The great Italian poet turns his hand to political thought and defends the reign of a single monarch ruling over a universal empire. He believed that peace was only achievable when a single monarch replaced divisive and squabbling princes and kings. However, he also believed in a separation of powers in that the Emperor has jurisdiction over temporal matters, whilst the Pope administered over things spiritual.
Rousseau’s classic work on the philosophy and practice of education. Emile’s tutor attempts to show how a young person can be brought up to fulfill their innate natural goodness in a corrupt society.
Two series of letters that have been described as “the wellsprings of nearly all ensuing debate on the limits of governmental power in the United States” are collected in this volume. The writings include Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania - the “farmer” being the gifted and courageous statesman John Dickinson and Letters from the Federal Farmer ?he being the redoubtable Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. Together, Dickinson and Lee addressed the whole remarkable range of issues provoked by the crisis of British policies in North America, a crisis from which a new nation emerged from an overreaching empire. Dickinson wrote his Letters in opposition to the Townshend Acts by which the British Parliament in 1767 proposed to reorganize colonial customs. The publication of the Letters was, as Philip Davidson believes, “the most brilliant literary event of the entire Revolution.” Forrest McDonald adds, “Their impact and their circulation were unapproached by any publication of the revolutionary period except Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.” Lee wrote in 1787 as an Anti-Federalist, and his Letters gained, as Charles Warren has noted, “much more widespread circulation and influence” than even the heralded Federalist Papers. Both sets of Letters deal, McDonald points out, “with the same question: the never-ending problem of the distribution of power in a broad and complex federal system.” The Liberty Fund second edition includes a new preface by the editor in which he responds to research since the original edition of 1962.
One of Kant’s most important philosophical works and one of the most important of the Enlightenment as well. In it he argues that the world that we know is structured by the way that we perceive and think about the world. Reason is universal and objective but our understanding and imagination shape the way we experience the world.
Written during the American Revolution these economic essays cover topics such as money, free trade, the rate of interest, the nature of the constitution, public debt, bank credit, and taxation.
Guizot presented the lectures upon which this book is based in 1828 at the Sorbonne where he was professor of history. He provides a survey of European history and culture from its beginnings until the French Revolution. He wants to show what is unique to European “civilisation”, such as feudalism, the rise of the free cities, the centralised monarchies, and revolutions in England and France.
When Walter Bagehot wrote Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market, in 1873, he did the unthinkable: In language as fresh and clear today as it was over 100 years ago, he respectfully dissected the Bank of England’s foundations, economic incentives, goals, and functions. In the process, he illuminated in a mere few hundred brilliant pages what distinguishes a Central Bank from a commercial bank, both on a daily basis and during crises such as bank panics and recessions. Bagehot’s book was so readable and so remarkable that it was re-issued three times within a year, and was republished in many editions both during his lifetime and afterwards. Another copy of this book can be found in HTML format at our sister website Econlib.
The Whole Duty of Man (first published in Latin in 1673), was among the first works to suggest a purely conventional basis for natural law. Rejecting scholasticism’s metaphysical theories, Pufendorf found the source of natural law in humanity’s need to cultivate sociability. This edition also includes he very important editorial material from Jean Barbeyrac’s French editions and are here translated into English for the first time.
Locke’s most famous work of political philosophy began as a reply to Filmer’s defense of the idea of the divine right of kings and ended up becoming a defense of natural rights, especially property rights, and of government limited to protecting those rights. This 1764 edition is famous for being the edition which was widely read in the American colonies on the eve of the Revolution.
One of the first responses to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Wollstonecraft later lived in France during the Terror and wrote a history of the events she witnessed.
