Originally published in German in 1936, The Natural Law is the first work to clarify the differences between traditional natural law as represented in the writings of Cicero, Aquinas, and Hooker and the revolutionary doctrines of natural rights espoused by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.Heinrich A. Rommen (1897–1967) taught in Germany and England before concluding his distinguished scholarly career at Georgetown University.Russell Hittinger is William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
“When democracy turns, as it often does, into a corrupt plutocracy, both national decadence and social revolution are being prepared.” So wrote the Irish-born historian W. E. H. Lecky (1838–1903) in this devastating assault on mass democracy. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
The Law of the Constitution elucidates the guiding principles of the modern constitution of England: the legislative sovereignty of Parliament, the rule of law, and the binding force of unwritten conventions.A. V. Dicey (1835–1922) was an English jurist, Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford University, and author of, among other works, The Law of the Constitution. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
This edition contains the thirty-nine essays included in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary that made up Volume I of the 1777 posthumous Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. It also includes ten essays that were withdrawn or left unpublished by Hume for various reasons.Eugene F. Miller was Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia from 1967 until his retirement in 2003. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
By examining the thought of four seminal thinkers, Shirley Robin Letwin in The Pursuit of Certainty provides a brilliant record of the gradual change in the English-speaking peoples’ understanding of “what sort of activity politics is.” As Letwin writes, “the distinctive political issue since the eighteenth century has been whether government should do more or less.” Nor, as many historians argue, did this issue arise because of the Industrial Revolution or “new social conditions [that] aggravated the problem of poverty” but, Letwin believes, because of the “profoundly personal reflection” of major thinkers, including Hume, Bentham, Mill, and Webb. David Hume, for example, believed that to “reach for perfection, to seek an ideal, is noble, but dangerous, and is therefore an activity that individuals or voluntary groups may pursue, but governments certainly should not.”By the end of the nineteenth century, as Letwin observes, Beatrice Webb came to “equate the triumph of reason over passion with the rule of science over human life.” Thus did the “pursuit of certainty” displace the traditional English understanding of the limitations of human nature—hence the necessity of limits to governmental power and programs. Consequently, in our time, “Politics was no longer one of several human activities and at that not a very noble one; it encompassed all of human life” in quest of philosophical “certainty” and social perfection. The Liberty Fund edition is a reprint of the original work published by Oxford in 1965.Shirley Robin Letwin (1924–1993) was a Professor of Political and Legal Philosophy at Harvard, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics.Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.