The English Libertarian Heritage: From the Writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the Independent Whig and Catos Letters (Paperback)

"No one can spend any time in the newspapers, library inventories, and pamphlets of colonial America without realizing that Cato's Letters rather than Locke's Civil Government was the most popular, quotable, esteemed source of political ideas in the colonial period." -- Clinton Rossiter. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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The following is from the foreword by Ronald Hamoway.

I am most pleased to have been asked to write a brief foreword to a reprinting of David L. Jacobson's edition of The English Libertarian Heritage, a collection of articles excerpted from The Independent Whig and Cato's Letters: Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious. These essays, authored by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon and first published as letters in the London press between 1719 and 1723, both reflected and contributed greatly to radical Whig political philosophy in England during the first decades of the eighteenth century and, some fifty years later, were to exercise a profound influence on the arguments put forward by American colonists in their struggles with the British crown. The colonists saw in these writings an impassioned and closely reasoned defense of the priority of personal freedom over political authority and of the principles of limited government, and regarded them with increasing favor as the agitation for a radical break with Great Britain swelled. Indeed, so popular did Trenchard and Gordon's writings become in the colonies immediately prior to the Revolution that selections from The Independent Whig and Cato's Letters were regularly reprinted in the American press. Bernard Bailyn, in his comprehensive study of the intellectual background to the Revolution (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution) notes that the writings of Trenchard and Gordon, in the minds of the American colonists, "ranked with the treatises of Locke as the most authoritative statement of the nature of political liberty."

As will be evident to the readers of the selection of letters offered in this edition, the writings of Trenchard and Gordon bear the unmistakable imprint of the political philosophy so forcefully expounded by John Locke in his Two Treatises of Civil Government, published some thirty years earlier. In letter after letter the authors vigorously maintain that Englishmen possess certain rights, both by virtue of their constitutional heritage and by their nature as human beings, and that among these rights are those of freedom of speech and conscience, and the right to resist oppressive government. In letters 59 through 68 of Cato's Letters particularly, of which Professor Jacobson offers extended excerpts, Trenchard and Gordon advance a theory of government and of inalienable rights that clearly echo Locke's Second Treatise. "All Men are born free," they write. "No Man has Power over his own Life, or to dispose of his own Religion; and cannot consequently transfer the Power of either to any body else. Much less can he give away the Lives and Liberties, Religion or acquired Property of his Posterity, who will be born as free as he himself was born, and can never be bound by his wicked and ridiculous Bargain." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.