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The Excellencieof a Free-State
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This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
Introduction, editorial additions, and index © 2011 by Liberty Fund, Inc.
This eBook edition published in 2012.
eBook ISBN: E-PUB 978-1-61487-243-6
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CONTENTS
The Thomas Hollis Library, by David Womersley
Marchamont Nedham and the English Republic
Nedham and Mercurius Politicus
Nedham and The Excellencie (1656)
The Republication of The Excellencie (1767)
The Reception of the Republication
Nedham and His Classical Sources
The Text and the Notes
The Excellencie of a Free-State
To the Reader
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An Introduction to the Following Discourse
The Right Constitution of a Commonwealth
All Objections Against the Government of the People, Answered
The Original of All Just Power Is in the People
Errours of Government; And Rules of Policie
APPENDIX A: The Edition of 1656
Textual Emendations
Advertisement
APPENDIX B: The Edition of 1767
Title Page
The Preface
Textual Adjustments
APPENDIX C: Corresponding Passages of Mercurius Politicus
The Endnotes
Three Other Editorials
Index
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Thomas Hollis (1720-74) was an eighteenth-century Englishman who devoted his energies, his fortune, and his life to the cause of liberty. Hollis was trained for a business career, but a series of inheritances allowed him to pursue instead a career of public service. He believed that citizenship demanded activity and that it was incumbent on citizens to put themselves in a position, by reflection and reading, in which they could hold their governments to account. To that end for many years Hollis distributed books that he believed explained the nature of liberty and revealed how liberty might best be defended and promoted.
A particular beneficiary of Hollis’s generosity was Harvard College. In the years preceding the Declaration of Independence, Hollis was assiduous in sending to America boxes of books, many of which he had had specially printed and bound, to encourage the colonists in their struggle against Great Britain. At the same time he took pains to explain the colonists’ grievances and concerns to his fellow Englishmen.
The Thomas Hollis Library makes freshly available a selection of titles that, because of their intellectual power, or the influence they exerted on the public life of their own time, or the distinctiveness of their approach to the topic of liberty, comprise the cream of the books distributed by Hollis. Many of these works have been either out of print
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since the eighteenth century or available only in very expensive and scarce editions. The highest standards of scholarship and production ensure that these classic texts can be as salutary and influential today as they were two hundred and fifty years ago.
David Womersley
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The republican writings of Marchamont Nedham are a landmark in Western political thought. Writing in the years following the execution of King Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy in 1649, Nedham proposed an alternative to the improvised and short-lived constitutional expedients that followed the overthrow of the monarchy. Instead of clinging to remnants of the native constitution, urged Nedham, his countrymen should recover the principles and forms of republican rule that had prospered in classical antiquity. A disciple of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose methods of argument he imitated and whose reasoning he adapted to an English setting, Nedham opened the way for the more-searching or learned republican thinking of his contemporaries James Harrington, Henry Neville, and Algernon Sidney. The Excellencie of a Free-State, published in 1656, is the most coherent expression of Nedham’s republican thought.
Nedham was no abstract political analyst. He was a hired journalist. Like his close friend and frequent literary ally John Milton, he published tracts in order to influence events. From 1650 to 1653 he wrote for the Commonwealth, which had replaced King Charles’s rule. From 1653 onward he wrote for the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Yet behind his outward enthusiasm for the new governors of England lay sharp criticisms of their characters and measures. To recover his meanings we
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need