Introduction: Hebraic Roots, Calvinist Plantings, Anerican Branches

Gordon Schochet is professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University and a founder and co-director of the Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library. He received his AB and MA degrees from Johns Hopkins University and his PhD from the University of Minnesota. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and has held several other fellowships. Professor Schochet is the author of Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Blackwell, 1975; 2nd ed., 1988), Rights in Contexts (2006), From Reformation to Revolution: Western Political Thought in the Early Modern Period (forthcoming), and numerous articles on political philosophy and its history, his current research and writing deals with the political thought of Hobbes, Locke, Filmer, and Mandeville, politics and patriarchy, religious liberty, Western concepts of conscience, and Hebraism in early modern political and legal philosophy.