This is an intellectual biography of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-85), who emerges as a central figure in the history of republican thought in the era of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This book has two related aims. The first is to fill an important gap in historical scholarship. Although Mably, whose career as a historian and political theorist stretched from 1740 to the eve of the French Revolution, clearly played a major role in the intellectual history of his era, there has been no study of his life and thought in English for nearly seventy years. At the same time, the book seeks to advance a novel interpretation of Mably's thought. He has most often been portrayed in two sharply contrasted ways, either as one of a handful of utopian communists and a precursor of nineteenth-century socialism, or as a deeply conservative enemy of the Enlightenment. This study sets forth a different reading of Mably's thought, one that shows him to be a classical republican, in the sense this term has acquired in recent years for students of early modern political thought. Mably was the author of the most comprehensive and influential body of republican thought produced in eighteenth-century France—a claim with implications that go beyond the merely biographical. These are explored in a final chapter, which draws some conclusions about the character of classical republicanism in France and about the French contribution to the republican tradition in Europe.

The English republican tradition and eighteenth-century France offers the first full account of the role played by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English republican ideas in eighteenth-century France. Challenging some of the dominant accounts of the republican tradition, it revises conventional understandings of what republicanism meant in both Britain and France during the eighteenth century, offering a distinctive trajectory as regards ancient and modern constructions and highlighting variety rather than homogeneity within the tradition. Hammersley thus offers a new and fascinating perspective on both the legacy of the English republican tradition and the origins and thought of the French Revolution. The book focuses on a series of case studies, featuring such colourful and influential characters as John Toland, Viscount Bolingbroke, John Wilkes and the Comte de Mirabeau. This book will thus be of value to all those interested in the fields of intellectual history and the history of political thought, seventeenth and eighteenth-century British history, eighteenth-century French history and French Revolution studies.

Following the cataclysmic events of 1789 some of those involved in the Revolution began to take seriously the possibility of a French republic. Various ideas developed about the form this should take and the models on which it could be based, from those of ancient Greece and Rome, to modern republics such as Geneva or the United States of America. However, a small number of thinkers - centred around the radical, Paris-based Cordeliers Club - looked to the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English republicans for guidance about realising ancient republican ideals in the modern world. This book offers an intellectual history of the Club, through a close analysis of texts and the relationships between their authors. Its main focus is on individual club members and their translations of and borrowings from the works of such thinkers as Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney and Thomas Gordon: the author shows how the Cordeliers adapted and developed those ideas so as to make them serve contemporary circumstances and concerns, and demonstrates that even after the establishment of a French republic in 1792, members of the Cordeliers Club continued to make use of English republican ideas in order to respond to key constitutional and political questions.

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Republicanism has been on scholars’ research agenda since the 1970s, and several studies on French republicanism in the eighteenth century have linked it to the Atlantic republican tradition. A central question that has puzzled intellectual historians studying republicanism is how this concept considered as antiquated or only adapted to small city-states became the concept of choice for a large modern nation such as France. The works of Pocock, Skinner, and Pettit launched vast research programme on Atlantic republicanism as a theory of liberty understood as 'non-domination'. Focusing on eighteenth-century France and the French revolution, historians such as Baker, Hammersley, Monnier, Spitz, Whatmore, and Wright have argued against Furet, Ozouf, Maintenant, Nicolet, and Vovelle that this republicanism existed before and during the revolution as a language of opposition based on classical Greek and Roman authors. In particular, Edelstein has shown how the two languages of republicanism and nature collided to form a 'natural republicanism' that pervaded during the revolution and intellectually explains the Terror. Hammersley, on the other hand, has shown how English republican texts provided answers to the fundamental question for early modern republicans: how republican institutions and practices (securing liberty) could be made workable in the context of a large nation-state? However, these studies on classical republicanism and natural republicanism have overlooked or insufficiently explained the universalist side of the language of republicanism in the French revolution: how could republicanism be made workable for the world, and how could it be argued that humankind formed a nation? This thesis provides an answer to how a 'universalrepublic' could be theorised in the French revolution by examining the writings of Anacharsis Cloots (1755–1794). It argues that Cloots was one of the leading proponents of ‘cosmopolitan republicanism-. The thesis uses Cloots’s entire corpus of works, which have been published in a three volume collection entitled OEuvres, as well as a collection of all his revolutionary writings in Ecrits révolutionaires. Using Skinner’s contextualist method, the thesis presents an interpretation of these writings by setting them in the political, social, and intellectual contexts in which Cloots wrote them.

Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.