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Editorial Note - Gershom Carmichael, Natural Rights on the Threshold of the Scottish Enlightenment: The Writings of Gershom Carmichael [1724]

Edition used:

Natural Rights on the Threshold of the Scottish Enlightenment: The Writings of Gershom Carmichael, ed. James Moore and Michael Silverthorne (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002).

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Editorial Note

In the last paragraph of his preface (pp. 19–20), Carmichael refers his readers to an appendix located at the end of his commentary (pp. 211–17) in which he sets out the propositions of moral science in what he takes to be their proper order. The chapter headings and the sequence in which the chapters are arranged in this edition for the most part follow the order which Carmichael proposes in his appendix. The organization of this edition therefore attempts to reflect the distinctive character and argument of Carmichael’s natural jurisprudence.

Readers interested in consulting Carmichael’s Latin text may be guided by the note numbers. Carmichael himself numbered each of his annotations after the book, chapter, and section of Pufendorf’s On the Duty of Man and Citizen. We have followed this practice and appended Carmichael’s number to each of the annotations. Thus II.4.5.i appended to the note on pp. 141–42 refers to Carmichael’s first note to On the Duty of Man and Citizen, book II, chapter 4, section 5.

The editors have included all the significant annotations that Carmichael published. Some smaller notes, which consist largely of cross-references and elementary explanations, have been omitted.