A set of eight volumes, these texts are designed to cover the literature of taxation from the late-17th century to the end of the 19th century. The writings focus on a number of themes, reflecting in turn the problems which revenue raisers have encountered over two centuries.

The Development of Ethics is a selective historical and critical study of moral philosophy in the Socratic tradition, with special attention to Aristotelian naturalism. It discusses the main topics of moral philosophy as they have developed historically, including: the human good, human nature, justice, friendship, and morality; the methods of moral inquiry; the virtues and their connexions; will, freedom, and responsibility; reason and emotion; relativism, subjectivism, and realism; the theological aspect of morality. This volume examines early modern moral philosophy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Volume 3 will continue the story up to Rawls's Theory of Justice. The present volume begins with Suarez's interpretation of Scholastic moral philosophy, and examines seventeenth- and eighteenth- century responses to the Scholastic outlook, to see how far they constitute a distinctively different conception of moral philosophy. The treatments of natural law by Grotius, Hobbes, Cumberland, and Pufendorf are treated in some detail. Disputes about moral facts, moral judgments, and moral motivation, are traced through Cudworth, Clarke, Balguy, Hutcheson, Hume, Price, and Reid. Butler's defence of a naturalist account of morality is examined and compared with the Aristotelian and Scholastic views discussed in Volume 1. The volume ends with a survey of the persistence of voluntarism in English moral philosophy, and a brief discussion of the contrasts and connexions between Rousseau and earlier views on natural law. The emphasis of the book is not purely descriptive, narrative, or exegetical, but also philosophical. Irwin discusses the comparative merits of different views, the difficulties that they raise, and how some of the difficulties might be resolved. The book tries to present the leading moral philosophers of the past as participants in a rational discussion that is still being carried on, and tries to help the reader to participate in this discussion.

This study clarifies the character of 'political economy' as a distinct and separable intellectual discipline in the generic sense, in the texts of Adam Smith. It focuses upon the scope and fundamental conceptualizations of the new science. Smith's conceptualization of economic analysis is shown to constitute a unified intellectual piece for understanding economic society and its dynamics. Smith's fundamental economic language is exhaustively examined, in all his texts, with a view to clarifying the meaning of the basic concepts of his system. As well, the 'prehistories' of those concepts, in literature prior to Smith, back to the earliest times, are quite comprehensively treated, thereby placing his political economy in its larger historical context and conveying a rich sense of the history of these ideas over the whole course of our civilization. A quite complete account of Smith's economics as a whole is also entailed by this undertaking: his key substantive economic doctrines are thoroughly considered as well, and all the elements of his economic theory receive attention. To that extent, notwithstanding the focus on concepts, an interpretation of the substance of Smith's political economy is also provided. This focus is partly motivated by the view that Smith's intellectual triumph in the history of social science is not so much about the success of specific doctrines. His more considerable theoretical success is at a deeper level: gaining a wide and long-lasting acquiescence in the conceptual universe framed by the fundamental structures of his system, for a newly emerging discipline. Those who subsequently contested Smithian doctrine did so within Smith's framework; they did so 'on his terms'. While the book's primary purpose is to reconstruct the character of Smith's political economy as a distinct intellectual enterprise, it also addresses its relevance to modern economics, and to policy and practice in contemporary liberal society.