Volume 1 of the trilogy, Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), established the principles: self-ownership or autonomy, first possession, voluntary exchange, and pro- tection against aggression. Those mandates could be breached only in carefully defined and narrow circumstances - like private emergencies or public necessity - and then only with compensation to aggrieved parties.
Volume 2, Principles for a Free Society: Reconcil- ing Individual Liberty with the Common Good (1998), em- braced a mostly laissez-faire government, relying on social norms and customs, delineating private and common prop- erty rights in water and telecommunications, and promoting private altruism over public redistributionism. Epstein's foun- dation was natural law, but defended on consequentialist rather than deontological or self-evident grounds.
InVolume3,whileacknowledgingthathisintellec- tual path over the decades has led him to endorse a some- what enlarged role for the state, Epstein nonetheless rein- forces his case for libertarian fundamentals accompanied by a limited set of forced exchanges. His dual goals: first, to defend classical liberalism against skeptics who posit that "no moral judgment about the shape of political institutions is better than any other"; and second, to address the main objection of some psychologists and behavioral economists - that humans are not entirely rational, and the assumption of homo economicus is too sweeping to justify the classical liberal exaltation of private ordering.
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