Back to the hall
TG
Enlightenment & Revolutions
Trenchard & Gordon
1670–1723 · 1691–1750 · Whig radicalism
Cato's Letters: how to recognize liberty being taken.
Writing as Cato, these two Englishmen published 144 letters attacking standing armies, prosecutions for seditious libel, and the partnership of crown and church. They defined liberty as the absence of arbitrary power and taught readers to treat small encroachments as the beginnings of slavery. Colonial Americans read them so widely that the letters supplied the revolutionary vocabulary itself.
Why it matters for freedom
Their letters taught a generation that liberty dies when people stop watching those who govern them.
Who they stood against
standing armies, crown patronage, and the clergy who preached submission