Pro-independence rhetoric met its libertarian counter-argument from Benthamian source

Evidence

But whether or not this observation is correct, it is worth noting that Lind and others were directly influenced in their anti-American writing by exposure to someone who thought that he had made a great breakthrough in coming to see liberty as the absence of coercion. This is Jeremy Bentham, who was himself an opponent of the American,

and later the French, Revolutions (Hart 1982: essay 3). Referring to ‘a very worthy and ingenious friend’ (p. 17), Lind acknowledged Bentham’s influence on his conception of liberty, and did so as a result of a complaint from Bentham that he had failed to mention him in an earlier article of April 1776.

— Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 233

Categorization

• XREF: Pettit situating his own negative-liberty foil; connects to Berlin’s history of liberty which the reader has likely studied.
• SEED: Bentham’s ‘cornerstone of my system’ letter shows how intellectual priority disputes shaped revolutionary-era polemic, a possible essay hook.