Phillis Wheatley Peters’s America was both a place and an idea, a reality and an aspiration. Through her writings she transformed herself from being a victim in the actual America into a voice for the America she envisioned. Wheatley Peters’ works should be considered diachronically, recognizing the significance of when she wrote what and to whom, rather than synchronically, as if her positions were unchanging over time. Anyone who attempts to identify her political beliefs must consider how free she was to express them, as well as whether the voice we hear is that of the author, rather than that of a persona she has created. Her image of America evolved radically during the 1770s, as did her vision of her place and role in it. The many ways in which Wheatley Peters subtly and indirectly confronted the issues of racism, sexism, and slavery are increasingly appreciated. Her ambition to be recognized as America’s unofficial poet laureate should be undisputed. Considered a remarkable curiosity during her lifetime, Wheatley Peters is now recognized as a major historical, literary, and political figure, whose significance transcends her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

In drafting a constitution for the democratic republic of the United States, the Framers took elaborate measures to control the hazards of minority and majority political factions. The Framers’ conclusion that factions are inevitable is confirmed by the partisan nature of modern American politics.

Enlightenment thought contributed to developing and reinforcing white supremacy in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. While often celebrated as promoting universal liberty, Enlightenment scholarship was deeply intertwined with colonization and slavery, with many prominent thinkers either benefiting from or actively justifying human trafficking and racial hierarchies. Figures like Hans Sloane and John Locke developed new systems of human classification that departed from earlier Greek environmental theories, instead positing fixed racial categories with Europeans at the top. This early scientific racism provided justification for colonial exploitation while being funded by slavery-derived wealth. Additionally, emerging concepts of liberty and rights were explicitly limited to white men, with writers contrasting “freeborn” Englishmen to supposedly inferior races. These ideas culminated in new forms of race-based or “nation” states, exemplified by the USA, which formally enshrined white supremacy in law. While some contemporary voices criticized these developments, the profitable alliance between Enlightenment thought, colonialism, and slavery proved difficult to stop.

Chapter 8 focuses on Machiavelli’s mature theory of the state in the Discorsi. It begins by drawing attention to the extent to which his theory continues to be mounted as an attack upon the prevalent pattern of neo-classical political discourse in the humanist writings of his predecessors, which had defined and explicated the civitas, the populus, and the res publica as forms of civil association. Their political arguments had been predicated upon a belief in natural human sociability. As in Il Principe, so in the Discorsi, Machiavelli’s theory of the state involves him in rejecting these philosophical presuppositions entirely and in supplying a new philosophical picture of the state as a body. After identifying some new challenges which now face Machiavelli in his account of ‘the free state’, this chapter shows how Machiavelli uses Book 1, chapter 2, to furnish two novel pieces of his theory. The first consists in a conjectural history of the state; the second articulates a genealogy of virtue. That Machiavelli’s explanation of the generation of a moral vocabulary among humans is ensconced within his account of the formation of the state is of lasting significance for our understanding of the architecture of his philosophy.

Even with emancipation firmly in view as a goal of ending the civil war, Lincoln had to struggle against unsuccessful and even uncooperative generals and officers, and against public opinion which was inflamed by the sensational arrests of prominent anti-war democratic dissidents. Through 1863, his public utterances and writings were aimed at explaining the overall object of the war and justifying actions he had taken to pursue that object. Nevertheless, he was willing to listen to peace overtures, and even to meet with commissioners from the confederacy. But there were moments of discouragement, particularly when it seemed that he might not gain re-election to the presidency. Those fears were largely dispelled by the military successes of Ulysses s. Grant, and Lincoln was able to proceed to a triumphant conclusion of the military campaigns in 1865.

Chapter 3 focuses on liberty and servitude, and the way in which these conditions – defined in Roman law in terms of the status of individual persons – are predicated of collective bodies described as civitates and populi in Roman political philosophy. Machiavelli’s relationship to this particular conception of liberty has been at the centre of much recent literature on classical, early modern, and contemporary republicanism, but his theory of freedom requires closer scrutiny, not least because of its relationship to a line of thinking about popular self-government which had been used by humanists to articulate a theory of popular sovereignty from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century in Renaissance Florence. This chapter shows how the key concepts of this thesis come from Cicero’s philosophy, which conveys to the humanists an influential account of how to constitute the entity which he calls the populus as the ultimate bearer of public authority. Cicero’s view of ‘the people’ as the master of its own affairs informs his definition of the res publica as res populi – literally, a ‘thing of the people’ – and this chapter shows how it informs the very basis of the classical republican tradition which Machiavelli inherits and reworks.

This chapter re-examines slavery and abolition in the writing and reception of the Declaration of Independence. Far from being marginal parts of the nation’s founding document, as previous generations of scholars asserted, both slavery and abolition proved to be essential to the making and meaning of the Declaration. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, the Declaration testified to the nation’s high abolitionist ideals and the enduring problem of slavery in American statecraft. By examining not only Jefferson’s ideas about black freedom in the Revolutionary era but a wide range of reformers who meditated on it as well – including African American writers and reformers like Benjamin Banneker – this essay argues that the Declaration itself remains a testament to the conflicted nature of emancipation in the American mind.

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.

When early modern writers invoked the right of resistance their intentions were generally directed at addressing two fundamental ideas in the conceptual catalogue of political philosophy: sovereignty and liberty. Both of these concepts have played a major role in the history of political thought, each undergoing a crescendo in the late medieval period to become the dominant actors on the stage of early modernity. But their historical development cannot be separated from the dawn of certain ideas about resistance, which evolved in parallel and served as a fulcrum for debates about the origin and nature of political authority, as well as the boundaries and implications of subjection to political power. It was precisely through the construction and appeal to a right of resistance that many contemporary thinkers canvassed the fundamental questions of what is the state and what is its ultimate raison d’être.

This chapter aims to provide an introductory account of conceptions of natural rights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is, of how human beings were considered to hold certain rights by virtue of their human nature or as conferred by natural law. It will show how conceptions of natural rights differed, as embedded in different theoretical frameworks, and were put to different political, social, and religious uses. At the same time, in several instances conceptions of natural right were used ‘in action’ in similar ways, despite the different theological or philosophical frameworks in which they were imbedded. Despite differences, then, early modern conceptions of natural rights shared some features, and were put to uses, that may seem counterintuitive to the modern reader.

The liberties guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States—including freedom of speech, freedom of association, the free exercise of religion, and the guarantees of due process and equal protection under law—are designed to ensure to each individual the ability to pursue his or her own interests free from improper interference by the government. Since the government in a democracy is directed by the preferences of the majority, another way of describing the function of the entrenched liberty protections in the Constitution is to say that they protect the minority against the abuse of political power by the majority. The Constitution’s liberty guarantees are enforced by the federal courts through the exercise of the power of judicial review. In exercising this power, the federal courts therefore perform an essential role in securing the liberties that are fundamental to the democratic political tradition. If it is true that even a majority vote cannot justify the legitimacy of legislation inconsistent with respect for these liberties, then the exercise of the power of judicial review to enforce constitutionally protected rights is essential to ensure that the power of the majority is exercised legitimately.

The notion of right(s) is ubiquitous in Roman Republican writings and its meaning often ambiguous and varied; it includes the idea of justice, normative rules, as well as a wider legal order. Following the work of Michel Villey, who argued that the Romans did not have a concept of subjective rights, as this would have required associating the ideas of right and power, historians of political thought and philosophers of law have all agreed that the Romans did not have much (or anything) to contribute to the idea of subjective rights and focused on identifying its first developments in subsequent periods, ranging from the twelfth century down to the late medieval period.

Bentham gave utilitarianism its name and put it on the map, both as a philosophical theory and as a reforming social and political doctrine. In all of his philosophizing, Bentham was most fundamentally concerned with its relevance for law and, ultimately, for a distinctive kind of legal, social, and political reform. Bentham was unalterably opposed to legal and political doctrines whose only grounding was in tradition and any common sense tradition informs. This extended also to his views about morality. His defense of the principle of is not grounded, as Sidgwick will argue any moral principle must be, in intuition. But neither does Bentham ground his utilitarianism in an empiricist-naturalist metaethics, as do Cumberland and Mill, though his metaphysics certainly has that character. Bentham holds that the ultimate grounding of utilitarianism must be political. According to Bentham, the utility principle is the only one that can play the role that a moral principle must be able to play in informed noncoercive public debate. In this way, Bentham anticipates Rawls’s “political liberalism.” This chapter argues that Bentham could accept Rawls’s an emended version of Rawls’s slogan: “the principle of utility: political, not metaphysical.”

For the last fifty years, scholars have accepted that the political philosophies associated with the Enlightenment and British country ideology played a central role in provoking the American Revolution. This chapter moves away from this approach to consider the broad spectrum of political thought in colonial America in the decades immediately before independence. The bulk of this thought was neither as secularized, nor as hostile to imperial authority, nor as egalitarian, nor as American as scholars have assumed. This broader perspective makes it evident that the Revolutionary breach did not grow in any meaningful way from the Enlightenment or British country thought. I argue instead that it was political thought normalized within the empire – indeed central to imperial authority’s proper functioning – and familiar to British Americans that served as the primary intellectual basis for resistance to the London authorities as the imperial crisis intensified. Colonists used Protestant political idioms that warned of the continuing dangers of popery and tyranny to indict the imperial ministry’s actions, formed arguments about the nature of the British constitution drawn from mainstream imperial political theory to undermine the London government’s authority, and invoked episodes from Britain’s tortured seventeenth-century history to legitimate their acts of resistance. This appropriation ultimately destroyed the logic of empire in British America. argue in stead that it was the colonists’ understanding of the British constitution, their use of mainstream imperial Protestant political idioms that denounced popery and Catholicism to indict the imperial

The Introduction examines the emergence and development of law and literature as an interdisciplinary field, while highlighting the ways in which eighteenth-century studies has contributed to and been shaped by the enterprise. Over the past twenty-five years, scholars have examined numerous connections between the era’s legal and literary discourses, emphasizing the formal complexities of both legal and literary texts. The chapters in this volume build upon and extend this body of work, taking up topics including the nature of legal and literary interpretation, the role of legal rhetoric in Britain’s industrial economy, the desire for and resistance to law during public health crises, the regulation of the legal profession, the emergence of the modern judicial decision, the place of law in Britain’s expanding empire, and the role of law in maintaining and rectifying gendered, racial, religious, and class-based inequalities. The Introduction presents an overview of these case studies, reflects on themes running through the volume, and offers suggestions for future work in the field.