Liberty Fund Inc imprint: 143 books

An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature is a concerted effort at intellectual mediation in the deep religious dispute of the English civil war in the seventeenth century. On one side was the antinomian assertion of extreme Calvinists that the elect were redeemed by God’s free grace...

Social Contract, Free Ride is a cogent argument that strikes at the very foundations of traditional economic apologies for coercive action by the state to fulfill necessary public utility. Anthony de Jasay is an independent theorist living in France. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

Divided into three books, Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man draws together the concerns of many of his earlier works. The first book considers man in the private sphere, while the second explores man in the public sphere. The final book is an account of progress in the sciences of logic, morals,...

Born in 1694, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui helped transform the modern tradition of natural law and convey it to new generations. Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1694–1748) was a Swiss jurist. Petter Korkman is a Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and is a Postdoctoral Researcher...

George Turnbull’s eighteenth-century translation of A Methodical System of Universal Law was his major effort to convey continental natural law to Britain, thus making Heineccius’s natural jurisprudence more accessible to English-speaking audiences. Turnbull includes extensive comments on Heineccius’s...

The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks is one of the major products of the Scottish Enlightenment and a masterpiece of jurisprudence and social theory. Drawing on Adam Smith’s four-stages theory of history and the natural law’s traditional division of domestic duties into those toward servants,...

Samuel Pufendorf’s The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature suggested 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. Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694)...

Samuel Pufendorf’s Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion (published in Latin in 1687) is a major work on the separation of politics and religion. Written in response to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by the French king Louis XIV, Pufendorf contests the right of the sovereign to control...

This volume brings together a series of lectures A. V. Dicey first gave at Harvard Law School on the influence of public opinion in England during the nineteenth century and its impact on legislation. Dicey’s lectures were accurate as a reflection of the anxieties felt by turn-of-the-century Benthamite...

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont spent nine months in the U.S. studying American prisons on behalf of the French government. They investigated not just the prison system but indeed every aspect of American public and private life—the political, economic, religious, cultural,...

According to Bruno Leoni, the greatest obstacle to rule of law in our time is the problem of overlegislation. In modern democratic societies, legislative bodies increasingly usurp functions that were, and should be, exercised by individuals or groups rather than government. Bruno Leoni (1913–1967)...

Gershom Carmichael (1672–1729) was the first professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, preceding Hutcheson, Smith, and Reid. He defended a strong theory of rights and drew attention to Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke. James Moore is Professor of Political Science at Concordia...

This edition brings back into print, after two and a half centuries, the pioneering work of English republicanism, Marchamont Nedham’s The Excellencie of a Free-State, which was written in the wake of the execution of King Charles I. First published in 1656, and compiled from previously written...

Christian Thomasius’s natural jurisprudence is essential to understanding the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany, where his importance was comparable to that of John Locke’s in England. First published in 1688, Thomasius’s Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae (Institutes of Divine...