Political Theory

Constitutionalism and Authority in Enlightenment Thought: Montesquieu, Hume, and Burke

ABSTRACT

Using readings from Montesquieu, Hume, and Burke, the colloquium explored the relationship between liberty and authority in modern constitutional theory.

READING LIST

From Liberty Fund

Further Reflections on the Revolution in France

by By Edmund Burke
Edited by Daniel E. Ritchie

In his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke excoriated French revolutionary leaders for recklessly destroying France’s venerable institutions and way of life. But his war against the French intelligentsia did not end there, and Burke continued to take pen in hand against the Jacobins until his…

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Additional Readings

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edited by J. C. D. Clark. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Hume, David. Essays: Moral, Political and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985, 1987.

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat. The Spirit of the Laws. Translated by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.