According to Quentin Skinner, who provides the helpful foreword to Lorenzo Sabbadini's Property, Liberty, and Self-Ownership in Seventeenth-Century England, there has been a recent revival of interest in “ideas about self-ownership” among intellectual historians as well as political philosophers (ix). Sabbadini's engaging and clearly written study of self-ownership is an excellent example of this scholarship. He is keen to note that his aims in writing the book were primarily historical: to improve understanding of the idea of liberty in seventeenth-century England by expanding the role of property, and to consider the concept of self-ownership as it emerged in that period. But he also admits his presentist concerns—to challenge today's political theorists to take the relationship between property and freedom more seriously.

Over six chapters Sabbadini brings together the works of a disparate group of early modern English authors with a common interest in notions of property. Chapter 1 focuses on debates over ship money, and chapter 2 considers the arguments of the Levellers, who first introduced the language of self-ownership into political debate. In chapter 3, Sabbadini discusses the republican literature of the Interregnum in which hereditary government was critiqued because it allowed kings to assert property rights over their people, and the protection of private property was lauded as the way to guarantee citizen independence. In chapters 4 and 5, Sabbadini reveals the temporary shift away from the language of self-ownership in the work of James Harrington, who believed property should be in the hands of the people, and of Restoration writers who sought to link guarantees of property ownership to the ancient constitution. The final chapter not only charts the return to this idea of self-ownership in the work of John Locke but confirms its centrality to his thought. It is in this context that Sabbadini makes his important historical claim: that Locke's arguments, usually thought to form the bedrock of English liberalism, also have republican sentiments at their heart.

Freedom in the republican model is not the lack of interference but the escape from arbitrary power. Indeed, Thomas Hobbes's negative view of freedom in Leviathan, in which liberty was the absence of physical bonds, here appears closer to the libertarian model. Locke by comparison foregrounds freedom in the absence of an authority that could usurp possession over an individual's goods arbitrarily, including property in his own body; this, in Locke's view, was slavery. Sabbadini suggests that the issue of property has been largely absent from conventional models of republican theory because of its gendered construction—only propertied men could be free. These concerns evaporate, however, once it is clear that the concept of self-ownership was not articulated “as part of a libertarian discourse about property rights but as part of a republican complaint about arbitrary power” (228). Sabbadini thus confirms Locke as heir to a specific concept of neo-Roman republicanism that was central to political debates from the mid-seventeenth century.

Sabbadini also questions the appropriation of the Lockean argument on self-ownership for the ideology of possessive individualism. As Sabbadini notes, C. B. Macpherson had linked such ideas to the emergence of market society in England, arguing that self-ownership allowed individuals to “alienate their labour power . . . in the service of others” (ix). Though Locke did present a defense of private property, and more especially as it related to the body, this was intended to prevent rather than facilitate the alienation of it. Like the Leveller Richard Overton, Locke argued that individuals did not have the power to alienate their own bodies because they were not in possession of them: that power belonged exclusively to God.

Despite this lack of possession, the idea of self-ownership has settled at the core of the libertarian tradition, with Robert Nozick in particular understanding it as the right of every person to determine their own actions and reap the benefits of them. In its ultimate form, this labor theory of value denies any government the right to tax its citizens on the property that their hands have created. Of course, this works exceedingly well for those who have property, but for Nozick's opponents the ramifications of this position for raising levels of inequality make his claims hugely controversial. Such problems also troubled the minds of seventeenth-century commentators, encouraging some to abandon ideas about self-ownership in favor of a more equitable model of property distribution. Even in promoting egalitarian measures, however, such writers did not discount the important connection between freedom and property: the former could not exist if there was no security of the latter.

In his conclusion, Sabbadini is keen “to challenge the dominance of liberalism in today's political culture” and exhorts theorists to reengage with the role of republican ideas as part of our political heritage (221). Doing so will mean ditching the privileged property holder element that emerged in seventeenth-century republican thought, but not its core message: that economic dependence undermines freedom. Indeed, this message was critical to the concerns of early modern writers for whom the loss of property—in their goods or their bodies—threatened to reduce them to enslavement. Sabbadini's detailed and persuasive study of the discourses of property and self-ownership in mid-seventeenth-century England provides an important corrective to the Lockean idea of self-ownership in pursuit of the liberal tradition. But just as importantly, by tying property and self-ownership to slavery, he reveals how forms of economic dependence are working to undermine notions of individual freedom in contemporary society, with potentially explosive results. It is republican ideas, he argues, that can go beyond their liberal counterparts in addressing the problems of inequality that make individuals feel “disempowered and unfree, even if they are not being coercively interfered with by the state” (231).