The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

Richard Price (1723-1791) was an eminent Welsh philosopher and Dissenting Minister who won considerable fame as a supporter of the American and French Revolutions. The volume is comprised of his most important pamphlets (1759-1789).

Born in the village of Llangeinor, near Bridgend in south Wales, Richard Price (1723–91) was, to his contemporaries, an apostle of liberty, an enemy to tyranny and a great benefactor of the human race. His friend Benjamin Franklin described aspects of his work as ‘the foremost production of human understanding that this century has afforded us’. A supporter of the American and French Revolutions, Price corresponded with the likes of Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Mirabeau and Condorcet. In November 1789 he publicly welcomed the start of the French Revolution and thus inspired not only Edmund Burke to write his rebuttal in Reflections on the Revolution in France, but also the Revolution Controversy, ‘the most crucial ideological debate ever carried on in English’. Price also brought to world attention the Bayes-Price Theorem on probability, which is the invisible background to so much in modern life, and wrote a fundamental text on moral philosophy. Yet, despite all this and more, he remains little-known beyond academia, a situation that this biography helps to rectify. Liberty’s Apostle tells his life story through his published works and, fully for the first time, his now published correspondence with a host of eighteenth century celebrities. The life revealed is of a truly remarkable Welshman and, as Condorcet remarked, of ‘one of the formative minds’ of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.

Richard Price (1723-1791) was a Welsh moral and political philosopher. In 1744, he published a volume of sermons, which gained him the acquaintance of Lord Shelburne; this raised his reputation and helped determine the direction of his career. It was, however, as a writer on financial and political questions that Price became widely known. In May 1770 he presented to the Royal Society a paper on the proper method of calculating the values of contingent reversions. In 1771, he published his Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt. Price then turned his attention to the question of the American colonies. He had from the first been strongly opposed to the war, and in 1776 he published a pamphlet entitled Observations on Civil Liberty. A second pamphlet on the war with America, the debts of Great Britain, and kindred topics followed in the spring of 1777. Much of Price's most important philosophical work was in the region of ethics. The Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1757) contains his whole theory.

The fifth edition of Michael L. Morgan's Classics of Moral and Political Theory broadens the scope and increases the versatility of this landmark anthology by offering new selections from Aristotle's Politics, Aquinas' Disputed Questions on Virtue and Treatise on Law, as well as the entirety of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, Kant's To Perpetual Peace, and Nietzsche's On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.

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