This book offers a fresh reassessment of John Selden's position and role in the western political tradition. Although Selden was one of the major jurists and political thinkers of the seventeenth century, and although his thought exerted significant influence on several prominent intellectuals, such as Hale, Clarendon and Burke, his work has been traditionally neglected by historiography. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did a renewed interest in Selden's work emerge, following the rediscovery of his thought by J. G. A. Pocock, Richard Tuck and David S. Berkowitz. This revival of interest in Selden led to the publication of several studies on this author in the past four decades. However, the essays directly addressing Selden are immensely less numerous than studies on his contemporaries Grotius and Hobbes. Moreover, Selden's contributions to early modern political thought have been severely underestimated or even misinterpreted in some recent studies: Selden has been variously described as an advocate of natural rights, an intermediate figure between Grotius and Hobbes or, conversely, an enemy of natural rights theories and an expert in Jewish law and English law who, none the less, never formulated any political ideas of his own. In this book, Ofir Haivry contends that Selden was actually an original political and legal thinker and presents a theoretical framework for Selden's ideas, following indications offered by Pocock and by a few other historians, such as Sergio Caruso and Alan Cromartie.

The first three chapters of this book concentrate on the historical, political and intellectual context of Selden's work. Chapter i provides a thorough, detailed account of Selden's life and of the development of his ideas, also considering his political activities as a member of parliament in a controversial period of English history. Chapter ii explores the impact that the early modern crisis of knowledge and obligation had on Selden's thought. Haivry observes that, in seventeenth-century England, political and legal theorists had to cope not only with the challenges to Aristotelianism and the scholastic tradition, in scientific as well as political matters, from the neo-classicism of the Renaissance, the Reformation and advances in the natural sciences: they also had to consider the peculiar path followed by English law, given that the common law had experienced a different historical development from the Romanist and Aristotelian traditions and, in England, legal studies had triggered the rise of historical antiquarianism, as is also proven by Selden's scholarly interests. Chapter iii analyses the interactions, similarities and differences between Selden and the other foremost political and legal thinkers of his time – Grotius, Hobbes and Filmer. In this respect, Haivry notes that ‘Grotius, Filmer and Hobbes all held that old-style constitutionalism was dead, and thus that what was needed now was an alternative framework for politics, focusing on the will of the sovereign, while Selden remained a lifelong defender of constitutionalism, and especially of its English version’ (p. 192). As Haivry clarifies in the conclusion to his book, ‘Selden articulated a theory of constitutional contractarianism, which emerged at least in part as opposition to philosophical contractarian theories of individual consent (such as Grotius’ and Hobbes’) as well as to absolutist theories of politics (such as Bodin's and Filmer's)’ (p. 462).

In the second half of this book, Haivry elucidates the main elements and implications of Selden's constitutional contractarianism. Chapter iv examines the theoretical foundations of Selden's approach to law: to Selden, ‘all legal systems (or at least, all just ones) have a common natural “immutable” root, upon which each political society “increased, altered, interpreted” to suit its particular needs and circumstances. In short, he presented a theory of law as changing with time while remaining rooted in some fixed natural principles – of continuity through change, of a tradition’ (p. 260). It was, therefore, Selden's theory of constitutional contractarianism that led him to reject universalistic, abstract views of consent and of the contract and to study historical legal traditions, such as English law and Jewish law. As Haivry explains in chapter v, Selden found in the Hebrew tradition many effective applications of the ‘universal philosophy of morals’ (p. 322) that underlies all just legal systems. And Selden believed that there was an essential continuity between Jewish law, Christianity (particularly Reformed Christianity) and, hence, English law, especially regarding two issues which Haivry investigates in chapter vi: Church and State relations and the functions of political and judicial assemblies. Haivry points out that Selden opposed the separation of State and Church, which, in his opinion, could lead to either religious despotism or the subjection of the Church to a despotic political power. Moreover, Selden thought that all assemblies dealing with legal, political and social issues had to play a role in the government of the state, which he envisioned as a mixed regime able to avert the risk of despotism. Thus, he proposed to incorporate religion ‘into the political process, so that it would become a beneficial moral and political power within the state – a view certainly consistent with his description of the ancient Jewish Sanhedrin’, which he saw as ‘a national assembly, socially varied and combining political, judicial and religious functions’ (p. 465).

Although some of Selden's proposals remained dead letters, Haivry is right in arguing that ‘Selden had a significant, if as yet still relatively unexplored, role in shaping the constitutional and political ideas of England and the English-speaking nations, even to this day’ (p. 468). Many English constitutional ideas and practices, from the mid-seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century and beyond, can indeed be traced back to Selden, whose constitutional contractarianism was rooted in the traditionalist and constitutionalist approach typical of the English political tradition. In conclusion, Ofir Haivry's well-researched, convincing book has reconstructed John Selden's political theory in a coherent, comprehensive manner, accurately reassessed his contributions to the English constitutional tradition and, thus, appropriately repositioned his work within the western political tradition.