What did it mean to be a republican thinker in the eighteenth century?

Our knowledge of the developments of the republican tradition in the political history of the Enlightenment has not made great advances in recent decades. Paradoxically, the recent explosion of interest in these issues among philosophers and historians of political thought has probably not furthered our understanding of them, for they have ended up privileging a sort of imagined republicanism, divorced from its context, made up of arbitrary metahistorical reconstructions, the paradigmatic nature of which systematically gives ample concessions to anachronism: the true mortal sin of the professional historian.