Three modes of thinking about government underlay Owenite attempts to design the ideal polity: republicanism, in both its eighteenth century country and ancient forms; radical puritanism, especially in the shape of Quakerism; and natural jurisprudence, upon which much late eighteenth-century moral philosophy and political economy was based. Though their components can be separately analysed, the divergencies between these traditions (at least as contemporaries understood them) should not be exaggerated. In the revived radical political discourse of the late eighteenth century, many reformers saw these approaches to politics as mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting responses to similar problems. Republicanism stressed the need for popular sovereignty, participation and public virtue in order to avoid ‘corruption’ resulting in the tyranny of one or of the few. Quakerism indicated the possibility of a purer and more stringent form of social morality. Natural law, as the reformers read it, centred upon rights as the basis of political legitimacy, tended to be concerned with the preservation of individual liberty against the encroachments of state power, and focussed correspondingly more upon individuals in their civil than in their political capacities.