WEEK OF July 24-28, 2006

The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks; or, An Inquiry into the Circumstances which give rise to Influence and Authority in the Different Members of Society, edited and with an Introduction by Aaron Garrett (1771, 2006).

The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks is one of the major products of the Scottish Enlightenment and a masterpiece of jurisprudence and social theory. Building on David Hume, Adam Smith, and their respective natural histories of man, John Millar developed a progressive account of the nature of authority in society by analyzing changes in subsistence, agriculture, arts, and manufacture. The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks is perhaps the most precise and compact development of the abiding themes of the liberal wing of the Scottish Enlightenment. Drawing on Smith’s four-stages theory of history and the natural law’s traditional division of domestic duties into those toward servants, children, and women, Millar provides a rich historical analysis of the ways in which progressive economic change transforms the nature of authority. In particular, he argues that, with the progress of arts and manufacture, authority tends to become less violent and concentrated, and ranks tend to diversify. Millar’s analysis of this historical progress is nuanced and sophisticated; for example, his discussion of servants is perhaps the best developed of the “economic” arguments against slavery.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on John Millar]

WEEK OF April 10-14, 2006

A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23, "Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full", edited, with an Introduction by John Kilcullen and Chandran Kukathas (2005).

The topics of church and state, religious toleration, the legal enforcement of religious practices, and religiously motivated violence on the part of individuals, have once again become burning issues. Pierre Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary was a major attempt to deal with very similar problems three centuries ago. His argument is that if the orthodox have the right and duty to persecute, then every sect will persecute since every sect considers itself orthodox. The result will be mutual slaughter, something God cannot have intended. Bayle has often been seen as a skeptic who blazed a philosophical path that Denis Diderot, David Hume, and other Enlightenment thinkers would follow. But his was a philosophical skepticism that did not exclude the possibility of religious faith, and Bayle himself was a Calvinist Christian. The Philosophical Commentary takes its starting point from the words attributed to Jesus Christ in Luke 14:23, “And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be full.” Bayle contends that the word compel cannot mean “force.” From this perspective, he constructs his doctrine of toleration based on the singular importance of conscience. His point is not that coercion usually is ineffective in matters of faith, but that even when effective, it is wrong because it ignores the indispensability of the free conscience. Bayle’s book was translated into English in 1708. The Liberty Fund edition reprints that translation, carefully checked against the French and corrected, with an introduction and annotations designed to make Bayle’s arguments accessible to the twenty-first-century reader.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Pierre Bayle]

WEEK OF January 9-13, 2006

Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, trans. Ralph Raico, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (2005).

The term "liberalism" comes from the Latin word liber meaning "free." Mises defines liberalism as "the liberal doctrine of the harmony of the rightly understood interests of all members of a free society founded on the principle of private ownership of the means of production." This book presents the theoretical and practical arguments for liberalism in the classical tradition.

The foundation of liberalism, Mises says, rests on an understanding and appreciation of private property, social cooperation, the freedom idea, ethics and morality, democracy, and the legitimate role of government. Liberalism is not a political party; it is a system of social organization. The liberal program aims at securing equality under law and freedom of opportunity for everyone to make their own choices and decisions, so long as they do not interfere with the equal rights of others; it offers no special privileges to anyone. Under liberalism, the role of government would be limited to protecting the lives, property, and freedom of its citizens to pursue their own ends and goals. Mises is more specific here than elsewhere in applying the liberal program to economic policy, domestic and foreign. Also in this book, Mises contrasts liberalism with other conceivable systems of social organization such as socialism, communism, and fascism.

Bettina Bien Greaves was a senior staff member with the Foundation for Economic Education from 1951 to 1999. She is the author of Mises: An Annotated Bibliography.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Ludwig von Mises]

WEEK OF September 12-16, 2005

Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, Edited and with an Introduction by Richard Tuck. From the Edition by Jean Barbeyrac, 3 vols. (1625, 2005).

Since the nineteenth century, Hugo Grotius’s Rights of War and Peace has commonly been seen as the classic work in modern public international law, laying the foundation for a universal code of law. However, in the seventeenth century and during the Enlightenment, the work was considered a major work of political theory that strongly defended the rights of individual agents - states as well as private persons - to use their power to secure themselves and their property. Grotius’s continuing influence owed much to the eighteenth-century French editor Jean Barbeyrac, whose extensive commentary was standard in most editions, including the classic, anonymously translated, English one (1738), which is the basis for the Liberty Fund edition. The present edition also includes the Prolegomena to the first edition of Rights of War and Peace (1625); this document has never before been translated into English and adds new dimensions to the great work. Hugo Grotius is one of the most important thinkers in the early-modern period. A great humanistic polymath - lawyer and legal theorist, diplomat and political philosopher, ecumenical activist and theologian - his work was seminal for modern natural law and influenced the moral, political, legal, and theological thought of the Enlightenment, from Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke to Rousseau and Kant, as well as America’s Founding leaders.

Richard Tuck is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Professor of Government at Harvard University.

Knud Haakonssen is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex, England.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Hugo Grotius]

WEEK OF July 4-8, 2005

The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa with the Collaboration of M.H. Dobb (1951, 2005), 11 vols.

This eleven-volume set of The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo contains all of Ricardo’s published and unpublished writings, and provides great insight into the early era of political economics by chronicling Ricardo’s significant contributions to modern economics. The edition has been widely acclaimed as the best example, prior to the Glasgow edition of Adam Smith’s writings, of scholarly editing applied to the work of an economist. It contains a general index and includes four volumes dedicated to his personal correspondence with such economic luminaries as Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, and James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill. Complete sets of the edition have not been available for many years. This publication is an affordable paperback version of the hardcover edition prepared under the auspices of the Royal Economic Society by Piero Sraffa and printed by Cambridge University Press in 1951–1973.

The entire series includes:

• Volume 1: On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
• Volume 2: Notes on Malthus’s Principles of Political Economy
• Volume 3: Pamphlets and Papers 1809-1811
• Volume 4: Pamphlets and Papers 1815-1823
• Volume 5: Speeches and Evidence
• Volume 6: Letters 1810-1815
• Volume 7: Letters 1816-1818
• Volume 8: Letters 1819-1821
• Volume 9: Letters 1821-1823
• Volume 10: Biographical Miscellany
• Volume 11: General Index

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on David Ricardo]

WEEK OF June 20-24, 2005

Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, Corrected and Improved, in a Third Edition. Several Essays Added Concerning the Proof of a Deity, Edited and with an Introduction by Mary Catherine Moran (1779, 2005).

The Essays is commonly considered Kames’s most important philosophical work. In the first part, he sets forth the principles and foundations of morality and justice, attacking Hume’s moral skepticism and addressing the controversial issue of the freedom of human will. In the second part, Kames focuses on questions of metaphysics and epistemology to offer a natural theology in which the authority of the external senses is an important basis for belief in the Deity.

Like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Butler, Kames rejected the idea that morality is founded on self-interest and argued that human beings naturally possess a “moral sense,” or conscience. At the same time, Kames believed our naturally benevolent inclinations could become law-like only through the principle of justice, which “guards the persons, the property, and the reputation of individuals, and gives authority to promises and covenants.”

Editor Mary Catherine Moran writes, “In its concern to vindicate the veracity of our common moral intuitions and sense perceptions that are rooted in our very nature, the Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion helped found the Scottish Common Sense school,” a philosophy that was given its classic formulation by Kames’s friend Thomas Reid.

The text of this volume is based on the third edition of 1779, while the appendix presents substantial variant readings in the first and second editions.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Henry Home, Lord Kames]

WEEK OF February 21-25, 2005

Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays (1713, 2004).

"A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity in bondage."
-Joseph Addison, Cato 1713

Joseph Addison was born in 1672 in Milston, Wiltshire, England. He was educated in the classics at Oxford and became widely known as an essayist, playwright, poet, and statesman. First produced in 1713, Cato, A Tragedy inspired generations toward a pursuit of liberty. Liberty Fund’s new edition of Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays brings together Addison’s dramatic masterpiece along with a selection of his essays that develop key themes in the play.

Cato, A Tragedy is the account of the final hours of Marcus Porcius Cato (95–46 B.C.), a Stoic whose deeds, rhetoric, and resistance to the tyranny of Caesar made him an icon of republicanism, virtue, and liberty. By all accounts, Cato was an uncompromisingly principled man, deeply committed to liberty. He opposed Caesar’s tyrannical assertion of power and took arms against him. As Caesar’s forces closed in on Cato, he chose to take his life, preferring death by his own hand to a life of submission to Caesar.

Addison’s theatrical depiction of Cato enlivened the glorious image of a citizen ready to sacrifice everything in the cause of freedom, and it influenced friends of liberty on both sides of the Atlantic. Captain Nathan Hale’s last words before being hanged were, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” a close paraphrase of Addison’s “What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country!” George Washington found Cato such a powerful statement of liberty, honor, virtue, and patriotism that he had it performed for his men at Valley Forge. And Forrest McDonald says in his Foreword that “Patrick Henry adapted his famous ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ speech directly from lines in Cato.”

Despite Cato’s enormous success, Addison was perhaps best-known as an essayist. In periodicals like the Spectator, Guardian, Tatler, and Freeholder, he sought to educate England’s developing middle class in the habits, morals, and manners he believed necessary for the preservation of a free society. Addison’s work in these periodicals helped to define the modern English essay form. Samuel Johnson said of his writing, “Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the study of Addison.”

Christine Dunn Henderson received her Ph.D. from Boston College and has taught at Merrimack College and Marshall University. She edited Seers and Judges, a volume of essays on politics and American literature. Christine is a Fellow at Liberty Fund.

Mark E. Yellin, also a Fellow at Liberty Fund, received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, has taught at North Carolina State University, and edited Douglass Adair’s Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Joseph Addison]

WEEK OF October 11-15, 2004

Francis Hutcheson, An inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726), ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (2004).

Francis Hutcheson’s first book, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, was published in 1725, when its author was only thirty-one, and went through four editions during his lifetime. This seminal text of the Scottish Enlightenment is now available for the first time in a variorum edition based on the 1726 edition.

The Inquiry was written as a critical response to the work of Bernard Mandeville and as a defense of the ideas of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury. It consists of two treatises exploring our aesthetic and our moral abilities. The first treatise argues that human beings possess a natural internal sense of beauty, whereas the second focuses on the "moral sense" that enables us to distinguish virtue from vice and thus to act from moral love, or "benevolence."

As Professor Wolfgang Leidhold notes, "The study of the Inquiry is indispensable for a deeper understanding of the moral and political principles of the liberal tradition in the eighteenth century and the formation of American political thought." Leading Americans such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were among the book’s admirers.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Francis Hutcheson]

WEEK OF September 27-October 1 2004

Nathaniel Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652, 2001).

An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature is a concerted effort to find a middle way between the two extremes that dominated the religious dispute of the English civil war in the seventeenth century. At one extreme end of the spectrum was the antinomian assertion that the elect were redeemed by God’s free grace and thereby free from ordinary moral obligations. At the other end of the spectrum was the Arminian rejection of predestination and assertion that Christ died for all, not just for the elect. Faced with the violence of these disputes, Nathaniel Culverwell attempted a moderate defense of reason and natural law, arguing, in the words of Robert Greene, that "reason and faith are distinct lights, yet they are not opposed; they are complementary and harmonious. Reason is the image of God in man, and to deny right reasonis to deny our relation to God."

Culverwell was close to the Cambridge Platonists (Whichcote, Cudworth, Smith, and More); and he had obviously learned from Bacon, Grotius, and Selden. However, the most profound influence on him was that of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez’s De Legibus, ac Deo Legislatore (1612).

An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature was delivered as a series of sermon-like lectures at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1645-46 and then published posthumously in 1652. The lectures are based on Proverbs 20:27, "The understanding of a man is the Candle of the Lord." The critical edition published here was first issued in 1971 by the University of Toronto Press and now includes a new Introduction by Robert A. Greene.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Nathaniel Culverwell]

WEEK OF September 20-24, 2004

The Divine Feudal Law: Or, Covenants with Mankind, Represented, (1695, 2002).

Originally published posthumously, in Latin, in 1695, The Divine Feudal Law sets forth Pufendorf’s basis for the reunion of the Lutheran and Calvinist confessions. This attempt to seek a "conciliation" between the confessions complements the concept of toleration discussed in Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society. In both works Pufendorf examines the proper way to secure the peaceful coexistence of different confessions in a state.

Although he argued in Of the Nature that maintaining peace and order in the state does not require all subjects to share one belief, Pufendorf also believed that "true" Christianity was beneficial to society. For that reason he advocated a reunion of the confessions on the basis of fundamental truths that he believed were contained in the Bible, saying a conciliation should be enforced not by law but by mutual agreement of the dissenting parties. Therefore, the reunion of the confessions must be accompanied by toleration.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Samuel von Pufendorf]

WEEK OF September 13-17, 2004

Natural Rights on the Threshold of the Scottish Enlightenment: The Writings of Gershom Carmichael (2002).

WEEK OF September 6-10, 2004

Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002).

Francis Hutcheson is one of the central figures in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Read widely in Britain, France, Germany, and America, he influenced philosophers ranging from his student Adam Smith to Kant. After the initial reaction to his first major work, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson took stock of his critics and wrote An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. The first half of the work presents a rich moral psychology built on a theory of the passions and an account of motivation deepening and augmenting the doctrine of moral sense developed in the Inquiry. The second half of the work, the Illustrations, is a brilliant attack on rationalist moral theories and is the font of many of the arguments taken up by Hume and used to this day. Despite the intrinsic merits of the Essay and its vast influence, it has until recently been available only in expensive facsimiles. This edition makes Hutcheson’s seminal work widely available in a critical edition, fully collating the lifetime editions of 1728, 1730, and 1742.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Francis Hutcheson]

WEEK OF August 30 - September 3

Samuel von Pufendorf, Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society (1687, 2002).

Samuel Pufendorf’s Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion (published in Latin in 1687) is a major work on the separation of politics and religion. Written in response to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by the French king, Louis XIV, Pufendorf contests the right of the sovereign to control the religion of his subjects, because state and religion pursue wholly different ends. He concludes that, when rulers transgress their bounds, subjects have a right to defend their religion, even by the force of arms. Pufendorf’s opposition to the French king does not demonstrate political radicalism. Instead, like John Locke and others who defended the concept of toleration, Pufendorf advocates a principled, moderate defense of toleration rather than unlimited religious liberty. The present translation was first published in 1698.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Samuel von Pufendorf]

WEEK OF August 23-27, 2004

George Turnbull, Observations upon Liberal Education (1742, 2003).

The Scottish Enlightenment is studied today as one of the great moments in the history of liberal thought. The luminaries of the time, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, and others, wrote extensively on morals, politics, economics, and law within a liberal order; but it fell to George Turnbull, a lesser-known contemporary, to provide a formal treatise on the theory and practice of education. Turnbull equally embodied in his life and his work the ideas by which the Scottish Enlightenment came to be known. Now best remembered as the mentor of Thomas Reid, Turnbull nonetheless made significant, original contributions to the moral-sense school of Scottish moral philosophy. In one of his most important works, Observations upon Liberal Education, he applied his ideas on the moral sense to the education of youth. Turnbull showed how a liberal education enables youth to realize a true "inward liberty" and moral strength and thus prepares them to live responsibly and happily in a free society. In presenting his arguments, Turnbull drew upon an impressive number of authors, both ancient and modern, including John Locke. Indeed, there is probably no richer treasure trove of sources for all the various educational debates that took place during the eighteenth century. Turnbull’s influence was not confined to Scotland. Benjamin Franklin, in drafting his Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, drew generously from Turnbull’s Observations. In the Introduction, Terrence Moore notes that "as our own age struggles to reform schools and to form free and responsible citizens, concerned teachers and parents may wish to return to their enlightened moorings by contemplating and indeed emulating Turnbull’s ambitious curriculum in virtue and learning.’First published in 1742, Observations upon Liberal Education is now republished by Liberty Fund in its first modern edition.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on George Turnbull]

WEEK OF August 16-20, 2004

The Selected Writings and Speeches of Sir Edward Coke in 3 vols. (2003).

The new Liberty Fund edition of The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke includes selections from the four volumes of the Institutes and cases from the Reports, and several of Coke’s speeches in Parliament. Taken together, these writings delineate the origin and nature of the modern common law and indicate the profound interrelationship in the English tradition of custom, common law, authority (of both Crown and Commons), and individual liberty. Coke’s great law books and speeches are well represented on Magna Carta, citizenship, habeas corpus, freedom from wrongful search and arrest, the origins of law, judicial review, administrative law, judging, criminal law, the moral obligations of officials, the powers of King, Parliament, church, and the law, property and rights, and the profession and study of law. The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke is the first anthology of his works ever published.

Steve Sheppard is a professor at the School of Law, University of Arkansas. He writes on constitutional history and theory, legal history, property law, and general jurisprudence, and he has edited The History of Legal Education (Salem Press, 1998).

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Sir Edward Coke]

WEEK OF August 9-13, 2004

David Fordyce, The Elements of Moral Philosophy (1754, 2003).

Though little known today, the Aberdeen philosopher David Fordyce was an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and closely associated with liberal Dissenters in England. His Elements of Moral Philosophy was a notable contribution to the curriculum in moral philosophy and was one of the most widely circulated texts in moral philosophy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Fordyce stands in the tradition of Shaftesbury and has similarities with Hutcheson and Turnbull. In his lectures, he suggested that "Ethics Enquires into the active & moral part of mans constitution & thence deduces the Rule of Life & Conduct, & explains the several offices or Duties to which he is obliged by the Laws of Nature."The Elements of Moral Philosophy was first published as part of a comprehensive textbook system in 1748 and as a separate book in 1754. It is the latter that is now being reissued. Subsequently the work was used for the article on moral philosophy in the first Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771). A Brief Account, Fordyce?s opening lectures to his Marischal class of 1743-44, has never before been published.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on David Fordyce]

WEEK OF August 2-6, 2004

Bernhard Knollenberg, The Growth of the American Revolution: 1766-1775 (1975, 2003).

Origin of the American Revolution is the first of Bernhard Knollenberg’s two-part history concerning the basis of the conflict between England and its North American colonies from 1759 to 1766. In volume one, Origin of the American Revolution, Knollenberg knits together the most important and coincident prerequisite conditions that made the colonial break with England inevitable. The book is in great measure a work of imperial history, in that it views the advent of the American Revolution within the context of the first British Empire. In this context, Knollenberg views the movement toward independence as the failure of the British to solve the problem of empire. Although Knollenberg does not primarily deal with intellectual history, he describes the basic divergence in political principles between England and its North American colonies. In keeping with the style of the time in which he wrote, Knollenberg stresses politics and economics over social and cultural history.

Knollenberg describes volume two, Growth of the American Revolution, as ". . . an Account of the Change in the Minds and Hearts of a Majority of the People of the Thirteen Colonies Who Rebelled against Great Britain in 1775, together with a description of the Provocative Conduct of the British Parliament and Government Accounting for this Change and the Colonists’ Responses to the said Conduct.’ Continuing the work Knollenberg began in the first book, Growth of the American Revolution covers the period from the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 to the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord in 1775.

Bernard W. Sheehan is Professor emeritus of history at Indiana University and past editor of the Indiana Magazine of History.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Bernhard Knollenberg]

WEEK OF July 26-30, 2004

Samuel Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature (1691, 2003)

Samuel Pufendorf's seminal work, The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature (first published in Latin in 1673), was among the first to suggest a purely conventional basis for natural law. Rejecting scholasticism’s metaphysical theories, Pufendorf found the source of natural law in humanity’s need to cultivate sociability. At the same time, he distanced himself from Hobbes’s deduction of such needs from self-interest. The result was a sophisticated theory of the conventional character of man’s social persona and of all political institutions.

Pufendorf wrote this work to make his insights accessible to a wide range of readers, especially university students. As ministers, teachers, and public servants, they would have to struggle with issues of sovereignty and of the relationship between church and state that dominated the new state system of Europe in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Pufendorf had a formative influence on moral, political, and legal theory for generations.

The Whole Duty was first translated into English in 1691. The fourth edition was significantly revised—by anonymous editors—to include a great deal of the very important editorial material from Jean Barbeyrac’s French editions. This was reproduced in the fifth edition from 1735 that is republished here. The English translation provides a fascinating insight into the transplantation of Pufendorf’s political theory from a German absolutist milieu to an English parliamentarian one.

The three pieces by Barbeyrac appeared first in 1718 and are here translated into English for the first time.

Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1744) was a Huguenot refugee from religious persecution in France. He taught in Germany, Switzerland, and Holland and became one of the most important disseminators of Protestant natural law as well as an important rights-theorist.

Andrew Tooke (1673–1732) was professor of geometry at Gresham College and then Master of the Charterhouse.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Samuel von Pufendorf]

WEEK OF July 19-23, 2004

Robert Nisbet, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America (1988, 2003).

The Present Age challenges readers to reexamine the role of the United States in the world since World War I. Nisbet criticizes Americans for isolationism at home, discusses the gutting of educational standards, the decay of education, the presence of government in all facets of life, the diminished connection to community, and the prominence of economic arrangements driving everyday life in America. This work is deeply indebted to the analyses of Tocqueville and Bryce regarding the threats that bureaucracy, centralization, and creeping conformity pose to liberty and individual independence in the western world. The Present Age relates a tragedy - the unprecedented militarization of American life in the decades after 1914, as the result of the necessary resistance to National Socialist and Communist totalitarianism that fed into and reinforced the profound tendencies toward centralization within modern society.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Robert A. Nisbet]

WEEK OF July 12-16, 2004

H.B. Acton, The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed (1955, 2003).

Written nearly fifty years ago, at a time when the world was still wrestling with the concepts of Marx and Lenin, The Illusion of the Epoch is the perfect resource for understanding the roots of Marxism-Leninism and its implications for philosophy, modern political thought, economics, and history. As Professor Tim Fuller has written, this "is not an intemperate book, but rather an effort at a sustained, scholarly argument against Marxian views."

Far from demonizing his subject, Acton scrupulously notes where Marx’s account of historical and economic events and processes is essentially accurate. However, Acton also points out that Marx is generally right about things that were already widely known and accepted in his own time and indeed had been long understood in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Acton shows that in many cases Marx either is simply wrong or has stated his views so as to render his theories immune to disproof. Acton also explains why the embodiment of Marxist-Leninist theory in an actual social order would require coercive support if it were not, sooner or later, to collapse of its own contradictions.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on H.B. Acton]

WEEK OF July 5-9, 2004

Liberty and Order: The First American Party Struggle, ed. Lance Banning (2004).

Liberty and Order is an ambitious anthology of primary source writings: letters, circulars, debate transcriptions, House proceedings, and newspaper articles that document the years during which America’s founding generation divided over the sort of country the United States was to become.

The founders’ arguments over the proper construction of the new Constitution, the political economy, the appropriate level of popular participation in a republican polity, foreign policy, and much else, not only contributed crucially to the shaping of the nineteenth-century United States, but also have remained of enduring interest to all historians of republican liberty.

This anthology makes it possible to understand the grounds and development of the great collision, which pitted John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and others who called themselves Federalists or, sometimes, the friends of order, against the opposition party led by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their followers, in what emerged as the Jeffersonian Republican Party.

Editor Lance Banning provides the reader with original-source explanations of early anti-Federalist feeling and Federalist concerns, beginning with the seventh letter from the "Federal Farmer," in which the deepest fears of many opponents of the Constitution were expressed. He then selects from the House proceedings concerning the Bill of Rights and makes his way toward the public debates concerning the massive revolutionary debt acquired by the United States. The reader is able to examine the American reaction to the French Revolution and to the War of 1812, and to explore the founders’ disagreements over both domestic and foreign policy. The collection ends on a somewhat melancholy note with the correspondence of Jefferson and Adams, who were, to some extent, reconciled to each other at the end of their political careers. Brief, elucidatory headnotes place both the novice and the expert in the midst of the times.

With this significant new collection, the reader receives a deeper understanding of the complex issues, struggles, and personalities that made up the first great party battle and that continue to shape our representative government today.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Misc - 18thC]

WEEK OF June 21-25, 2004

The Selected Writings and Speeches of Sir Edward Coke in 3 vols. (2003).

The new Liberty Fund edition of The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke includes selections from the four volumes of the Institutes and cases from the Reports, and several of Coke’s speeches in Parliament. Taken together, these writings delineate the origin and nature of the modern common law and indicate the profound interrelationship in the English tradition of custom, common law, authority (of both Crown and Commons), and individual liberty. Coke’s great law books and speeches are well represented on Magna Carta, citizenship, habeas corpus, freedom from wrongful search and arrest, the origins of law, judicial review, administrative law, judging, criminal law, the moral obligations of officials, the powers of King, Parliament, church, and the law, property and rights, and the profession and study of law. The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke is the first anthology of his works ever published.

Steve Sheppard is a professor at the School of Law, University of Arkansas. He writes on constitutional history and theory, legal history, property law, and general jurisprudence, and he has edited The History of Legal Education (Salem Press, 1998).

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Sir Edward Coke]

WEEK OF June 14-18, 2004

Law, Liberty, and Parliament: Selected Essays on the Writings of Sir Edward Coke (2004).

Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) remains one of the most important figures in the history of the common law. The essays collected in this volume provide a broad context for understanding and appreciating the scope of Coke’s achievement: his theory of law, his work as a lawyer and judge, his role in pioneering judicial review, his leadership of the Commons, and his place in the broader culture of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Sir Edward Coke claimed for judges the power to strike down statutes, created the modern common law by reshaping medieval precedents, and, in the House of Commons, led the gathering forces that would ultimately establish a constitutional regime of ordered liberty and responsible, representative government. His Reports and Institutes are fundamental sources of legal doctrine and authority.

Although much has been written on Coke, there has been no single adequate study or collection of these writings until now. Law, Liberty, and Parliament brings together material that not only is useful for understanding Coke’s career and achievement, but also illuminates the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods in which the common law became inextricably identified with constitutional authority.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

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WEEK OF June 7-11, 2004

Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (1815, 2003).

Principles of Politics, first published in 1815, is a “microcosm of [Constant’s] whole political philosophy and an expression of his political experience,” says Nicholas Capaldi in his Introduction. In Principles, Constant “explores many subjects: law, sovereignty, and representation; power and accountability; government, property and taxation; wealth and poverty; war, peace, and the maintenance of public order; and above all freedom, of the individual, of the press, and of religion. . . . Constant saw freedom as an organic phenomenon: to attack it in any particular way was to attack it generally.” While Constant’s fluid, dynamic style and lofty eloquence do not always make for easy reading, his text forms a coherent whole, and in his translation Dennis O’Keeffe has focused on retaining the “general elegance and subtle rhetoric” of the original. This translation is based on Etienne Hofmann’s critical edition of Principes de politique (1980), complete with Constant’s additions to the original work.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

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WEEK OF May 24-28, 2004

Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (1959, 2004).

“Professor Robbins’ book, a monumental piece of mature scholarship . . . is a history of liberal ideas and the men who promulgated them in England from the Restoration to the American War of Independence.”
—John Charles Weston, Jr., The Review of Politics (1961)

In her Introduction to The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, Caroline Robbins wrote that the Commonwealthmen were “a gifted and active minority of the population of the British Isles, who kept alive, during an age of extraordinary complacency and legislative inactivity, a demand for increased liberty of conscience.” Their essays, arguments, pamphlets, and histories—a continual flow from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth—were hugely popular in America. The themes presented were revolutionary: separation of powers, natural rights, rotation in office, religious freedom, a supreme court, and resistance to tyranny. They achieved very little political success, but the documents of later generations are full of ideas kept alive by the Commonwealthmen in difficult times.

In The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, Robbins adeptly presents a history of these men, whose writings advocated the principles of liberty in an era when change was considered perilous.

[More on some Commonwealthmen: Algernon Sidney, John Milton, John Locke, Trenchard and Gordon, Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, Richard Price ...]

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Caroline Robbins]

WEEK OF May 17-21, 2004

Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea (1609), trans. Richard Hakluyt (2004).

The freedom of the seas--meaning both the oceans of the world and coastal waters--has been among the most contentious issues in international law for the past four hundred years. The most influential argument in favor of freedom of navigation, trade, and fishing was that put forth by the Dutch theoristHugo Grotius in his 1609 Mare Liberum (The Free Sea).

The Free Sea was orginally published in order to buttress Dutch claims of access to the lucrative markets of the East Indies. It had been composed as the twelfth chapter of a larger work, De Jure Praedae (On the Law of Prize and Booty), which Grotius had written to defend the Dutch East India Company’s capture in 1603 of a rich Portuguese merchant ship in the Straits of Singapore.

Liberty Fund’s new edition of The Free Sea publishes the only translation of Grotius’s masterpiece undertaken in his own lifetime--a work left in manuscript by the English historian and promoter of overseas exploration Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616). This volume also contains William Welwod’s critque of Grotius (reprinted for the first time since the seventeenth century) and Grotius’s reply to Welwod. Taken together, these documents provide an indispensable introduction to modern ideas of sovereignty and property as they emerged from the early-modern tradition of natural law.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

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WEEK OF May 10-14, 2004

Francis Hutcheson, An inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726), ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (2004).

Francis Hutcheson’s first book, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, was published in 1725, when its author was only thirty-one, and went through four editions during his lifetime. This seminal text of the Scottish Enlightenment is now available for the first time in a variorum edition based on the 1726 edition.

The Inquiry was written as a critical response to the work of Bernard Mandeville and as a defense of the ideas of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury. It consists of two treatises exploring our aesthetic and our moral abilities. The first treatise argues that human beings possess a natural internal sense of beauty, whereas the second focuses on the "moral sense" that enables us to distinguish virtue from vice and thus to act from moral love, or "benevolence."

As Professor Wolfgang Leidhold notes, "The study of the Inquiry is indispensable for a deeper understanding of the moral and political principles of the liberal tradition in the eighteenth century and the formation of American political thought." Leading Americans such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were among the book’s admirers.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

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WEEK OF April 24-48, 2006

William Edward Hartpole Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, edited and with an Introduction by William Murchison, 2 vols. (1896, 1981).

Democracy and Liberty is the most thorough manual of conservative politics produced during the nineteenth century.

— Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind

When democracy turns, as it often does, into a corrupt plutocracy, both national decadence and social revolution are being prepared." So wrote the Irish-born historian, W. E. H. Lecky (1838–1903) in this devastating assault on mass democracy. Lecky spoke for the landed gentry and the upper middle classes of late Victorian England when he warned his countrymen that an unfettered democracy would destroy the balance of interests in the community and thereby undermine the Constitution." A tendency to democracy," said Lecky, "does not mean a tendency to parliamentary government, or even a tendency toward greater liberty." Indeed, the type of democracy emerging in Britain seemed to be the rudiment of socialism.

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WEEK OF January 30 - February 3, 2006

Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism before Adam Smith, ed. Henry C. Clarke (2003).

This collection of thirty-seven readings (from thirty-three writers) brings together some of the most significant pre–Adam Smith writings on the political and cultural dimensions of capitalism.

To modern readers, these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of commerce and economic life in general are surprising because they are so closely integrated to moral and cultural issues. Though we may have forgotten how extensively such issues were once discussed, it is uncanny what a contemporary ring many of these issues have. Part of the value of this book is in reminding us that many of our own concerns are not without precedent and earlier reflection.

The selections come both from now-unfamiliar authors who were influential in their own time, as well as from such well-known writers as Rousseau, Defoe, Fielding, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. The essays emphasize the human meaning of the market; they were selected to provide a sense of the range of opinion that prevailed on the broader significance of the market economy before it became a pervasive feature of modern life.

Commerce, Culture, and Liberty presents rich and provocative writings on the relationship between commerce and luxury, virtue, nobility, agriculture, the state, religion, civility, and liberty. The book restores the voice of a rich body of reflections on the larger import of the birth of the modern economy that has been largely silent in academic discourse on the topic. Moreover, it presents significant though hard-to-find writings by a host of well-known authors, including a little-known essay by Rousseau. It also presents important writings that have been preempted by Adam Smith, writings that say as much about our age as about the age in which they were written.

Henry C. Clark is Professor of History at Canisius College. He has written articles on the French and Scottish Enlightenments and is the author of La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth-Century France .

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

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WEEK OF November 28 - December 2, 2005

Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, ed. Ross M. Lence (1992).

Calhoun’s most important constitutional and political writings are now available as complete, unabridged texts and in a single volume, many for the first time since the 1850s. These writings address such issues as states’ rights and nullification, slavery, the growth of the Federal judicial power, and Calhoun’s doctrine of the "concurrent majority." This selection presents twelve notable speeches, letters, and essays by Calhoun; among them are his famous Fort Hill Address and his two great treatises on government - "A Disquisition on Government" and the "Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States."

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

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WEEK OF September 5-9, 2005

Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 2 vols. With a Commentary Critical, Historical, and Explanatory by F.B. Kaye (1732, 1988).

Mandeville is the wittiest and shrewdest philosopher ever to make a significant impact upon economics. He anticipated Oscar Wilde in choosing his enemies with great care, and within his own century they included David Hume, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson. He could afford even such enemies because his friends and admirers have been legion.

— George J. Stigler, University of Chicago

It used to be that everyone read the "notorious" Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733). He was a great satirist and came to have a profound impact on economics, ethics, and social philosophy.

The Fable begins with a poem and continues with a number of essays and dialogues. It is all tied together by the startling and original idea that "private vices" (self-interest) lead to "publick benefits" (the development and operation of society). From that simple beginning, Mandeville saw that orderly social structures (such as law, language, the market, and even the growth of knowledge) were a spontaneous growth developing out of individual human actions.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

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WEEK OF August 8-12, 2005

George W. Carey, In Defense of the Constitution (1989, revised ed. 1995).

In Defense of the Constitution refutes modern critics of the Constitution who assail it as "reactionary" or "undemocratic." The author argues that modern disciples of Progressivism are determined to centralize political control in Washington, D.C., to achieve their goal of an egalitarian national society. Furthermore, he contends, Progressive interpreters of the Constitution subtly distort fundamental principles of the Constitution for the precise purpose of achieving their egalitarian goals. It is in their distrust of self-government and representative institutions that Progressivists advocate, albeit indirectly, an elitist regime based on the power of the Supreme Court?or judicial supremacy. Key elements and issues in this transformation of the original republic into an egalitarian mass society are thoroughly examined.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

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WEEK OF July 25-29, 2005

Raoul Berger, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Foreword by Forrest McDonald (2nd ed.) (1997).

The Justices, who are virtually unaccountable, irremovable, and irreversible, have taken over from the people control of their own destiny.

— Raoul Berger

It is the thesis of this monumentally argued book that the United States Supreme Court—largely through abuses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution—has embarked on "a continuing revision of the Constitution, under the guise of interpretation." Consequently, the Court has subverted America's democratic institutions and wreaked havoc upon Americans' social and political lives.

One of the first constitutional scholars to question the rise of judicial activism in modern times, Raoul Berger points out that "the Supreme Court is not empowered to rewrite the Constitution, that in its transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment it has demonstrably done so. Thereby the Justices, who are virtually unaccountable, irremovable, and irreversible, have taken over from the people control of their own destiny, an awesome exercise of power."

The Court has accomplished this transformation by ignoring or actually distorting the original intent of both the framers and the supporters of the Fourteenth Amendment. In school desegregation and legislative reapportionment cases, for example, the Court manipulated the history, meaning, and purpose of the amendment's Equal Protection Clause in order to achieve a desired political result. In cases involving First Amendment freedoms and the rights of the accused, the judges converted the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause into a vehicle for the nationalization of the Bill of Rights. Yet these actions were nothing less than "usurpations" that robbed "from the States a power that unmistakably was left to them."

This new second edition includes the original text of 1977 and extensive supplementary discourses in which the author assesses and rebuts the responses of his critics.

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WEEK OF July 18-22, 2005

Lord Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, with a foreword by Steven J. Tonsor (1910, 2000).

Delivered at Cambridge University between 1895 and 1899, Lectures on the French Revolution is a distinguished account of the entire epochal chapter in French experience by one of the most remarkable English historians of the nineteenth century. In contrast to Burke a century before, Acton leaves condemnation of the French Revolution to others. He provides a disciplined, thorough, and elegant history of the actual events of the bloody episode - in sum, as thorough a record as could be constructed in his time of the actual actions of the government of France during the Revolution. There are twenty-two essays, commencing with "The Heralds of the Revolution," in which Acton presents a taxonomy of the intellectual ferment that preceded - and prepared - the Revolution. An important appendix explores "The Literature of the Revolution." Here Acton offers assessments of the accounts of the Revolution written during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries by, among others, Burke, Guizot, and Taine.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton]

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WEEK OF July 11-15, 2005

The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001). 5 vols.

Originally published by the University of Chicago Press to commemorate the bicentennial of the United States Constitution, The Founders’ Constitution is arguably the most important of all resources on the principles of the Framers of the American republic. As the editors explain, the work consists of "extracts from the leading works of political theory, history, law, and constitutional argument on which the Framers and their contemporaries drew and which they themselves produced." In cooperation with University of Chicago Press, Liberty Fund has prepared this new paperback edition of the entire work in five volumes. The documentary sources and inspirations reach to the early seventeenth century and extend through those Amendments to the Constitution that were adopted by 1835 - that is, through the end of the era of Chief Justice John Marshall of the United States Supreme Court.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

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WEEK OF July 4-8, 2005

The American Republic: Primary Sources, ed. Bruce Frohnen (2002).

Many reference works offer compilations of critical documents covering individual liberty, local autonomy, constitutional order, and other issues that helped to shape the American political tradition. Yet few of those works are available in a form suitable for classroom use, and traditional textbooks give short shrift to these important issues. The American Republic overcomes that knowledge gap by providing, in a single volume, critical, original documents revealing the character of American discourse on the nature and importance of local government, the purposes of federal union, and the role of religion and tradition in forming America’s drive for liberty. The American Republic is divided into nine sections, each illustrating major philosophical, cultural, and policy positions at issue during crucial eras of American development. Readers will find documentary evidence of the purposes behind European settlement, American response to English acts, the pervasive role of religion in early American public life, and perspectives in the debate over independence. Subsequent chapters examine the roots of American constitutionalism, Federalist and Anti-Federalist arguments concerning the need to protect common law rights, and the debates over whether the states or the federal government held final authority in determining the course of public policy in America. Also included are the discussions regarding disagreements over internal improvements and other federal measures aimed at binding the nation, particularly in the area of commerce. The final section focuses on the political, cultural, and legal issues leading to the Civil War. Arguments and attempted compromises regarding slavery, along with laws that helped shape slavery, are highlighted. The volume ends with the prelude to the Civil War, a natural stopping-off point for studies of early American history. By bringing together key original documents and other writings that explain cultural, religious, and historical concerns, this volume gives students, teachers, and general readers an effective way to begin examining the diversity of issues and influences that characterize American history. The result unquestionably leads to a deeper and more thorough understanding of America’s political, institutional, and cultural continuity and change.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Misc - Early American Republic]

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WEEK OF June 20-24, 2005

John Macxy Zane, The Story of Law 2nd ed., Introduction by James M. Beck. New Foreword, Annotations, and Bibliographies by Charles J. Reid, Jr. (1927, 1998).

Written for the layman as well as the attorney, The Story of Law is the only complete outline history of the law ever published. "It is," too, noted journalist William Allen White of the original edition, "the sort of book that any lawyer could take home and give to his children in their teens and twenties as a justification of his career." Moreover, The Story of Law has well been termed "the perfect book for introducing the beginning law student to the origin and history of the law." John M. Zane lucidly describes the growth and improvement of the law over thousands of years, and he points out that an increasing awareness of the individual as a person who is responsible for decision and action gradually transformed the law. The seventeen chapters include "The Physical Basis of Law," "Law Among Primordial Men," "Babylonian Law," "The Jewish Law," "Law Among the Greeks," "The Roman Creation of Modern Law," "Medieval Law in Europe," "The Origins of English Law," and "International Law." Professor Charles J. Reid, Jr., of Emory University School of Law, has contributed an unsurpassed forty-page "Selected Bibliography on Legal History" that will be of enormous interest to academics, students, practicing attorneys, and general readers alike.

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WEEK OF June 13-17, 2005

Liberty and Order: The First American Party Struggle, ed. and with a Preface by Lance Banning (2004).

Liberty and Order is an ambitious anthology of primary source writings: letters, circulars, debate transcriptions, House proceedings, and newspaper articles that document the years during which America’s founding generation divided over the sort of country the United States was to become.

The founders’ arguments over the proper construction of the new Constitution, the political economy, the appropriate level of popular participation in a republican polity, foreign policy, and much else, not only contributed crucially to the shaping of the nineteenth-century United States, but also have remained of enduring interest to all historians of republican liberty.

This anthology makes it possible to understand the grounds and development of the great collision, which pitted John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and others who called themselves Federalists or, sometimes, the friends of order, against the opposition party led by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their followers, in what emerged as the Jeffersonian Republican Party.

Editor Lance Banning provides the reader with original-source explanations of early anti-Federalist feeling and Federalist concerns, beginning with the seventh letter from the "Federal Farmer," in which the deepest fears of many opponents of the Constitution were expressed. He then selects from the House proceedings concerning the Bill of Rights and makes his way toward the public debates concerning the massive revolutionary debt acquired by the United States. The reader is able to examine the American reaction to the French Revolution and to the War of 1812, and to explore the founders’ disagreements over both domestic and foreign policy. The collection ends on a somewhat melancholy note with the correspondence of Jefferson and Adams, who were, to some extent, reconciled to each other at the end of their political careers. Brief, elucidatory headnotes place both the novice and the expert in the midst of the times.

With this significant new collection, the reader receives a deeper understanding of the complex issues, struggles, and personalities that made up the first great party battle and that continue to shape our representative government today.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

[More on Misc - 18thC]

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WEEK OF May 30 - June 3, 2005

Jacob Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians (1885, 1999).

Renowned for his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and Reflections on History (published by Liberty Fund), Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) has well been described as "the most civilized historian of the nineteenth century." Judgments on History and Historians consists of records collected by Emil Dürr from Burckhardt's lecture notes for history courses at the University of Basel from 1865 to 1885. The 149 brief sections span five eras: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, History from 1450 to 1598, the History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and the Age of Revolution. As Walter Goetz observed of the work a generation ago, "It is impossible to imagine a more profound introduction to world history and its driving forces."

Alberto R. Coll is a Professor of Strategy and Policy at the United States Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island.

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WEEK OF May 23-27, 2005

William Leggett, Democratic Editorials: Essays in Jacksonian Political Economy, (1834, 1984).

Wlliam Leggett (1801-1839) was the intellectual leader of the laissez-faire wing of Jacksonian democracy. His diverse writings applied the principle of equal rights to liberty and property. These editorials maintain a historical and contemporary relevance.

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WEEK OF May 16-20, 2005

Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, The Reformation, and Social Change (1967, 1999).

The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century collects nine essays by Trevor-Roper on the themes of religion, the Reformation, and social change. As Trevor-Roper explains in his preface, "the crisis in government, society, and ideas which occurred, both in Europe and in England, between the Reformation and the middle of the seventeenth century" constituted the crucible for what "went down in the general social and intellectual revolution of the mid-seventeenth century." The Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution in England laid the institutional and intellectual foundations of the modern understanding of liberty, of which we are heirs and beneficiaries. Trevor-Roper's essays uncover new pathways to understanding this seminal time.

In his longest essay, "The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Trevor-Roper points out that "In England the most active phase of witch-hunting coincided with times of Puritan pressure—the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the period of the civil wars—and some very fanciful theories have been built on this coincidence. But . . . the persecution of witches in England was trivial compared with the experience of the Continent and of Scotland. Therefore . . . [one must examine] the craze as a whole, throughout Europe, and [seek] to relate its rise, frequency, and decline to the general intellectual and social movements of the time. . . ." Neither Catholic nor Protestant emerges unscathed from the examination to which Trevor-Roper subjects the era in which, from political and religious causes, the identification and extirpation of witches was a central event.

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WEEK OF May 9-13, 2005

Benjamin A. Rogge, Can Capitalism Survive? (1979).

Benjamin A. Rogge was a legendary professor and lecturer with a gift for rendering into clear English the complex and vitally important principles of economics. He forsook professional jargon and mathematical opaqueness for clarity, logic, and an illluminating humor.

In Can Capitalism Survive Rogge confronts anew the question first posed by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. That question, simply put, is "can capitalism survive" Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent end to the Soviet quest of communistic hegemony, and despite adoption of modest market mechanisms throughout the Pacific Rim, including China, the triumph of free economies generally, or of capitalism specifically, is far from assured. What, then, Rogge asks, are the perennial challeges to economic liberty - and how might they be met

Other essays in the collection explore the philosophy of freedom, the nature of economics, the business system, labor markets, money and inflation, the problems unique to cities and education. Each essay is a masterpiece - penetrating, wise, and witty in its examination of and prescription for timeless issues as they confront the world's peoples today.

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WEEK OF May 2-6, 2005

M.J.C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (1967, 1998).

Arguably no political principle has been more central than the separation of powers to the evolution of constitutional governance in Western democracies. In the definitive work on the subject, M. J. C. Vile traces the history of the doctrine from its rise during the English Civil War, through its development in the eighteenth century - when it was indispensable to the founders of the American republic - through subsequent political thought and constitution-making in Britain, France, and the United States. The author concludes with an examination of criticisms of the doctrine by both behavioralists and centralizers - and with "A Model of a Theory of Constitutionalism." The new Liberty Fund second edition includes the entirety of the original 1967 text published by Oxford, a major epilogue entitled "The Separation of Powers and the Administrative State," and a bibliography.

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WEEK OF April 18-22, 2005

Areopagitica and Other Political Writings of John Milton, Foreword by John Alvis (17thC, 1999).

As poet, statesman, and pamphleteer, John Milton remains one of the singular champions of liberty in the annals of history. Even in his mediations on theology Milton strove to demonstrate that liberty - of conscience - is one of the inviolable rights of free peoples. In his theological writings he seeks to unite ancient philosophy and the authority of the Judeo-Christian scriptures to support the concept of free, republican government. During the crises that wracked English life and liberties during the seventeenth century, Milton's was one of the indispensable voices and pens. He published several revolutionary manifestos, two works defending regicide, and of course the famous Areopagitica, or defense of freedom of expression and the press against censorship. John Alvis has collected into a superb one-volume edition all of Milton’s political writings of enduring importance. These include the entirety of Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, A Defence of the People of England, The Second Defence of the People of England, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and Mr. John Milton’s Character of the Long Parliament.

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WEEK OF April 11-15, 2005

Kenneth Minogue, The Liberal Mind (1963, 2000).

Kenneth Minogue offers a brilliant and provocative exploration of liberalism in the Western world today: its roots and its influences, its present state, and its prospects in the new century. The Liberal Mind limns the taxonomy of a way of thinking that constitutes the very consciousness of most people in most Western countries. While few - especially in America - embrace the description of liberal, still, Minogue argues, most Americans and most Europeans behave as liberals. At least they are the heirs of what Minogue describes as "the triumph of an enlarged, flexible, and pragmatic version of liberalism." By examining the larger implications of the concept of liberalism, Minogue offers fresh perspective on the political currents that continue to shape governments and policy in the Western world.

A copy of the book can be ordered from Liberty Fund's online catalog.

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WEEK OF April 4-8, 2005

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776, 1981).

Volume I of Smith’s great work on political economy. First published in 1776, the year in which the American Revolution officially began, Smith’s Wealth of Nations sparked a revolution of its own. In it Smith analyzes the major elements of political economy, from market pricing and the division of labor to monetary, tax, trade, and other government policies that affect economic behavior. Throughout he offers seminal arguments for free trade, free markets, and limited government.

The Glasgow edition was originally commissioned to celebrate the bicentenary of The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s greatest work. But the project had and has a wider purpose. It is hoped that the most complete edition of Smith’s works will facilitate perception of the fact that individually they form the parts of a single whole which embraces theories of knowledge and of communication together with the main components of ethics, jurisprudence, and political economy. This aim accords with Smith’s own wishes as set out in the concluding pages of the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)—a promise which was repeated in the advertisement to the final edition of 1790.

— Andrew S. Skinner, General Editor, and Professor of Political Economy, University of Glasgow

Now complete in seven titles/eight volumes, this series is the first uniform collection of Adam Smith’s writings. The Glasgow edition is published in hardcover by Oxford University Press. The paperback edition is published by Liberty Fund. The online version is provided under license from Oxford University Press.

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WEEK OF March 28 - April 1, 2005

David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, Literary (1777, 1987).

We have Hume's own word that the definitive statement of his philosophy is not to be found in the youthful Treatise of Human Nature but in the 1777 posthumous edition of his collected works entitled Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. Yet a major part of this definitive collection, the Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (a volume of near 600 pages, covering three decades of Hume's career as a philosopher) has been largely ignored. The volume has rarely been in print, and the last critical edition was published in 1874-75. With this splendid, but inexpensive, new critical edition by Eugene Miller, the door is open to a richer notion of Hume's conception of philosophy.
— Donald Livingston, Emory University

This edition contains the thirty-nine essays included in Essays, Moral, and Literary, that made up Volume I of the 1777 posthumous Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. It also includes ten essays that were withdrawn or left unpublished by Hume for various reasons. The two most important were deemed too controversial for the religious climate of his time.

This revised edition reflects changes based on further comparisons with eighteenth-century texts and an extensive reworking of the index.

Eugene F. Miller is a professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia.

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WEEK OF March 21-25, 2005

Frederick William Maitland, A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality, as Ideals of English Political Philosophy from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge (1875, 2000).

A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality is a window to one of the most important historians of all time.

This exclusive Liberty Fund edition of F. W. Maitland's classic includes a note on Maitland by Charles Haskins, and a general account of Maitland's life and work, "The Historical Spirit Incarnate: Frederic William Maitland," by Robert Schuyler.

A historian's historian, F. W. Maitland was never to be caught indulging in fanciful speculation about times long past. Rather, he said, "We shall have to think away distinctions which seem to us as clear as the sunshine; we must think ourselves back into a twilight." To achieve this discipline, Maitland chose his tools of historical analysis with a lawyer's care. For example, to decipher works of medieval law written in Anglo-French patois, he became "grammarian, orthographer, and phoneticist."

Thus did none other than Lord Acton declare Maitland to be "the ablest historian in England." In 1875, at only twenty-five years of age, Maitland, in pursuit of a fellowship in Cambridge University, submitted a remarkable work entitled "A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality as Ideals of English Political History from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge."

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WEEK OF March 14-18, 2005

Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism before Adam Smith, ed. Henry C. Clarke (2003).

This collection of thirty-seven readings (from thirty-three writers) brings together some of the most significant pre–Adam Smith writings on the political and cultural dimensions of capitalism.

To modern readers, these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of commerce and economic life in general are surprising because they are so closely integrated to moral and cultural issues. Though we may have forgotten how extensively such issues were once discussed, it is uncanny what a contemporary ring many of these issues have. Part of the value of this book is in reminding us that many of our own concerns are not without precedent and earlier reflection.

The selections come both from now-unfamiliar authors who were influential in their own time, as well as from such well-known writers as Rousseau, Defoe, Fielding, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. The essays emphasize the human meaning of the market; they were selected to provide a sense of the range of opinion that prevailed on the broader significance of the market economy before it became a pervasive feature of modern life.

Commerce, Culture, and Liberty presents rich and provocative writings on the relationship between commerce and luxury, virtue, nobility, agriculture, the state, religion, civility, and liberty. The book restores the voice of a rich body of reflections on the larger import of the birth of the modern economy that has been largely silent in academic discourse on the topic. Moreover, it presents significant though hard-to-find writings by a host of well-known authors, including a little-known essay by Rousseau. It also presents important writings that have been preempted by Adam Smith, writings that say as much about our age as about the age in which they were written.

Henry C. Clark is Professor of History at Canisius College. He has written articles on the French and Scottish Enlightenments and is the author of La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth-Century France .

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WEEK OF March 7-11, 2005

Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756, 1982).

This is a new edition of Edmund Burke's first work, originally issued anonymously in 1756 as a letter attributed to "a late noble writer." In 1757 Burke produced a revised version with a new preface but still did not attach his name to the work. This Liberty Fund edition is based on the 1757 revision. The Vindicationis a political and social satire ridiculing the popular enlightenment notion of a pre-civil "natural society."

Frank N. Pagano is a Tutor at St. John's College at Santa Fe.

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WEEK OF February 28 - March 4, 2005

James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1874, 1993).

"Stephen’s book is the finest exposition of conservative thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century." (Sir Ernest Barker, Political Thought in England, 1848 to 1941). Students of political theory will welcome the return to print of this brilliant defense of ordered liberty. Impugning John Stuart Mill’s famous treatise, On Liberty, Stephen criticized Mill for turning abstract doctrines of the French Revolution into "the creed of a religion." Only the constraints of morality and law make liberty possible, warned Stephen, and attempts to impose unlimited freedom, material equality, and an indiscriminate love of humanity will lead inevitably to coercion and tyranny. Liberty must be restrained by custom and tradition if it is to endure; equality must be limited to equality before the law if it is to be just; and fraternity must include actual men, not the amorphous mass of mankind, if it is to be real and genuine.

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WEEK OF February 21-25, 2005

Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action (1792, 1993).

A Liberty Fund edition of this work. "The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument . . . unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity. " This description by Wilhelm von Humboldt of his purpose in writing The Limits of State Action animates John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and serves as its famous epigraph. Seldom has a book spoken so dramatically to another writer. Many commentators even believe that Humboldt’s discussion of issues of freedom and individual responsibility possesses greater clarity and directness than Mill’s.

The Limits of State Action, by "Germany’s greatest philosopher of freedom," as F. A. Hayek called him, has an exuberance and attention to principle that make it a valuable introduction to classical liberal political thought. It is also crucial for an understanding of liberalism as it developed in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. Humboldt explores the role that liberty plays in individual development, discusses criteria for permitting the state to limit individual actions, and suggests ways of confining the state to its proper bounds. In so doing, he uniquely combines the ancient concern for human excellence and the modern concern for what has come to be known as negative liberty.

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WEEK OF February 14-18, 2005

Hyppolyte Taine, The French Revolution (1884, 2002).

Hippolyte Taine's The French Revolution, which is written from the viewpoint of conservative French opinion, is a unique and important contribution to revolutionary historiography.

Taine condemns the radicals of the French Revolution, unhesitatingly contradicting the rosy, Rousseauesque view of the Revolution.Taine approached the Revolution in the same way that a medical doctor approaches a disease. Indeed, he described his work not so much as a history as a "pathology" of the Revolution. His method constitutes his principal contribution to study of the subject. This method began with an examination, not of the French, but of the English. As Professor Mona Ozouf observes, Taine "maintained [that] the history of the Revolution depended on the definition of the French spirit." He had, in an earlier account of English literature, defined "a unique explanatory principle" for investigation of the contrasting societies of the French and the English. This principle among the English, he reported, is "the sense of liberty," or what he described as the English conviction that "man, having conceived alone in his conscience and before God the rules of his conduct, is above all a free, moral person." In contrast to the English ability to conserve and even to expand liberty through gradual adaptation to changing circumstances, Taine identified a "French spirit" that became, Ozouf emphasizes, "his central explanation of the French revolutionary phenomenon." This phenomenon explained, Taine argued, why France "had demolished its national community well before the Revolution" - thus making the Revolution not only inevitable, but also inevitably terrible.

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