An Essay on the First Principles of Government

Download or read book An Essay on the First Principles of Government written by Joseph Priestley and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-04-11 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.