Sidney’s Conception of Liberty

Abstract

Algernon Sidney¹ had a much less flattering perception of Cromwell, whom he viewed as another “Caesar” or “Tarquin.”² Tarquin was the first Roman king to rule without the consent of the people (sine jussu populi),⁴ and Sidney believed that England’s early Saxon monarchs had also once been elected, omnium consensu,⁴ to rule under laws approved by their Germanic senate and people.⁵ So the ancient Greeks, Italians, Gauls, Germans, Spaniards, and Carthaginians had all been “free nations” because they refused to let their princes be “masters of their lives and goods,” while the Assyrians, Medes, Arabs, Egyptians, Turks, “and others like them” lived in slavery, because their masters were “restrained by no law.”⁶ Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government followed Cicero and Machiavelli in defining basic liberty as “an independency upon the will of another,” and free nations as those where “potentiora erant legum quam hominum imperia” (“the rule of laws was greater than the commands of men”).⁷