This is a scholarly, entertaining, well-written, and provocative book on the ideas of seventeenth-century English republicans and on their debts to Niccolò Machiavelli and the ancients. It deserves to be read by all students and scholars of early modern political thinking and of the history of republicanism. It is always thoughtful, well documented, and cogently argued, even when its claims are at their boldest. It will stimulate lively debate, even if some of its theses do not meet with universal acceptance.

Paul Rahe argues that ancient and modern republicanism differ crucially from each other—a claim that he supported at length in his earlier Republics Ancient and Modern (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992). Ancient republicans included such thinkers as Aristotle and Cicero. They held that the ideal republic requires virtuous citizens and claimed that at least some people are capable of being educated in virtue. Rahe contends that a radically new and distinctively modern form of republicanism began with Machiavelli, who argued that people are self-seeking and that it is therefore pointless to try to ground a state on virtue. True, Machiavelli talked about virtue and referred to ancient authors, but this, claims Rahe, was window dressing. In fact, he broke utterly with classical republican thinking. The ancients had regarded the multitude as vain and inconsistent. In Machiavelli's opinion the masses were reliable judges of their own mundane material self-interest, and politics was not about anything more elevated, so the multitude was well qualified to play an important political role. While ancient republicanism centered on the lofty ideal of selfless public service by the virtuous few, its modern equivalent is concerned with designing laws and institutions to promote the material welfare of the populace. Rahe detects one major exception to the rule that Machiavelli was uninfluenced by the ancients. He argues that his antireligious attitudes were indebted to the Epicureans (especially Lucretius). He also claims that Machiavelli was influenced by medieval Averroists.

Having mapped out the distinction between ancient or Aristotelian and modern or Machiavellian republicanism, Rahe turns his attention to leading English republicans of the mid-seventeenth century. It has sometimes been supposed that these writers were classical republicans, that they were disciples of Machiavelli, that they brought the republicanism of the ancients to England, and that their descendants transported it to America, where it had a great impact upon the founding fathers. Rahe launches a vigorous attack on this thesis. He argues that John Milton was indeed a classical republican but stresses how little he owed to Machiavelli. Marchamont Nedham, in contrast, is here presented as a thorough Machiavellian, who anglicized the Florentine's theories by wedding them to talk about English rights and property but who was in no way a classical republican. Rahe then proceeds to discuss the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, who was obviously no republican in his mature years but who may have penned some early essays that have republican or at least humanist overtones. Hobbes had links with Sir Francis Bacon, who praised Machiavelli. Rahe speaks of Hobbes's “undoubted admiration for Machiavelli” (275) and contends that even when in his later monarchist years he tried to restore the traditional virtues to something like their old place, he did so on the Machiavellian ground that they promoted self-preservation. Rahe then discusses James Harrington, claiming that he too was no classical republican, that he owed much to Machiavelli and especially to Hobbes, that his references to the ancients were intended as subterfuge, and that his system was grounded on the manipulation of self-interest, not on virtue.

A striking link between the English republicans Rahe surveys, whether they turn out to be classical or modern, is that (on his account) they are virtually all anticlerical and skeptical in religion or, to be blunt, atheists—and this is true too of the nonrepublican Hobbes and his friends. So, for example, we are told that Milton was “a thoroughgoing and highly circumspect infidel” (174); that Bacon was an atheist and proclaimed his atheism in his Essayes; and that his religious views were endorsed by Hobbes, his patron the Earl of Devonshire, and their Venetian friends including Paolo Sarpi, another atheist (257–59). Not everyone will be persuaded that there were quite as many atheists as Rahe has claimed. Hobbes certainly did share anticlerical views with a number of republicans, and such authors sometimes cited the works of Sarpi in their support. But vast quantities of anticlerical and especially antipapal polemic circulated in early modern England, and the fact that someone drew on such writings is no evidence of Machiavellianism or atheism. Rahe links Harrington's views to the libertine atheism of Hobbes and Machiavelli and says that Harrington “coined the term ‘Priest-craft’” (2; cf. 96, 334). In fact, “priestcraft” occurs decades earlier in the English version of the Reformer John Bale's The pageant of popes contayninge the lyues of all the bishops of Rome, published at London in 1574 (fols. 60a, 173b). The concept is arguably a Reformation commonplace.

Rahe has a great deal to say about classical sources, Machiavelli, and mid-seventeenth-century English republicans. Intervening periods and authors get shorter shrift (although there is some material on medieval Averroism). Perhaps Milton's writings are best understood in the context of the decades immediately preceding them rather than in that of ancient Greece. Much of what he had to say closely echoes the works of the French monarchomachs of the later sixteenth century. Pierre Bayle saw him as one of the monarchomachs. The influence of Machiavelli on Hobbes is not debatable, and the material in the anonymous early discourses sometimes attributed to Hobbes (but never acknowledged by him) echoes dozens of political discourses rather than Machiavelli in particular. It is hard to show that Harrington was guilty of subterfuge in citing the classics, and it seems doubtful that Harrington was aware of the distinction between ancient and modern republicanism that features so largely in Rahe's work. Indeed, few if any contemporary writers appear to have employed that or an equivalent distinction.