For Students

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…

In this volume, Mises argued that economics is a science because human action is a natural order of life and that it is the actions of humans that determine markets and capital decisions. Since Mises believed these links could be proven scientifically, he concluded that economics, with its basis on that human action, is indeed a science in its own…

St. George Tucker’s View of the Constitution, published in 1803, was the first extended, systematic commentary on the United States Constitution after its ratification. Generations learned their Blackstone and their understanding of the Constitution through Tucker. Clyde N. Wilson is Professor of History and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun at the University of South Carolina.

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 Vindication is a political…

By 1989, when Michael Oakeshott’s Voice of Liberal Learning was first published by Yale University Press, books that held a negative view of education in the United States had garnered a remarkable amount of attention. Oakeshott’s approach to the subject is subtle, comprehensive, and radical—in the sense of summoning readers to the root of the matter. That root, Oakeshott believed,…

The debates between Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Hayne of South Carolina gave fateful utterance to the differing understandings of the nature of the American Union that had come to predominate in the North and the South by 1830. To Webster, the Union was the indivisible expression of one nation of people. To Hayne, the Union was the voluntary…