Search results for ""liberty fund""

"A Treatise of the Laws of Nature", originally titled "De Legibus Naturae", first appeared in 1672 as a theoretical response to a range of issues that came together during the late 1660s. It conveyed a conviction that science might offer an effective means of demonstrating both the contents and the obligatory force of the law of nature. At a time when Hobbes's work appeared to suggest that the application of science undermined rather than supported the idea of obligatory natural law, Cumberland's "De Legibus Naturae" provided a scientific explanation of the natural necessity of altruism. Through his argument for a moral obligation to natural law, Cumberland made a critical intervention in the early debate over the role of natural jurisprudence at a moment when the natural law project was widely suspected of heterodoxy and incoherence. This is the first modern edition of "A Treatise of the Laws of Nature", based on John Maxwell's English translation of 1727. The edition includes Maxwell's extensive notes and appendixes. It also provides, for the first time in English, manuscript additions by Cumberland and material from Barbeyrac's 1744 French edition and John Towers's edition of 1750.

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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.

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A historian's historian, F W Maitland was never to be caught indulging in fanciful speculation about times long past. Rather, he said, "We shall have to think away distinctions which seem to us as clear as the sunshine; we must think ourselves back into a twilight." To achieve this discipline, Maitland chose his tools of historical analysis with a lawyer's care. For example, to decipher works of medieval law written in Anglo-French patois, he became 'grammarian, orthographer, and phoneticist'. Thus did none other than Lord Acton declare Maitland to be 'the ablest historian in England'. In 1875, at only twenty-five years of age, Maitland, in pursuit of a fellowship in Cambridge University, submitted a remarkable work entitled 'A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality as Ideals of English Political History from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge'.

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Though Edmund Burke is usually identified as the first to articulate the principles of a modern conservative political tradition, he was actually preceded by a Scotsman who is better known for espousing a brilliant concept of scepticism. David Hume was undoubtedly the eighteenth-century British writer whose works were most widely known and acclaimed on the Continent during the later Enlightenment period. Hume's impact (in France) was of undeniable importance, greater even for a time than the related influence of Burke, although it represents a contribution to French counter-revolutionary thought which, unlike that of Burke, has been almost totally ignored by historians to this day.

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