Books by Paul (University of Toronto) Downes

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature explores the development of ideas about sovereignty and democracy in the early United States. It looks at Puritan sermons and poetry, founding-era political debates and representations of revolutionary and anti-slavery violence to reveal how Americans imagined the elusive possibility of a democratic sovereignty.

Paul Downes combines literary criticism and political history in order to explore responses to the rejection of monarchism in the American revolutionary era. He claims that the post-revolutionary American state and the new democratic citizen inherited some of the complex features of absolute monarchy, even as they were strenuously trying to assert their difference from it.