In this substantial new book on Anglo-American political thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Lee Ward asks for a truce between the proponents of the “republican synthesis” and the devotees of Lockean liberalism. At first glance, that request comes off as a little odd. The once-heated battle now draws few partisans. The peacemakers increasingly claim the field. The Politics of Liberty, in fact, participates in a well-established effort to treat liberalism and republicanism as interrelated political languages rather than mutually exclusive discourses. Ward pursues that agenda through an examination of the assumptions and principles that inform several “serious works of political theory” (8). The focus on a select group of theorists necessarily limits what he can say about their influence on politics and political culture in England or America. A political scientist, Ward is most concerned with the debate on the origins and purposes of politics. That orientation, however, does allow him to make fresh claims about the roots of Whig political thought and the source of divisions within it.

Part 1 of the book opens with an assessment of Robert Filmer and the objects of Filmer's ire. There were the Jesuit scholars who regarded political authority, but not particular political forms, as divinely ordained. There were John Calvin's disciples, who lauded the right of resistance, the mixed constitution, or parliamentary supremacy. And there was the natural jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes that, from Filmer's point of view, reached the right result in the wrong way, grounding absolutism in consent and contract, rather than in scripture. Each presented government as the product of human will, rather than a gift from God. This Filmer could not abide. He regarded dependence, not liberty, as the essential fact of human existence and obedience its most basic virtue.

Part 2 then turns to a detailed analysis of James Tyrrell, Algernon Sydney, and John Locke, whom Ward credits with initiating the principal strains of Whig political thought—moderate, republican, and liberal, respectively. All three traditions originated in a similar project, Ward contends. They hoped to free the doctrine of natural liberty from the religious politics of its earlier advocates, while, at the same time, avoiding the absolutist conclusions reached by its first secular proponents, Hobbes and Grotius. In their replies to Filmer, they hoped to place the doctrine of natural liberty on more solid ground during the Exclusion Crisis. What impresses Ward, then, about Tyrrell, Sidney, and Locke are their theoretical innovations, not their debts to intellectual traditions, classical or otherwise.

The attention to first premises draws out unexpected resonances among his three subjects and specifies the distinctions that led them to sometimes radically different conclusions. It also helps Ward give continental thinkers their due. The German political theorist Samuel Pufendorf emerges as a vital influence on James Tyrrell and the moderate Whig case for legal limits on sovereign power. Ward shows that Sidney's radical republicanism, with its distinctive emphasis on popular sovereignty and legislative supremacy, owes much to the Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza, whose work helped Sidney explain why reason and virtue in government originated with the multitude. If the moderate Whiggism of James Tyrrell prevailed in eighteenth-century Britain, the others also would have afterlives in British political culture, most immediately in Cato's Letters, where, he argues, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon synthesized liberal individualism and modern republicanism.

The third part of the book turns to revolutionary America where, Ward demonstrates, the “moderate, liberal, and republican strains of Whiggism … emerged, intersected, and quarreled” (326). James Otis and John Dickinson revised the moderate Whig doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty by including a natural right to self-government within it. The incoherence of this position moved others to rehabilitate the more radical elements in the Whig tradition. When he described American colonists as a free and independent people by right of emigration, and when he rejected the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, Thomas Jefferson took Lockean principles to their logical extreme, Ward claims. At the same time, Ward argues, Thomas Paine's radical republicanism—with its description of democracy as the most natural form of government—may be traced back to Sidney and Spinoza. The first wave of written state constitutions betrayed the influence of Sidneyan assumptions regarding the virtues of popular sovereignty. The second wave, beginning with the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, addressed the perceived imbalance that ensued. By treating the origins of government as the delegation of authority, by establishing its institutions through popular ratification of its fundamental laws, this second wave accepted the Lockean distinction between the work of government and its authorization.

Ward's readings of the individual thinkers are rigorous, provocative, and lucid. His classification of concepts and marking of lineages are often ingenious. Too many matters crucial to the subject, though, escape his attention. He proves oddly dismissive of the common-law tradition and its distinctive politics of liberty. While he places the liberal and republican strains of Whiggism in dialogue with each other, patriotic conceptions of liberty during the eighteenth century, and before, are read out. The abbreviated discussion of eighteenth-century trends proves disabling when Ward turns his attention to America, where the politics of liberty, in his telling, seem to begin in the 1760s, with James Otis. More importantly, the author never articulates a clear model for how he understands the transmission of ideas. We do not learn whether the philosophical differences he elucidates were causes or consequences of political differences, whether they were discourses or resources. In some ways, Ward does attend to context. Each chapter opens with an effective sketch of the moment when each author wrote. And he establishes the influence of natural jurisprudence on seventeenth-century British political thought. Yet, in Ward's hands, these texts become objects for classification more often than agents in the political life of a nation. That is a defensible choice but it comes at a cost. We learn more than we knew about their “philosophical foundations” (11), but less than we might about what they meant in the world.