The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America

Examines the philosophical origins of the Anglo-American political and constitutional tradition in seventeenth-century England.

Lee Ward (Author)

9780521179638, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 15 March 2010

470 pages
23 x 15.4 x 2.8 cm, 0.64 kg

"...Mr. Ward's simple but profound contribution to the debate shows that the liberal and republican interpretations present a false dichotomy....Mr. Ward does an excellent job of recreating the intellectual milieu of the Exclusion Crisis by revivifying the major alternative political philosophies, many of which are virtually unknown today, that formed the horizon of the early modern debate over sovereignty..."
--Matthew Simpson, The Scriblerian

This study locates the philosophical origins of the Anglo-American political and constitutional tradition in the philosophical, theological, and political controversies in seventeenth-century England. By examining the quarrel it identifies the source of modern liberal, republican and conservative ideas about natural rights and government in the seminal works of the Exclusion Whigs Locke, Sidney, and Tyrrell and their philosophical forebears Hobbes, Grotius, Spinoza, and Pufendorf. This study illuminates how these first Whigs and their diverse eighteenth-century intellectual heirs such as Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Hume, Blackstone, Otis, Jefferson, Burke, and Paine contributed to the formation of Anglo-American political and constitutional theory in the crucial period from the Glorious Revolution through to the American Revolution and the creation of a distinctly American understanding of rights and government in the first state constitutions.

Introduction: re-examining the roots of Anglo-American political thought
Part I. The Divine Right Challenge to Natural Liberty: 1. The attack on the Catholic natural law
2. Calvinism and parliamentary resistance theory
3. The problem of Grotius and Hobbes
Part II. The Whig Politics of Liberty in England: 4. James Tyrrell: the voice of moderate Whiggism
5. The Pufendorfian movement: moderate Whig sovereignty theory
6. Algernon Sidney and the old Republicanisms
7. A new Republican England
8. Natural rights in Locke's two treatises
9. Lockean liberal constitutionalism
10. The glorious revolution and the catonic response
Part III. The Whig Legacy in America: 12. British constitutionalism and the challenge of empire
13. Thomas Jefferson and the radical theory of empire
14. Tom Paine and popular sovereignty
15. Revolutionary constitutionalism: laboratories of radical Whiggism
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], History of ideas [JFCX], History of the Americas [HBJK]