The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America

With in-depth analysis of political philosophy and careful attention to historical context, 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 between the proponents of the doctrine of natural liberty and the champions of divine right theory, this study 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 forbears Hobbes, Grotius, Spinoza, and Pufendorf. These first Whigs and their 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 to the American Revolution and the creation of a distinctly American understanding of rights and government in the first state constitutions.

• Philosophical origins of American Revolution and founding period • Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British political thought and history • Study integrating historical context and political philosophy

Introduction: reexamining 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.