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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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David Hume's great, enduring reputation in philosophy tends to obscure the fact that, among his contemporaries, his history of England was a more successful work. The history covers almost 1800 years. Hume saw English history as an evolution from a government of will to a government of law. Advanced in Hume's masterly prose, this argument continues to make the "History" a valuable study for the modern reader. This Liberty Fund edition is based on the edition of 1778, the last to contain corrections by Hume. The typography has been modernized for ease of reading. Hume's own index to the entire work may be found at the conclusion of volume VI.

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Written in 1938 when the Western world had succumbed to the notion that history is a creature of blind force. A reviewer at the time noted the importance of Croce's belief that "the central trend in the evolution of man is the unfolding of new potentialities, and that the task of the historian is to discover and emphasise this trend: the story of liberty". As Croce himself writes, "Even in the darkest and crassest times liberty trembles in the lines of poets and affirms itself in the pages of thinkers and burns, solitary and magnificent, in some men who cannot be assimilated by the world around them." The first edition in English of HISTORY AS THE STORY OF LIBERTY appeared in London in 1941. The new Liberty Fund edition includes modest improvements to the translation by Folke Leander and arranged by Claes Ryn.

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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. Beginning with the legacies of Greek and Roman life and thought, Rommen traces the natural law tradition to its displacement by legal positivism and concludes with what the author calls 'the reappearance' of natural law thought in more recent times. In the seven chapters Rommen explores 'The History of the Idea of Natural Law' and 'The Philosophy and Content of the Natural Law'. In his introduction, Russell Hittinger places Rommen's work in the context of contemporary debate on the relevance of natural law to philosophical inquiry and constitutional interpretation.

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THE SERVILE STATE has endured as his most important political work. The effect of socialist doctrine on capitalist society, Belloc wrote, is to produce a third thing different from either -- the servile state, today commonly called the welfare state.

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