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Edmund Burke’s interpretation of the revolution in France, beginning 1789, is nothing short of an interpretation of human nature, and of Western civilization. Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle, 1789-1797 collects the most penetrating and timeless passages of Burke's writings from 1789 until his death. Published in partnership with:

This volume contains a selection of 15 items published in Econ Journal Watch (EJW), including Hume's original account of his affair with Rousseau. Adam Smith also looms large. Two items are by Edmund Burke. View content list  below (or by clicking LEARN MORE...).

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Smithian Morals takes up Adam Smith’s thought on justice, virtue, propriety, beneficialness, liberty, God, and the conscience. Smith is pursued as exemplar, sage, moral guide, and therapist. Smith teaches us to think dialectically. At the center of Smith’s thought Klein sees a robust affirmation: “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.” Smith teaches a presumption of liberty. The strength of that presumption is up to us. Smith’s liberalism is outspoken to the point of abolitionism on particular issues, but in a broader sense it is conservative; it is an engaging, humane conservative liberalism. It emanates from a true moralist and his philosophy of virtue. Smith teaches a presumption of liberty not from first principles or purportedly self-evident propositions. He picks up midstream, mindful of the waters about all he treats and about his own weather-beaten vessel, for he is coursing upon the waters with us. As interpreter of Smith’s texts, Klein is open about his tendencies toward classical liberalism, non-foundationalism, and esoteric reading.

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Central Notions of Smithian Liberalism explores notions jural, political, and economic. The author does intellectual history as a way of theorizing—that is, to advance political theory, jural theory, moral theory, social theory, economic theory. The author treats Adam Smith and the liberalism he shared with David Hume and Edmund Burke. They represent classical liberalism at its best. Their classical liberalism is today aptly called conservative liberalism. The chapters derive mostly from substantial articles previously published in scholarly journals. Chapters expound Smith’s tri-layered justice, liberty, jural dualism, Humean conventionalist political theory, and Smithian liberalism. A chapter written with Erik Matson, “Convention without Convening,” explains natural convention, transcending “nature” and “convention” and attesting the place of Hume and Smith in natural law traditions and enlarging our understanding of those traditions. A chapter asks and answers, “Is It Just to Pursue Honest Income?”.  Another chapter identifies four sets of nonconflicting rules, namely (1) government law, (2) commutative justice, (3) ethics writ large, and (4) just government law. Other chapters relate Smithian liberalism to various topics, including Iain McGilchrist’s divided brain, being grateful for without being grateful to, and the Export-Import Bank. The final chapter considers the fortunes of liberalism in relation to prevailing attitudes toward allegory and God.

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John Rae's Life of Adam Smith was originally published by Macmillan in 1895. Here we offer an inexpensive facsimile reprint.

Our reprinting of the work is the first in our reprint series called CL Reprints. The Project Manager of CL Reprints is Zachary Yost. The logo for CL Reprints is the following illustration "Gutenberg's Press" by Dave Grey, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Here are excerpts from two 1895 reviews of Rae's Life of Adam Smith, and one from 1966 when it was previously reprinted:

Carlos C. Closson, Journal of Political Economy, 1895:

Mr. John Rae, with the co-operation of many scholars and of university and library officials, has given us a Life of Adam Smith which sums up, in thoroughly competent fashion, the information that has come to light during the last century. Mr. Rae has executed his task conscientiously and well. He keeps himself -perhaps almost too much -in the background, leaving the documents and bits of evidence to tell their own story.

Edward Gaylord Bourne, The American Historical Review, 1895:

Mr. Rae has made not only a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the career of Adam Smith, but, incidentally, has presented an instructive picture of educational activity during the middle of the eighteenth century.

A.J. Youngson, The Economic Journal, 1966:

It is just over seventy years since Rae's Life of Adam Smith was published. It remains the standard biography and has become, in its way, a classic. The product of careful scholarship, its merits are many and obvious. Rae made use of a great variety of material, published and unpublished; he wrote well; and his account is at once full, accurate, sympathetic and fair.

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William R. Scott's Francis Hutcheson was originally published by Cambridge at the University Press in 1900.

Our reprinting of the work is the second in our reprint series called CL Reprints. The Project Manager of CL Reprints is Zachary Yost. The logo for CL Reprints is the following illustration "Gutenberg's Press" by Dave Grey, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

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This volume is one of several edited by J.R. McCulloch. Eleven gems from 17th, 18th, early 19th century authors.

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This volume is one of several edited by J.R. McCulloch. Eleven gems from 17th, 18th, early 19th century authors.

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This volume is one of several edited by J.R. McCulloch. Eleven gems from 17th, 18th, early 19th century authors.

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James Anson Farrer (1849–1925) was a Barrister and writer who wrote a too-forgotten book on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS).  The title of Farrer’s 1881 book—simply Adam Smith—is misleading in that the book is not about the whole of Smith’s thought, but only TMS. Farrer’s book presents many of the main ideas in TMS, quoting amply.

In the final chapter “Review of the Principal Criticisms of Adam Smith’s Theory,” Farrer draws from Dugald Stewart, James Mackintosh and especially Théodore Simon Jouffroy and Thomas Brown, interlacing their criticisms with suggestions on how Smith might have responded. At the end the book, Farrer signals a turn to his own voice and judgment, and renders judgments more or less in line with the many earlier critics of TMS.

Farrer’s treatment of the criticisms are valuable, both as intellectual historiography and, in its own right, as philosophical criticism of Smith. Those who warm to TMS need to engage and respond to the long and rich lines of serious criticism, lines that include Farrer.

Free PDF direct download complete … Before the First Opium War, from 1839–1842, China had long had substantial commercial activity. After Europeans forced the country to open up to the West, one of the Western ideas…

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In March 2022, Adam Smith Works, a website of Liberty Fund, launched Just Sentiments. Collected here are the 22 essays that appeared during 2022–2023. Most are on the thought of Adam Smith. Each author draws on his or her own lengthier scholarly works, to offer interpretations that are important, textually grounded, and compactly expressed. Topics: the polysemy of ‘natural;’ natural convention; jurisprudence, honest income, and the Great Enrichment; Smith’s dual moral authorizations; David Hume on English liberty; Smith and Jamesian pragmatism; prudent entrepreneurship; words in and not in Smith’s two masterpieces; the History of Astronomy; polygamy and kin networks; “By the Same Author”; poverty and liberty; moral judgment and governmentalization; the labor theory of value; Parmenides addresses Plato; French liberal economics 1695–1776; virtue and the court of princes; moral innovation and the man within the breast; Smith parries Philo on the problem of evil; Smith’s endorsement of an interest-rate cap; Smith and Confucius; Smith on school funding.

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Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847) shared with David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville a spiritual approach to human existence. Geijer well understood the wider European conversation that was taking place, but he wrote in Swedish and for Swedes. He wrote as an esteemed professor and cultural luminary.

Into the 1830s, Geijer, in his fifties, had long been regarded as a nationalist influenced by German idealism and romanticism. After age 50, Geijer’s liberalism became more pronounced. In 1838 Geijer announced to his public that he had revised his thinking and worldview and had gone over to liberalism. “An Economic Dream,” contained in this volume, is a short essay he published in 1847, shortly before his death, and it expresses Geijer’s humanism and liberalism. Whether Geijer’s new open stance in favor of liberalism was really at odds with his concern for solidifying and stabilizing the Swedish nation is a matter for consideration. Throughout his writings, Geijer gives Christianity a central place and importance, including in his essay on slavery, contained in this volume.

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The Spirit of Smithian Laws discusses Adam Smith's ethics. His impartial-spectator process is a dynamic call upward, enabling one to better sustain his or her locus of affirmation, to better cohere as a just human being. The puzzle is always: Wherein lies better? Which way is up? Smith's approach to the puzzle runs against foundationalism. His ethical thought is here called beholderism. It is organized by organons, chief of which is the notion of a beholder who is God or who is God-like in knowledge and universal benevolence (if not more).

Chapter titles:

1. Major Themes and Ambling through a Few Spirals
2. Who Is Adam Smith's Impartial Spectator?
3. Beholderism: In Praise of Adam Smith's Organon and Allegory
4. Hume and Smith on Utility, Agreeableness, Propriety, and Moral Approval
5. Adam Smith's Nonfoundationalism
6. Ought Is an Is regarding What Is Owed to God/Joy: On the Positive-Normative Distinction
7. The Circumstantiality of Bivariate Relationships in TMS
8. In a Word or Two, Placed in the Middle
9. Adam Smith's Attitude toward Rousseau
10. TMS's Appeal Moves with Openness to Nonfoundationalism: 35 Critics, 1765–1949
11. Circa 1800

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John Noonan's The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (1957) is:

"an admirably complete and fascinating study of one of the thorniest problems that ever set scholastic heads aching. How hard they must have ached is seen from the wide range of Mr. Noonan's material and his careful analysis of each intricate phase of the problem from the Church's seemingly absolute condemnation of ‘profit from a loan’ in the twelfth century down to Pius XII's high praise of the banking system as such in the twentieth. On their arrival the scholastics found usury under the severest strictures of the Church both in the dogmatic and disciplinary fields. They were confronted at the same time with pressures demanding some system of lending for profit as a requisite of growing economic life. There ensued ‘three hundred years of debate’(1150-1450), which the author treats in Part I of his book. During this period the scholastics developed their ‘natural law case against usury’ in support of the Church's dogmatic stand and on the basis of close, careful reasoning. But in deference to human needs involved in trade and commerce they also discerned various cases which, however nearly these might resemble usury itself, actually stood outside the ban.

Part II deals with the general revision of the usury theory and the final triumph of the triple contract in later scholastic thought. Cases exempted by the scholastics from the Church's condemnation are multiplied. Instances of reprobated usury tend to become the exception rather than, as formerly, the rule. In Part III we are shown the usury theory in modern times from three perspectives. The Calvinist ‘countertheory’ has swept away the entire scholastic analysis with all its carefully elucidated principles. Calvin made the individual Christian conscience the sole guide to the morality of profit-making on loans. Sin lies only in excess. The official Catholic teaching, on the other hand, reaffirms the Church's original condemnation, but at the same time recognizes the justice of certain titles to profit other than merely that of lending. In practice the Church allows the taking of interest at reasonable rates fixed by the civil law. The third perspective is an evaluation of the theories of a number of modern Catholic historians. The author interdicts, e.g., Hilaire Belloc's appeal to the scholastics against international banking, and of others against the capitalist system.”—Catholic Historical Review, 1959