The Intellectual Origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism (1660–1720)

Abstract

Arguably, the tradition of democratic republican theory which arose in the Dutch Republic in the years around 1660 in the writings of Johan and Pieter de la Court, Franciscus van den Enden and Spinoza played a decisively important role in the development of modern democratic political theory. The tradition did not end with Spinoza but continued to develop in the United Provinces and–in the work of Bernard Mandeville, who seemingly belongs more to the Dutch than the British republican tradition–in London, down to the early 18th century. The failure in most histories of republicanism to appreciate how strikingly different intellectually, and as an ideology, the Dutch tradition was from the Anglo-American republican tradition, has had the effect of obscuring its central importance in the development of radical republicanism in mid- and late 18th-century France.