Eighteenth-century English thinkers held law as the source, not enemy, of civil liberty
Evidence
Price’s views on liberty and law, or more generally liberty and authority, were commonplace in eighteenth-century England and America. The general opinion was that without law there was no liberty—no liberty in the proper, civil sense—and that the legal dispensation under the received constitution of England was especially well suited to the production of liberty. Caleb Evans (1775: 20) put the point nicely. ‘Such is the excellent nature of the British constitution that the voice of its laws is the voice of liberty. The laws of England are the laws of liberty’. — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 214
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s article on sumptuary/immodesty moral panics and to civic-republican debates about law enabling rather than restricting freedom. — connects to: Locke regarded non-arbitrary law as enlarging rather than constraining freedom — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 212; Eighteenth-century Anglo thought distinguished civil liberty from the natural liberty law restrains — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 232; English nobility saw universal laws as the guarantee of their own liberty — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 5133 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Eighteenth-century Anglo thought distinguished civil liberty from the natural liberty law restrains
#expands(0.85) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 232 - English nobility saw universal laws as the guarantee of their own liberty
#exemplifies(0.80) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 5133 - Hobbesian freedom-as-non-interference displaced republican non-domination only in later eighteenth-century writings
#complicates(0.75) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 222