by Michael P. Zuckert



Editorial Reviews

Review
This is a work of careful scholarship and vast erudition.... By
illustrating how Lockean and republican ideas came to be blended, Zuckert
forcefully recounts the origins of the American republic.

Product Description:

In Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, Michael Zuckert proposes a
new view of the political philosophy that lay behind the founding of the
United States. In a book that will interest political scientists,
historians, and philosophers, Zuckert looks at the Whig or opposition
tradition as it developed in England. He argues that there were, in fact,
three opposition traditions: Protestant, Grotian, and Lockean. Before the
English Civil War the opposition was inspired by the effort to find the
"one true Protestant politics--an effort that was seen to be a failure by
the end of the Interregnum period. The Restoration saw the emergence of
the Whigs, who sought a way to ground politics free from the sectarian
theological-scriptural conflicts of the previous period.

The Whigs were particularly influenced by the Dutch natural law
philosopher Hugo Grotius. However, as Zuckert shows, by the mid-eighteenth
century John Locke had replaced Grotius as the philosopher of the Whigs.
Zuckert's analysis concludes with a penetrating examination of John
Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the English "Cato," who, he argues, brought
together Lockean political philosophy and pre-existing Whig political
science into a new and powerful synthesis. Although it has been
misleadingly presented as a separate "classical republican" tradition in
recent scholarly discussions, it is this "new republicanism" that served
as the philosophical point of departure for the founders of the American
republic.

Product Details

Paperback: 410 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press; Reprint edition (February 17, 1998)
ISBN: 0691059705