Ofir Haivry. John Selden and the Western Political Tradition

Over the past thirty years, the seventeenth-century lawyer, polymath, and Hebraist John Selden (1584–1654) has finally become a major subject for early modern scholarship. Despite the excellence of this work, two misapprehensions regarding Selden’s writings have continued to dominate. One is that Selden did not have ideas but cared about scholarship for its own sake. The other is that if Selden had ideas, they were secularizing and Hobbesian, with an overriding commitment to subjecting religion to the state. In John Selden and the Western Political Tradition, Ofir Haivry demolishes both of these notions. Not only did Selden have ideas, but they were profoundly religious; Selden’s ideas were strongly felt by his contemporaries, who both heralded and vilified them; and those ideas made a lasting impact on the future of English government and religion after the Restoration in 1660. What is more, Selden not only wrote his ideas; he also practiced them in Parliament. Whereas Selden developed and changed as a scholar over the course of his career, especially in his attitudes toward Judaism, nonetheless he purveys a consistency in his ideas whether he is writing a commentary on Michael Drayton’s poem Poly-Olbion; exploring the instantiation of natural law in the minimal slate of Noahide principles; annotating seminal texts in the history of common law; defending his controversial case that tithing is no longer required by God; criticizing Hugo Grotius’s argument that the seas belong to no nation in particular; explicating the Jewish laws of inheritance and marriage; or amassing his enormous study of that Jewish court of elders known as the Sanhedrin. Selden strongly believed that the ideas worked out in these writings could remedy the contemporary crisis that afflicted epistemology, morality, government, and religion

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