The Excellencie of a Free-State - (Thomas Hollis Library) by Marchamont Nedham (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This edition brings back into print, after two and a half centuries, the pioneering work of English republicanism, Marchamont Nedham's The Excellencie of a Free-State, which was written in the wake of the execution of King Charles I.

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?

David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Divinity and State.

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

Blair Worden is Emeritus Fellow of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford.

Review Quotes

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.