Chapter 6 turns to the attack on the Whig view of the state, and especially to the rejection of the Whig contention that no arbitrary or despotic power is any longer being exercised. The chapter focuses on two major challenges to this complacency. One line of criticism pointed out that, with the creation and rapid growth of the national debt, enormous sums were now being paid directly to the crown, thereby bringing an obvious danger of despotism. The second and epoch- making challenge came from the American colonies. When the British government resolved in 1764 to tax them directly, the colonists denounced this innovation as an obvious act of despotism. They argued that, because they had no representation in the British Parliament, they had no means of expressing or withholding their consent. They were thus being subjected to a wholly arbitrary form of power, and were consequently being treated as slaves. The chapter traces the development of this patriot case in the writings of Otis, Hopkins, Dulany, Dickinson, Jefferson and other colonists, and concludes with the defence of the patriot cause by Price and Paine and the publication of the Declaration of Independence.

All the conspirators could read, and most could write, more or less. Radical newspapers and tavern trade clubs and societies provided their political education. ’Low’ radicals in regency London were as deeply influenced by the agrarian socialist Thomas Spence as by Tom Paine, but, either way, their values drew on Enlightenment. They believed in the people’s right to resist oppression, and some hoped for the redistribution of landed property throughout the kingdom.Spence propagated his ideas through slogans, songs, graffiti, and tokens as well as pamphlets and books; and after his death in 1814 they were propagated through the Society of Spencean Philanthropists and Wedderburn’s ‘chapel’ in Soho, to both of which key conspirators belonged.

In this concluding chapter, I consider how the development of a particular attachment to the founding has shaped constitutional development in the United States and how an alterative grounding in the constitutional thought of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson might provide intellectual resources for a renewed democratic constitutionalism in contemporary American politics.