The great eighteenth-century theorist of international law Emer de Vattel (1714–1767) was a key figure in sustaining the practical and theoretical influence of natural jurisprudence through the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. Coming toward the end of the period when the discourse of natural law was dominant in European political theory, Vattel’s contribution is cited as a major source of contemporary wisdom on questions of international law in the American Revolution and even by opponents of revolution, such as Cardinal Consalvi, at the Congress of Vienna of 1815. Vattel broadly accepted the early-modern natural law theorists from Grotius onward but placed himself in the tradition of Leibniz and Christian Wolff. This becomes particularly clear in two valuable early essays that have never before been translated and are included in the present volume. On this philosophical basis he established what the proper relationship should be between natural law as it is applied to individuals and natural law as it is applied to states. The significance of The Law of Nations resides in its distillation from natural law of an apt model for international conduct of state affairs that carried conviction in both the Old Regime and the new political order of 1789–1815. The Liberty Fund edition is based on the anonymous English translation of 1797, which includes Vattel’s notes for the second French edition (posthumous, 1773).

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Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (1818) is considered Germaine de Staël (1766-1817)’s magnum opus and sheds renewed light on the familiar figures and events of the French Revolution, among them, the financier and statesman Jacques Necker, her father. Editor Aurelian Craiutu states that Considerations explores “the prerequisites of liberty, constitutionalism and rule of law, the necessary limits on power, the relation between social order and political order, the dependence of liberty on morality and religion, and the question of the institutional foundations of a free regime.”

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In this anthology, the doyen of the Austrian school of economics, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) offers an articulate and accessible introduction to and critique of two topics he considers especially important: inflation and government interventionism. According to Mises, inflation, that is monetary expansion, is destructive; it destroys savings and investment, which are the basis for production and prosperity. Government controls and economic planning never accomplish what their proponents intend. Mises consistently argues that the solution to government intervention is free markets and free enterprise, which call for reforming government. For that, ideas must be changed to “let the market system work.” There is no better “planning for freedom” than this.

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The Roots of Liberty 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.

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Charles McIlwain (1871-1968) was a highly regarded scholar of Anglo-American constitutional history and a professor of government at Harvard University. Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern came from a series of lectures he gave at Cornell University in the 1938–39 academic year. In this work McIlwain explores the roots of liberty by examining the development of modern constitutionalism from its ancient and medieval origins. He shows how constitutional safeguards have grown in the Western world from the law and custom of the Roman Republic through the English common law to the establishment of America’s constitutional government.

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Condillac (1714–1780) was one of eighteenth-century France’s preeminent philosophers of the Enlightenment, who had wide-ranging influence beyond metaphysics and epistemology to political thought and economics. He was a leading advocate in France of the ideas of John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley, and David Hume. His book covers such topics as value, money, agriculture, domestic and foreign trade, war, labor, interest rates, luxuries, and the various government policies that affect these subjects. The theme that unites these disparate subjects is liberty. As Condillac writes near the end of the work, the means to eradicate all the abuses and injustices of government is “to give trade full, complete and permanent freedom.”

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New Liberty Fund Book (May 2008) - The Revolutionary Writings of Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) was a trusted military aide and secretary to General George Washington during the American Revolution and was later appointed inspector general of the army, with the rank of major general. He was an attorney and politician, a member of the Continental Congress in the 1780s, and a representative of New York at the Annapolis Convention and the Constitutional Convention. He supported the new Constitution in The Federalist, with Madison and Jay. As the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was an advocate of sound public credit, development of natural resources and trade, and establishment of the first national Bank of the United States. The opposition to his policies led to the factional divisions from which developed the system of political parties.

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New Liberty Fund Book (May 2008) - A.V. Dicey, Law & Public Opinion in England in the 19thC (1917)

This volume brings together a series of lectures A. V. Dicey (1835-1922) first gave at Harvard Law School on the influence of public opinion in England during the nineteenth century and its impact on legislation. It is an accessible attempt by an Edwardian liberal to make sense of recent British history. In our time, it helps define what it means to be an individualist or liberal. Dicey's lectures were a reflection of the anxieties felt by turn-of-the-century Benthamite Liberals in the face of Socialist and New Liberal challenges.

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New Liberty Fund Book (March 2008) - Jean Louis De Lolme, The English Constitution (1771)

The Constitution of England is one of the most distinguished eighteenth-century treatises on English political liberty. In the vein of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), De Lolme’s account of the English system of government exercised an extensive influence on political debate in Britain, on constitutional design in the United States during the Founding era, and on the growth of liberal political thought throughout the nineteenth century. Originally published in French in Amsterdam in 1771, The Constitution of England was the first book-length analysis of the “separation of powers” proposed in book XI of Spirit of the Laws, which sketched an institutional distinction between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government.

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