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.

An ancient analogy has it that the family simultaneously is a source of inspiration and of legitimization for the political order. With attention to the interactions between family imagery, familial structures, intrafamilial relationships, and premodern Western political imagination, this chapter argues that until modern times, the analogy predominated political theories and understandings, and traditional imagery of family and the political order were largely static. The rise of liberalism caused the collapse of these ideas and demanded new definitions, articulations, and justifications.