In this defence of religious toleration, Bayle discusses the words attributed to Jesus Christ in Luke 14:23, “And the Lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be full.” Bayle contends that the word compel cannot mean “force.” From this perspective, he constructs his doctrine of toleration based on the singular importance of conscience. Bayle argues that if the orthodox have the right and duty to persecute, then every sect will persecute since every sect considers itself orthodox. The result will be mutual slaughter, something God cannot have intended.

Grotius’s influential argument in favor of freedom of navigation, trade, and fishing in Richard Hakluyt’s translation. The book also contains William Welwod’s critque and Grotius’s reply to Welwod.

A collection of three of Descatres philosophical works: the Discourse of Method, the Meditations, and selections from his Principles of Philosophy.

From an 1818 edition which combines Bentham’s defence of the practice of charging interest on loans with a critique of certain taxes which increased the cost of appearing before the courts.

In a landmark work, a leading scholar of the eighteenth century examines the ways in which an understanding of the nature of history, seen as as a continual struggle between liberty and virtue on one hand and arbitrary power and corruption on the other, influenced the thinking of the founding fathers.

This is an interesting edition from 1879 which combines On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection of Women (1869), which were originally published separately, in a single edition. Mill had been somewhat coy about publishing The Subjection of Women during his lifetime because he feared the condemnation of his peers for daring to apply the general notions of individual liberty which he had clearly spelled out in On Liberty to the particular case of women. So he withheld publication until just before his death. It was left to an enterprising publisher after the author’s death to recognize the connection between the two works and to combine them in a new edition. This was something which was not done again until the 1970s when the significance of Mill’s writings on women were again appreciated.

Though usually Edmund Burke is identified as the first to articulate the principles of a modern conservative political tradition, arguably he was preceded by a Scotsman who is better known for espousing a brilliant concept of skepticism. As Laurence Bongie notes, “David Hume was undoubtedly the eighteenth-century British writer whose works were most widely known and acclaimed on the Continent during the later Enlightenment period. Hume’s impact [in France] was of undeniable importance, greater even for a time than the related influence of Burke, although it represents a contribution to French counter-revolutionary thought which, unlike that of Burke, has been almost totally ignored by historians to this day.” The bulk of Bongie’s work consists of the writings of French readers of Hume who were confronted, first, by the ideology of human perfection and, finally, by the actual terrors of the French Revolution. Offered in French in the original edition of David Hume published by Oxford University Press in 1965, these vitally important writings have been translated by the author into English for the Liberty Fund second edition. In his foreword, Donald Livingston observes that “If conservatism is taken to be an intellectual critique of the first attempt at modern total revolution, then the first such event was not the French but the Puritan revolution, and the first systematic critique of this sort of act was given by Hume.”

One of several books Guyot wrote attacking socialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this volume, in the tradition of Bastiat, he criticises what he calls “socialistic sophisms,” socialistic legislation, strikes, subsidies to business, and the connection between militarism, protectionism, and socialism.

The second of a two part series on Spooner’s theory that the institution of slavery was not supported by the ideas behind the constitution and was thus “unconstitutional.”

A pioneering work of the Scottish Enlightenment in the field of “philosophical history”, or what we would today call sociology. It deals with the social, political, economic, intellectual, and legal changes which accompanied societies as they made the transition to modern commercial and manufacturing society.