Natural law and enlightenment classics

"Commissioned in October 1604 by the United Dutch East India Company, Hugo Grotius's Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty was intended to justify the Dutch capture in 1603 of a wealthy Portuguese merchantman, the Santa Catarina, in the Strait of Singapore. In a clever and intricate defense of international free trade, Grotius (1583-1645) introduced the notion of a man as a sovereign and free individual with a right to self-defense and, by extension, the right of a company of private merchants to establish a trade empire."--Jacket. The history of Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty is complex. When Grotius's personal papers were auctioned in The Hague in 1864, scholars discovered that Mare Liberum was just one chapter in a manuscript of 163 folios, written in justification of the capture of the Portuguese merchantman Santa Catarina in the Strait of Singapore in February 1603. Robert Fruin persuaded the scholar H.G. Hamaker to transcribe and publish it in 1868. Knud Haakonssen, the General Editor of the Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics series, states,?Grotius's work on the right of prize and booty is unusual. It has been argued in some of the most prominent recent scholarship that the work, while never published by Grotius himself, was the intellectual resource for much of his most important work. One chapter of the manuscript was used for his famous work on the free sea, Mare Liberum, and many of the most important features of his greatest work, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (The Rights of War and Peace), are either derived from, or revised versions of, the earlier writing."

Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence was Pufendorf's first work, published in 1660. Its appearance effectively inaugurated the modern natural-law movement in the German-speaking world. The work also established Pufendorf as a key figure and laid the foundations for his major works, which were to sweep across Europe and North America. Elements of Universal Jurisprudence established Pufendorf's political theory, which, when fully developed, became the most significant alternative to rights-based theories. Pufendorf rejected the concept of natural rights as liberties and the suggestion that political government is justified by its protection of such rights, arguing instead for a principled limit to the state's role in human life. The Liberty Fund edition is based on the translation by William Abbott Oldfather prepared for the Classics of International Law series published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"With the publication of Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind, Liberty Fund presents, for the first time in English, Francis Hutcheson's teachings regarding logic and metaphysics. The texts of A Compend of Logic and A Synopsis of Metaphysics represent Hutcheson's only systematic treatments of logic, ontology, and pneumatology, or the science of the soul, topics that were considered indispensable for the instruction of students in the eighteenth century. Originally composed in Latin, they were intended for classroom use and belong to a textbook tradition of commentary on the writings of others. James Moore states that "some of the most distinctive and central arguments of Hutcheson's philosophy - the importance of ideas brought to mind by the internal senses, the presence in human nature of calm desires, of generous and benevolent instincts - will be found to emerge in the course of these writings.""--Jacket.