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The essay is an overview of libertarian literature. It begins dealing with lexical issues concerning the meaning of liberalism, classical liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism. There are two meanings of libertarianism: a large one, as a free market oriented liberalism, and a strict one, as an extreme classical liberalism which calls in question the State as the main enemy of liberty. Novelist Ayn Rand is one of the main sources for contemporary libertarian theory, although she never called herself libertarian. Murray N. Rothbard is the most important libertarian thinker; he was an "austrian" economist and a natural law theorist who considered free market as the social institution capable to satisfy every human need, security and justice included. In response to rothbardian society without a State, Robert Nozick exposed a minarchist position, in favour of a minimal State limited to the function of protecting individual rights. This distinction between anarchism and minarchism is a crucial one for libertarian theory. The most interesting current literature is that in rothbardian, natural law and natural rights style. There is also an italian libertarian literature, including works of political theory, philosophy of law, environmentalism and history.

The paper points out the deep connection between libertarian philosophy and political realism. At the core of the analysis there is the idea the State is an anti-juridical organization, because it rests on a bellicose way to conceive human relations. In this sense, the theory of a free society is not only the logical consequence of Misesian refutation of every collectivist way to produce goods and services (protection and law included) in absence of market prices. Using Rothbard's and Salin's studies on monopoly and cartels, the paper emphasizes the difference between a market society and a society without State, remarking that in the last one a monopoly de facto is also a monopoly de jure. For this reason, libertarians are called to prove that a society without State is the best way to reduce coercion and aggressions; and that the suppression of the legal monopoly of the force is the necessary condition to realize a social order less unjust, whit a checks and balance system marked by a strong competition of companies charged to provide legality, security and protection.

Guns are mere objects. Preventing people from owning them, or limiting their availability, is an infringement of the natural right to property. Guns are also a peculiar good, since they are the key for the protection of liberty and property. In this perspective, gun control is not about guns: it is about control. In fact, government growth may be slowed by private gun ownership. A tyranny is unlikely to occur where people are armed. Historical evidence confirms this point: for example, Adolf Hitler disarmed the German Jews as a premise to their genocide. Moreover, statistics show that private gun ownership does not increase gun accidents or crime; indeed, when private citizens are armed, criminals tend to strike less, or to strike in less lethal ways. Criminals fear armed citizens much more than police forces. Gun control laws, however, are extremely effective in the disarmament of lawabiding citizens; much less in disarming outlaws. The right to keep and bear arms should be maintained where it is recognized, and restored elsewhere. Italy belongs to the latter category. Libertarians' efforts to reduce the size of government require private gun ownership, because privately owned weapons are the only, sensible obstacle to the rise of Political power.

At the beginning of the 1990 American libertarian intellectual such as Murray N. Rothbard, Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., and Hans-Hermann Hoppe gave rise to the paleolibertarian movement. Paleolibertarians, who favour laissez-faire in the economic realm but oppose moral relativism, were seeking an alliance with the so-called "paleoconservatives" like Sam Francis, Tom Fleming, Paul Gottfried or Pat Buchanan. The word "paleolibertarian", first used by Rockwell, had the purpose to recapture the radicalism and the political and intellectual rigor of the pre-war libertarian "Old right". Rothbard's death in 1995 was a blow, but paleolibertarians still continued their twofold battle for the defence of the unfettered free-market, developing the methodology of the Austrian School of Economics; and for the defence of the traditional Christian values of the Western Civilization, threatened by the post-modern "liberal" culture, now leading in the political and intellectual elite. Today the paleolibertarians, facilitated by the Internet, have become a rapidly growing intellectual movement. The main centres of diffusion of their ideas are the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn (Alabama) and the website LewRockwell.com, that ranks among the most widely read news website.

Many times the Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1535-1624) has been presented like a "communist", or a "socialist", or an "individualist", a "classical liberal", a "libertarian", an "austrian economist". The first consideration someone can do is all these traditions are very different each other and the second is that, apparently, they have few in common with catholic tradition. In this work the author tries to describe the complex intellectual world in which Juan de Mariana gave his contribution to economic thought, supposedly in the same line of the tradition of future Austrian Economics. In fact, according with recent studies of many authors, the prehistory of the Austrian School of Economics can be found in the works of the Spanish Scholastics, written in that historical period which is known as the "Spanish Golden Century" and ran from the mid-sixteenth century through the seventeenth century. According with Friedrich A. Hayek, some researches by Marjorie Grice- Hutchinson, Raymond de Roover and Murray N. Rothbard demonstrate that the basic principles of the theory of the competitive market were worked out by the Spanish Scholastics of the School of Salamanca and that economic liberalism was not designed by the Calvinists, but by the Spanish Jesuits. The works written by Alejandro Antonio Chafuen and Jesús Huerta de Soto stressed that perhaps the most libertarian of all the scholastics, particularly in his later works, was exactly Father Mariana. There is no dubt that Mariana has anticipated some important points of Austrian Economics, but is this enough to think about him like a libertarian? It's possible to give two different answers to this question, both correct: the first one as an economist, and the second one as a historian of political thought.