Rethinking America's modernity: Natural law, natural rights and the character of James Wilson's liberal republicanism

A return to the political thought of James Wilson, one of the most neglected of the founders, can help Americans recover a self-understanding that will do justice to themselves and their republic. While Wilson follows Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in rooting the law of nature in human passions, not least the ubiquitous passion for self-preservation, he extends their teachings by drawing on the Scottish Enlightenment accounts of human ''sociability.'' The result is a view of the liberal republic as an arena for the activation and expansion of the moral sentiments, not merely as a mechanism for the balancing of interests.