Important Text From Francis Hutcheson Republished

Peter Klein at Organisations and Markets
an excellent economics Blog (8 July), reminds us that Liberty Fund * (www.libertyfund.org) publishes this month Francis Hutcheson’s Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria, with A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, at the ludicrously low price of GBP8.95 9 - about USD16!).

The ‘never to be forgotten’ Professor Hutcheson, was Adam Smith’s teacher at the University of Glasgow.

General Editor, Knud Haakonssen (an authority on the 18th century Enlightenment writes:

“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”

First published in 1742, this is the 1745 edition, in both Latin and English, edited by Luigi Turco, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bolonga, Italy.

* A couple of years ago I met a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, who on hearing that I recommended the Liberty Fund edition of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, told me stiffly that he would never buy anything from Liberty Fund because of its ‘rightwing political leanings’.

Being familiar with the Works of Adam Smith, John Millar, Francis Hutchinson, Lord Kames and the Federalist Papers, I confess I have never noticed anything particularly ‘right wing’ (the good professor did not define what he meant by this appellation) in any of these books. As the professor had a North American accent, I assume he was talking about something related to politics in North America. It’s a funny old world…