The Anti-Catholic Roots of Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom in English Political Thought

Intense religious and political hostility to Roman Catholicism, or "popery" as its detractors referred to it, played a pervasive and constitutive role in the development of both liberal and republican conceptions of liberty in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English political thought. Liberal and republican thinkers alike endorsed both individual and collective notions of liberty, such as freedom of thought and the idea of a free state, in contradistinction to various political and religious evils closely associated with Catholicism. The rhetoric of anti-popery served as the common language of thinkers who otherwise approached the question of English liberty in different ways. Ideas of Creation in the Writings of Richard Overton the Leveller and Paradise Lost