This is the second of two studies of the seventeenth-century English republican, Algernon Sidney. It is linked both chronologically and thematically to its predecessor, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623–77 (1988). It is also structurally similar to that work. Each begins with a general, principally analytical section, intended to set the succeeding account of Sidney's activities, and of a major work, in its explanatory context. In the previous book that context was intellectual; the subsequent object was to describe the principal layers of Sidney's intellectual development. Here the context is at once broader in historical, and shorter in chronological scope: it is an examination of the religious and political crisis of 1678–83. The overall objective is, however, the same. It is to complete the account of Algernon Sidney's life and thought, by recreating the contexts which gave them the meaning, and the importance, that Sidney himself attached to them.

As this object has dictated both of these structures, so it has underlain the division into two books itself. In Sidney and the English Republic it was possible to achieve the required recontextualisation biographically, without going far beyond the person and ideas of Sidney himself. For the period 1678–83 this has not been possible. One result is that it is not until part two, or chapter 5 of the present work, that the biographical narrative already begun is resumed. This second contextualisation would have been an unacceptable rupture in the midst of a single-volume biography.