When Charles II assumed the throne of England in 1660, one of the first acts of his government was to ban Samuel Rutherford's masterwork of political theory, Lex, Rex. Condemned as “a book inveighing against monarchie, and laying ground for rebellion,” Lex, Rex was burned in public, and its author was charged with treason, dismissed from his post as rector of the University of Saint Andrews, and placed under house arrest. His colleagues feared he would be executed. Rutherford,...

Frederick Douglass was born in February 1818, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. When he was eight-years-old, Douglass was sent to Baltimore to live as a houseboy with some relatives of his master. Shortly after his arrival his new mistress taught him the alphabet. Her husband forbade her to continue this instruction, but Douglass was undeterred. He gave away his food in exchange for lessons in reading and writing from the neighborhood boys. At about the age of twelve...

Francisco Marroquín was born in the province of Santander, in northern Spain, of noble and landed family. pleting ecclesiastical studies and taking priestly vows, Marroquín studied theology and philosophy at the University of Heusca. While at the University, Marroquín belonged to a renewal movement that affirmed all people as equal before God and under law and no society as just unless it was based on the free exercise of human will. This renewal movement parable to the humanist movements...

William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, was the son of Sir William Penn, a distinguished English admiral. His boyhood was marked by bination of pietism with a strong interest in athletics, and he was expelled from Oxford for nonconformity. After leaving the university, he traveled on the continent, served in the British navy, and studied law. In 1667 he became a Quaker, and in the next year he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for his nonconformist religious...

Ibn Khaldun, considered the greatest Arab historian, is also known as the father of modern social science and cultural history. Born in Tunis to a politically influential and devout family, his early education was marked by the high intellectual stimulation that such affluence afforded. In 1349 the Black Death struck Tunis and took away his mother and father, as well as many of his teachers. He was therefore eager to exchange the loneliness of Tunis for a political post...

In the Spring of 1776, with the American Revolution well under-way, the Commonwealth of Virginia's Revolutionary Convention deliberated the new state's constitution. The delegates intended to include a Declaration of Rights, which, in turn, would include a clause on religious liberty. George Mason proposed, “All men should enjoy the fullest toleration in exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience,” but James Madison objected. Such an appeal for religious toleration is defective, he reasoned, for behind the idea...

Jean-Baptiste Say was inspired to write his Treatise on Political Economy when, working at a life insurance office, he read a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. His Treatise, often described as a popularization of Smith’s ideas, departed from the typical economics methodology of his day. This departure was based on Say’s conviction that the study of economics should start not with abstract mathematical and statistical analyses but with the real experience of the human person. Such a...

Jurist Samuel von Pufendorf made important contributions to the study of law in light of the political realities created in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War. As a young student of ethics and politics, Pufendorf was impressed by the natural-law theory of Hugo Grotius. A faithful Lutheran all his life, Pufendorf's overriding concern was to harmonize the insights of early Enlightenment political thinking with Christian theology. In 1660 he was appointed professor of natural law at the University...