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Christian Wolff’s The Law of Nations is a cornerstone of eighteenth-century thought. A treatise on the philosophy of human action, on the foundations of political communities, and on international law, it influenced philosophers throughout the eighteenth-century Enlightenment world. According to Knud Haakonssen, general editor of the Natural Law and Enlightenment series, “before Kant’s critical philosophy, Wolff was without comparison the most influential German thinker for several decades as well as a major European figure.”One of the most striking features of The Law of Nations is Wolff’s single-minded dedication to what he calls the “scientific method.” Though different from what we understand by that today, Wolff’s method still focuses on the illumination of truth via a step-by-step, logical examination of what is already known in order to explain what is unknown. As such, The Law of Nations is Wolff’s triumphant synthesis of his scientific method and his observations regarding the operations of nations. It examines the full gamut of national functions: what duties nations have to themselves and to each other, how national ownership should be viewed, how treaties should be formed, and how nations should act in both war and peace.Though Wolff’s contemporaries in authority did not always accept his ideas—he was banished from the lands of the king of Prussia for seventeen years for his radical notions regarding moral obligation and human free will—his influence ultimately spread across Europe, shaping philosophical study in many German, Dutch, and Scandinavian universities especially.The Liberty Fund edition of The Law of Nations is the first in English since the 1934 translation by Joseph H. Drake. Thomas Ahnert has revised and corrected that translation for readability and accuracy and has also added footnotes that explain the many references and technical terms Wolff uses throughout the text.Thomas Ahnert is Reader and Head of History at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Among his publications are The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, 1690–1805, an edition of Thomasius’s Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence, and Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment.

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Often described as the culmination of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie was collected not only to serve as a comprehensive reference work, but to “change the way men think” about every aspect of the human and natural worlds. In his celebrated “Preliminary Discourse” to the compilation, d’Alembert traced an entire history of modern philosophy and science designed to chart the way toward a sweeping Baconian project of improving the world through usable knowleEAe.This anthology is the first endeavor to bring together the most significant political writing from the entire twenty-million-word compendium. It includes eighty-one of the most original, controversial, and representative articles on political ideas, practices, and institutions, many translated into English for the first time. The articles cover such topics as the foundations of political order, the relationship between natural and civil liberty, the different types of constitutional regimes, the role of the state in economic and religious affairs, and the boundaries between manners, morals, and laws. In addition to Diderot’s early and important articles “Political Authority,” the “Citizen,” and “Natural Right” and the substantial treatments of subjects such as the “Legislator” (by Saint-Lambert), “Representation” (by d’Holbach), “Population” (by Damilaville), and “Political Economy” (by Quesnay), the anthology will also introduce to many English-language readers the tireless figure of Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (1704–80), who wrote about 18,000 articles, or about 25 percent of the Encyclopédie. Jaucourt’s numerous articles on political topics did much to solidify the new political teachings of the natural-law tradition, the English Whig writers, the Huguenot diaspora, and particularly Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws had appeared shortly before the first volume of the Encyclopédie itself.Henry C. Clark is a Visiting Professor in the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College. He has written two books and numerous articles, mainly on the French and Scottish Enlightenments.Christine Dunn Henderson is a Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund.

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Exploring the Bounds of Liberty presents a rich and extensive selection of the political literature produced in and about colonial British America during the century before the American Revolution. Most colonial political pamphlets and broadsides were printed in London, but even in the mid-seventeenth century some writings were published in New England, which then had the only printing presses in British America. With the expansion of printing to most of the colonies during the last decade of the seventeenth and the first three decades of the eighteenth century, however, the number of political polemical publications increased exponentially throughout colonial British America, from Barbados to Nova Scotia. The number of publications dealing with political questions increased in every decade after 1710, to become a veritable flood by the 1750s.Exploring the Bounds of Liberty is an ideal introduction to the rich, hitherto only lightly examined literature produced in and about the British colonies between 1680 and 1770. It provides easy access to key but little-discussed political writings, illuminating important political debates in the early-modern British empire and giving crucial context for much better-known tracts of the American Revolution.The selections are presented in chronological sequence, from the earliest, William Penn’s “The Excellent PrivileEAe of Liberty and Property” (1687), to the latest, an anonymous 1774 protest against taxes arbitrarily imposed by royal officials without local consent or parliamentary authority, but simply in the king’s name. Each of the selections is preceded by a short, substantive introductory essay that clarifies the context and content of the sources.As the editors write in their introduction, these writings speak directly to such themes in the history of liberty as the nature and source of corporate and individual rights, the importance of due process and the rule of law for the preservation of those rights, the centrality of private property and local autonomy in a free polity, and the ability of people to pursue their domestic happiness.Jack P. Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, where he was a member of the Department of History for thirty-nine years. He has published widely on colonial British America and the American Revolution, most recently Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900 (2010); Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (2011); Celebrating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2013); Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity (2011); and Settler Jamaica: A Social Portrait of the 1750s (2016).Craig B. Yirush is an Associate Professor of History at UCLA. Educated at the University of British Columbia, CambriEAe University, and the Johns Hopkins University, he teaches and writes about the intellectual history of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British world. He is the author of Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of American Political Theory, 1675–1775.

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This volume, the third in our Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat, includes two of Bastiat’s best-known works, the collected Economic Sophisms and the pamphlet What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen. We are publishing here for the first time in English the Third Series of Economic Sophisms, which Bastiat had planned but died before he could complete the project.Both Economic Sophisms and What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen share similar stylistic features and were written with much the same purpose in mind, to disabuse people of misperceptions they might have had about the benefits of free trade and free markets. Throughout the book, Bastiat’s clever and witty arguments against tariff protection and subsidies to domestic industry are timeless, as governments and vested-interest groups are still advocating the same policies 160 years after Bastiat wrote.Frédéric Bastiat was born in 1801, and during his short life (he died in Rome, on Christmas Eve, in 1850) he was witness to many historic events, such as the victory of Richard Cobden’s free-trade Anti–Corn Law League in 1846, the rise of socialism, the 1848 Revolution, and the rise of Louis Napoléon to the presidency of the Second Republic. Many of these events affected his ideas and became targets of his writings. In his final work, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, completed only months before his death, he provides one of his keenest economic insights, that, although there are obvious beneficial effects of government interventions at first, that is, the “seen,” there are also the “unseen” consequences, for example, in the form of opportunity costs that are ignored but that often have deleterious economic effects. He makes this case most eloquently in the form of a parable in the opening chapter, “The Broken Window.”To accompany Bastiat’s original works, we have provided detailed and comprehensive explanatory footnotes, glossaries, and appendixes. Bastiat refers to dozens of other writers and politicians and is critical of French government policies regarding taxation, tariffs, and subsidies to business. The glossary of authors and politicians provides detailed information about the individuals Bastiat mentions in his essays, the views they held, the books they published, and the laws that the French state enacted in order to maintain the system of protection and subsidies that Bastiat and the other free-market economists so strenuously opposed. This collection of supplementary material allows us a better understanding of the community of economists and politicians of which Bastiat was a part in the late 1840s.Jacques de Guenin founded the Cercle Frédéric Bastiat in 1990. He had degrees in science from the University of Paris and from the University of California, Berkeley, and was the author of The Logic of Classical Liberalism.Dennis O’Keeffe was Professor of Social Science at the University of Buckingham and Senior Research Fellow in Education at the Institute of Economic Affairs, London.Jean-Claude Paul-Dejean is a Bastiat scholar and a historian at the University of Bordeaux.David M. Hart has a Ph.D. in history from King’s College, CambriEAe, and is the Director of Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty.

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A Treatise on Political Economy by Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) is a foundational text of nineteenth-century, free-market economic thought and remains one of the classics of nineteenth-century French economic liberalism. Destutt de Tracy was one of the founders of the classical liberal republican group known as the Idéologues, which included Jean-Baptiste Say, Marquis de Condorcet, and Pierre Cabanis.In this volume, Destutt de Tracy provides one of the clearest statements of the economic principles of the Idéologues. Placing the entrepreneur at the center of his view of economic activity, he argues against the luxurious consumption of the idle rich and recommends a market economy with low taxation and minimum state intervention.Destutt de Tracy sent the text of A Treatise on Political Economy to Thomas Jefferson in hopes of securing its translation in the United States. It was met with enthusiastic approval. Jefferson wrote to the publisher, “The merit of this work will, I hope, place it in the hands of every reader in our country.”Jeremy Jennings is Professor of Political Theory at Queen Mary, University of London. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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In Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 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—through subsequent political thought and constitution-making in Britain, France, and the United States.M. J. C. Vile is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Kent at Canterbury and author of The Structure of American Federalism. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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This famed Payne edition of Select Works of Edmund Burke is universally revered by students of English history and political thought.Volume 3 presents Burke’s Four Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France—generally styled Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–1796). The Letters, Payne believed, deserve to “rank even before [Burke’s] Reflections, and to be called the writer’s masterpiece.” Faithfully reproduced in each volume are E. J. Payne’s notes and introductory essays. Francis Canavan, one of the great Burke scholars of the twentieth century, has added forewords and a biographical note on Payne.Francis Canavan (1917–2009) was Professor of Political Science at Fordham University from 1966 until his retirement in 1988. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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Born in 1694, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui helped transform the modern tradition of natural law and convey it to new generations.Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1694–1748) was a Swiss jurist.Petter Korkman is a Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy at the Academy of Finland. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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Vindiciae Gallicae was James Mackintosh’s first major publication, a contribution to the debate begun by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The success of Mackintosh’s defense of the French Revolution propelled him into the heart of London Whig circles. Following the September 1792 massacres Mackintosh, along with other moderate Whigs, revised his opinions and moved closer to Burke’s position. The Liberty Fund edition also includes Mackintosh’s Discourse on the Law of Nature and Nations, Letter to William Pitt, and On the State of France in 1815.James Mackintosh (1765–1832) was a prominent Scottish Whig.Donald Winch is Research Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Sussex and a Fellow of the British Academy. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution was a winner in the Scholarly/Reference category at the Chicago Book Clinic’s 2009 Book & Media Show.Germaine de Staël’s voice, which Napoleon Bonaparte tried to silence by censorship and banishment, is a unique and important contribution to revolutionary historiography.Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, considered Madame de Staël’s magnum opus, became a classic of liberal thinking, making a deeply original contribution to an ongoing political and historical debate in early nineteenth-century France and Europe.Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) rose to fame as a novelist, critic, political thinker, sociologist of literature, and autobiographer.Aurelian Craiutu is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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