In his series of lectures, Burns focuses on Natural Law and Civil Theology in sixteenth century Scotland. Never published, archives of his lectures reveal that he discussed John Ireland, the Scottish tradition, John Mair, the challenge of reform, John Knox, George Buchanan, and James VI.
James Henderson Burns was born on 10 November 1921 in Linlithgow, Scotland. A leading historian of European political thought, he specialised in the Reformation, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Jeremy Bentham. Appointed Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Aberdeen in 1947, he contributed to the Innes Review starting in 1950. Burns moved to University College London in 1952 as Reader and was Founding Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremey Bentham. Made Professor of the History of Political Thought in 1967, he retired in 1986 as the John Hinkley Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Fellow of the British Academy in 1992, he oversaw UCL’s Bentham Project for nearly twenty years. Burns has written more than one hundred articles published in the Scottish Historical Review, Political Studies, Journal of the History of Ideas, and more. His monographs include Jeremy Bentham and University College (1962), Scottish Churchmen and the Council of Basle (1962), The Fabric of Felicity (1967), Absolutism: The History of an Idea (1987), Lordship, Kingship and Empire (1992), and The True Law of Kingship (1996).
