Leibniz' Universal Jurisprudence Justice as the Charity of the Wise

This book fills an embarrassingly long-standing lacuna in the research of those political philosophers and historians of political thought who write in the English language. One cannot imagine a more neglected and yet formidable political thinker than Leibniz. Riley's painstaking and authoritative book is written in a lucid and accessible style, sprinkled here and there with flashes of wit, philosophically sophisticated and historically learned. The scholarship Riley displays is truly impressive. At home when citing the Bible or Roman law, Riley is even more at ease when discussing Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, Fénelon, Bossuet, Descartes, Pascal, Arnauld, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle, not to mention passing references to Grotius, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare. Even when retelling an old story, such as the quarrel between Fénelon and Bossuet, Riley sets forth a fresh presentation and adds a thoughtful account of the response of Leibniz. Riley has all the necessary learning. His account is richly textured, comprehensive, grounded in many years of research, but never pedantic. He knows every tree and yet sees the forest.

There is no other treatment of these topics in English that is anywhere near as detailed and as comprehensive."

Leibniz' Universal Jurisprudence is brimming with erudition acquired during decades of scholarship. Serious students of Leibniz' thought will surely have a great deal to learn from this book...it is a much needed work.

Patrick Riley's book is an attempt to recapture the sweeping and daring of the moral, political and theological thinking of one of the cleverest and most ambitious of all philosophers. He brings to this venture an impressive scholarly knowledge of the philosophical life of France and Germany in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a disarmingly exuberant enthusiasm for his author.