Classic Legal Theory

This is the first complete critical edition to take proper account of the publishing history and of Hobbes's own wishes. The result is as definitive an edition of Leviathan as modern scholarship can provide.

The Summa Theologiae is the best-known work of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), a scholastic theologian and Doctor of the Church. It is a compendium of all of the main theological teachings of the Catholic Church.

Rousseau's explosive cry for human liberty helped to spark the French Revolution and has haunted our discussions of how we should rule one another ever since--seen as both a blueprint for political terror and as a fundamental statement of democracy.

Designed to serve the needs of students confronting Locke's political thought for the first time, Lee Ward's edition offers a faithful text of Two Treatises of Government with modernized spelling and punctuation. Its Editor's Introduction outlines the main arguments of these works.

This work, one of the most important texts in the history of ethics, presents Immanuel Kant’s conception of moral self-government based on pure reason. It has been a source of controversy and an object of reinterpretation for over two centuries. This new edition of Kant’s work provides a fresh translation that is uniquely faithful to the German original and more fully annotated than any previous translation.

The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832) is a classic of nineteenth-century English jurisprudence, a subject on which Austin had a profound impact. This edition includes the complete and unabridged text of the fifth (1885) and last edition.

John Austin (1790-1859) was a pre-eminent British jurist of the 19th century. A pupil of Jeremy Bentham, he brought a rigorously analytical approach to jurisprudence, where before there had been muddle and confusion. These volumes are based on lectures given by Austin.

First published in 1789, Jeremy Bentham's best-known work remains a classic of modern philosophy and jurisprudence. Its definitions of the foundations of utilitarian philosophy and its groundbreaking studies of crime and punishment retain their relevance to modern issues of moral and political philosophy, economics, and legal theory.

First published in 1945 under title: The limits of jurisprudence defined, being a continuation of the author's An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation.

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century.