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.