A man was killed for what he had written in private and never published. It is worth truly considering that fact still for a moment, because it tells us something about the stakes of the ideas this article concerns. These were not abstractions to be debated at leisure. In the England of the 1680s, the proposition that no king could derive an unanswerable title from Adam — and that legitimate power rested instead on law, the public good, and some form of consent — was dangerou