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.

Europe’s revelation of hitherto latent human powers had negative faces too, of which imperial expansion was one. The domination of weaker peoples brought suffering and destruction everywhere, often worsened by the limits to European power that placed stable rule over conquered populations out of reach, so that the dominators had regular recourse to brutal exemplary punishments, often justified by the racist discourse generated by the need to justify the whole system. The capacity of formal imperialism to endure was undermined by the seeds it bore of its own overcoming: first, the violent and expensive wars between imperial rivals and then the disclosure to dominated peoples of the knowledge and techniques employed to subject them. But from the beginning these horrors generated internal protests and critiques, often based on a heightened realization of and respect for cultural difference. By the middle of the eighteenth century a phalanx of distinguished and influential voices was raised against the system, never strong enough to rein it in, but testimony to the persistence of the more humane and generous attitude manifested earlier.

Chapter 3 describes Grouchy’s thought during the first four years of the French Revolution. It explores both the philosophical foundations for and the results of the strong political and intellectual partnership that developed with her husband, Condorcet, from around 1790. Grouchy took advantage of the symbolic political power with which marriage was imbued in revolutionary discourse to use her own union as a microcosm of the polity she and Condorcet were advocating. They demonstrated that sentiment not only allowed individuals to reason rights, but created bonds that enabled independent people to work together for the advancement of political goals beyond their basis self-interest. This created the basis from which citizens could contribute to the creation of a just constitution. The state, in turn, had a central role in fostering the emotional faculties of the citizenry. Women, moreover, had an identical capacity for moral and political judgement as men. They made this argument both in the public display of their collaboration, and in texts that they co-authored together. This Chapter makes the case for Grouchy’s co-authorship of Condorcet’s influential 1791 Cinq mémoires de l’instruction publique and argues for her centrality to Condorcet’s revolutionary thinking and career.

Chapter 2 discusses the adaptations that Grouchy made to her initial draft of the Letters on Symapthy between 1786 and 1789. It explores her interest, during this period, in the affair of the trois roués, a court case that had captured the attention of her uncle Dupaty and Condorcet. This constituted her first sustained exposure to the political injustices of ancien régime. By engaging with the work of these two men, and the ideas of other eighteenth-century natural rights thinkers, Grouchy developed her own ideas as to how injustice could be combatted. This resulted in various additions to the Letters. Building on her original ideas about sympathy-based morality, she elaborated her own definition of natural rights. She went on to argue that these rights, and justice as a whole, could only exist in society when a minimal degree of social and economic equality was guaranteed by the state. This Chapter argues that this was the period when the Letters changed from a moral treatise to a text concerned with political theory.

Chapter 4 explores Grouchy’s first elaboration of a specifically republican political philosophy during the French Revolution. It describes how, together with Condorcet, Paine, Brissot and others, she founded the first explicitly republican journal of the Revolution in 1791: Le Républicain. It explores the context for her declaration of republicanism: the flight of Louis XVI from Paris in June 1791. It demonstrates how, in the articles she contributed to this journal and other anonymously published pieces, Grouchy elaborated on the theory she had been developing between 1786 and 1791. She added an unambiguously anti-royal element to her thought, arguing that a king can never feel sympathy with his people, and can therefore never be a just ruler. This Chapter explores how she drew, in particular, on the ideas of Paine, but also describes a major intellectual and political fissure that developed between Grouchy and her ‘Brissotin’ allies during this period. While they advocated an offensive European war after 1791, she argued against one. Due to her reliance on mutual sentiment between ruler and ruled as the basis of political society, she opposed, on philosophical grounds, the sending of ‘armed missionaries’.

This chapter seeks to elucidate the confusing rhetoric about rights at the time of the American founding. Influenced by social contractarian principles and common law traditions, American elites generally thought about rights in three ways. Inalienable natural rights, such as religious conscience, were aspects of freedom that individuals could not rightfully surrender to the control of the body politic. Retained natural rights, often summarized as life, liberty, and property, were rights that individuals voluntarily retained upon entering into a political society but that were regulable by law in promotion of the public good. And fundamental positive rights, such as the right to a jury trial, were rights that individuals acquired only upon the creation of political society. By recovering these categories, the chapter attempts to show not only the malleable and multifaceted nature of eighteenth-century American rights talk but also its overall intelligibility.

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 touches upon the very large topic of how individual rights interact with the police power. In what sense and to what degree do rights contravene state and local exercises of the police power? It is a shibboleth that regulatory power is constrained by rights. But this chapter interrogates these issues in more depth and detail, by discussing how rights claims are framed in connection with the police power and how the government’s assertions of power are circumscribed by particular doctrines and arguments in courts. Further, the chapter considers how the debate over the nature and content of so-called positive rights implicates the police power questions, questions concerning authority and content.

The transatlantic intellectual movement today called “the Enlightenment” took particular forms in British North America during the American Revolution. This essay explores four interlocking Enlightenment concepts as used by eighteenth-century Americans to describe their political revolt against British monarchical rule: nature, progress, reason, and revolution. Americans appealed to nature to delegitimize claims to authority that rested on history, custom, divine access, and lineage. Dispensing with cyclical ideas of history and decline narratives from the Bible, they invented the new idea of progress as a way to describe social and political improvements resulting from human reason. They described reason, in turn, as a distinct mode of knowledge resulting from sensory data, opposing it to knowledge resting on belief or the passions alone. Finally, they described their own break with Britain as a revolution because it seemed to show the reality of progress toward a better world of reason, natural rights, and government by the people. The essay also surveys the historiography on “the American Enlightenment,” a term invented by Americans during the Cold War era amid fears of Soviet-style totalitarianism. Eighteenth-century people themselves spoke of “enlightenment” as a never-ending process rather than a finished project.

Institutions are the system of legal rules and social norms that enhance individual economic property rights. Individuals take them as exogenous, but they are endogenous to the entire system. Institutions are complicated distributions of economic property rights and are therefore the result of attempts to maximize wealth net of the transaction costs involved. This chapter defines institutions, relates them to property rights, reviews the literature, and provides numerous examples of institutions and their evolution.

This chapter re-examines Boccaccio’s naturalism and its putative connection to his feminism, disputing the claim that naturalism in the Decameron is inspired by Boccaccio’s advocacy for natural rights. Critics often celebrate the strong female protagonists of Bartolomea (2.10) and Madonna Filippa (6.7), who defend themselves against accusations of adultery, as evidence that Boccaccio was an early proponent for natural rights, especially the subjective rights of women. However, when Boccaccio gives his adulteresses a chance to finally speak, it is not to insist upon their subjective rights but to take a more unsettling stance: they rest their defenses on their status as socially valuable things. In both of these tales, the women situate their infidelity within a moral economy that views property relations from the ground up, vindicating the needs of things over the rights of individual owners. Having experienced the agricultural crisis wrought by the Plague, Boccaccio’s storytellers would have been especially receptive to such arguments for “adulterous” forms of possessing.

This conclusion draws together the central themes of the book, laying out how George and the Irish Land War helped to further drive liberals, conservatives, and socialists towards an organicist utilitarian politics. It also offers a brief summary of the subsequent trajectory of the land question and some of its orientating politics in Ireland, Britain, and the Unitec States. The conclusion discusses why the late nineteenth century remains such a critical moment for contemporary discussion of liberalism and democracy.

The North Atlantic is best considered as an increasingly integrated economic and social region during the late nineteenth century, and this approach helps to clarify Ireland’s geopolitical place during the ideologically tumultuous 1880s. Using this framework, this chapter explores the place of Henry George and of the Irish Land War in this fractious period, detailing how technological and political developments reshaped long-standing assumptions. It explains how the Land War became an international event, with significance extending far beyond Ireland itself. The chapter also recounts George’s intellectual biography, setting the scene for the development of his most famous work, Progress and Poverty. The reaction to this book is assessed, particularly the most common arguments made by critics, and the ways in which these critiques developed commonalities across the political spectrum.

The goal of the final chapter is to examine the central role of necessities in the epistemological, moral and political theory of An Essay of Human Understanding and of the Two Treatises of Government. A study of the former shows Locke’s preoccupation with classical moral questions such as happiness and the ‘good objects of desires’ and how necessities helped him to strike a balance between tradition and the new science. As a rule of thumb of proper conduct, knowledge of necessities leads to the preservation of life, a human being’s most important duty to God. His doctrine of necessities is what made it possible for Locke to develop the theory of the public good with which, it is argued, he attempted to defeat the egoist theory of self-interest. Examination of his conception of property and money through the lens of human necessities shows a certain ambiguity in Locke’s normative ideals. Nevertheless, my conclusion is that above other considerations underlying the capital-oriented ideals of the period, the last word of Locke’s political theory is the public good represented by preservation and convenience for the commonwealth and, when possible, for the whole of humanity.

The implications for morality and natural law of Hobbes’s skilful employment of Neoplatonist metaphysics such as Avicenna’s, entailing a sharp division between the human soul and the human body, are spelled out in Chapter 3. This shows that the concept of need, rather than right is central to Hobbes’s natural law and political theory. Judgements concerning needs, including the needs of others, represent a constant source of legitimacy for acting in the state of nature and in the commonwealth. A thorough analysis of the doctrine of necessity in Leviathan, Hobbes’s masterpiece, follows. The superior and absolute sovereignty that Leviathan evaluates and proposes is the true and scientific concept of sovereignty in a commonwealth, by reference to the needs of human nature and also in accordance with divine command. Hobbes exploits his doctrine of metaphysics of necessity to explain that that type of absolute sovereignty is compatible with freedom; after all, each free act of every human being is necessary in the sense of a metaphysics of necessity.