The work of Overton H. Taylor is here made available within the covers of a single volume. More than twenty years of study and reflection have taken shape in the previously scattered short writings, which, chronologically presented, amount almost to intellectual autobiography.

Taylor is not simply an “economist” in the present-day meaning of the term. He is a political philosopher and a political economist—a scholar whose interests extend beyond economics into the surrounding areas of social science, philosophy, ethics, political thought, and intellectual history. Taylor’s search into the basic questions of social science has led him repeatedly—as the papers show—to new and fresh appraisals.

The writings here collected cover a wide range of subjects. Some of them are concerned with large segments of the general history of ideas in Western civilization. Other are extended, critical reviews of the books or the thoughts of contemporary thinkers such as R. H. Tawney, A. G. B. Fisher, and Joseph Schumpeter. Still others discuss modern problems of social philosophy and public policy. In all of them, the reader will find a creative and thought-provoking investigation of the foundations of the liberal conservative position.