INTRODUCTION

English republicanism defined itself primarily in relation, not to constitutional structures, but moral principles. It was of these which Milton spoke when he praised ‘fortitude and love of freedom … wisdom … valour, justice [and] constancy’, and Vane when he wrote to Harrington ‘joyning in witness with you … unto those principles of common right and freedome, that must be provided for, in whatsoever frame of Government it be’. These constituted the moral philosophy of English republicanism: the positive moral good it proposed to itself.

One aspect of this moral philosophy concerned means. Whatever its constitutional form, the citizens of a republic were free. This freedom was, in the words of Milton, ‘the only school of virtue’. Recently Quentin Skinner has identified within these English writings a ‘third theory of liberty’, distinct from both the Greek positive liberty identified by Pocock and the negative liberty associated with natural law language (liberalism).