Francis Hutcheson’s Classic Text on Natural Law

8 July 2007 at 11:09 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

O&M readers interested in the Scottish Enlightenment (and who isn’t?) may enjoy this new volume from Liberty Fund, Francis Hutcheson’s Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria, with A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy. Hutcheson, of course, was Adam Smith’s teacher at the University of Glasgow. Writes General Editor Knud Haakonssen:

Hutcheson’s Institutio was written as a textbook for university students and it therefore covers a curriculum which has an institutional background in his own university, Glasgow. This was a curriculum crucially influenced by Hutcheson’s predecessor Gershom Carmichael, and at its center was modern natural jurisprudence as systematized by Grotius, Pufendorf, and others. . . . The Institutio is the first major [published] attempt by Hutcheson to deal with natural law on his own terms. . . . It therefore encapsulates the axis of natural law and Scottish Enlightenment ideas, which so many other thinkers, including Adam Smith, worked with in their different ways.

The book includes both the Latin original and an English translation, so you can brush up on your Latin as you work through the text (an added bonus!).