years.

First published in 1994, this book collects virtually all of Seldon’s major ideas and his proposals for reform. In its totality, The State Is Rolling Back demonstrates Seldon’s long-standing advocacy and commitment to free-market reforms and includes his earliest, barbed criticisms of the “welfare state.”

“The economic and political problems of 1990s and the opening years of the twenty-first century cannot be understood, the failure of government to solve them analysed, or the required remedies devised without the thinking of the classical Scottish and English economists and political philosophers.
The essays reprinted here, based on classical thinking, appeared as articles in (mostly) British newspapers and periodicals over fifty-five years from 1937 to 1992.”

Arthur Seldon

Dr Arthur Seldon CBE (1916-2005) was joint founder president, with Ralph Harris, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, where he directed academic affairs for 30 years.

He studied at the London School of Economics where Arnold Plant and Lionel Robbins deepened his interest in classical liberalism and Friedrich Hayek introduced him to Austrian Economics. He received an honorary degree in 1999 from the University of Buckingham.

• Seldon was Vice president of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), whose past presidents include von Hayek and Milton Friedman.

  For over thirty years from the late 1950s Arthur Seldon was the Editorial Director of the London-based Institute for Economic Affairs, where his publishing program was one of the principal influences on governments all around the world, persuading them to liberalize their economies.

• Arthur Seldon was a prophet of what came to be called Thatcherism. The Thatcherite revolution of the 1970s and 1980s had many roots, but one was certainly a sea change in the intellectual climate of the times, and Seldon played a huge role in that sea change.