Liberty and American experience in the eighteenth century / edited and with an introduction by David Womersley.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Of liberty and colonies" : a case study of constitutional conflict in the mid-eighteenth-century British American empire / Jack P. Greene -- The dialectic of liberty : law and religion in revolutionary America / Robert A. Ferguson -- Religious conscience and original sin : an exploitation of America's Protestant foundations / Barry Shain -- Liberty, metaphor, and mechanism : "checks and balances" and the origins of modern constitutionalism / David Wootton -- Moral sense theory and the appeal to natural rights in the American founding / R.G. Frey -- "Riches valuable at all times and to all men" : Hume and the eighteenth-century debate on commerce and liberty / John W. Danford -- Scottish thought and the American revolution : Adam Ferguson's response to Richard Price / Ronald Hamowy -- Federalism, constitutionalism, and republican liberty : the first constructions of the constitution / Lance Banning -- Is there a "James Madison problem"? / Gordon S. Wood.

"Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century presents new essays on central themes of the American Founding period by some of today's preeminent scholars of American history." "In ten essays, these writers explore various specific aspects of the zeitgeist, among them Burke's theories on property rights and government, the relations between religious and legal understandings of liberty, the significance of Protestant beliefs on the founding, the economic background to the Founders' thought on governance, moral sense theory contrasted with natural rights, and divisions of thought on the nature of liberty and how it was to be preserved."--Jacket.