My doctoral and subsequent work upon Algernon Sidney (1623–83) yielded three wider perspectives. One was an argument concerning ‘the shape of the seventeenth century’. Another was a view of the European context of that period of English history which placed emphasis upon the formative influence of the United Provinces. The third was an account of English republican thought alternative to that usually arrived at through the study of James Harrington. It is to this last that I turn here, partly on the grounds that there still exists no single book-length introduction to a subject of relatively recent, though now buoyant, historiographical coinage.

Thus in the first place this book draws heavily upon, and attempts to assess, a still-developing historiography of remarkable richness. This connects subjects ancient, early modern and modern; continental Europe, the British Isles and the Americas; and social, economic, religious, political and intellectual history. This reflects the intellectual content of a body of seventeenth-century writing which itself spanned Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, and had a wide, indeed global, subsequent impact. It did so partly because the republican writing of the English revolution constitutes one of the finest bodies of political literature in the English language. In addition, in the course of a penetrating engagement with the failures as well as hopes of one past society in crisis, it aspired to universal observations concerning the human condition.