Product Description: In the two related works in this volume, Bentham offers a detailed critique of William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-9). In "Comment on the Commentaries," on which Bentham began work in 1774, he exposes the fallacies which he claims to have detected in Blackstone, and criticizes the theory of the Common Law...read more

Almost on the eve of the sixteenth-century Reformation, the long-running debate over the respective authority of popes and councils in the Catholic Church was vigorously resumed. This book offers the first English translation of four major contributions to that debate. These complex arguments are fundamental for any society under government, whether church or state, and even on the threshold of the twenty-first century the concerns that underlie and animate these scholastic disputations continue to retain their force. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: This is a study of the ideology of monarchy in late medieval Europe. In the 15th and early 16th centuries European monarchies faced a series of crises and conflicts, which gave rise to intense debate as to the nature and authority of monarchy in its various forms...read more

This volume offers a comprehensive and authoritative account of the history of a complex and varied body of ideas over a period of more than one thousand years. A work of both synthesis and assessment, The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought presents the results of several decades of critical scholarship in the field, and reflects in its breadth of enquiry precisely that diversity of focus that characterized the medieval sense of the "political," preoccupied with universality at some levels, and with almost minute particularity at others. Among the vital questions explored by the distinguished team of contributors are the nature of authority, of justice, of property; the problem of legitimacy, of allegiance, of resistance to the powers that be; the character and functions of law, and the role of custom in maintaining a social structure.

Product Description: This volume makes available one of the central texts in the development of utilitarian tradition, in the authoritative 1977 edition prepared by Professors Burns and Hart as part of Bentham's Collected Works. Certain that history was on his side, Bentham sought to rid the world of the hideous mess wrought by legal obfuscation and confusion, and to transform politics into a rational, scientific activity, premised on the fundamental axiom that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: 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...read more