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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 ideas on natural law and toleration were highly influential in both Europe and the British Isles.Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) taught natural law and was court historian in both Germany and Sweden.Simone Zurbuchen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence was Pufendorf’s first work, published in 1660. Its appearance effectively inaugurated the modern natural-law movement in the German-speaking world, establishing Pufendorf as a key figure and laying the foundations for his later major works.Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) taught natural law and was court historian in both Germany and Sweden.Thomas Behme is a member of the faculty at the Institute for Philosophy, Free University of Berlin. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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Gershom Carmichael (1672–1729) was the first professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, preceding Hutcheson, Smith, and Reid. He defended a strong theory of rights and drew attention to Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke.James Moore is Professor of Political Science at Concordia University in Montreal.Michael Silverthorne is Honorary University Fellow in the School of Classics at the University of Exeter. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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Grotius’s The Truth of the Christian Religion was first published in Leiden in 1627 in Latin. Written in plain and direct language for his countrymen, this short work aimed to show those who would encounter pagans, Muslims, and Jews that the Christian religion was the true revealed religion. In addition to “fortifying” the beliefs of his fellow Christians, the treatise intended to convince non-Christians of “the reasonableness of believing and embracing the Christian Religion above any other.”Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was a lawyer and legal theorist, diplomat and political philosopher, ecumenical activist and theologian.Maria Rosa Antognazza is Professor of Philosophy and Department Head at King’s College London. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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Christian Thomasius’s natural jurisprudence is essential to understanding the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany, where his importance was comparable to that of John Locke’s in England.First published in 1688, Thomasius’s Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae (Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence) attempted to draw a clear distinction between natural and revealed law and to emphasize that human reason was able to know the precepts of natural law without the aid of Scripture. Thomasius also argued that his orthodox Lutheran opponents had failed to understand this distinction and thereby had confused reason and Scripture.This volume also contains significant selections from his Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium(Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations), published in 1705. In Foundations Thomasius significantly revised the theory he had put forward in the Institutes, and much of the Foundations therefore is a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on his earlier ideas.Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) was a German philosopher and legal theorist.Thomas Ahnert is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Edinburgh.Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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The great eighteenth-century theorist of international law Emer de Vattel (1714–1767) was a key figure in sustaining the practical and theoretical influence of natural jurisprudence through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Coming toward the end of the period when the discourse of natural law was dominant in European political theory, Vattel’s contribution is cited as a major source of contemporary wisdom on questions of international law in the American Revolution and even by opponents of revolution, such as Cardinal Consalvi, at the Congress of Vienna of 1815.The significance of The Law of Nations resides in its distillation from natural law of an apt model for international conduct of state affairs that carried conviction in both the Old Regime and the new political order of 1789–1815.The Liberty Fund edition is based on the anonymous English translation of 1797, which includes Vattel’s notes for the second French edition (posthumous, 1773).Emer de Vattel (1714–1767) was a Swiss philosopher and jurist in the service of Saxony.Béla Kapossy is Professeur Suppléant of History at the University of Lausanne.Richard Whatmore is a Reader in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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This 1742 translation is a collaborative work by Francis Hutcheson and a colleague at Glasgow University, the classicist James Moor. Although Hutcheson was secretive about the extent of his work on the book, he was clearly the leading spirit of the project.This influential classical work offers a vision of a universe governed by a natural law that obliges us to love mankind and to govern our lives in accordance with the natural order of things.In many ways, Hutcheson and Moor’s The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus is a companion volume to Hutcheson’s Latin work on ethics, released in the same year, Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria. In the latter volume, which is also available from Liberty Fund, Hutcheson continues a theme that proffered his ethics as a modern and, not least, Christianized version of Stoicism.Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was educated at the University of Glasgow, where he assumed the chair of moral philosophy in 1729. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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Divided into three books, Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man draws together the concerns of many of his earlier works. The first book considers man in the private sphere, while the second explores man in the public sphere. The final book is an account of progress in the sciences of logic, morals, and theology. Throughout the entire work, Kames expounds on his fundamental hypothesis that, at the beginning of the history of the human race, savagery was ubiquitous and that the human story is one of an emergence out of barbarism and toward maturity.Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) was one of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment.James A. Harris is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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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.Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) was one of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment.Mary Catherine Moran taught in the Department of History at Columbia University. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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Samuel Pufendorf’s The Present State of Germany was first published in 1667 (under the pseudonym Severinus de Monzambano) and immediately became one of the most notorious works in Europe for the next half century. Its trenchant critique of previous theories of the Holy Roman Empire elicited both attacks and defenses, and it also anticipated many elements in Pufendorf’s subsequent writings on natural law, history, and religion.Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) taught natural law and was court historian in both Germany and Sweden.Michael J. Seidler is Professor of Philosophy at Western Kentucky University. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

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