Abstract
For Roman jurists like Cicero, the rendering of the Greek word politeia into Latin as res publica was intended simply to describe the state or public affairs. It was in this sense of any legitimate political community that Bodin understood re publica, or la chose publique when he published Six Books of the Republic. In English the word best translates as common weal or commonwealth, and similarly refers to the common business, and to the state as the arena of this public business. By the seventeenth century, two additional meanings came to be associated with republic or republicanism: a form of state distinguished from hereditary sovereign monarchy, and a style of political conduct where civic equality, public participation, and public spiritedness were deemed essential to the health of the state.1 Both of these associations, inasmuch as they were embraced by seventeenth-century theorists, found their most immediate historical roots in the Italian city-republics of the Renaissance. And during our period, they would find their most compelling application in mid-century England, where the Civil War created a temporary power vacuum and a free press, both of which facilitated the emergence of radical new views on public authority.
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Notes and References
R. N. Berki, ‘Republic/Republicanism’ in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Institutions (Oxford, 1987), p. 534;
Herbert H. Rowen, ‘Kingship and Republicanism in the Seventeenth Century’ in C. H. Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation (New York, 1965), pp. 428–9.
Quentin Skinner, ‘The Italian City-Republics’ in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey (Oxford, 1993), pp. 57–69;
Margaret Canovan, ‘Republicanism’, in The Encyclopedia of Democracy (Berkeley, CA, 1968), pp. 3–5.
Machiavelli, Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth, 1984), book 2,ch.2.
Arthur Herman, ‘The Huguenot Republic and Antirepublicanism in Seventeenth-Century France’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1992), 249–69.
Quoting John Dunn, ‘The Identity of the Bourgeois Liberal Republic’, in Biancamaria Fontana (ed.), The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge, 1994), p. 206.
Linda Kirk, ‘Genevan Republicanism’, in David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, CA, 1994), p. 270.
For a discussion see William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley, CA, 1968), pp. 3–5.
E. H. Kossmann, ‘Freedom in Dutch Thought and Practice’, in Jonathan I. Israel (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch Moment (Cambridge, 1991), p. 287.
See also Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), p. 215.
Eco Haitsma Mulier, ‘The Language of Seventeenth-century Republicanism in the United Provinces: Dutch or European?’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), p. 179.
See also Kossmann, ‘The Development of Dutch Political Theory in the Seventeenth Century’, in J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (eds), Britain and the Netherlands (London, 1959), p. 91.
See J. L. Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic during the Seventeenth Century (London, 1974).
Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt: 1555–1590 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 271.
Blair Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism, 1649–1656’, in Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society, p. 46. For the later development of these ideas in England, see Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (London, 1959);
and in America, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967).
Glenn Burgess, ‘Impact of the Civil War’, in John Morrill (ed.), Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s (London, 1991), p. 73.
F. D. Dow, Radicalism in the English Revolution, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1985), p. 12.
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York, 1972), p. 77.
Hobbes quoted in Andrew Sharp (ed.), Political Ideas of the English Civil Wars (London, 1983), pp. 234–5.
John Sanderson, ‘But the people’s creatures’: The Philosophical Basis of the English Civil War (New York, 1989), pp. 128–9.
Martin Dzelzainis (ed.), John Milton: Political Writings, trans. Claire Gruzelier (Cambridge, 1991), p. xi.
Ibid., p. ix. See also Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1978).
Wootton, Divine Right, p. 17. For a representative selection of Leveller writings, see G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Levellers in the English Revolution (New York, 1975),
and Don M. Wolfe (ed.), Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1967).
David Wootton, ‘The Levellers’ in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey (Oxford, 1992), p. 71.
Derik Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England, 1603–1658 (Cambridge, MA, 1986), p. 272.
Perez Zagorin, History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, 1954), pp. 9–11.
Ronald Hutton, The British Republic 1649–1660 (London, 1987), pp. 13–14.
Gerrard Winstanley, The Saints Paradise (abstract) in George H. Sabine (ed.), The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (New York, 1965), p. 94.
James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1992), p. viii.
Caroline Robbins (ed.), Two English Republican Tracts (London, 1969), p. 68.
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© 1998 W. M. Spellman
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Spellman, W.M. (1998). Republicanism Rekindled. In: European Political Thought 1600–1700. European Culture and Society. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27200-6_5
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