Reviewed by Craig Yirush | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Craig Yirush | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Craig Yirush, University of California, Los Angeles

The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America. By Lee Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 459 pages. $90.00 (cloth).
In this ambitious and wide-ranging study, of the relationship between the seventeenth-century idea of natural law and Whig political theory in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic world, Lee Ward situates the American founding in a broader European intellectual context, taking Baruch Spinoza, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Samuel von Pufendorf as seriously as John Locke and Algernon Sidney. Having rooted the major strands of Whig thought in the natural law tradition, Ward traces their explosive effects on both sides of the Atlantic in the era of the American Revolution. This study of the relationship between the seventeenth-century idea of natural law and Whig political theory in the early modern Anglo-American world is ambitious and wide-ranging.	1
The first of the book's three parts offers a detailed account of the various strands of what Ward calls the "natural liberty tradition" (11). The first school, the late Spanish scholastics and the English Parliamentary Calvinists of the civil war era, believed that "human beings are naturally free and equal" (11), that government "is the product of consent" (12), and that, as a result, political absolutism is illegitimate. Ward also argues, however, that their "classical and Christian premises" (71) led them to view political society as divinely ordained and organic. As a result they believed there could be no individual right to resist tyranny and to dissolve all political allegiance.	2
Natural law theories of Grotius and Hobbes comprised the second strand of the seventeenth-century natural liberty tradition. In Ward's view Grotius and especially Hobbes broke with earlier natural law theorists in fundamental ways. They held that political power was secular, not divine, and that political society was not organic but rather a human construct, created by individuals who had prepolitical natural rights. In addition, unlike scholastics and Calvinists, Grotius and Hobbes sanctioned absolutism by arguing that individuals could fully alienate their natural liberty.	3
In part two Ward focuses on three related yet distinct Whig thinkers James Tyrrell, Locke, and Sidney to explain the origins of the Anglo-American Whig tradition. All three accepted the fundamental premises of Grotian and Hobbesian "modern natural jurisprudence" (12), though realizing its argument that individuals could fully alienate their rights was problematic given their need to combat Robert Filmer's divine right theory. As a result, Ward argues, "each of the important strains of Whig thought" attempted to create "a new politics of liberty" by synthesizing "the secularizing" (Grotius and Hobbes) and the "anti-absolutist" (98) (Catholic and Calvinist) aspects of the seventeenth-century natural liberty tradition. Each of these three strands of Whig thought then shaped the complex politics of liberty in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American Atlantic.	4
As the originator of what Ward calls "moderate Whig" (133) political theory, Tyrrell is central to Ward's story. Heavily influenced by conservative natural law theorist Pufendorf, Tyrell upheld a system of contractually limited monarchy with sovereignty resting "in the king-in-Parliament, not in the people understood independently of the institutions of government" (150). According to Ward in this "moderate Whig compact theory of sovereignty" individuals had "claims to certain natural rights" but were "fundamentally restricted in the exercise of those rights by the requirements of society as a whole" (146). Above all, these moderate Whigs held that there could be no "general right of rebellion" (150).	. . .

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