Pahl, Jon. Paradox Lost: Free Will and Political Liberty in American Culture, 1630-1760

Pahl, Jon. Paradox Lost: Free Will and Political Liberty in American Culture, 1630-1760. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. First Edition. ISBN: 9780801843341. [6304] Gray cloth with gilt titles, xvi., 234 clean pp., dust jacket intact and fine. Fine in fine dust-jacket. Hardcover. "What does the concept of freedom mean in American culture? Where did the characteristic understandings and practices associated with liberty originate, and why? In Paradox Lost Jon Pahl shows how religious ideas about free will directly influenced how Americans thought about liberty."From the antinomian controversy of the 1630s to Jonathan Edwards's classic Freedom of the Will in 1754, leading religious thinkers of colonial America developed ideologies of free will that avoided the extremes of fate ('tyranny') and blind chance ('anarchy'). Transforming these ideologies into political terms, Calvinist and Anglican writers cultivated public theologies that contained the central pa