Written in response to Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), the Discourses Concerning Government is a classic defense of republicanism and popular government. Sidney rejected Filmer’s theories of royal absolutism and divine right of kings, insisting that title to rule should be based on merit rather than birth; and republics, he thought, were more likely to honor merit than were monarchies.

Written during the English Revolution, Milton’s pamphlet argues that there exists a voluntary contract between free men and their rulers, and that if a ruler becomes a tyrant then the people have the right to depose him if the ordinary magistrates have not done so.

In the aftermath of the English Revolution which saw the execution of a king and the creation of a Commonwealth and the restoration of the monarchy, Filmer wrote a solid defense of the divine right of kings which in turn prompted John Locke to write a riposte - part 1 of the Two Treatises of Government.

In a rather grumpy “advertisement” Senior tells us that he rather unwillingly had to give a formal lecture as Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University and have it published. The books contains a lecture on the transmission of gold in international trade and 2 lectures on attempts by protectionists and mercantilists to restrict this.

Molyneux’s work was eagerly read by the American colonists who used its anti-imperial and anti-mecantilist arguments in their own struggle against Britain.

The second of two important collections of early economics works made by McCulloch. This volume deals with coins and coinage, the export of gold and silver, and the history of coinage in Scotland, Ireland, England, and ancient Greece and Rome.

This collections contains his philosophical writings on Locke, natural law, Thomas More, and Machiavelli; his historical writings on the Glorious Revolution, his defence of the French Revolution Vindiciae Gallicae; and several of his speeches in the House of Commons.

A volume of poems published after Shelley’s death in 1822 with a preface by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Douglass’s third and last autobiography of his life as a slave, runaway, and then campaigner for the abolition of slavery. This edition is interesting because of the introduction by one of Britain’s leading classical liberal reformers, John Bright.

This Liberty Fund publication of Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria is a parallel edition of the English and Latin versions of a book designed by Hutcheson for use in the classroom. General Editor Knud Haakonssen remarks that “Hutcheson’s Institutio was written as a textbook for university students and it therefore covers a curriculum which has an institutional background in his own university, Glasgow. This was a curriculum crucially influenced by Hutcheson’s predecessor Gershom Carmichael, and at its center was modern natural jurisprudence as systematized by Grotius, Pufendorf, and others… . The Institutio is the first major [published] attempt by Hutcheson to deal with natural law on his own terms… . It therefore encapsulates the axis of natural law and Scottish Enlightenment ideas, which so many other thinkers, including Adam Smith, worked with in their different ways. It is of great significance that this work issued from the class in which Smith sat as a student.”