The 17th century was an important period in the development of natural law theories. The crises and revolutions of the mid-century prompted many thinkers to see civil and economic relations as being based on natural law and natural…
According to Caroline Robbins, the 18thC Commonwealthmen built upon the Old or Real Whig tradition and were active from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the eve of the American Revolution in 1776. They believed in natural rights,…
Does the legitimacy of government depend on the divinely instituted right of the monarch to rule or upon the natural rights of man and the consent of the governed? Debate on this issue spurred the English Civil War and continued long…
Classic works in the discipline are joined by explorations of how economic reasoning applies to political science and other social sciences, as well as the relevance of economics as moral philosophy. A consistent theme is the view…
The English Civil War (1642 -1660) pitted supporters of Parliament against the Crown. The period includes the trial and execution of Charles I, the replacement of the monarchy with the Commonwealth of England (1649-1653), the rise of…
Donald Lutz drew up a list of the most frequently cited authors by members of the Founding Generation of the American Republic. A full list can be found here and there is a bibliographical essay on this topic by Forrest McDonald.
The intellectual struggle to articulate the theory of classical liberalism was often as hard fought as the physical battle for its political realization. The Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics Series presents not only some of the…
The natural law and natural rights tradition emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries and argues that the world is governed by natural laws which are discoverable by human reason. A key aspect of this intellectual tradition is the…
The name given to an ideal political community, “Utopia,” comes from Thomas More’s work Utopia which was published in Latin in 1516. What is interesting about many conceptions of utopian communities is that the authors assumed that…
