Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England. By Vickie B. Sullivan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 284p. $75.00.

In this important and insightful book Vickie B. Sullivan offers an impressive and ambitious examination of the philosophical roots and historical development of liberal democratic theory in early-modern England. In the Introduction, Sullivan frames her analysis in the context of the various contours of the debate about the character of early-modern thought between the advocates of classical republicanism, on the one hand, and the proponents of the liberal school, on the other. The opening chapters on Machiavelli and Hobbes, respectively, provide a provocative interpretive lens through which to evaluate and critique the prevailing liberal and republican paradigms. The lion's share of the book deals in five successive chapters with the way in which English republicans from the civil war era through the early Hanoverian period—including Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and the coauthors of Cato's Letters, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon—modified, balanced, and ultimately synthesized the Machiavellian republican and Hobbesian liberal elements of their complex philosophical inheritance. With the final consummation of this synthesis in the commercial republic of Cato's Letters, Sullivan argues, a distinctively modern form of liberal republicanism was born.