The study of political thought is too important to be left to political science and history alone. Of course, it would be odd if analysis did not start within these disciplines. However, the inability to establish more widespread, genuinely interdisciplinary modes of study has meant that ways of reading texts established by historians and social scientists have been accepted as the norm and then imported back into disciplines such as literary studies. Given that our understanding of the early-modern period has been transformed by the realization that people did not divide up the world and the books that represent it as we do, this is a seriously disabling problem for those concerned to reconstruct the past. If we are attempting to recover a world in which people read religious tracts, literary texts, scientific treatises, legal documents and other forms of writing alongside each other, we should recognize that our attempts to distinguish rigidly between subjects will not always yield fruitful results.

A case in point is the question of early-modern republicanism, a subject that has had little impact on the analysis of literature before the eighteenth century. This means that historical and theoretical debate about the existence and substance of republicanism has concentrated on the question of whether it was a language or a programme, a means of articulating an alternative to monarchical government, or a plan of action designed to replace hereditary monarchy.