Some scholars propose Hugh Williamson as a possible author for this pamphlet that argues that the British government has pushed the Americans “ into the very bowels of a civil war.” The author further suggests that peace requires a change of the governing party in Britain rather than complete submission from the Americans. The pamphlet’s lively contemporary description of the Boston Tea Party and other famous precursors of the Revolution are of particular interest even to casual readers.

One of the many pamphlets in response to Johnson’s Taxation no Tyranny, Resistance no Rebellion praises the good sense and dignity of the Americans while noting the ways in which they have been insulted by the British. The author is particularly incensed by Johnson’s claims of absolute authority for the King and Parliament, writing that “Their love of power has betrayed them into an absurdity.”

This 1775 pamphlet was published as an anonymous response to Samuel Johnson’s Taxation No Tyranny. Johnson’s towering reputation as a man of letters appears to enrage rather than intimidate this anonymous author, who takes Johnson to task for cloaking poor logic and argumentation in his famous linguistic splendor. The anonymous pamphleteer argues that, rather than the absolute power that Johnson argued for, “English power will stand upon the firmest ground, when it is least abused by tyranny” and emphasizes the mutual dependence of Great Britain and the colonies.

The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776 selected by Jack Greene, makes available in modern digitized form a trove of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets that directly addressed what became known in metropolitan Britain as the American Question. This pamphlet is a part of that collection.

Written in response to Samuel Johnson’s Taxation no Tyranny, this pamphlet dismisses Johnson’s arguments as unworthy of response, except for the fact that they are “irritating to Englishmen.” The author makes much of Johnson’s receipt of a government pension, calling him a “slave of state…hired by his stipend to obey his master in all things.” His most telling blow is to quote from Johnson’s poem ”London,” an earlier work in defense of liberty, as an argument against Johnson’s later pamphlet.

Written in 1775 in response to the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, Samuel Johnson’s Taxation no Tyranny is a defense of Parliamentary Sovereignty, particularly the right to tax. One of the greatest English prose stylists of his era, Johnson brings his considerable skills to bear against the “zealots of anarchy” in the American colonies who objected to taxation without representation.

The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776 selected by Jack Greene, makes available in modern digitized form a trove of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets that directly addressed what became known in metropolitan Britain as the American Question. This pamphlet is a part of that collection.

The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776 selected by Jack Greene, makes available in modern digitized form a trove of eighteenth-century books and pamphlets that directly addressed what became known in metropolitan Britain as the American Question. This pamphlet is a part of that collection.

In Historical Law-Tracts, Kames combined the natural law framework that underlies his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion with the “conjectural,” or philosophical, approach to history that would receive its fullest treatment in his Sketches of the History of Man to offer a history of law as a history of the progress of mankind from savage to civil society.

This is the first full-length English translation of Benjamin Constant’s massive study of humanity’s religious forms and development, published in five volumes between 1824 and 1831. Constant (1767–1830) regarded On Religion, worked on over the course of many years, as perhaps his most important philosophical work. He called it “the only interest, the only consolation of my life,” and “the book that I was destined by nature to write.”