The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessa… - Bernard Bailyn

The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.

Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.

The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.