Chapter 3 shifts to the period in which the constitutional debates following the revolution of 1688 gave way to a long period of greater political stability. The Tories were ousted with the coming of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1714, after which the Whigs settled into power under the leadership of Robert Walpole. The chapter first shows how the Whig oligarchy was opposed by a new generation of ‘commonwealthmen’, notably Trenchard and Gordon, and by a more conservative opposition led by Bolingbroke, who appropriated many ‘commonwealth’ themes. Next the chapter surveys the success of the Whigs in countering these opponents and cementing themselves in power. After their triumph over the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 the Whigs presided over an outpouring of patriotic sentiment. They were congratulated for repudiating arbitrary power, granting the people a voice in making the laws and guaranteeing their basic rights, and thereby ensuring that Britian was genuinely a free state.

Chapter 10 As the French Revolution became increasingly violent, there was an growing backlash in Britain against the celebration of liberty as independence. One response, popular among a number of conservative churchman, took the form of reviving the claim that all subjects have a duty of non-resistance and passive obedience. But a different although no less hostile response came from a number of self-styled ‘liberal’ legal and political writers who saw themselves as equally opposed to conservatives and revolutionaries. This group has been little studied, but the aim of this chapter is to show that they were of central importance in discrediting the ideal of liberty as independence. They accepted the Hobbesian view that most of our natural rights must be given up in the name of peace, and that the rights remaining to us as subjects of states must basically take the form of the silence of the law. Although the ideal of liberty as independence continued to be celebrated by early British socialists, the liberal writers paved the way for the explicitly Hobbesian commitments of the early utilitarians, who finally succeeded in turning the claim that liberty cannot mean anything other than exemption from restraint into a new orthodoxy.

Chapter 8 focuses on how the strand of legal argument traced in Chapter 7 was deployed by a number of pro-imperialist writers in England in reply to Price, Paine and the American colonists in 1776. The first to take up the claim that liberty is nothing other than absence of restraint were the lawyers John Lind and Richard Hey, and they were soon followed by a large number of other critics of Price, among whom the most prominent were Adam Ferguson, John Welsey and later William Paley. The chapter focuses in particular on three objections generally raised against Price’s account of liberty. The first was that his definition confuses the state of being unfree with that of merely lacking security for the liberty you possess. The second was that he connects liberty with an unviable concept of inalienable natural rights. The third was that, by defining liberty as absence of dependence, and then equating dependence with slavery, he commits himself to a morally indefensible definition of slavery. He forgets that slaves are not merely subject to the will of their masters, but that the chief horror of slavery is that they are also regarded as being their master’s property.

Chapter 5 begins to trace the process by which the entire Whig vision of civil society and the free state was discredited and rejected. First the Whig view of civil society was challenged and ridiculed. They had attempted to claim that no one is condemned to live in subjection to the mere will and power of anyone else. But in addition to ignoring the continued existence of slavery, this assurance was shown to overlook the overwhelming extent to which women were still obliged to live in servitude. This point was made in a wave of protests by Judith Drake, Mary Astell, Sarah Chapone and other pioneering feminist writers. The account given by the Whigs of the administration of justice was likewise dismissed with ridicule. Here the three great novelists of the 1740s -- Fielding, Smollett and Richardson -- made an important contribution that has arguably been too little recognised. The chapter concludes by examining their satirical commentaries on Whig complacencies, in which they focused on the corruption and ignorance of Justices of the Peace, the widespread contempt for the law, and the incapacity of the government to secure the safety of the people.

Chapter 7 begins with the reaction that followed from Price and Paine’s defence of the colonial cause. They agreed with the colonists that to live in dependence on the arbitrary will of someone else is what it means to be a slave, and consequently agreed that the colonists must have a natural right to free themselves from their servitude, if necessary by force. This was the moment when a large number of pro-imperial spokesmen came forward to claim that the colonists and their supporters were failing to understand what it means to speak of possessing or losing one’s liberty. They objected that we are not rendered unfree if we are merely subject to someone else’s will; we are only rendered unfree if we are restrained from acting in some particular way. Generally this definition of liberty has been seen as an invention of the late eighteenth century. But as this chapter shows, it arose out of a long tradition of legal and political argument that originated with Hobbes, Pufendorf and their followers. We already find it present in England in the early eighteenth century, and the pro-imperialist writers now brought it to the forefront of debate.

Chapter 4 examines the body of Whig propaganda in which the government was congratulated for having succeeded in establishing a free civil society within a free state. A large number of Anglican writers joined the spokesmen for the government in arguing that Britain had by now established a constitution that made her the envy of Europe. Everyone was now equally subject to the law; the law alone ruled, with no incursions of arbitrary power; and the law was at last being expertly administered, without any corruption or incompetence. As a result, the life, liberty and property of every subject was now fully secure, including the property that (as Locke had said) everyone may be said to possess in their own person. No one is any longer condemned to live in a state of subjection to the mere will and power of anyone else. The consequence is said to be a civil society in which everyone can hope to find their own pathway to prosperity and happiness. The chapter concludes with an examination of Whig celebrations of urban life as the best setting in which to lead a flourishing and happy life.

Conclusion: a reckoning. Liberty used to be defined as absence of dependence. Nowadays it is usually defined as absence of restraint. But the underlying aim of this book has been to establish that there are several reasons for thinking that the ideal of liberty as independence is to be preferred. We gain from it a better sense of how the mere fact of living in subjection -- whether or not we are restrained -- takes away our liberty. We also gain from it a more helpful way of thinking about fundamental rights. Rather than conceiving of them as universal moral claims, there may be good reasons for preferring to think of them as the creation of specific independent communities. Above all, the ideal of liberty as independence helps us to see the importance of cherishing the value of autonomy in relationships between states as well as individual citizens. It is difficult to see how the requirements of justice can be met in the absence of a commitment to the ideal of liberty as independence.

Chapter 9 illustrates the immediate counterblast to which Price’s critics were subjected by a number of writers who continued to insist that liberty is a matter of possessing an independent will, not merely of not unrestrained from acting as you choose. Some leading Anglicans took up this position in their support of Price, including Richard Watson and Peter Peckard. But it was Price himself who answered his critics most fully. He admitted (although not explicitly) that he had given too broad a definition of slavery, but forcefully denied that he had confused the state of being at liberty with that of possessing security for your liberty. He countered that, unless you are free from the possibility of being restrained, you are not in possession of your liberty, because you remain in a condition of subjection and servitude. The chapter concludes by noting that this way of thinking about liberty gained much additional support after the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Burke denounced the revolution, but he was in turn denounced by Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, all of whom saw in the revolution a successful uprising against arbitrary and despotic power in the name of liberty as independence.

INTRODUCTION. When and why did it come about that one prevailing way of understanding what it means to be free was replaced by a strongly contrasting account that came to be no less widely accepted, and still remains dominant? The argument of the book is that, in Anglophone political theory, the change happened quite suddenly in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Before that time it was generally agreed that what it means to be free is that you are not subject to, or dependent on, the arbitrary will and power of anyone else. Liberty was equated with independence. But by the early nineteenth century it had come to be generally accepted that liberty simply consists in not being restrained from acting as you choose. What prompted the change, the book argues, was not the imperatives of commercial society, as has often been argued. Rather it was a growing anxiety, in the face of the American and French Revolutions, about the democratic potential of the ideal of liberty as independence.

Chapter 2. The removal of James II from the throne in 1688 and the settlement of the crown jointly on William and Mary gave rise to an extensive debate about the legitimacy of the new regime. Many wrote to celebrate the ending of arbitrary rule. Some commentators (notably James Tyrrell) focused on the final securing of the fundamental rights of the people in the manner promised by the ancient constitution of England. But others (notably John Locke) preferred to appeal to the natural rights of the people as the only sound basis for guaranteeing freedom under government. At the same time, however, many rejected the settlement of 1688. The Jacobites objected that William and Mary were merely usurpers, while in the course of the 1690s a group of ‘commonwealth’ writers began to argue that the crown and executive were failing to keep their promise to outlaw the use of arbitrary power. The chapter concludes by discussing the contributions of Molesworth, Trenchard and Toland to the development of ‘commonwealth’ claims about the policies that will need to be followed if the freedom of the people from subjection and dependence is to be secured.