A mid-19th century translation of this work. “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument … unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” This description by Wilhelm von Humboldt of his purpose in writing The Limits of State Action animates John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and serves as its famous epigraph. Seldom has a book spoken so dramatically to another writer. Many commentators even believe that Humboldt’s discussion of issues of freedom and individual responsibility possesses greater clarity and directness than Mill’s. The Limits of State Action, by “Germany’s greatest philosopher of freedom,” as F. A. Hayek called him, has an exuberance and attention to principle that make it a valuable introduction to classical liberal political thought. It is also crucial for an understanding of liberalism as it developed in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. Humboldt explores the role that liberty plays in individual development, discusses criteria for permitting the state to limit individual actions, and suggests ways of confining the state to its proper bounds. In so doing, he uniquely combines the ancient concern for human excellence and the modern concern for what has come to be known as negative liberty.

This collection contains the Putney Debates, the Whitehall Debates, and numerous other documents about Puritan religious and political views during the English Revolution, in particular the Levellers. The collection has pieces by many authors including John Saltmarsh, John Goodman, William Ames, John Calvin, Samuel Rutherford, Martin Luther, John Milton, William Prynne, Hanserd Knollys, Roger Williams, Philip Nye, Richard Mather, William Dell, John Lilburne, Richard Overton, Henry Ireton, Thomas Rainborough, Oliver Cromwell, and John Wildman.

A collection of Averroes’ shorter works on religion, including the relation between religion and philosophy, the nature of eternal knowledge, and methods of argument and faith.

In his ethical treatises Aristotle offers a defense of the idea of eudaimonism (human flourishing or happiness) which is achieved as a result of human choice in search of excellence and the good life.

As a result of Peel’s Bank Act of 1844 and the discovery of gold in California in 1848 a dramatic increase in the amount of gold entered into circulation. Richard Cobden translated an expanded version of Chevalier’s essay in order to bring to world attention the thoughts of this French free market economist on the impact these events would have on the value of gold and other commodities.

The essays selected here for translation derive largely from Thomasius’s work on Staatskirchenrecht, or the political jurisprudence of church law. These works, originating as disputations, theses, and pamphlets, were direct interventions in the unresolved issue of the political role of religion in Brandenburg-Prussia, a state in which a Calvinist dynasty ruled over a largely Lutheran population and nobility as well as a significant Catholic minority. In mandating limited religious toleration within the German states, the provisions of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) also provided the rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia with a way of keeping the powerful Lutheran church in check by guaranteeing a degree of religious freedom to non-Lutherans and thereby detaching the state from the most powerful territorial church. Thomasius’s writings on church-state relations, many of them critical of the civil claims made by Lutheran theologians, are a direct response to this state of affairs. At the same time, owing to the depth of intellectual resources at his disposal, these works constitute a major contribution to the broader discussion of the relation between the religious and political spheres.

An Historical View of the English Government consists of three parts, concerned with the most substantive revolutions in English government and manners: from the Saxon settlement to the Norman Conquest, from the Norman Conquest to the accession of James I, and from James I to the Glorious Revolution. Through these three phases Millar 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 political liberty, are not such as to secure liberty forever.

“We have Hume’s own word that the definitive statement of his philosophy is not to be found in the youthful Treatise of Human Nature but in the 1777 posthumous edition of his collected works entitled Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. Yet a major part of this definitive collection, the Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (a volume of near 600 pages, covering three decades of Hume’s career as a philosopher) has been largely ignored. The volume has rarely been in print, and the last critical edition was published in 1874-75. With this splendid, but inexpensive, new critical edition by Eugene Miller, the door is open to a richer notion of Hume’s conception of philosophy.” (Donald Livingston, Emory University). This edition contains the thirty-nine essays included in Essays, Moral, and Literary, that made up Volume I of the 1777 posthumous Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. It also includes ten essays that were withdrawn or left unpublished by Hume for various reasons. The two most important were deemed too controversial for the religious climate of his time.

A pioneering article on trade unions which was pubished in one of the leading professional economics journals in the early 20th century.

Observations on “The Two Sons of Oil” was written in 1811 in response to the Reverend Samuel B. Wylie’s work, The Two Sons of Oil, which was published in 1803. In this work of radical Presbyterian theology, Wylie pointed out what he considered to be deficiencies in the constitutions of both Pennsylvania and the United States and declared them to be immoral. Findley’s response to Wylie’s criticisms in Observations showed that it was neither the purpose nor the design of the United States government to have a federal religion and a federal creed. In a broader sense the book is also a passionate defense of a civil government guided by moral principles that allow for essential freedoms. Findley’s defense of religious liberty and the American constitutions affords a grand window through which to view early American understanding about the relationship between politics and faith and why it is essential for both liberty and piety to resist any attempt to unite government and Church.