from III - Absolutism and Revolution in the Seventeenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Sources and resources
The contribution of seventeenth-century republicanism to the development of western political thought was made principally in England. In Italy the vitality of Renaissance republicanism had been largely extinguished by 1600; in Holland the emergence of the independent United Provinces produced little systematic exploration of republican principles; in France, Spain, and the empire the domestic opposition to the advances of absolutism was particularist rather than republican. In England, the breakdown of political institutions between 1640 and 1660 stimulated a more profound reexamination of political belief and practice. The ideas of the English republicans are not easy to classify. Writing in order to shape events, they adapted their arguments and their emphases to immediate circumstances. Usually writing in opposition to the prevailing power, they drew heavily on ideas of contract and resistance and of natural rights which were not peculiarly republican. Their constitutional proposals were flexible, and the form of government often mattered less to them than its spirit. The term republican was not, on the whole, one which they sought, and was more commonly one of abuse. Nevertheless, a republican tradition can be identified which was to enter the mainstream of eighteenth-century political ideas in Britain, on the continent, and in America.
In the emergence of that tradition there were three main stages. The first, and most fruitful, belongs to the Interregnum of 1649–60. It was a response to the execution of Charles I in 1649, to the abolition of monarchy and of the House of Lords in the same year, and to the ensuing failure of a series of improvised Puritan regimes to provide a durable alternative to kingship – an alternative which the republican writers of the Interregnum sought to provide.
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