British Democracy Research Articles

‘In Accord with British Traditions’: The Rise of Compulsory Religious Education in Ontario, Canada, and Victoria, Australia, 1945–50

This article examines the establishment of legally mandated Protestant training in the Australian state of Victoria and the Canadian province of Ontario. Fearing moral decay at home and a menacing world environment seemingly unfavourable to the ‘British way of life’ in the 1940s, educators asserted that religion, and specifically Protestant Christianity, was the only means by which the moral core of their British democracy could be preserved. The teaching of religious instruction was highly controversial in both places. Supporters of the new curriculum believed the religious courses would strengthen the British identity and moral backbone of the Canadian and Australian nations, while opponents argued that imposing religion in the classroom was antithetical to British ideals of freedom and toleration. Educators struggled to reconcile these divergent views on how religion fitted into a wider British identity, and the resulting tension exposed the points of ethnic and cultural fracture that undermined the credibility of Britishness after 1950. The very efforts to impose a unifying sense of Britishness were so controversial and problematic that they ultimately required an alternative understanding of what it meant to be a citizen of Ontario or Victoria.

The Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews in 1848: Allies against French Revolution and British Democracy

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviews battled over the meaning of the French revolutions of 1789 and 1830, the former periodical commending and the latter condemning political progress. After the February Revolution of 1848, however, the opponents joined forces by scorning the French Republicans and by insisting that Britain was safe from a similar crisis. Yet their emphasis on British exceptionalism and security was accompanied by the admission that Britain was also progressing toward a democratic order. The two reviews thus contradicted both their former positions and their faith in the status quo.

LES JUGES JUGEZ, SE JUSTIFIANTS(1663) AND EDMUND LUDLOW‘S PROTESTANT NETWORK IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY SWITZERLAND

ABSTRACTThis article aims to locate English republican thought and writing in a wider European context and to understand the personal connections that aided the distribution and reception of English republican ideas abroad. It does so through the case-study of a little-known pamphlet published by the English regicide Edmund Ludlow during his exile in Switzerland after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660.Les juges jugez, se justifiants(1663) was a French translation of the dying speeches and other miscellaneous texts of some of the English regicides, produced in Geneva and subsequently printed in Yverdon with the help of Ludlow's local Protestant network. Rather than propagating a secular republican ideology, Ludlow offered his work to a European Protestant audience in the language of Geneva, promoting a primarily religious cause in an attempt to make martyrs out of political activists. It is therefore to Ludlow's Protestant networks that we need to turn to find out more about the transmission of English republican ideas in francophone Europe and beyond.

Winstanley’s Utopia in Literature and in Cinema

Trying to achieve a perfect or better society for living, men dared, from very beginning of his existence, to fulfill their own utopias. This was case of Winstanley, a man who during Interregnum envisioned for future of English Commonwealth establishment of a rural communism as he believed the earth was a common treasure for all. Beginning his utopia with an impulse to act and a call for action: If you don't act, you do nothing Winstanley, failed setting up Diggers communities with whom he established proto-socialist communes. However he still continued to act, but this time digging in pages and not in ground as he had done with Diggers. Based in his previous experience with Diggers communities he wrote then his remarkable utopia, The Law of Freedom, which he dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, urging English people to emulate it. Once more he wasn't succeeded with his words and only in twentieth century historians and film makers found in his pamphlets and his literary utopia, a remarkable literary and historic resource to depict socio-political reality of Interregnum period. So it would be in cinema through shot of image, that Winstanley's utopia would be relived and restored it to life. Through this remarkable intersemiotic transpose we realize that process of writing can be regarded as process of picturing as both try to piece together or, in other words, re-member fragments of recollections from past, of haunting guilt and traumas, beautiful dreams and aspirations, or visions of utopias that far from being fixed entities, are, rather, an endless and unfinished process filled with clashes and conflicts.

Introduction

Introduction RORY LOUGHNANE, ANDREW J. POWER, AND PETER SILLITOE In late 1624 tides of change were sweeping across Europe. Louis XIII appointed Cardinal Richelieu as First Minister of France on 12 August of that year, the Siege of Breda represented a high-water mark for Spanish success in the Eighty Years’ War, and, as the health of James I declined, England faced up to the prospect of a new monarch for the first time in over two decades.1 The wider contexts for the adventoftheCarolineerainEnglishhistory—royalismandradicalism,cavalierism andparliamentarianism—hasinvitedanapproachtoliterarystudiesoftheperiod that is tied inextricably to the political and theological controversies, conflicts and crises of its day. The writing of the period itself was long treated as a type of stopgap , bridging the creative brilliance of the ‘golden age’ of English writing, from Spenser to Shakespeare to Donne, with the outbreak of civil war, the formation of the English Commonwealth, undone by the later Restoration, and the emergence of Milton, Davenant and Dryden. Thus the ‘first’ Caroline period of literature — more typically discussed as ending in 1642, such has been the predominance of critical writing on dramatic performance, but in fact ending with the execution of Charles I in 1649 — has suffered by negative comparison to what came before and what emerged later. But such a critical vantage point has come under increased attack in recent years as scholars have set out to understand and appreciate the literature of this period on its own merits and not only in the light of the literary successes of the earlier age or the bloody ruptures of the civil war to come.2 On James I’s final months, see Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the 1 First Monarch of a United Great Britain (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), pp. 330–50. Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 2 helped first instigate the revisionist charge. More recently, works such as Reid Barbour’s Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Thomas N. Corns’s collection The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and his monograph A History of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) have helped sustain it. As ever, much criticism has centred on drama in the period, and there have been several excellent revisionist studies of the period, including: Julie Sanders’s Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999) and The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer’s collection Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern Stage, 1625–1642 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Yearbook of English Studies, 44 (2014), 1–11© Modern Humanities Research Association 2014 We begin by attempting to situate our current enterprise within recent studies of the period. The present volume brings together fourteen established and emerging scholars of Caroline literature to assess and respond to recent critical approaches, while also shedding new light on overlooked texts, contexts and practices. We have requested that contributors ask new questions about the function, form and features of Caroline literature, shifting the critical question from ‘how is such writing distinct from what comes before?’ or, ‘how does it pre-empt the revolution to come?’ to ‘how might we approach this literature on its own terms?’ This is not to dismiss the political and theological turmoil of the period, or, indeed, to overlook the weighty sense of nostalgia for, and anxious engagement with, earlier writing that is pervasive in this period, but instead to search for new ways to approach an epoch of writing that remains (relatively) neglected in the English canon. The fruits of such an approach — from the identification of a new vogue for the ‘grotesque’ in contemporary poetry to a reconsideration of the evidence for the reputation of the Red Bull theatre and its repertory — attest to the varied ways by which we might revisit and revise opinions about Caroline literary activity. The volume is divided into three discrete sections — drama, poetry and other writing — but, as will become clear, each section...

An Account of Denmark, With Francogallia and Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor by Robert Molesworth

Reviewed by: An Account of Denmark, With Francogallia and Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor by Robert Molesworth D. W. Hayton Robert Molesworth . An Account of Denmark, With Francogallia and Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor, ed. Justin Champion . Indianapolis : The Liberty Fund , 2011 . Pp. lvii + 394 . $18.49 . Robert, first Viscount Molesworth (1656–1725) was perhaps the most important of the Irish “commonwealthsmen” identified in Caroline Robbins’s pathbreaking study The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Harvard, 1959; reprinted by The Liberty Fund in 2004). Political historians focus on his exposition of “Gothic constitutionalism” as a classic exemplar of libertarian Whiggism, and explore his connections with the third earl of Shaftesbury, whose advocacy of a “polite” culture of civic virtue he is alleged to have brought to Ireland. After 1715, Molesworth, despairing of preferment in England, retired to his Irish estates and ensconced himself within a circle of disciples, including the young Francis Hutcheson, through whom Shaftesbury’s ideas were transmitted to Scotland. Historians of Ireland are interested in Molesworth’s contributions [End Page 186] to the development of a “patriot” interest in the Dublin parliament and the Dublin press after 1714. And historians of Denmark, where Molesworth served unhappily as William III’s envoy extraordinary between 1689 and 1692, still pick over the insults to their native land, its people, and especially its monarchy, contained in the famous (or to, Danes, infamous) Account of the kingdom published in 1694. These different phases of Molesworth’s life reflect an unsettled temperament and disappointed ambition, resulting in a public life marked by sharp changes of direction. For many years, he was torn between settling in Ireland and London; he oscillated between supporting Whig ministries as bastions against “popish” absolutism, and opposing them when he smelled a betrayal of traditional principles; and he was himself alternately attracted by the prospects of office and repelled by the expectations of patronage. Throughout, however, he kept the greater good firmly in view. Devoted to the ideal of liberty and public virtue, he despised tyranny, especially “priestcraft,” whether Roman Catholic or High Anglican. Molesworth’s attributable published writings have been gathered for the first time in this handsomely produced volume, one of a series of principal libertarian tracts in the library of Thomas Hollis, the eighteenth-century English Dissenter whose mission in life was to reprint and circulate works from the canon of English republican thought. Hollis was a particular benefactor of American colleges, including Harvard, and this connection presumably forms the rationale for the series. Molesworth’s editor is Mr. Champion, whose own studies of English anti-clericalism, and of Toland, an Irish writer with a close personal connection to Molesworth, fit him admirably for the task. This edition brings together the Account of Denmark and the full text of Molesworth’s translation of Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (the preface of which is often studied separately), and adds an interesting pamphlet from the days of Molesworth’s Irish exile, the Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor (1723), an early example of the literature on Irish “improvement” that reached maturity a decade or so later with the writings of Thomas Prior and Arthur Dobbs. Although the editorial apparatus is minimal (some might wish for more since Molesworth is not important enough to make another edition likely in the near future), Mr. Champion amply explains for the “general reader.” The discussion of the Account of Denmark, with its essential warning that liberty could be imperiled and even destroyed by Protestant as well as Catholic monarchs bent on absolute rule, and of Franco-Gallia, with its account of the ideal “Gothic constitution,” in which liberty was guaranteed by aristocratic virtue, sets Molesworth’s writing in a long chronological and a broad continental perspective. It also integrates them into a vision of liberty’s origins in historical processes. Mr. Champion’s persuasive reading emphasizes Molesworth’s “historical scholarship,” which connects closely with that of Molesworth’s protégé Toland, and finds a link between the Danish and French experience as establishing “how historically contingent these traditions of freedom were.” The afterlife of both texts is discussed...

The crisis of British democracy: Back to the '70s or stuck in the present?

‘Crises can transform politics; scandals rarely do.’ Drawing a contrast with the ructions of the 1970s, David Runciman argues that British democracy is suffering from a permanent state of scandal which obscures the underlying crisis of elitist managerial politics.

William Harvey: a life in circulation

In 1628, the English physician William Harvey published his revolutionary theory of blood circulation. Offering a radical conception of the workings of the human body and the function of the heart, Harvey's theory overthrew centuries of anatomical and physiological orthodoxy and had profound consequences for the history of science. It also had an enormous impact on culture more generally, influencing economists, poets and political thinkers, for whom the theory triumphed not as empirical fact but as a remarkable philosophical idea. In the first major biographical study of Harvey in 50 years, Thomas Wright charts the meteoric rise of a yeoman's son to the elevated position of King Charles I's physician, taking the reader from farmlands of Kent to England's royal palaces, and paints a vivid portrait of an extraordinary mind formed at a fertile time in England's intellectual history. Set in late Renaissance London, the book features an illustrious cast of historical characters, from Francis Bacon and John Donne to Robert Fludd, whose corroboration of Harvey's ideas helped launch his circulation theory. After he published his discoveries, Harvey became famous throughout Europe, where he demonstrated his theory through public vivisections. Although his ideas met with vociferous opposition, they eventually triumphed and Harvey became renowned as the only man in the history of natural philosophy to live to see a revolutionary theory gain wide currency. But just as intellectual ideas could be toppled, so too could kings. When Charles I was overthrown during the Civil War of the 1640s, his loyal court physician fell also, and Harvey, an unrepentant Royalist, was banished from London under the English Republic. He died in the late 1650s, a gout-ridden, melancholy man, uncertain of his achievement. A victim of the political turmoil of the times, William Harvey was nevertheless the mainspring of vast historical changes in anatomy and physiology. Wright's biography skillfully repositions Harvey as a man who embodied the intellectual and cultural spirit of his age, and launched a revolution that would continue to run its course long after his death.

The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns. By Rachel Hammersley. Studies in Early Modern European History. Edited by Joseph Bergin et al.Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Distributed by Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. xii+239. $90.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns. By Rachel Hammersley. Studies in Early Modern European History. Edited by Joseph Bergin et al.Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Distributed by Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. xii+239. $90.00.Andrew JainchillAndrew JainchillQueen’s University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 85, Number 2June 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/669760 Views: 22Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Rachel Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France. Between the Ancients and the Moderns. Manchester/New York, Manchester University Press 2010 Hammersley Rachel The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France. Between the Ancients and the Moderns. 2010 Manchester University Press Manchester/New York £ 60,–

Article Rachel Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France. Between the Ancients and the Moderns. Manchester/New York, Manchester University Press 2010 was published on June 1, 2013 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 296, issue 3).

BRITISH POLITICS AND CINEMA'S HISTORICAL DRAMAS, 1929–1938

ABSTRACTInspired by the debate about the influence feature films exerted over popular political attitudes during the interwar period, this article explores how one of cinema's most popular genres, the historical drama, represented British politics during the 1930s. It concentrates on eight films that depicted leading figures from Britain's modern political past, ranging from Robert Clive and Pitt the elder to Queen Victoria by way of Benjamin Disraeli. The article emphasizes how this historiophoty was shaped by the movies' production context. For they were: created within a transatlantic culture, with a majority produced in Hollywood; depended on how stars associated with the genre, notably George Arliss, embodied their roles; and structured around conventions which privileged popularity over accuracy. Thanks to such influences, these movies articulated a strongly normative view of British democracy, showing how personable, paternalistic, and disinterested leaders had improved the people's welfare and advanced a benevolent empire. This picture of Britain's political past was clearly convenient to Stanley Baldwin's Conservative party. However, it owed its essential character less to the establishment bias of the interwar film industry and more to the irreducibly ‘cinematic’ nature of commercial cinema.

The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism. Edited by RobertCrowcroft, S. J. D.Green and RichardWhiting. I. B. Tauris. 2010. xiii + 328pp. £59.50.

HistoryVolume 98, Issue 330 p. 259-262 Reviews and Short Notices The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism. Edited by Robert Crowcroft, S. J. D. Green and Richard Whiting. I. B. Tauris. 2010. xiii + 328pp. £59.50. R. Gerald Hughes, R. Gerald Hughes Aberystwyth UniversitySearch for more papers by this author R. Gerald Hughes, R. Gerald Hughes Aberystwyth UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 April 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12010_6Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume98, Issue330April 2013Pages 259-262 RelatedInformation

POLITICAL REPRESENTATION IN BELGIUM, FRANCE AND PORTUGAL: MPs AND THEIR CONSTITUENTS IN VERY DIFFERENT POLITICAL SYSTEMS

Premieres lignes : Introduction In many contemporary democracies, how the political system works is questioned. Citizens are showing growing dissatisfaction in their institutions, and trust in their representatives and in political parties is declining (Dalton 2004). The recent financial and economic crisis has even led to some political scientists to wonder whether our system of government is still able to maintain the link with citizens (Mair 2009). And the debate has not been limited to political and social sciences. Within society, but also within political institutions, there have been many discussions for several years on how to restore citizens' trust in democracy. Interestingly, on many occasions, it has appeared that among the solutions proposed, institutions have been very central. And among institutional cures proposed, changes in electoral institutions have been often put to the forefront. One recent example is the UK referendum on alternative vote (AV) in 2011. Though it was probably not the main motivation of this proposal, how this new electoral system would change British democracy, and would potentially re-engage

The American Civil War in the shaping of British Democracy

The American Civil War in the shaping of British Democracy, by Brent E. Kinser, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, 206 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6095-8 Brent E. Kinser's The American Civil War i...

Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism, Republicanism and Democracy

Summary Traditional accounts of seventeenth-century English republicanism have usually presented it as inherently anti-monarchical and anti-democratic. This article seeks to challenge and complicate this picture by exploring James Harrington's views on royalism, republicanism and democracy. Building on recent assertions about Harrington's distinctiveness as a republican thinker, the article suggests that the focus on Harrington's republicanism has served to obscure the subtlety and complexity of his moral and political philosophy. Focusing on the year 1659, and the pamphlet war that Harrington and his supporters waged against their fellow republicans, it seeks to re-emphasise important but neglected elements of Harrington's thought. It suggests that the depth and extent of Harrington's sympathy with royalists and royalism has been underplayed, while too little attention has been paid to the fundamental differences between his ideas and those adopted by other republican thinkers at the time. In addition it brings to light, for the first time, Harrington's innovative endorsement of both the term and the concept of ‘democracy’ and draws attention to his intellectual and personal affinities with the Levellers. Finally it outlines some implications of these findings for understandings of English republicanism and the republican tradition more generally.

La Boétie and the Neo-Roman Conception of Freedom

Freedom as a natural right, the importance of consent, defending the idea that government should be in the hands of the most virtuous and reflective citizens, denouncing patronage, the need to link individual and political freedom … These are some of the characteristics of La Boétie's doctrine that I believe place him within the tradition that Quentin Skinner calls the neo-Roman conception of civil liberty. Of course, La Boétie did not write a positive defence of the rule of law, as Livy did in his History of Rome and as the English republicans do, but the Discourse can easily be read as a legal plea condemning absolute monarchy and any kind of arbitrary regime.

From ‘arms, malice, and menacing’ to the courts: disputed elections and the reform of the election petitions system

For almost as long as there have been elections, their outcomes have been disputed. Disgruntled candidates have tried many different avenues to right the wrongs of an election they consider they should have won. For several hundred years, jurisdiction over disputed elections was exercised by the Monarch personally, then by the courts, and then by Parliament until finally, in the 1860s, Parliament ceded its power to the courts in the form of the election petitions jurisdiction. This paper considers that history, examines the current system of election petitions, and proposes a number of reforms to this crucial aspect of British democracy.

The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth‐Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns – By Rachel Hammersley

The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth‐Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns – By Rachel Hammersley

BRENT E. KINSER. The American Civil War in the Shaping of British Democracy.

BRENT E. KINSER. The American Civil War in the Shaping of British Democracy.

Republics Ancient and Modern (Continued)

Republics Ancient and Modern (Continued) Michael P. Zuckert (bio) Paul A. Rahe . Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii + 422 pp. List of abbreviations, notes, and index. $74.00 (cloth); $29.99 (paper). Paul A. Rahe . Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. xvii + 374 pp. List of abbreviations, notes, and index. $38.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). Twice in Against Throne and Altar Paul Rahe calls John Milton "the best-read Englishman of his generation" (ATA, pp. 102, 155). I suppose that claim could be made for Paul Rahe himself. He seems to have read or at least cited in his notes every primary and secondary text of even tangential relevance to his topics. It is difficult to imagine a better bibliographical guide to those materials than Rahe's notes, which also contain extremely learned discussions of issues roiling the relevant scholarly waters. Moreover, the range of topics, thinkers, and historical eras Rahe covers is more than impressive. In the two books under review, he takes up the modern republican tradition from Machiavelli through Margaret Thatcher, Nicholas Sarkozy, and, very briefly, Barack Obama, with backward looks at Epicurus, Aristotle, Averroes, and the medieval Averroist tradition. He traces the resurgence of Averroism at Padua in the fifteenth century and follows the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of inquietude from Pascal through Nicole and Locke and up to its central role in Tocqueville's diagnosis of the ills of modern democratic republicanism, among many other things. Learnedness is not Rahe's sole virtue. Despite the heavy overlay of scholarship, he writes lucid, fluid, and graceful prose. He has a point—or many points—to make and addresses important questions. He writes not only clear but fearless prose, for he jumps into many raging scholarly and political debates with forcefully put judgments about where truth lies. For a historian, he delves extremely deeply into the thought he is discussing. For a student of political thought, he is remarkably knowledgeable about the relevant history. He is more careful with the thought and more pointed in his use of historical context than writers of the so-called Cambridge school, of whom he often reminds one. [End Page 10] Both books are related to Rahe's earlier mammoth Republics Ancient and Modern (RAM, 1992), which was an attempt to elucidate not the continuities between ancient and modern republicanism, as modern authorities like J. G. A. Pocock had done, but to bring out the "decisive break" between them (RAM, p. x). Against Throne and Altar is clearly part of that same agenda. Indeed, he presents it as "a sequel of sorts," aiming to make up for the "short shrift" he had given some thinkers in the earlier book's twelve hundred pages (ATA, p. 1). To redress the slight inflicted by the earlier book, he discusses at length Machiavelli, John Milton, Marchmont Nedham, Thomas Hobbes, and James Harrington. His point is not merely that these five thinkers were under-discussed earlier, but that they represent a tradition of Machiavellian republicanism (or at least Nedham and Harrington do); and the tradition is an important one, for "their thinking marked a turning point in the history of constitutional prudence" (ATT, p. 1). Although Milton is sometimes treated as one of the English republicans influenced by Machiavelli, Rahe sees him differently. He is a contrast with the Machiavellians, for he is a genuine representative of the classical republican tradition, albeit one who took Machiavelli seriously but wrote in opposition to him. The differences between Milton and the others, thus, is a carryover from the theme of Republics Ancient and Modern—that there is really a great difference between the two forms of political thought. Rahe does not consider Hobbes to be a Machiavellian republican either; he presents him rather as a "modern monarchist" who, in his youth, was touched by Machiavelli but who has a place in this book because he greatly influenced James Harrington, whose republicanism was, Rahe argues, an amalgam of Machiavellian and Hobbesean themes. Rahe's other book, Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift (SD...