PART THREE - THE WHIG LEGACY IN AMERICA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2009
Summary
As we have seen, the common front against divine right absolutism that united the various strands of English Whig thought in the Exclusion era soon splintered when the Stuart line, or at least from the Whig perspective the most unsavory (i.e., Catholic) elements of it, were packed off to forced exile and eventual oblivion. The very term “Whig” came to represent differing, often conflicting, and eventually quite separate ideas of liberty and government. Our analysis of the distinct strands of Whiggism present at the origin of this diverse body of thought provides a conceptual framework by which we can trace the development of the modern politics of liberty in eighteenth-century England and America. I have argued that the diversity within the Whig school reflects the enormous impact of modern natural jurisprudence on English constitutional and political thought. Such thinkers as Pufendorf and Spinoza made their impact on Anglo-American thought largely indirectly through the medium of the Whigs. Imagine the foundational works of Tyrrell, Sidney, and Locke to be intellectual and philosophical genetic markers placed in the bloodstream of the tradition. In the following discussion, we will identify and analyze the full panoply of Anglo-American Whig thought including moderate, liberal, and republican strains of Whiggism as they emerged, intersected, and even quarreled in the twelve-year period spanning the beginning of the Anglo-American imperial dispute in 1764 and the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.
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- The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America , pp. 325 - 326Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004