The Excellencie of a Free-State: Or, The Right Constitution of a Commonwealth (Thomas Hollis Library) - Softcover

Nedham, Marchamont

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865978093 ISBN 13: 9780865978096

Publisher: Liberty Fund, 2012

Synopsis

First published in 1656, and compiled from previously written editorials in the parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Politicus, The Excellencie of a Free-State addressed a dilemma in English politics, namely, what kind of government should the Commonwealth adopt? One possibility was to revert to the ancient constitution and create a Cromwellian monarchy. The alternative was the creation of parliamentary sovereignty, in which there would be a "due and orderly succession of supreme authority in the hands of the people's representatives." Nedham was convinced that only the latter would "best secure the liberties and freedoms of the people from the encroachments and usurpations of tyranny."

Marchamont Nedham (1620-1678) was a polemicist, pamphleteer, and editor of Mercurius Politicus.

Blair Worden is Research Professor of History, Royal Holloway College, University of London.

About this title

About the Author

Blair Worden is Visiting Professor of History at the University of Oxford. His most recent books are The English Civil Wars, 1640-1660 and Literature and Polities in Cromwellian England.
David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Divinity and State.

Review

SirReadALot.org
May 2012

The republican writings of Marchamont Nedham are a landmark in Western political thought. Writing in the years following the execution of King Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy in 1649, Nedham proposed an alternative to the improvised and short-lived constitutional expedients that followed the overthrow of the monarchy. Instead of clinging to remnants of the native constitution, urged Nedham, his countrymen should recover the principles and forms of republican rule that had prospered in classical antiquity. A disciple of Niccolo Machiavelli, whose methods of argument he imitated and whose reasoning he adapted to an English setting, Nedham opened the way for the more searching or learned republican thinking of his contemporaries James Harrington, Henry Neville, and Algernon Sidney. The Excellencie of a Free-State is the most coherent expression of Nedham's republican thought.

Edition details

• Publisher: Liberty Fund
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0865978093
• ISBN 13: 9780865978096
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 319
• Editor: Worden Blair