Even this is entitled “The First” it is the only part Spooner published. It was meant to be the opening section of a much larger treatise on natural law. It is interesting because Spooner outlines the basic principles of the thinking which he used repeatedly in his other writings.

A selection from Acton’s large mass of correspondence including a number to Gladstone on the budget, foreign affairs, Acton’s library, and women’s suffrage.

This is a critical collection of essays on the origin and nature of the idea of liberty. The authors explore the development of English ideas of liberty and the relationship those ideas hold to modern conceptions of rule of law. The essays address early medieval developments, encompassing such seminal issues as the common-law mind of the sixteenth century under the Tudor monarchs, the struggle for power and authority between the Stuart kings and Parliament in the seventeenth century, and the role of the ancient constitution in the momentous legal and constitutional debate that occurred between the Glorious Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence.

One of the works which appeared independently in 1871 (along with a work by Jevons and Walras) which revolutionized thinking about economics. The theory of marginal utility and new ways of thinking about marginal value and price theory help found the Austrian School of economics, whose later theorists included Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard.

Vindiciae Gallicae was James Mackintosh’s first major publication, a contribution to the debate begun by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The success of Mackintosh’s defense of the French Revolution propelled him into the heart of London Whig circles. The turn of events in France following the September 1792 Massacres caused Mackintosh, along with other moderate Whigs, to revise his opinions and to move closer to Burke’s position. A Discourse on the Law of Nature and Nations was the introduction to a popular course of public lectures at Lincoln’s Inn in 1799 and 1800. These lectures provided Mackintosh with an opportunity to complete the evolution of his political thought by expounding the principles of a Scottish version of the science of natural jurisprudence dealing with “the rights and duties of men and of states,” to announce his withdrawal of support for the French Revolution, and to criticize former allies on the radical wing of the reform movement. The Liberty Fund edition also includes Mackintosh’s Letter to William Pitt, an attack on the prime minister, Pitt the Younger, for going back on his own record as a parliamentary reformer; and On the State of France in 1815, his reflections on the nature and causes of the French Revolution.

Priestley supported the early phase of the French Revolution and saw it as an advance in human liberty, thus objecting to Burke’s severe criticisms.

Written toward the end of Mises’s life, his last monograph, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, returned to economics as a science based on human action. Mises believed that, since the publication of Human Action, economists and scientists alike had misinterpreted the idea of economics as a science by deeming it epistemological positivism—that they believed that the “science” basis was still more rooted in philosophy than in actual science. 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 right and not an ideology or a metaphysical doctrine.

Cantillon wrote one major work, Essay on the Nature of Trade in general, which was regarded by Jevons and Hayek as an important early contribution to the theory of marginal utility. It lay forgotten for over 100 years until Jevons rediscovered it in the late 19th century. This edition is a bi-ligual French and English version with essays on the significance of Cantillon by Higgs and Jevons.

A defence of the American Revolution by one of its key supporters in Britain, along with a letter by Turgot and a short essay by Mathon de la Cour (also known as Fortuné Ricard).

An first full-length assessment of the contributions to economics of Friedrich Hayek (Nobel Prize 1974). Hayek is unique, he argues, for a number of reasons: because of his emphasis on the function of institution s in coordinating the various plans of individuals in the market; his attack on the expansionary policies of central banks which discoordinate the patterns of business investment and produce depressions; and his view about the possibility of rational economic calculation under socialism.