An Essay on the First Principles of Government

Book excerpt: 'Essay on the First Principles of Government' (1768) is an early work of modern liberal political theory by 18th-century British polymath Joseph Priestley. Priestley's friends urged him to publish a work on the injustices borne by religious Dissenters because of the Test and Corporation Acts, a topic to which he had already alluded in his "Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life" (1765). Between 1660 and 1665, Parliament passed a series of laws that restricted the rights of Dissenters: they could not hold political office, teach school, serve in the military or attend Oxford and Cambridge unless they ascribed to the thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. In defending the Dissenters, Priestley distinguishes between a private and a public sphere of governmental control; education and religion, in particular, he maintains, are matters of private conscience and should not be administered by the state.