Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics
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Historical Law-Tracts
by Henry Home, Lord Kames
Historical Law-Tracts is one of the earliest contributions to the Scottish Enlightenment project of a historical science of society. Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), was an influential Scottish judge, a prolific man of letters, and one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in Scotland, and his goal in this work is to show the study of law as a…
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An Historical View of the English Government
by John Millar
An Historical View of the English Government traces the development of the “great outlines of the English constitution”—the history of institutions of English liberty from Saxon antiquity to the revolution settlement of 1689. Millar demonstrates serious concern for the maintenance of liberties achieved through revolution and maintains that the manners of a commercial nation, while particularly suited to personal and…
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An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue
by Francis Hutcheson
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…
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Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence, with Selections from Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations
by Christian Thomasius
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…
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An Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe
by Samuel Pufendorf
Samuel Pufendorf was a pivotal figure in the early German Enlightenment. His version of voluntarist natural law theory had a major influence both on the European continent and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, particularly Scotland and America. Pufendorf’s An Introduction to the History of the Principal Kingdoms and States of Europe (1682) became one of his most famous and widely…
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The Law of Nations Treated According to the Scientific Method
by Christian Wolff
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…
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The Law of Nations
by Emer de Vattel
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…
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Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind
by Francis Hutcheson
Until the publication of this Liberty Fund edition, all but one of the works contained in Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind were available only in Latin. This milestone English translation will provide a general audience with insight into Hutcheson’s thought. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was educated at the University of Glasgow, where he assumed the chair of moral…
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The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
by Francis Hutcheson and James Moor
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…
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A Methodical System of Universal Law
by Johann Gottlieb Heineccius
George Turnbull’s eighteenth-century translation of A Methodical System of Universal Law was his major effort to convey continental natural law to Britain, thus making Heineccius’s natural jurisprudence more accessible to English-speaking audiences. Turnbull includes extensive comments on Heineccius’s text and also presents his own philosophical work, A Discourse upon the Nature and Origin of Moral and Civil Laws. Johann Gottlieb…
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Natural Rights on the Threshold of the Scottish Enlightenment
by Gershom Carmichael
Gershom Carmichael (1672–1729) was the first professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, preceding Hutcheson, Smith, and Reid. His philosophy focused on the natural rights of individuals—the natural right to defend oneself, to own the property on which one has labored, and to services contracted for with others. Although he appealed to the authority of Grotius and Locke,…
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Observations upon Liberal Education
by George Turnbull
Originally published in 1742, Observations upon Liberal Education is a significant contribution to the Scottish Enlightenment and the moral-sense school of Scottish philosophy. In Observations, Turnbull applies the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to the education of youth. He shows how a liberal education fosters true “inward liberty” and moral strength and thus prepares us for responsible and happy lives…
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