A collection of essays some of which were previously published in the Encyclopedia Britannica. They cover money, exchange, rent, the history of commerce, maritime law, and biographical essays on Quesnay, Smith, and Ricardo.

Roscoe Pound, former dean of Harvard Law School, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Calcutta in 1948. In these lectures, he criticized virtually every modern mode of interpreting the law because he believed the administration of justice had lost its grounding and recourse to enduring ideals. Now published in the U.S. for the first time, Pound’s lectures are collected in Liberty Fund’s The Ideal Element in Law, Pound’s most important contribution to the relationship between law and liberty. The Ideal Element in Law was a radical book for its time and is just as meaningful today as when Pound’s lectures were first delivered. Pound’s view of the welfare state as a means of expanding government power over the individual speaks to the front-page issues of the new millennium as clearly as it did to America in the mid-twentieth century. Pound argues that the theme of justice grounded in enduring ideals is critical for America. He views American courts as relying on sociological theories, political ends, or other objectives, and in so doing, divorcing the practice of law from the rule of law and the rule of law from the enduring ideal of law itself.

The 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was the last edition which appeared before the First World War destroyed the old liberal order in Europe. The next edition, the 12th, reproduced the 11th edition with the addition of 4 supplementary volumes which covered the war and its immediate aftermath. This article is part of the supplementary volumes.

A translation of some of Wyclif’s shorter Latin works, his Treatise Trialogus, his Treatise against Orders of Friars, and other shorter works.

One of the earliest Indian plays written in Sanskrit. It is a comedy set in a royal court in which love and mistaken identity play a part.

The first of many anti-slavery tracts written by the Quaker Thomas Clarkson. This one began as a prize-winning Latin dissertation submitted to Cambridge University in 1785. In it he examines the history of slavery, the slave trade, and the nature of slavery in the European colonies.

Hobbes on Civil Association consists of Oakeshott’s four principal essays on Hobbes and on the nature of civil association as civil association pertains to ordered liberty. The essays are “Introduction to Leviathan” (1946); “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes” (1960); “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes” (1937); and, “Leviathan : A Myth” (1947). The foreword remarks the place of these essays within Oakeshott’s entire corpus.

A collection of sermons by the English Puritan minister John Robinson who was the pastor to the Pilgrim Fathers.

While under arrest and awaiting execution by King Theodoric for threatening his position by attempting to reconcile a schism between Rome and Constantinople in 524, Boethius wrote his best know work, The Consolation of Philosophy, in which he argues that despite the seeming injustice of the world, there is, in Platonic fashion, a higher realm and that all else is subordinate to that divine Providence.

The superior exposition in this classic work goes far in explaining James Mill’s lasting appeal. Most often remembered as an expositor of David Ricardo and as the most unforgettable home-schooling parent of all time - through the eyes of his ultimately more famous son, John Stuart Mill, James Mill’s original work has much to offer. Consider the excellent summaries of diminishing marginal returns in Chapter II, of comparative advantage in Chapter III, Section V, of the quantity theory of money and the market for foreign exchange in Chapter III, Sections VII-XVI, and of the aggregate budget constraint and the relationship between bequests and tax burdens in Chapter IV. James Mill’s exposition of the labor theory of value is so compelling and simple that it stood for over a generation, to much unfortunate misapplication. It still represents a logic so apparently correct that students and laymen alike easily lapse into it.