Aristotle expressed the view that the political state exists by nature because human beings are political or social by nature. Thomas Hobbes maintained on the contrary that the political commonwealth arises from an artificial covenant, whereby a multitude authorizes a sovereign to rule over it. Whether it is a result of nature, the consequence of a choice to escape the state of nature, or the outcome of some other process of deliberation, the fact of human association gives rise to recurrent themes in political and social philosophy. The character and requirements of justice, the profile of political legitimacy, and the relationship between the powers of government and the rights of the governed are some of the subjects of ongoing consideration and debate in the disciplines of philosophy, political theory, economics, and law. This volume represents a contribution to the investigation of these issues of perennial interest and import, featuring essays whose authors hope to extend, deepen, and, in some cases, move in new directions, the current state of discussion.

The thirteen essays in this collection explore the foundations of political association, the nature of justice, and the character of the rights and liberties that individuals enjoy by virtue of membership in civil society. Some identify and examine misconceptions common in current thinking among political philosophers and laypersons alike. Some seek to clarify the role played in theory and in policy by concepts prominent in political thought such as ownership and property, or those perhaps less well entrenched, such as exploitation and genocide. Others propose new understandings of the work and influence of political philosophers, such as John Rawls, whose ideas are prevalent in ongoing debates.

In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence appealed to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” and affirmed “these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness In 1935, John Dewey, professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University, declared, “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology….” These opposing pronouncements on natural rights represent two separate and antithetical American political traditions: natural rights individualism, the original Lockean tradition of the Founding; and Progressivism, the collectivist reaction to individualism which arose initially in the newly established universities in the decades following the Civil War. The tensions between these two manifestly disparate traditions in the country's political and legal philosophy have set the stage for most of the principal disputes in its political, constitutional, and economic history over the past century and a quarter.

The essays in this collection investigate in turn these two political traditions and their critical interactions. The first series of essays deals with the development of natural rights individualism, some examining its origins in the thought of the seminal political theorist, John Locke, and the influential constitutional theorist, Montesquieu, others the impact of their theories on intellectual leaders during the American Revolution and the Founding era, and still others the culmination of this tradition in the writings of nineteenth-century individualists such as Lysander Spooner.