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.

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 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.

This book argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. Influential early modern theorists of toleration, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of conformity. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theorists of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. While this is a book about freedom, it is also a book about threats to freedom, specifically conformity, hypocrisy, and persecution. It considers the social, psychological, and political harms done by political refusals to tolerate religious differences and allow individuals to practice their religion freely in accordance with the dictates of conscience. By returning to a historical context in which liberty of conscience was not granted to religious dissenters –but rather actively denied – this book foregrounds Bayle’s argument that coercing conscience exacerbates religious fervor and inflicts significant psychological harm on dissenters, thereby undermining the goal of cultivating social cohesion in politics. In controversies on the politics of conscience, I suggest that we acknowledge that refusals to tolerate claims of conscience – while perhaps well-grounded in democratic laws and norms – might exacerbate conscientious fervor and empower resentment against the state. This Baylean intuition does not necessarily tell us where to draw the limits of toleration – what should be tolerated and what goes beyond the pale – but it does tell us something about how to approach invocations of conscience and what to expect when we deem something intolerable.

Recent theorizing about cosmopolitanism has emphasized the need to embrace diversity as a constituent element informing the shared value of cosmopolitanism. This development suggests the need for an alternative genealogy from received accounts which typically trace cosmopolitanism from the Stoics through Kant, on the premise of moral continuities and consensus. My chapter explores the work of John Locke and his engagement with scepticism as a different way of encountering diversity with implications for a reimagined cosmopolitanism. But Locke’s inheritance is not straightforward and presents as many dilemmas as solutions to the challenge of reconciling difference with universal commitments. His acceptance, at some level, of diversity is not the prelude to an expression of human solidarity, framed around a nascent cosmopolitan ideal. Locke’s ultimate pessimism on these matters is a reminder of the difficulties involved in the contemporary project of accommodating divergent philosophical forces.

In this chapter, we argue that Thomas Jefferson affirmed the core of classical philosophical theology.Jefferson understood Nature’s God to be a creating, particularly providential, and moralistic being, whose existence and causal relation to the world was essential to the foundations of natural-rights republicanism.For Jefferson, belief in such a God was warranted on the basis of reason, and thus is akin to the propositions that Thomas Aquinas called the preambula fidei. Jefferson’s theology was essential to natural-rights republicanism in that God’s creation and ordering of man to happiness grounded the moral law, human moral equality, and the natural right of property.Jefferson did not adhere to the major tenets of orthodox Christianity as presented in the religion’s earliest creeds, but he nonetheless affirmed the existence of a God of Nature whose attributes included being a providential, moralistic creator. And while Jefferson can appear at times as a philosophical dilettante with scattered thoughts,Jefferson developed a natural theology that has surprising continuities, and some important discontinuities, with the classical natural-law tradition.

In The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke seems to support what Quentin Skinner identified as the neo-Roman theory of liberty. That is to say, according to Locke, in order to be free, it is not sufficient to be free from constraint or coercion. It also necessary for you to be free of dependency on the will of another person. The sheer fact of absolute monarchy, of ruling by will rather than law, constitutes an act of war, and the people have the right to take up arms against it. However – and here his story becomes strange – Locke also defends prerogative power. That is, he defends the right of the magistrate to exercise their will over and above the rule of law. This chapter will explore this apparent contradiction and try to make sense of it in Locke’s terms. It will conclude that Locke points to an irresolvable tension between the will and the good, and that while the languages of political thought cannot be historically disentangled, they can have distinct and rich philosophical lives.

In the Scientific Revolution the concept of body evolved along several divergent lines, from conceptions that rely exclusively on extension and motion to more elaborate accounts that include attributes such as solidity and force. A host of complications were disputed, such as atomism versus the infinite divisibility of bodies, the distinction between primary and secondary properties, and the possibility of a vacuum. This chapter explores these and other issues, but with an emphasis on the relationship between body and spatial extension. Descartes's three-part distinction—i.e., whether the relationship between body and extension is conceptually, modally, or really distinct—serves as a framework for investigating the development of early modern theories of material body, a process that laid the basis for the ontology and epistemology of modern science.

The third chapter presents selections from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Montesquieu, and David Hume, and explains the central theoretical assumptions of classical liberalism. Switching the emphasis from the people apprehended as an organic whole to the people as a collection of individuals, social contract theory presupposes that the state is an artificial entity created by human will and consent. The liberal perspective emphasizes the original equality and freedom of all individuals, often overlooking the unicity of each person, and values the private good over the common good. Excerpts from Hobbes and Locke illustrate the idea of the social contract. Although neither Montesquieu nor Hume embraced the social contract theory, their thought exemplifies the liberal ideas that the state should protect, as much as possible, the right of individuals to pursue their lives as they see fit.

Edward Andrew discusses Pierre Bayle, who held that conscience was the “voice of God,” but that humans can still err. Enlightenment thinkers increasingly insisted that social approval, not God’s voice, guided conscience. Thus, conscience became not about certainty concerning the right course of action, but rather about alignment with social forces that might create stability. Bayle maintained that conscience was a faculty of the person, although subject to error. This distinguished him from Locke, who referenced conscience in his political writings. However, in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke asserted that conscience was only one’s abiding beliefs. Bayle, however, proposed that conscience was the development of applications of natural law and Scripture. Harold Schulweis and Harold Berman are conversation partners for Bayle. Schulweis sees conscience as a force of judgment outside law. Morality is not fixed; rather, the person with an active conscience constantly recalibrates her actions and judges the right thing to do. Berman, however, thought conscience as a force beside law, like a jury that renders its judgment about the right decision under the circumstances.

When influential philosophers prior to the Enlightenment such as Leibniz and Malebranche speculate about the interior life of ‘Man’ they presuppose the elect, saved man. This continues to be the case with Pierre Nicole and Jacques-Joseph Duguet, whose writings coincide with Jansenism’s turn towards a movement of political opposition to absolutism that ended up in Jacobinism. The shadows cast by predestination can still be detected even in Locke and Montesquieu, regarded as the founding figures of the Enlightenment. The theory of election would retain a subliminal presence in the history of the human sciences of the eighteenth century. So too would their increasing preoccupation with causality in psychological and social identity; out of the causes for election and reprobation came the imputation of causes for developmental normality and abnormality (‘idiocy’, ‘imbecility’ etc.) in the history of medicine.

The chapter criticises the liberalist presuppositions that an individual-centred view on privacy builds upon. It discusses the legal person of the Union as an economic agent.