Blackstone's Science of Legislation

Dados Bibliográficos

ID10067902
AutoresDavid Lieberman (University of California, Berkeley, autor correspondente)
Ano1988
Volume27
Fascículo2
Páginas117-149
Data de publicação1988-04-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of British Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1086/385908
OpenAlexW2141833865
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas13
Referências citadas38

In 1795, Dugald Stewart, the professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and reigning Athenian of the North, observed in a famous estimate of the career of Adam Smith that “the most celebrated works produced in the different countries of Europe during the last thirty years” had “aimed at the improvement of society” by “enlightening the policy of actual legislators.” Among such celebrated productions Stewart included the publications of François Quesnay, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, Pedro Campomanes, and Cesare Beccaria and, above all, the writings of Smith himself, whose Wealth of Nations “unquestionably” represented “the most comprehensive and perfect work that has yet appeared on the general principles of any branch of legislation.” One of the more striking achievements of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century social thought has been to make sense of this description of Smith's Inquiry and to enable us better to appreciate why Smith chose to describe his system of political economy as a contribution to the “science of a legislator.” In a cultural setting in which, as J. G. A. Pocock has put it, “jurisprudence” was “the social science of the eighteenth century,” law and legislation further featured, in J. H. Burns's formula, as “the great applied science among the sciences of man.” Moralists and jurists of the period, echoing earlier political conventions, may readily have acknowledged with Rousseau that “it would take gods to give men laws.” Nevertheless, even in Rousseau's program for perfecting “the conditions of civil association”—“men being taken as they are and laws as they might be”—a mortal “legislator” appeared plainly “necessary.”

Jurisprudence · Legal science · Legislation · Legislator · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · History · Law · Political Theory and Influence