Hobbes argued that the root of the English Civil War was the befuddlement of human minds by Greek and Roman authors. Jonathan Scott's study builds upon his earlier works on Algernon Sidney and the English Civil War, and examines the minds that Hobbes thought befuddled, arguing that any befuddlement was at least highly fertile. His emphasis is upon the political writers who at diverse times defended the English Commonwealth: Harrington, Milton, Nedham, Sidney, Streator, and Vane. In effect, he says, these men lived at the intersection of Renaissance Avenue and Reformation Drive, the intersection from which Enlightenment Street begins. In this context, Scott examines the work of modern writers, especially Fink and Pocock, on this period.

What did Harrington, Milton, Nedham, and Sidney have in common that contemporaries such as Hobbes or Filmer do not? Their starting point was a humanist education which saw Greco-Roman writers as representing a unity with authoritative force. Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero were grouped together as authorities. Athens, Sparta, and Rome might be cited together as models. Since the Renaissance north of the Alps was Christian, the ancient Israelite state, especially as portrayed in Samuel was also noticed. Indeed, a sub-theme in Scott's work is a growing self-confidence, grounded in the knowledge that printing, gunpowder, and America had been unknown to the ancients. This permitted Venice or the United Netherlands to be cited as examples equal to Athens or Rome, Machiavelli and Grotius as authorities equivalent to Plato or Aristotle. From this background, one does not get a political theory, still less a specific constitution (and certainly not, Scott argues against Fink, the "mixed constitution" of Polybius). Rather, there is a rhetoric and temper that holds that all office-holders, even Kings, have limits to their power and that government must be in the interest of the governed, a people in effect represented by the educated gentlemen

This temper was confronted with the crises of the 16th and 17th century: the abrupt growth in population, the inflation consequent to American silver and gold, and the destruction of Western European religious unity. In France, Denmark, and the states of Iberia, Italy, and Germany, "absolute" rulers emerged free of many of the restraints that had bound Medieval rulers and able to impose both taxes and religion upon their subjects through a bureaucracy rather than an autonomous gentry. Was the same to happen in England under the Stuarts? Under this impetus came the insistence that a Monarch was not, as Elizabeth I had been regarded, a part of a "Republic" or "Commonwealth" but was instead seen as an "interest" opposed to that of the whole, an ominous note in a rhetoric which expected members of a "Commonwealth" to act in the interest of the whole rather than in their own self-interest.

"Republican" political theory cannot be studied as abstract ideas but as reactions, by people educated in a particular tradition, to events. Perhaps the most valuable section of this book is the third, chronological section which relates specific books and pamphlets to historical events. England's new Stuart dynasty insisted on the "divine right of kings" (a fairly unprecedented claim in English history), tried o squeeze new revenues for themselves from the gentry, and failed to defend what the gentry saw as English (and Protestant) interests overseas. It is against this background that Republican writers criticize the Stuarts from the 1620's on. The rhetoric of resistance to Charles I, as well as Sidney's attacks on the Restoration Monarchy, became the rhetoric of the English Whigs in 1689 and that of the Americans in 1776. Yet, while Scott often cites Locke's name, the continuities and discontinuities between his thought and those of the English Republicans are not examined.

Scott treats the Protestantism of his writers, and their alignment with a Puritan revolution as unexceptional. Yet, the exemplars of humanism in the Netherlands and England, Erasmus and More, both died as Roman Catholics. The theory of human nature espoused by the English Republicans, Scott admits (p. 43), was the Arminianism of the Puritans' opponents. The theory of resistance to the King adopted by Republicans owed less to Luther or Calvin than it did to the Spanish Jesuit Suarez. For that matter, the Puritans' Dutch Calvinist counterparts supported the (Calvinist) quasi-monarchy of the House of Orange and opposed the Republic of Oldenbarneveldt and De Witt. For all of Scott's insistence on the "Anglo-Dutch" nature of early modernity, one would scarce learn from this book that the 16th century Netherlands had its own share of civil and religious conflict.

Part of Scott's announced intention is to de-center Harrington as the "model" Republican. But, to do that is to emphasize the Republican failure both before Cromwell's 1653 coup and after his 1658 death. The traditional constitution had broken down; what was to replace it? What to moderns seems the obvious alternative, representative government, was barred if only because no plausible electorate in England would have supported the Regicides against the Monarchy. Given the Republican invocation of the People and their rights, there is a certain irony here which Scott notes only in passing. Milton and Nedham served Cromwell's dictatorship without offering it any theoretical justification. Sidney and Vane opposed it but could suggest as alternatives only the rule of a "natural aristocracy" or of the Saints.

Scott sees Harrington's Oceana not as criticism of Cromwell but as advice to him (in the Xenophon-Machiavelli tradition) on how to turn his dictatorship into a more permanent regime. Harrington would have agreed with Kant (and Hobbes) that a race of "intelligent devils" could operate a successful state. For Milton, Nedham, Sidney, and Vane, the citizens and, above all, the rulers of a Commonwealth must be virtuous. As Scott suggests, one can read Paradise Lost as the final polemic of English Republicanism against those who would build a state except on the virtue of its leaders.

Stephen Oren, Independent Scholar

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