Overview

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.

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9780190462857

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Somos' study of the distinctive role of the category of the state of nature in transforming the political awareness and focusing the increasingly revolutionary purposes of America's leaders presents a fundamental challenge to current historiography of the Revolution. It also suggests an original and imaginative approach to capturing the dynamics of revolutionary ideology in the making. It is a book to reckon with. -John Dunn, Professor of Political Theory (Emeritus), University of Cambridge In the vast volume of literature on the American Revolution, Somos' 'American States of Nature' stands out as a provocative and original contribution to its intellectual and legal history. Canvassing sources from the canonical and familiar to the unexpected and neglected, he carefully reconstructs the forgotten history of the 'state of nature' discourse in the American colonies, revealing its significance in the decades culminating in 1776. This painstaking and important work should lead us to revise conventional narratives concerning the Revolution and its relation to American constitutional origins, development, and self-understanding. -David Grewal, Professor of Law, Yale University An invaluable contribution to our understanding of the origins of the American Revolution-Somos' meticulous, closely argued analysis of the development and deployment of distinctively American ideas about the 'state of nature' offers a fresh and illuminating perspective on why patriots ultimately embraced (and loyalists resisted) the break with Britain. This is conceptual history at its very best. -Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History (Emeritus), University of Virginia In this thoughtful, fine-grained analysis of eighteenth-century political literature, Somos demonstrates that the term state of nature, widely employed in these texts, led to the creation of a unique American understanding of what constituted the state of nature and its implications for subsequent political debate. -James Muldoon, Professor of History (Emeritus), Rutgers University, The John Carter Brown Library

Somos' study of the distinctive role of the category of the state of nature in transforming the political awareness and focusing the increasingly revolutionary purposes of America's leaders presents a fundamental challenge to current historiography of the Revolution. It also suggests an original and imaginative approach to capturing the dynamics of revolutionary ideology in the making. It is a book to reckon with. -John Dunn, Professor of Political Theory (Emeritus), University of Cambridge In the vast volume of literature on the American Revolution, Somos' 'American States of Nature' stands out as a provocative and original contribution to its intellectual and legal history. Canvassing sources from the canonical and familiar to the unexpected and neglected, he carefully reconstructs the forgotten history of the 'state of nature' discourse in the American colonies, revealing its significance in the decades culminating in 1776. This painstaking and important work should lead us to revise conventional narratives concerning the Revolution and its relation to American constitutional origins, development, and self-understanding. -David Grewal, Professor of Law, Yale University An invaluable contribution to our understanding of the origins of the American Revolution-Somos' meticulous, closely argued analysis of the development and deployment of distinctively American ideas about the 'state of nature' offers a fresh and illuminating perspective on why patriots ultimately embraced (and loyalists resisted) the break with Britain. This is conceptual history at its very best. -Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History (Emeritus), University of Virginia In this thoughtful, fine-grained analysis of eighteenth-century political literature, Somos demonstrates that the term state of nature, widely employed in these texts, led to the creation of a unique American understanding of what constituted the state of nature and its implications for subsequent political debate. -James Muldoon, Professor of History (Emeritus), Rutgers University, The John Carter Brown Library the conclusions and methods of this book are a very welcome addition to the vast field of studies concerning the complex process with which American identity and citizenship built itself between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Going beyond the disciplinary conventions of legal and political history and addressing issues concerning the history of mentality and intellectual history in the broader sense, this book reminds us of the importance of taking account of the role of symbolic discourse, of citizenship-building through education, and literary and popular culture representations to understand one of the most peculiar turns in Western history. * Luana Salvarani, Global Intellectual History *

Author Information

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.

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