John Rawls’s work on justice has drawn more commentary and aroused wider attention than any other work in moral or political philosophy in the twentieth century. Rawls is the author of two major treatises, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993); it is said that A Theory of Justice revived political philosophy in the English-speaking world.

But before and after writing his great treatises Rawls produced a steady stream of essays. Some of these essays articulate views of justice and liberalism distinct from those found in the two books. They are important in and of themselves because of the deep issues about the nature of justice, moral reasoning, and liberalism they raise as well as for the light they shed on the evolution of Rawls’s views. Some of the articles tackle issues not addressed in either book. They help identify some of the paths open to liberal theorists of justice and some of the knotty problems which liberal theorists must seek to resolve.

A complete collection of John Rawls’s essays is long overdue.

A pioneer in bringing mathematical methods into everyday use in economics, Lloyd A. Metzler is well known for his adroit use of formal tools and exceptionally readable prose style which have provided a generation of economists with clear solutions to difficult analytical problems. The papers collected in this volume, including four previously unpublished, retain a freshness and clarity that is readily recognized by today's students of economics.

Over the years Mr. Metzler's contributions to economic theory have ranged widely over the fields of international economics, macroeconomic theory, business fluctuations, and the mathematical theory of general equilibrium. Most notably, he carries Lord Keynes's theories further, working out the essential properties of the foreign-trade multiplier. His discussions of tariff repercussions, capital transfers, and stability conditions in the foreign-exchange market are of vital importance to today's dramatic efforts to achieve economic stability throughout the world.

Collected Papers, enhanced by many tables and figures and clearly indicative of the author's far-reaching economic mind, is organized into four sections: The Theory of International Trade; Money, Interest, and Prices; Business Cycles and Economic Fluctuations; and Mathematical Economics and Statistics. Two of the articles in this volume were part of the author's doctoral thesis which was awarded the David A. Wells Prize at Harvard University.

The first six volumes of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce included Peirce’s main writings in general philosophy, logic (deductive, inductive, and symbolic), pragmatism, and metaphysics. Volumes VII and VIII are a continuation of this series. Originally published as two separate volumes, they now appear in one book as part of the Belknap Press edition. Volume VII contains papers on experimental science, scientific method, and philosophy of mind. Volume VIII contains selections from Peirce’s reviews and correspondence and a bibliography of his published works, speeches and correspondence, and works by other authors which quote or describe manuscripts by Peirce which are not included in Volumes I–VIII of Collected Papers.

As is true of the series as a whole, the material in these volumes is not readily accessible elsewhere. Many of the manuscripts have never been published before, and the previously published material which is included is widely scattered in a number of journals.

Peirce’s work in experimental science played an important role in his life and in the formation of his philosophy, and Volume VII is designed to show how the principal focus of his attention shifted from this sphere to the methods of science and finally to speculative metaphysics. Thus it includes his only published article in experimental psychology and two short pieces on gravity as well as the most important part of “The Logic of 1873” (in which pragmatism was first formulated in writing); “The Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents,” discussion of the historical method; “Economy of Research” (1879), containing many pertinent reflections on scientific methodology of interest to research directors today; and much more.

America’s first original philosopher and logician, and the founder of the philosophy of pragmatism, Peirce was also influential in shaping the thinking of such figures as William James and John Dewey. The reviews and correspondence contained in Volume VIII show his attitude toward these philosophies and illustrate the nature of his relationships with the great thinkers of his day.

The bibliography in Volume VIII lists chronologically all of Peirce’s known published works, giving a clear picture of the development of his thought from 1860 through 1911. It is more complete than any published so far in that many new items are included and items previously listed in different sources are here brought together.

These volumes will be of great value to all persons interested in philosophy, scientific method, psychology, the methodology of history, and American studies in general.

This volume contains the published contributions of one of the founders of modern logic and America’s greatest logical genius. It is not only of historical but of contemporary interest because of its many acute discussions of fundamental logical problems. To assist the general reader, the editors have prefixed to the text a selected list of important topics and have provided many footnotes and an exhaustive index.

The present, the longest volume of the series of Peirce’s Collected Papers, reveals most clearly his stature as a logician and a student of the foundations of mathematics. It includes not only some striking anticipations of recent work in logic and the foundations of mathematics but also a number of vital contributions to these subjects as now understood. In addition there is an entirely original treatment of logical diagrams which makes possible a detailed analysis of the process of reasoning and provides the link between modern logic and Peirce’s conception of pragmatism. It is the most advanced and important of the volumes on exact logic.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.

The study of production is central to economic theory, and capital and its accumulation are two of the most interesting aspects of the modern production process. Capital may take the form of inventories of inputs, inventories of outputs, or machines and other fixed goods. The essential and unique aspect of all types of capital is that it must be accumulated as the result of prior stages of the production process. This gives the dynamic theory of production a recursive structure that can be exploited by economic analysis. The optimization of production under recursive conditions lends itself to general mathematical methods of dynamic programming and optimal control theory. This is the main theme of the essays included in this fifth volume of Kenneth Arrow's Collected Papers.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.

Although economic theory has been Kenneth Arrow's comparative advantage as well as his special interest, from time to time he has turned his attention to applied problems, often with unexpected results. A request from the Ford Foundation to write a survey of health economics led to his famous paper, "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care," which raised for the first time many issues in the economics of information, particularly what are now called incentive compatibility issues. Other fruitful papers included in this volume deal with racial discrimination, the cost of oil imports, health insurance, environmental resources, and urban economics. Arrow's main interest in studying these disparate problems has been their potential source for new theory as well as their policy applications.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.

The third volume of Kenneth Arrow's Collected Papers concerns the basic concept of rationality as it applies to an economic decision maker. In particular, it addresses the problem of choice faced by consumers in a multicommodity world and presents specific models of choice useful in economic analysis. It also discusses choice models under uncertainty, giving the basic theory and critiques of this theory based on experimental evidence and applications. Among the major papers are "Alternative Approaches to the Theory of Choice in Risk-Taking Situations," a masterly survey of subjective probability and choice theory, and "The Theory of Risk Aversion," an exposition of the theory of choice under uncertainty.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in journals. This publication of his collected papers, to be completed in seven topical volumes, will be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and taste in the selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer.

This volume is concerned with the foundations of neo-classical economic analysis. General equilibrium is a theory of prices in which all of the actions of the economic agents in an economy are determined simultaneously and in a decentralized fashion. The price system, determined in competitive markets, guides actions for both firms and individual consumers. All of the complex interrelations of the economy are distilled into the determination of this price system.

In these papers, Arrow examines the conditions under which such a price system would exist. He also clarifies the conditions under which the system can or cannot achieve an optimum. In the latter case, when “market failures” are present, he shows the role of a benevolent government in helping to overcome the induced inefficiencies.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.

This volume begins with Arrow's papers on statistical decision theory, which served as a foundation for his work on the economics of information. As he writes in his preface, "Statistical method was an example for the acquisition of information. In a world of uncertainty, it was no great leap to realize that information is valuable in an economic sense." The later, applied papers, which operationalize the theory of the early ones, include essays on the demand for information, the economic value of screening devices, and the effect of incomplete information on the structure of organizations, futures markets, and insurance.

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.

In this first volume, Arrow takes up the basic question of whether collective choices can be made in such a way as to reflect individual preferences. The seminal 1950 paper that opens the volume shows that given certain reasonable conditions that social choices must satisfy to reflect individual preferences, it is impossible to make a choice among all sets of alternatives without violating some of the conditions. The subsequent papers extend, deepen, and clarify these results and examine the concept of justice, both in the abstract and in economic models. The volume also contains searching critiques of the theories of justice of John Rawls and Robert Nozick.

Robert Lucas is one of the outstanding monetary theorists of the past hundred years. Along with Knut Wicksell, Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, James Tobin, and Milton Friedman (his teacher), Lucas revolutionized our understanding of how money interacts with the real economy of production, consumption, and exchange.

Lucas’s contributions are both methodological and substantive. Methodologically, he developed dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium models to analyze economic decision-makers operating through time in a complex, probabilistic environment. Substantively, he incorporated the quantity theory of money into these models and derived its implications for money growth, inflation, and interest rates in the long run. He also showed the different effects of anticipated and unanticipated changes in the stock of money on economic fluctuations, and helped to demonstrate that there was not a long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation (the Phillips curve) that policy-makers could exploit.

The twenty-one papers collected in this volume fall primarily into three categories: core monetary theory and public finance, asset pricing, and the real effects of monetary instability. Published between 1972 and 2007, they will inspire students and researchers who want to study the work of a master of economic modeling and to advance economics as a pure and applied science.

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.

"Treason" is a word with many connotations, a word applied to a host of varied offenses throughout the history of humanity. These essays by Floyd Seyward Lear analyze the development of the political theory of treason from its beginning in Roman Law to its transformation in the Germanic custom of the early Middle Ages.

The author has presented treason as a political idea, possessing historical continuity, though varying from age to age as it follows the evolution of political authority itself. These studies trace the shifting emphasis in crimes against the state from acts directed against a central absolutist authority to acts involving the personal relationship of a pledged troth and individual fealty. This is a shift from the concept of majesty in Roman law to the concept of fidelity in Germanic law with the corollary shift from allegiance as an act of deference to allegiance as a token of mutual fidelity.

These ideas are examined chronologically across an interval extending from archaic Roman law to incipiently feudal forms, from which modern theories of treason, allegiance, and sovereignty derive. Contemporary concepts in these political areas can hardly be understood apart from their historical origins. Broadly considered, this work is intended as a contribution to intellectual history.

Further, this collection represents the synthesis of material widely scattered in the primary sources and relevant secondary works. The two concluding bibliographical essays are intended as a general survey of the literature relevant to these studies in Roman and Germanic public law. Descriptive and interpretive works which deal with treason and its allied aspects of political and legal theory are not numerous in the English language.