The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Contributors
• Liberty and American Experience In the Eighteenth Century
• David Womersley, Introduction: a Conservative Revolution
• Jack P. Greene, “of Liberty and of the Colonies”: a Case Study of Constitutional Conflict In the Mid-eighteenth-century British American Empire
• Barry Shain, Religious Conscience and Original Sin: an Exploration of America’s Protestant Foundations
• David Wootton, Liberty, Metaphor, and Mechanism: “checks and Balances” and the Origins of Modern Constitutionalism
• R.g. Frey, Moral Sense Theory and the Appeal to Natural Rights In the American Founding
• John W. Danford, “riches Valuable At All Times and to All Men”: Hume and the Eighteenth-century Debate On Commerce and Liberty
• Ronald Hamowy, Scottish Thought and the American Revolution: Adam Ferguson’s Response to Richard Price
• Gordon S. Wood, Is There a “james Madison Problem”?

Contributors

lance banning was Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, where he taught since 1973. A native of Kansas City, he received his B.A. from the University of Missouri at Kansas City in 1964 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University (St. Louis) in 1968 and 1971. He held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Center for the History of Freedom.

Banning was coeditor of the University Press of Kansas series “American Political Thought,” editor of After the Constitution: Party Conflict in the New Republic, and author of many articles and essays on the American Founding and the first party struggle. His first book, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology, received the international book award of Phi Alpha Theta and was nominated by the press for Pulitzer, Bancroft, and other prizes. Jefferson and Madison: Three Conversations from the Founding, a revision of his 1992 Merrill Jensen Lectures at the University of Wisconsin, and The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic were published in 1995. The latter received the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

During the spring of 1997, Banning held the John Adams Chair in American History, a senior Fulbright appointment, at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. During the fall of 2001, he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh.

His last publications were Liberty and Order: The First American Party Struggle, an anthology of primary sources from Liberty Fund, and Conceived in Liberty: The Struggle to Define the New Republic, 1789–1793. He died in 2006.

john w. danford was educated at Dartmouth College, Berkeley, and Yale University, from which he has a doctoral degree in political science. He is the author of three books: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, David Hume and the Problem of Reason, and Roots of Freedom: A Primer on Modern Liberty. He has published articles on Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and David Hume, among others, in journals such as Western Political Quarterly, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics. He has taught at the University of Chicago, University of Houston, and Loyola University Chicago and served as the Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Jurisprudence at Colgate University.

After working on issues in the philosophy of science (or social science) during the first part of his career, his work on David Hume led to a keen interest in the Scottish Enlightenment, and in the foundations of the kind of free societies (large modern commercial republics) studied and recommended by the Scots. More recently his attention has returned to the thought of the ancient Greeks, and in particular to Herodotus and his understanding of freedom and its importance for human flourishing.

robert a. ferguson is the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Law, Literature, and Criticism at Columbia University. His books include Law and Letters in American Culture; The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820; and most recently, Reading the Early Republic—all from Harvard University Press. He has also published numerous articles on American literature, legal history, the literature of public documents, and the relationship of law and legal institutions to American writing.

He teaches jurisprudence, law and literature, and early American constitutionalism at Columbia Law School and English and American literature for the English Department of Columbia University.

r. g. frey is Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, where he is also Senior Research Fellow in the Social Philosophy and Policy Center. His Doctor of Philosophy degree is from Oxford University, and he taught in the United Kingdom and Canada before coming to Bowling Green. He has published numerous books and articles on normative ethics, applied or practical ethics, and the history of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. In addition to an edition of Bishop Butler’s ethical writings, he is at work on a book entitled Virtue and Interest: The Moral Psychologies of Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hume.

jack p. greene is a student of colonial British America. He has published widely on this subject, including such works as The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1763; Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1789; Pursuits of Happiness: Social Development of the Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture; Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History; The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800; Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History; Explaining the American Revolution: Issues, Interpretations, and Actors; and Interpreting Early America: Historiographic Essays.

Having earlier taught at Michigan State University, Western Reserve University, and the University of Michigan, he became in 1966 a member of the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, where since 1976 he has been Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities. From 1990 to 1992, he was Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine. He has been a visiting professor at several institutions, including Oxford University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociale. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the John Carter Brown Library.

ronald hamowy is Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History at the University of Alberta. He is a graduate of the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago and has taught at Stanford University and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver before moving to Alberta.

Mr. Hamowy is the author of The Scottish Enlightenment and Spontaneous Order and numerous articles on the Scottish Enlightenment and F. A. Hayek. He is the editor of the 1995 Liberty Fund two-volume edition of Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters.

barry shain is Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. His publications include The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought and Man, God and Society: An Interpretive History of Individualism and numerous book chapters and reviews. His teaching specialties are American political thought (especially that of the Founding period), modern political philosophy, political theology, early-modern natural and international law, and American political culture. After earning two B.A.’s, one from San Jose State University and one from San Francisco State University, he received his M.A. and his Ph.D. from Yale University. He was the John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow in History in 1993, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in 1992 and 2005, and has been invited to speak at many lectures and conferences around the world. His research interests include the history and meanings of the most significant Western political concepts in the early-modern period, such as liberty, individual rights, slavery, and the self; and contending conceptions of the good as they developed in this period.

david womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Catherine’s College. His publications include The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a three-volume edition of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a collection of Contemporary Responses to Gibbon, the proceedings of the Gibbon Bicentenary Colloquium entitled Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, Gibbon and the Watchmen of the Holy City: the Historian and his Reputation, 1776–1815, and “Cultures of Whiggism”: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century. He has also edited Edmund Burke’s Pre-Revolutionary Writings, a collection of Augustan Critical Writing, English Literature: Milton to Blake, an abridged edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Restoration Drama: An Anthology, and Samuel Johnson’s Selected Essays.

His current projects include a biography of Gibbon; two monographs provisionally entitled Literary Whiggism 1680–1730 and Religion, History and Drama 1530–1603; and an edition of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. He is a General Editor of The Complete Writings of Jonathan Swift, for which he is editing the volume devoted to Gulliver’s Travels.

gordon s. wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History at Brown University. He received his B.A. degree from Tufts University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969.

He is the author of many works, including The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993. He is currently working on a volume in the Oxford History of the United States dealing with the period of the early Republic from 1789 to 1815. His book entitled The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin was published in 2004.

Professor Wood is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

david wootton is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York, England. He has published widely on intellectual and cultural history between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in France, Italy, and the English-speaking countries. His most recent book is Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates.