"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"--

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.

The Puritan Revolution escaped the control of its creators. The parliamentarians who went to war with Charles I in 1642 did not want or expect the fundamental changes that would follow seven years later: the trial and execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the creation of the only republic in English history. There were startling and unexpected developments, too, in religion and ideas: the spread of unorthodox doctrines; the attainment of a wide measure of liberty of conscience; and new thinking about the moral and intellectual bases of politics and society. God's Instruments centres on the principal instrument of radical change, Oliver Cromwell, and on the unfamiliar landscape of the decade he dominated, from the abolition of the monarchy in 1649 to the return of the Stuart dynasty in 1660. Its theme is the relationship between the beliefs or convictions of politicians and their decisions and actions. Blair Worden explores the biblical dimension of Puritan politics; the ways that a belief in the workings of divine providence affected political conduct; Cromwell's commitment to liberty of conscience and his search for godly reformation through educational reform; the constitutional premises of his rule and those of his opponents in the struggle for supremacy between parliamentary and military rule; and the relationship between conceptions of civil and religious liberty. The conflicts Worden reconstructs are placed in the perspective of long-term developments, of which many historians have lost sight. The final chapters turn to the guiding convictions of two writers at the heart of politics, John Milton and the royalist Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Material from previously published essays, much of it expanded and extensively revised, comes together with newly written chapters to bring fresh evidence and argument to a period of lively debate and interest.

James Harrington's brief career as a political and historical theorist spans the last years of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration of 1660. This volume comprises the first and last of Harrington's writings. Harrington was the first theorist to interpret the English Civil Wars as a revolution, the result of a long-term process of social change which led to the decay of the old political order. The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) is a fictionalised presentation of English history up to the victory of the New Model Army, explaining the fall of the monarchy and proposing a republic to replace it. A System of Politics, written after the Restoration, is a scheme of history and political philosophy erected on the foundations of his previous works. Professor Pocock's introduction emphasises Harrington's place as a pivotal figure in the history of English political thought. This edition also contains a chronology of events in Harrington's life and a guide to further reading.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T107681 A compilation of the leading articles of Marchamont Nedham's Mercurius politicus. Edited by R. Barron. London: printed for A. Millar and T. Cadell, G. Kearsly, and H. Parker, 1767. xxviii,176p.; 8°

15.000 B.C. to 1469.

As we search for greater understanding of the origins of liberalism, religious toleration, and modern democratic thought, Mark Jendrysik's timely work examines the political and religious ideals that buttressed the first 'modern' revolution. Explaining the English Revolution studies the years 1649 to 1653, from regicide to the establishment of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, during which time English writers "took stock" of a disordered England stripped of the traditional ideas of political, moral, and social order and considered the possibilities for a politically and religiously reordered state. Jendrysik provides--through a rich comparative analysis of the work of Thomas Hobbes and his contemporaries Filmer, Winstanley, Cromwell, and Milton--a new understanding of the Civil War-era intelligentsia's assessment of the crisis in the body politic and their varied prescriptions and plans for a new post-revolutionary England.