The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America

Extract

The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America. By Lee Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 470p. $90.00.

This is a study of the origins and development of Whig political thought in England and America. James Tyrrell, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke all wrote during the Exclusion Crisis in England that ended in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Their common enemy was divine right absolutism and its chief spokesman, Sir Robert Filmer. Their common starting point was the premise of man's “natural liberty” as requiring political orders to be grounded in some form of consent creating constitutional limitations on power and justifying resistance to tyranny. The core of the study is an analysis of Tyrrell's Patriarcha, Non Monarcha, Sidney's Discourse Concerning Government, and Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Lee Ward asks us to “imagine [these] foundational works … to be intellectual and philosophical genetic markers placed in the bloodstream of the tradition” of Whig political and constitutional thought in England and America (p. 325).