My Files Project

[George H. Smith]

Earlier this year I announced my plans to sell a set of CD-Rs that contains the entire Documents Folder on my hard drive, with the exception of some personal material. I am selling the first 10 sets for $1000. 3 sets sold shortly after I posted the initial blurb on OL, so there are 7 sets left.

I'm not sure what I will do after the remaining sets are sold. If I have my website up and running by then, my inclination is not to sell any more at all. But, as I said, I am not certain of my future plans in regard to the Files Project, beyond selling 10 sets.

Preparing the first disc (FP1) took longer than I expected, owing to the difficulty of sorting through over a thousand files written over a period of 25 years in order to weed out personal info. I probably deleted around 25 files and deleted a paragraph or two from a dozen more, but nothing else has been changed. The remaining folders and files on FP1 appear exactly as they appear on my hard drive, warts and all.

Now that first disc is ready to go, I will begin promoting the Files Project to markets other than OL and Atantis 2. In case any more OLers are interested in purchasing this set, here are some additional details.

1) FP1 contains 997 files in 125 folders. The remaining discs, after I weed out the personal stuff, will contain approximately 5000 additional files, so are talking about roughly 6000 files total. These include final or nearly final drafts of a great deal unpublished material, transcripts of various lectures, many manuscripts that I wrote for Knowledge Products during the 1980s (on John Locke, The American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution, etc.), rough drafts, detailed plans for projects that never bore fruit, extensive research notes, brainstorming efforts, and more.

2) Here is a list of some of the material on FP1 (the first disc):

12 nearly final draft chapters from The Disciplines of Liberty, along with rough drafts of and extensive notes about other chapters I had planned to include in this ambitious book that will probably never be completed.

Extensive material on the history of religious freedom and its relationship to the development of libertarian thought -- a project that I may eventually complete. This material includes one final draft chapter and detailed notes with material for later chapters. None of this material has ever been published.

2 final manuscripts for audio tapes on "Classical Liberalism" and 2 manuscripts on "The Modern Quest for Liberty." (The latter set contains discussions of Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, Ludwig von Mies, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, etc.) These manuscripts, which run over 50 pages each, were originally written during the 1990's for a Cato University project. Also included are earlier versions of these manuscripts, parts of which differ considerably from the final versions.

Several versions of 2 manuscripts that I wrote for audio tapes on "The Ideas of Liberty." These were originally recorded for Laissez Faire Books c. 1995.

A 60-page Introduction that I wrote years ago for a reprint of Thomas Hodgskin's great work, The Natural and Artificial Rights of Property Contrasted (1832). Originally commissioned by Laissez-Faire Books, this project fell though when Andrea Rich sold the company, so my article was never published. It is one of the best things on Hodgskin ever written, if I do say so myself.

The 24 articles that I wrote for The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, along with lots of notes.

Transcripts of various lectures from courses that I gave for Sharon Presley's "Resources for Independent Thinking" in Oakland during the 1990s. These include lectures on spontaneous order, property, etc.

Tons of material on Adam Smith, almost all of it unpublished.

Tons of material for a project titled Sovereign State, Sovereign Self -- a book that I hope to complete one day, should I live long enough.

The list goes on and on, and this is just the first disc. There is a lot of material on FP1 alone that I had totally forgotten about.

Please contact me if you have questions about the Files Project. I frankly expect the 7 remaining sets to sell fairly quickly after I advertise them more widely.

My e-address is smikro@comcast.net

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

In my last post I mentioned an unpublished and probably never-to-be published book titled The Disciplines of Liberty. Since some people have found this a curious and even humorous title (shades of BDSM), I thought I would explain what it is about.

My idea was to take five cognitive disciplines and trace their historical and theoretical contributions to the theory of liberty. These disciplines are political theory, history, sociology, social psychology, and economics. I completed around half the book in around 400 pages but could never secure sufficient funding to finish it.

This partial manuscript was written over a period of ten years (1985-1995), five of which were primarily devoted to research. The chapters, many of which are final drafts, are as follows:

1. The Idea of Freedom

2. The Presumption of Liberty

3. Political Theory and Ideology

4. Liberalism and Laissez-Faire

5. Individualism

6. The Human Sciences

7. The Methodology of the Social Sciences

8. Methodological Individualism

9. Sociology

10. Society and State

11. Social Psychology

12. The Philosophy of History

There is also a fairly complete rough draft of another chapter, "The Culture of Liberty."

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

I have nearly completed combing through thousands of files to weed out personal information, so I will be sending out the final disc soon to those OLers who purchased a set. Sorry this took so long, but there was a lot of stuff to go through.

I have decided to sell no more than ten sets total. Four have already been sold, so six are left. See the headline post on this thread for details, and contact me offlist if you are interested.

So far I have only announced this project on OL and A2. Now that all the material is almost ready to send out, I will be advertising on other forums, such as some freethought lists. Because of the threat of duplication, I would rather sells sets to OLers and other people I know and trust. That is why I am mentioning this again.

This is a pricey item, but I am willing to work out payment arrangements.

Ghs