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"The English Revolution has always held pride of place in histories of Anglophone political thought. The political writings of the Levellers and John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and James Harrington, to name only the most obvious, were all shaped by, indeed in many ways the products of, the upheavals of the mid seventeenth century. It is simply impossible to understand their political ideas without the context of the English Revolution. Historians have pored over every aspect of political thought from the first controversies leading up to the civil wars in the early 1640s to the final debates on the eve of the Restoration in 1659-60, and yet there is one period amid these revolutionary decades which has captured scant scholarly attention. This is the period of the free state from early 1649, when Charles I was executed and the free state established, to the spring of 1653, when Oliver Cromwell and the army dissolved the Rump and eventually established the protectorate. This scholarly neglect is even more startling given the fact that the trial and execution of Charles I and the founding of the free state arguably marked the culmination of the entire period. Historians have of course examined the political ideas underlying these events and the whole republican era, but, although they often disagree with one another on many points of detail, they agree on one salient general point. Practically all of them, though in varying degrees, play down, or even belittle, the importance of the political thought of the republican period"--
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Changing the form of government; 2. Anti-monarchism; 3. The free state; 4. Aristocracy; 5. Democracy; Epilogue.
About the author
Markku Peltonen is Professor of History at the University of Helsinki. He has published widely on early modern political thought and intellectual history, including Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (1995), The Duel in Early Modern England (2003) and Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity in Pre-Revolutionary England (2012), all published by Cambridge University Press. He has also edited The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (1996 ) and has been the recipient of numerous international research fellowships and awards.
Summary
English republicanism has long been a major theme in the history of political thought, but the years of the English free state are often overlooked. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the vast political pamphlet literature of the era, The Political Thought of the English Free State, 1649–1653 offers a provocative reassessment of the English Revolution and an original new perspective on English republicanism. Markku Peltonen explores the arguments in defence of the English free state and demonstrates the profound importance of the republican period. The pamphleteers who defended the free state maintained that the people, or their representatives, could alter the form of government whenever they deemed it advantageous, put forward powerful anti-monarchical arguments and widely shared the republican conviction that individual freedom could only materialise in a free state. Peltonen also highlights the unprecedented debate over whether the free state was an aristocracy or democracy and shows how, for the first time in English history, democracy was not only robustly defended but understood as representative.
Foreword
Presents a provocative reassessment of the English Revolution and an original new perspective on English republicanism.
