The neo-roman theory of free states became a highly subversive ideology in early-modern Britain. The strategy followed by the theorists I have been considering was to appropriate the supreme moral value of freedom and apply it exclusively to certain rather radical forms of representative government. This eventually allowed them to stigmatise with the opprobrious name of slavery a number of governments – such as the ancien régime in France and the rule of the British in North America – that were widely regarded as legitimate and even progressive. So it is hardly surprising to find that, throughout the period I have been surveying, the neo-roman theory was subjected to a continuing barrage of violently hostile criticism.

Among these criticisms, the most sweeping was expressed in perhaps its most influential form in Hobbes's Leviathan. It is the merest confusion, Hobbes insists, to suppose that there is any connection between the establishment of free states and the maintenance of individual liberty. The freedom described by the Roman writers and their modern admirers alike ‘is not the liberty of Particular men’; it is merely ‘the Liberties of the Common-wealth’.

Hobbes's objection was immediately taken up by Filmer, and has been repeated ever since. The writers I have been considering were concerned, we are told, with the liberty of cities, not the liberty of individual citizens. But this contention fails to come to grips with the structure of the neo-roman theory of liberty.