In this important and insightful book Vickie B. Sullivan offers an impressive and ambitious examination of the philosophical roots and historical development of liberal democratic theory in early-modern England. In the Introduction, Sullivan frames her analysis in the context of the various contours of the debate about the character of early-modern thought between the advocates of classical republicanism, on the one hand, and the proponents of the liberal school, on the other. The opening chapters on Machiavelli and Hobbes, respectively, provide a provocative interpretive lens through which to evaluate and critique the prevailing liberal and republican paradigms. The lion's share of the book deals in five successive chapters with the way in which English republicans from the civil war era through the early Hanoverian period—including Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and the coauthors of Cato's Letters, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon—modified, balanced, and ultimately synthesized the Machiavellian republican and Hobbesian liberal elements of their complex philosophical inheritance. With the final consummation of this synthesis in the commercial republic of Cato's Letters, Sullivan argues, a distinctively modern form of liberal republicanism was born.

The central argument of this thoughtful and engaging book is that the current scholarly debate between liberals and republicans is fundamentally misguided and counterproductive. Sullivan argues that rather than viewing liberalism and republicanism as moral and political antipodes, we must recognize that both concepts share a common root in a characteristically modern idea of human nature and the limited purposes of government. Her illumination of the inherently “complicated, intertwined nature of liberalism and republicanism” (p. 2) seen in the relationship between the thought of Machiavelli and Hobbes is a tour de force. In contrast to most commentators who associate republicanism, and by extension Machiavelli, with the classical Aristotelian conception of political life, Sullivan exposes with subtlety and clarity the underlying connection between Machiavelli's republicanism based on popular political participation in the service of imperial expansion and Hobbes's liberal philosophy of government directed to peace and the security of rights. She argues persuasively that Hobbes and Machiavelli express divergent, but interconnected, commitments emanating from a common source in the modern rejection of the ancient idea of citizenship, organic community, and the good life (pp. 4–5, 22). Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence Sullivan presents for the underlying connection between Hobbes and Machiavelli is the palpable sense in which English republican theorists freely incorporated ideas from both thinkers into their own arguments for fundamental political change in early-modern England. Thus, these two very different figures cast a long shadow over the English commonwealth tradition, profoundly shaping all efforts to produce a modern republicanism that “absorbed liberal purposes and improved upon ancient political practices” (p. 3).

The heart of this book's account of the formation of liberal republicanism is a carefully developed and tightly reasoned treatment of the English commonwealth tradition from Nedham to Cato. Admirably combining attention to historical context with close textual analysis, Sullivan argues that despite important differences between and among the English opposition writers, they shared a common project of trying to blend, balance, and ultimately harmonize the insights of Hobbes and Machiavelli. The tension between Harrington's and Sidney's endorsement of acquisitive imperialism and Nedham's and Neville's experimentation with contract theory culminates, Sullivan suggests, in the synthesis of liberalism and republicanism manifest in Cato's vision of a commercial republic in England. In Cato's “final reconciliation between liberalism and Machiavellian republicanism” (p. 251), we see the product of the fusion between Machiavelli and Hobbes, a republicanism purged of militarism and the liberal idea of equality and rights freed from the hold of authoritarian politics.

Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England makes a valuable contribution to the study of early-modern political thought that extends beyond illuminating such seminal thinkers—itself an impressive feat—and goes further to provide a comprehensive account of the way in which a number of well-defined ideas and principles shaped the development of nascent liberal and republican theory in England. Sullivan compels us to reevaluate what we know (or think we know) about the commonwealth tradition first brought to prominence by Caroline Robbins, J. G. A. Pocock, and Bernard Bailyn more than a generation ago. However, this study does more than most previous efforts to connect the historical context of the English constitutional struggles of the turbulent seventeenth-century with the fundamental philosophical reflections on first principles à la Machiavelli and Hobbes that informed these fierce political debates. Some readers will no doubt be introduced for the first time to such thinkers as Nedham and Neville, while all are encouraged to examine more familiar figures, such as Harrington and Sidney, with new eyes sensitive to the philosophical undercurrents of their arguments. Sullivan repeatedly demonstrates that there is more of theoretical import going on in the texts of these commonwealthmen than first appears as they worked to assimilate Machiavellian and Hobbesian philosophical materials in a distinctive liberal republican formulation.

For those readers interested primarily in Machiavelli and Hobbes, this book offers penetrating and refreshing interpretations of these important thinkers. Building on her previous, highly regarded work on Machiavelli (Machiavelli's Three Romes: Religion, Human Liberty, and Politics Reformed, 1996), Sullivan illustrates the thoroughly modern basis of Machiavelli's republicanism, which advocates a political populism rooted in the needs of imperial expansion, rather than a celebration of individual rights. In her provocative reading of Hobbes, Sullivan suggests that the egalitarian philosophical premises of the English archroyalist actually revealed “impulses [that] are more democratic” (p. 83) than the Florentine, and thus she constructs a persuasive argument that the English republicans may be understood to have radicalized the process of deepening “Machiavelli's democratic leanings” begun by Hobbes (p. 138). For others more concerned with the broader scholarly dispute about liberalism and republicanism, Sullivan brings probity and rigor to a debate too often marked by sweeping generalizations and antagonistic interpretive paradigms. This book challenges the assumption that republicanism is inherently classical in origin, as well as the conventional wisdom regarding the incompatibility of the logic of individual rights and popular participation in government.

John Locke, so often the fulcrum in the debate about the Founding of America, the commercial republic par excellence, is an important, if largely implicit, presence in this book. Locke's impact on the formation of liberal republicanism is most evident indirectly via Cato's Letters (pp. 234–39), the only post-Lockean work treated in this study. One implication of the book may be a welcome call to reevaluate the status of Locke in the early-modern period with an approach recognizing him as neither cipher nor cynosure, but rather a complex thinker who contributed to the formation of liberal republicanism by offering his own unique vision of individual rights and popular government. This admirable book invites such a line of investigation as Sullivan encourages us to follow her tracks through Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the English commonwealthmen to a fuller understanding of what is distinctively Lockean in the Anglo-American tradition.