This essay examines first the understanding of sex equality by the philosophic forebears of the US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes was the more thoroughgoing egalitarian of the two. He insisted that men were not inherently superior to women, either in strength or prudence. Locke by contrast wrote that in the conjugal union, even in nature, while the union by mutual compact could be limited to whatever was needed for raising children, still, because of the need to have some authority stronger and more able, men were entitled to rule the household. Despite this public claim that men are the “abler” sex, Locke’s private writings showed him to be much more gender egalitarian than Jefferson himself.

This chapter surveys associationist theories of emotion leading up to Darwin’s Expression. These theories analyze emotions as sequences of thoughts, feelings, and actions, linked together by principles of association. Thomas Hobbes contributes to this tradition the idea that emotions can be analyzed as “trains of thoughts.” John Locke contributes the idea that these trains are connected by the “association of ideas.” David Hume contributes the idea that association can occur via contiguity, resemblance, or cause and effect. David Hartley puts these ideas together to present the first full-fledged associationist theory of mind and emotion. Harley’s ideas are developed further by Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather), Thomas Brown, James Mill, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer, among others. This tradition in the philosophy of emotion has never before been described or analyzed.

As part of the major premise of the Declaration’s syllogism and of a general theory of rightful government, it is unlikely that the main ideas in the Declaration’s second paragraph exist as separate, free-floating nuggets of indeterminate meaning. My task in this essay is to reconstruct the theory of rightful government contained in that paragraph in order to progress toward fixing meaning for those ideas – equality, rights, liberty, and others – that have been so important to the self-understanding and political aspirations of Americans from 1776 on.

In the West, liberty and equality emerged as individual rights from theological speculations about the nature of God and human beings, and the relationship of human beings to each other and to God. It was a natural theology in which God is beneficent and glorifies in what God has created, having made a world in which it is possible for human beings to pursue happiness. Derived primarily from the writings of John Locke, that natural theology was embraced and expanded upon by Thomas Jefferson and articulated in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration’s natural theology foundation holds that liberty serves God’s purpose: preservation of creation and flourishing in the pursuit of happiness. And liberty is equal liberty because, as Locke’s philosophy and Jefferson’s Declaration proclaim, human beings’ equality is more than a right; it is a fact of creation. For Locke and Jefferson, and for the “American mind” of the founding era, the theology underlying the Declaration implies duties to one another. Without such obligations beyond the self, egoism would lead to confusion as everyone would assert their own interests, and God’s purpose would not be realized.

As unprecedented as the Declaration was, it was not without intellectual antecedents. The Declaration interacted with and built upon recent expressions of European Enlightenment political philosophy in its focus on “Nature and Nature’s God,” and in its reliance upon the normative principles of “laws of Nature” as well as natural or “unalienable” rights. European Enlightenment political philosophers themselves stood in complex and varied relationships with their ancient and medieval predecessors; sometimes adding to, sometimes transforming, and sometimes rejecting these preceding ideas. The Declaration brilliantly navigates this complex web of intellectual antecedents by treating the ideas of laws of nature, natural rights, the social contract, and republicanism in such a way that the points of tension between their different interpretations are minimized and subsumed within a shared understanding of the importance of nature for political life. In so doing, the Declaration provides an intriguing hint of how the deep fault lines between these political philosophical traditions might ultimately be bridged. The Declaration’s succinct statement of political principles may be viewed as a transformative distillation of a few of its most important European antecedents.

This chapter returns to the establishment of the British Museum, focusing on Sloane’s prints and drawings. It looks at his categorisation of visual material and the subsequent division of that material, focussing on the historical distinctions between ‘miniatura’ and ‘prints’ and the importance of something being framed or unframed. Taking examples of items which have been categorised as different things across the spectrum of printed images to printed text, the chapter ultimately argues that provenance is inherently paratextual and that how something is presented changes what it can be. A set of drawings initially owned by John Locke, now found between the British Library and the British Museum, demonstrates the forces of arbitrary chance and individual decisions on the subsequent survival and classification of an object. Finally, the chapter considers the importance of paper within a library, as a determining feature both materially and metaphorically,

This chapter examines how the theological ideas discussed in Chapter 5 were successfully disseminated throughout English society. To do this it examines the religious split between the established Church of England and non-conformity. The development of the theology self-love, happiness, and interest is examined in the writings of the enormously influential philosopher and theologian Richard Cumberland. It then discusses how this evolved into Latitudinarianism, and examines printed sermons as they commented on these ethical concepts, as well as on consumption and worldly goods. The writings of the Anglican ministers Joseph Butler and Josiah Tucker are examined to show how these ideas became directly linked to economic thought. The concurrent development of non-conformist theology relating to the same concepts is traced through the writings of John Locke on the mind, and the dairy of the student lawyer Dudley Ryder. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and his theory of polite sociability is also investigated to show how it provided a less austere means to disseminate Locke’s psychology of the mind. Central to this investigation will be the process by which individual selves were able to become comfortable with trusting new institutions by using the concept of interest as a form of commitment.

This chapter discusses the early modern transformation of the law. By the end of the eighteenth century, the law of ownership was firmly centered on land and the conception of the state was becoming firmly territorial, while the nineteenth century witnessed the abolition of the lawful private ownership of human beings. The chapter traces the rise of an early modern conception of property, which held that acquisition was primarily acquisition of land, and that it was established through cultivation rather than mere occupation. It shows how the venerable law of use rights found a home under a new doctrinal rubric, eminent domain, and discusses the transformation of the ancient law of enslavement through war. The chapter draws on the work of historians of the state who study the rise of a territorial understanding of sovereignty. It emphasizes the long legal history behind the disappearance of lawful private enslavement.

This chapter discusses the early modern transformation of the law. By the end of the eighteenth century, the law of ownership was firmly centered on land and the conception of the state was becoming firmly territorial, while the nineteenth century witnessed the abolition of the lawful private ownership of human beings. The chapter traces the rise of an early modern conception of property, which held that acquisition was primarily acquisition of land, and that it was established through cultivation rather than mere occupation. It shows how the venerable law of use rights found a home under a new doctrinal rubric, eminent domain, and discusses the transformation of the ancient law of enslavement through war. The chapter draws on the work of historians of the state who study the rise of a territorial understanding of sovereignty. It emphasizes the long legal history behind the disappearance of lawful private enslavement.

This contribution surveys the essays in political economy that Hume began to publish in 1752, with particular attention to his thinking about money. The essays are presented as, in part, extensions of the natural history of property and government that Hume began to sketch in A Treatise of Human Nature. But they were also carefully calibrated interventions in the political discourse of trade and finance prominent in British politics since the seventeenth century. Hume’s political economy can be situated in a range of British and European intellectual and political contexts. This chapter pays particular attention to his recurrent engagement with John Locke’s extensive writings on money, trade and taxation, which served Hume as a foil in developing his own positions. There is, it will be suggested, a deep connection between Hume’s celebrated critique of Locke’s account of the original contract and his rejection of Locke’s search for an invariable monetary standard.

Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with the concept of political party as David Hume. This chapter considers Hume’s various essays that treated the phenomenon of party between 1741 and 1758. In his first essays on party, he showed how both the Whig-Tory and Court-Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and inter-parliamentary conflict. In this way, he sought to transcend the arguments of the Court Whig ministry and the Country party opposition alike. Writing a new set of essays in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Hume turned to the parties’ ideological systems, as he tried to show that neither the Whig system of the ‘original contract’ nor the Tory system of passive obedience held water if philosophically probed, but that they could both have salutary consequences. While critical, Hume continued to give a fair hearing to both parties in his final essay on the subject, ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’ (1758). Though he ultimately wrote in favour of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, this chapter concludes that Hume may have approximated the ideal of non-partisanship as far as was possible in a divided society.

Chapter 1 focuses on the first draft of Grouchy’s Lettres on Sympathy, the only text to be published under her name in her lifetime. In contrast to commonly received historical wisdom, it argues that Grouchy did not, in fact, begin writing this treatise between 1791 and 1793. Rather, it suggests that it was first composed around 1786, in response to an Académie française competition to produce the best elementary moral treatise on the duties of the man and the citizen. It goes on to reconstruct the contents of the original text. Her aim, in this first draft, was non-political: she wanted to demonstrate how individuals, rather than regurgitating a catechism, could learn to discern moral truths for themselves through a reasoned reflection on the sentiment of sympathy. She predominantly engaged with the ideas found in the moral, pedagogical, and epistemological works of Rousseau, Smith, and Locke. Despite the circumstances of its eventual publication as an accompaniment to her translation of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, it is argued that Grouchy demonstrated significant disagreements with Smith, and instead hewed closely to the ideas of Rousseau.

This chapter proposes an alternative to the more economically driven historiography on French Enlightenment rights talk, by highlighting the role of philosophers, most notably Locke and Rousseau. It was their insistence on the inalienability of liberty that defined the philosophical discourse of rights in the eighteenth century. Locke repudiated the standard argument by natural lawyers (from Grotius to Pufendorf) that we could alienate our freedom, either by selling ourselves into slavery or subjecting ourselves to an absolutist sovereign. In both of these cases, we violate our right to self-preservation, which as a dictate of natural law is sacrosanct. Montesquieu similarly rejected Roman arguments for slavery in the name of self-preservation. And Rousseau insisted on the inalienability of liberty, through an operation (the social contract) that transforms natural liberty into political freedom. These arguments, too, informed the revolutionary understanding of human rights.

This chapter shows how ‘Liberty’ gained an ideological colouring in the eighteenth century largely due to its capacity to embrace a number of artistic/political perspectives, from an opposition to the legacy of anti-Walpole sentiments derived from centralising governmental influence, to an aesthetic reversal of taste away from generic prescription to a specific association with Whiggish denial of some inherited property rights. Goldsmith is rarely regarded as a deep political thinker, yet he mixed with several who could be thought to be polemicists for Liberty. This chapter shows how his poetry (The Traveller and The Deserted Village), plays (The Good Natur’d Man and She Stoops to Conquer) and his prose (The Citizen of the World) gave voice to his interrogation of English libertarian myths.

The flourishing of the essay as a protean literary form in an age marked by growing interest in essaying systematic knowledge reflects a tension within eighteenth-century empiricism. Two divergent subgenres emerged from this tension. The conversational essay, first, drew upon a Montaignian tradition rooted in scepticism, dialogue, and performative rationality; these essays were associated with a form of pragmatic empiricism at ease with the idea of human knowledge as intersubjectively constituted in the public domain. On the other hand, the systematic essays of the Enlightenment, spurred on by John Locke’s attempt to establish ‘order’ in intellectual inquiry, deployed the essay as an instrument for establishing Universal Truth and what Leibniz termed ‘demonstrative knowledge’. In considering the epistemology of the eighteenth-century essay in Britain, this chapter explores not only how this bifurcated empiricism influenced the development of the essay, but also the ways in which the essay reconstituted empiricism itself.

In this chapter, I examine whether punishment is morally permissible. Criminal prosecution and punishment are the main functions of international criminal justice and lie at the heart of what institutions of international criminal justice – such as the International Criminal Court – do. To begin, I reconstruct Locke’s argument for the permissibility of punishment. Locke argues that we have a moral duty to ‘preserve humanity’ and we can discharge that duty by exercising our ‘natural executive right’ – that is, a right to punish – in the state of nature. Punishments are effective in enforcing rights because they deter crimes. I discuss several objections against the consequentialist structure of Locke’s argument. To counter these objections, I argue for a mixed theory that distinguishes between justifying the practice of punishment and justifying the distribution of punishment within that practice. To explain the latter, we must take into account considerations of normative individualism, egalitarianism, and pragmatic considerations. Taken together, these arguments imply that coercive punishment is permissible for natural rights enforcement.

This chapter examines the liberal approaches to Christian prescriptivism, which have typically fallen under the label of the “essence of Christianity.” The quest for the essence has its origins in the Reformation but becomes a widespread theological concern in the Enlightenment. This first chapter examines liberal, historicist, dialectical, and liberationist versions of this quest. Using Schleiermacher’s rubric, I organize different versions of the essence along the lines of reason (doctrine), experience (culture), and morality (politics).

This chapter examines the view that state creation requires the existence of a normatively legitimate government. It begins by defining governmental legitimacy, arguing that it is best analysed in terms of the moral justifiability of individual acts of governance, whether viewed individually or in aggregate. Next, it considers what it means for institutions, social conventions, and legal principles to be legitimate before moving on to consider the negative argument that no theory of state creation that excludes a criterion of governmental legitimacy could ever be morally plausible. Having dismissed this objection as mistaken, the chapter then examines a range of legitimacy-based reconstructions, which draw respectively upon the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke. Each position is critiqued and dismissed as an implausible approach to the law of state creation.