Montesquieu deems slavery a form of despotism. His interest in how slavery has manifested itself in various cultures through history suffuses The Spirit of the Laws, and he devotes Book 15 of the work to the subject. Montesquieu’s treatment of slavery there is ambiguous, and scholars have reached differing assessments of his ultimate position on slavery. This chapter argues that Book 15 offers a biting satire of slavery in the face of the deeply entrenched prejudices and financial interests of his time. His satire conveys difficult truths in a manner that perhaps could prick European consciences more effectively than outrage and condemnations. Nevertheless, so subtle an approach to the prejudices and cruelties of his age brings with it the possibility of misunderstanding, and his views were cited on both sides of the subsequent debate over slavery.

When selecting the curriculum for the university that he had founded, Thomas Jefferson identified the sources from which he believed the American principles of government derived. The minutes of the 4 March 1825 meeting of the Board of Visitors for the University of Virginia report the following resolution: “it is the opinion of this Board that as to the general principles of liberty and the rights of man, in nature and in society, the doctrines of Locke, in his ‘Essay concerning the true original extent and end of civil government,’ and of Sidney in his ‘Discourses on government,’ may be considered as those generally approved by our fellow citizens of this, and the United States” (WrTJ [ed. Peterson] 479). The Board enjoined its scholars to imbibe the prescribed dose of American liberty directly from its sources in the thought of these two Englishmen.

What was so apparent to Virginia's Board of Visitors is no longer clear to scholars of the American founding. The Board's declaration challenges in at least two fundamental ways the course of several decades of prominent scholarship on the founding. First, it asserts the importance of John Locke; and second, it asserts that the thought of Locke and Algernon Sidney are compatible.

The principles of the American revolutionaries, this scholarship maintains, were republican, inspired by Niccolò Machiavelli, not liberal, inspired by John Locke. In this way, the republican scholarship argues that Locke's thought was largely irrelevant to the work of the American revolutionaries.

In a Machiavellian spirit – and, indeed, with Machiavelli's own language – Hobbes proclaims “Force, and Fraud” “the two Cardinall vertues” (90). As superlative as his praise of them is, however, it is definitely bounded, for he will recognize them as virtues, let alone the highest ones, only in the state of nature; they are, in fact, to be proscribed outside of the state of nature. After the state of nature is overturned, new virtues, ones that reject both aggression and competition, replace the old.

Machiavelli, by contrast, recognizes no such limit on these two so-called virtues. They are indispensable at all times for individuals who seek to rise in the world. In some sense, war is the fundamental condition not only among sovereign states but also among individuals. The Italian seems to have contemplated the possibility of the elimination of war, but he shuns that very possibility when he takes the side of Rome's patricians in their opposition to the plebeians who sought to be unchained from their city's wars. War is to be cultivated, in his view, and those most hungry for its honors must be embraced, despite the dangers such individuals present when they turn their aggressive instincts on the state itself.

The battles that thrill Machiavelli repel Hobbes. And therein rests a great deal of the difference between the two thinkers.

It is said that Thomas Hobbes, after considering James Harrington's Oceana, surmised that Henry Neville “had a finger in that pye.” Even if Hobbes's conjecture that Neville was coauthor with Harrington is mistaken, Neville may, in fact, still be held partly responsible for Harrington's great work of political thought, though in an entirely different manner. According to John Aubrey, Harrington's contemporary and chronicler of the lives of prominent Englishmen, Neville encouraged Harrington to turn his literary aspirations from poetry to political discourse. If true, Neville's advice helped produce a prolific political writer passionately dedicated to the establishment of a commonwealth in England.

Harrington published his great work Oceana in 1656 as a blueprint for the republican future he hoped to help usher into England, and between the occasion of the publication of his great work and the Restoration, Harrington attempted to make that future a reality by writing furiously to justify his model further and to defend it against its critics. In the process he collected a number of converts to his plan, who joined him in his efforts. The chaotic year of 1659 seemed to them to present an opportunity for the founding of that very republic. In July, Neville presented Parliament with “The Humble Petition of Divers Well Affected Persons,” which contained Harringtonian ideas for the establishment of a new government, but his effort was rebuffed. In the fall and winter of that year Harrington's famous Rota Club, which met in the evenings at a London coffeehouse, flourished.

Hobbes and Machiavelli laid the foundations for this reconciliation of liberalism and republicanism. One sought peace above all, the other war. For the sake of peace, one favored the people; for the sake of war, the other promoted the interests both of the nobles and of the people to the extent compatible with that end. That end of Machiavelli, though, dictates that the love of glory and the desires for preeminence and domination flourish among the few – precisely those passions that produce those political occurrences, war and internal oppression, from which the many flee.

Because Cato's thought represents the final synthesis, one can use it to assess the degree to which these two thinkers achieved their ends. Cato shows us that Hobbes's purpose ultimately won out, although his means did not. Nevertheless, this is a significant win for Hobbes's ambitions. Moreover, perhaps because of the addition of Machiavellian ferocity in service of the people's interest in peace and commodious living – interests repulsive to Machiavelli – modernity's purposes have all the more potency. Rather than arming an all-powerful sovereign, the people are to protect themselves with a Machiavellian ferocity; the people's purposes are given a more vigorous protection because they guard their interests for themselves with an intense vehemence born of an acute fear – an understanding that derives from the analyses of both Machiavelli and Hobbes – of violent death in war and of tyrannical oppression at the hands of the few.

Never mistaken as a man of principle, Marchamont Nedham is famous for his astonishingly rapid changes in alliances, writing at different times in support of Parliament, king, and Cromwell during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. He began his career as a journalist in 1643 by writing for Mercurius Britanicus, a parliamentary newspaper. As a consequence of his use of the newspaper to disseminate his mocking humor, which he aimed directly at the king, he went to jail. He then changed alliances just in time to be on the losing side, taking up the Royalist banner and editing Mercurius Pragmaticus beginning in 1647 and continuing through June of 1649, with a minor interruption in publication after the execution of Charles I. This episode ended with him again in jail, but this time his captors were the Parliamentarians. In order to win his freedom, he agreed to write a pamphlet supporting the fledgling government, and to edit a governmental newspaper. He fulfilled the latter agreement when, the next year, he published The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated and assumed the editorial duties of Mercurius Politicus, a newspaper that John Milton supervised for a time. His two treatises, The Case of the Commonwealth and The Excellencie of a Free State, would offer his editorials from this newspaper in a more coherent form. During the Protectorate, he served Cromwell in the capacity of a spy. Later, Nedham opposed the Restoration when it appeared a foregone conclusion, and finally fled to Holland.

In his Discourses Concerning Government, Sidney undertakes to vindicate human liberty against the claims of Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha maintains that nature and God dictate human dependency. Human beings, in Filmer's view, are born subject to a rigidly hierarchial chain of command that passes upward from the father, to the king, and finally to God. On the way to his repudiation of the Filmerian divine right of kings, Sidney produced the diffuse Discourses, which, among many other topics, considers the corrupting influence of monarchy, the unreasonable character of inheritance as a claim to rule, and the vigor of republics.

Liberty, it becomes increasingly clear as his Discourses progresses, is best guaranteed through a republic. He acted on that belief throughout his life, although it has been said that his commitment to republicanism was “intermittent and inconsistent.” He fought on the side of Parliament and was wounded in battle at Marston Moor in 1644. He entered Parliament in 1646, where he somewhat surprisingly – given the glee he will later manifest in his Discourses when contemplating the punishment of wayward monarchs – opposed the execution of Charles I. He came to work closely with a group of republicans in Parliament, among whom was Henry Neville, whose family had shared friendships and alliances with his own that went back for generations. He actively supported England's efforts in the Anglo-Dutch war, which broke out in the middle of 1652, and he joined the Council of State later that same year.

This work examines the writings of selected English thinkers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with republican sympathies. These writers, I argue, contribute to the reconciliation of elements of republicanism with liberalism that eventuates in a new synthesis – liberal republicanism. This particular formulation is intended to be disruptive of the current thinking on the relation between republicanism and liberalism, because republicanism was, and continues to be, a phenomenon associated, for the most part, with antiquity, whereas liberalism is decidedly a product of modernity. The republicanism of these English thinkers is fundamentally influenced, I will show, by the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, and their liberalism derives primarily from transformed elements of Thomas Hobbes's thought. The reconciliation of two such apparently contradictory terms – liberalism and republicanism – is unlikely to be a simple story; in fact, the history of that reconciliation is a complicated one.

The philosopher Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, for example, gives voice to the complicated character of the melding of republicanism and liberalism, of elements of antiquity and modernity. What this philosopher expresses as the entanglement of these elements has become in the thought of contemporary scholars and political thinkers a stark polarization: republicanism and liberalism are mutually contradictory. If thinkers evoke republican themes, then they are allied with antiquity and arrayed against the forces of liberal modernity.

As influential as Sidney's thought was in America before and immediately after the Revolution, that of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the authors of Cato's Letters, was even more so. “Cato” also surpasses Sidney in his public adoration of Machiavelli. Whereas Sidney is calculatedly circumspect in referring to Machiavelli, Cato exhibits no compunctions about associating himself with the Florentine; he has frequent recourse to the Florentine's thought, frequently names his source, and even refers to him as a “great authority” (16.121). Because Cato's influence was so wide and because he so overtly appeals to the thought of Machiavelli, it is necessary to ask what principles Cato derives and propounds from the Italian. Do his frequent appeals to the writings of this Renaissance thinker underscore his dedication to civic humanism and classical republicanism, or do they reveal, instead, his attempt to participate in a new and modern understanding of government and of the individual's place within it?

Given the immediate circumstances of the publication of Cato's Letters, it is all too easy to accept the notion that they are expressions of the former – of a nostalgic longing for a lost world of virtuous dedication to the homeland. The letters, which took the form of a series of articles that appeared in the London Journal and the British Journal from 1720 to 1723, originate as a response to the crisis of the South Sea Company.

Before the Restoration, Henry Neville had been an active republican. He was first elected to Parliament in April 1649, only a few months after the execution of Charles I, and was elected to serve on the Council of State in 1651. At that time he was “a favourite of Oliver [Cromwell],” but when Neville saw that the general “gaped after the government by a single person, he left him.” So far was Neville from being a favorite of Cromwell at this point that, when Cromwell expelled the Rump Parliament in April 1653, he included Neville among the members whom he criticized. Neville was back in Parliament immediately before the Restoration and brought forward for consideration “The Humble Petition,” which offered a proposal for an English republic modeled on Harrington's Oceana.

That futile petition was far from Neville's only association with Harrington, of course. In addition to Aubrey's report that Hobbes credited him with having helped Harrington compose Oceana, Aubrey claims that he helped Harrington to win converts to his cause: Harrington's and “H. Nevill's smart discourses and inculcations, dayly at coffee-houses, made many proselytes.” A friend to Harrington to the last, he “never forsooke him to his dyeing day.”

After the Restoration, Neville was careful to keep a low profile, at least for a time. Jailed in 1663 under suspicion of conspiracy, he traveled to Italy after his release. He published Plato Redivivus: Or, A Dialogue Concerning Government in 1681.