The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America

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Cambridge University Press, 2004 M07 26 - 459 pages
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.

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Contents

Reexamining the Roots of AngloAmerican Political Thought
1
THE DIVINE RIGHT CHALLENGE TO NATURAL LIBERTY
19
The Attack on the Catholic Natural Law
23
Calvinism and Parliamentary Resistance Theory
48
The Problem of Grotius and Hobbes
71
THE WHIG POLITICS OF LIBERTY IN ENGLAND
99
James Tyrrell The Voice of Moderate Whiggism
105
The Pufendorfian Moment Moderate Whig Sovereignty Theory
133
The Glorious Revolution and the Catonic Response
271
EighteenthCentury British Constitutionalism
305
THE WHIG LEGACY IN AMERICA
325
British Constitutionalism and the Challenge of Empire
327
Thomas Jefferson and the Radical Theory of Empire
351
Tom Paine and Popular Sovereignty
375
Revolutionary Constitutionalism Laboratories of Radical Whiggism
396
Conclusion
426

Algernon Sidney and the Old Republicanisms
152
A New Republican England
172
Natural Rights in Lockes Two Treatises
209
Lockean Liberal Constitutionalism
247
Bibliography
433
Index
451
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About the author (2004)

Dr Lee Ward is Alpha Sigma Nu Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Studies at Campion College at the University of Regina. In addition to authoring The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America, he co-edited The Ashgate Research Companion to Federalism (2009) with Ann Ward. He has also written articles on John Locke, Aristotle, Plato, Montesquieu, and Algernon Sidney that have appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Publius: A Journal of Federalism, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, the American Journal of Political Science, the International Philosophical Quarterly, and Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy.

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