This is a study of the origins and development of Whig political thought in England and America. James Tyrrell, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke all wrote during the Exclusion Crisis in England that ended in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Their common enemy was divine right absolutism and its chief spokesman, Sir Robert Filmer. Their common starting point was the premise of man's “natural liberty” as requiring political orders to be grounded in some form of consent creating constitutional limitations on power and justifying resistance to tyranny. The core of the study is an analysis of Tyrrell's Patriarcha, Non Monarcha, Sidney's Discourse Concerning Government, and Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Lee Ward asks us to “imagine [these] foundational works … to be intellectual and philosophical genetic markers placed in the bloodstream of the tradition” of Whig political and constitutional thought in England and America (p. 325).

Ward's study is much more complex and interesting than this summary might suggest. First, each of the three iterations of Whig thought represents a distinct way of conceiving political life, even though all are grounded in the “natural liberty” tradition. Tyrrell's ideas represent a conservative and even “Cavalier” understanding of government, one in which original liberty is profoundly mediated and transformed through secondary institutions and multiple compacts that become the immediate sources of reciprocal obligations binding subjects and rulers. Tyrrell's was the voice that dominated Whig constitutional thought from 1688 through the Augustan Age and was celebrated in the writings of Baron de Montesquieu, David Hume, and Sir William Blackstone. Sidney represents the radical republican and classical strain in Whig thought. To Sidney, natural liberty and human rationality preclude hereditary monarchy and require direct constitutional defense in broadly representative institutions, a vibrant and contentious political life, and popular militias. Sidney was executed for treason in 1683, but his thought gained new life in America through Cato's Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Locke represents the voice of liberalism and property rights in Whig political thought. He, like Sidney, faded from view after the Glorious Revolution, only to reemerge as a commanding figure in the American Revolution.

Secondly, the study places these seminal texts in the broader European context of early modern natural law and natural rights thinking. Tyrrell's writings are directly and convincingly connected to those of Samuel Pufendorf and Sidney's, in a less developed way, to Benedict Spinoza. Even before these connections are made, however, the author asks why both Filmer and his three opponents did not draw upon modern Catholic natural law writers, such as Francisco Suarez and Roberto Bellarmine, or derive many ideas from Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. While these latter connections and rejections are too summary and too sweeping to be convincing, they have the merit of seeing both Filmer and the founders of Whig thought as thoroughly conversant with the larger body of modern natural law argument, Continental and British, Catholic and Protestant.

A third complicating and interesting feature of this book is its interpretation of Tyrrell, Sidney, and Locke from within disputes in contemporary political theory regarding the tensions between “republicanism” and “liberalism” in early modern political thought. While Sidney and Locke are, respectively, most obviously representative of these two modes, Ward extends the logic of republicanism and liberalism into the broader patterns found in natural law and natural liberty writings, especially as they found voice in American critiques of British constitutional and imperial ideas. Two bodies of literature carry this American analysis, the pamphlets of James Otis, John Dickinson, Tom Paine, and Thomas Jefferson and early state bills of rights and frames of government. Especially interesting in this regard is the contrast Ward draws between the first and second waves of state constitution writing in the American revolutionary period as tensions between “constitutional authority” and “legislative will” emerged with increasing force.

Combining as he does a close analysis of selected texts with broadly conceived philosophical and political contexts, Ward implicitly rests the plausibility of his readings of those texts on their relationships to these contexts. While this connection of selected texts and context is most directly established when the context itself consists of many other texts, even here a difficulty arises. When the other texts are written on another level of discourse or constitute another genre of discourse, it is difficult to see what is carried over when the selected text is said to incorporate or reject these other texts. A case in point is Filmer, who, Ward argues, uses Luther as a positive model for ideas on scriptural authority and political absolutism while rejecting both Calvin and Catholic natural law theorists on the same grounds. While this is an interesting conjecture, there is little attempt to examine any larger political theology or biblical hermeneutic that might be found in Filmer's writings to solidify the connection to Luther or his rejections of Calvin, Suarez, and Bellarmine.

And while religion is an important part of Ward's political context—especially antipopery—its status as an articulate set of discourses with many philosophical and rhetorical resonances in Whig political thought is ignored. Symptomatic of this avoidance is his extensive discussion of early American state constitutional bills of rights without any consideration of one of the most foundational: “a natural and unalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences” (verbatim, Pennsylvania, Delaware, North Carolina, 1776; Vermont, 1777; New Hampshire, 1784).

The Language of Liberty 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (1994) by J. C. D. Clark is an almost exact parallel to this book in time frame, subjects, and persons, but its political and philosophical texts and contexts are infused with religion in all of its institutional, theological, and political dimensions. Reading the two books together leads to the disconcerting conclusion that political theory and political history have yet to find a language that provides common access to a shared political culture.