(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
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