BOOK: Mark SOMOS, American States of Nature : The Origins of Independence, 1761-1775 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). ISBN 9780190462857, $49.95

(Source: OUP)

Oxford University Press has just published a book on the “state of nature” discourse on the eve of the American Revolution.

ABOUT THE BOOK

American States of Nature transforms our understanding of the American Revolution and the early makings of the Constitution. The journey to an independent United States generated important arguments about the existing condition of Americans, in which rival interpretations of the term "state of nature" played a crucial role. "State of nature" typically implied a pre-political condition and was often invoked in support of individual rights to property and self-defense and the right to exit or to form a political state. It could connote either a paradise, a baseline condition of virtue and health, or a hell on earth. This mutable phrase was well-known in Europe and its empires. In the British colonies, "state of nature" appeared thousands of times in juridical, theological, medical, political, economic, and other texts from 1630 to 1810. But by the 1760s, a distinctively American state-of-nature discourse started to emerge. It combined existing meanings and sidelined others in moments of intense contestation, such as the Stamp Act crisis of 1765-66 and the First Continental Congress of 1774. In laws, resolutions, petitions, sermons, broadsides, pamphlets, letters, and diaries, the American states of nature came to justify independence at least as much as colonial formulations of liberty, property, and individual rights did. In this groundbreaking book, Mark Somos focuses on the formative decade and a half just before the American Revolution. Somos' investigation begins with a 1761 speech by James Otis that John Adams described as "a dissertation on the state of nature," and celebrated as the real start of the Revolution. Drawing on an enormous range of both public and personal writings, many rarely or never before discussed, the book follows the development of America's state-of-nature discourse to 1775. The founding generation transformed this flexible concept into a powerful theme that shapes their legacy to this day. No constitutional history of the Revolution can be written without it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Somos is Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow and Senior Research Affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, and co-editor-in-chief of Grotiana. He is the author of Secularisation and the Leiden Circle, co-editor (with László Kontler) of Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought, and co-author (with Dániel Margócsy and Stephen Joffe) of The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

1.1. The background and varieties of state of nature theorizing

1.2. The distinctive American state of nature discourse

1.3. Method, scope, and outline

2. The state of nature: sources and traditions

2.1. The uncivilized state of nature

2.2. Advertising America

2.3. Nathaniel Ames' Almanac (1763)

2.4. The state of nature in pre-revolutionary colonial education

3. Rights and constitutions: from Paxton's case to the Stamp Act

3.1. John Adams, James Otis and Paxton's Case (1761)

3.2. Abraham Williams, Election Sermon (1762)

3.3. Otis, Rights and Considerations (1764-65)

3.4. Thomas Pownall

4. The Stamp Act and the state of nature

4.1. Warren's Case (1765-67)

4.2. Enter Blackstone

4.3. Boston against the Stamp Act

4.4. The road to repeal

4.5. Richard Bland, Inquiry (1766)

5. Creating, contesting and consolidating an American state of nature

5.1. The constitutive state of nature

5.2. English Liberties (1680-1774) and British Liberties (1766-67)

5.3. Ancient constitutionalism

5.4. The freedoms of conscience, speech, religion, and the press

5.5. Loyalist vs patriot states of nature (1769-72)

6. The turn to self-defense

6.1. Colonial independence

6.2. The Boston Pamphlet

6.3. Christian resistance

6.4. The Boston Tea Party and the political economy of the state of nature

6.5. Rival epistemologies

7. The First Continental Congress: the consolidation of an American constitutional trope

7.1. Galloway's Plan and the state of nature

7.2. Loyalist vs Patriot states of nature (1773-76)

8. On slavery and race

8.1. Chattel slavery

8.2. Native Americans

9. Conclusion

Appendix I.

Appendix II.

Bibliography

More information here