Sunday, June 9, 2013

Kopel on Mayhew

That was the title of an old blogpost of mine from 2006. Here is Kopel's original article. Also see the comment at my blog where the commenter tries to make what America did "fit" with extant legal technicalities. That's Calvinist resistance speak.

1 comment:

J. L. Bell said...

In his 2006 article Kopel stated that Mayhew coined the phrase "No taxation without representation," apparently in 1766. Kopel didn't cite any text for that statement, nor has anyone else I've read making the claim. He may have been misled by a similarly unsourced claim on Wikipedia the year before.

Although Mayhew was one of the first ministers in Boston to revive the English Civil War's theological arguments for resistance to unjust authority at any level, the myth tying him to "No taxation without representation" renders him as more expicitly political than he really was. It also attempts to ground the Whigs' political and ecoonomic argument against new Parliamentary taxes in a false theological context.