The English free state or republic (1649–53) has always been seen as a failure, which almost no one outside the small coterie of its leaders genuinely wanted or actively supported. Historians have also belittled the importance of the political thought of the republican period. They have explored John Milton’s and Marchamont Nedham’s writings in defence of the republic but have mainly focused on de facto arguments that the free state could demand obedience because it offered peace and security. The Introduction explains how scholars have failed to properly examine the political thought of the period and have underestimated its breadth and depth. It also argues that, once we explore the pamphlet literature published during the free state, we can appreciate the importance of these pamphleteers’ political thinking. The aim is to offer a complete reassessment of the political thought of the English free state and to map the terrain of what it was possible to think.

This chapter examines pitfalls in current methodological approaches to studying secular apocalyptic thought and proposes an alternative. Over a half-century ago, Judith Shklar and Hans Blumenberg argued that secular apocalyptic thought is an unhelpful and vague concept, which too often functions as a rhetorical weapon. Their critiques largely have been neglected. I make the case for taking these critiques seriously and suggest a strategy to address them: the study of secular apocalyptic thought should focus on examples where secular thinkers explicitly reference religious apocalyptic texts, figures, and concepts so as to avoid making spurious connections and reading into texts influences that are not there.

The themes from this book require extending into other research areas. First, the history of political thought and ideas: psychology itself is an idea, since modern political thought emanated not only from thinking about ‘man’ but also from what the thinker believed himself to be, qua man: that is, his interior religious and/or psychological status. Second is the history of education, where the importance of the German-language tradition (Schleiermacher, Herbart, Froebel) might lead to studying the idea of universal salvation as a founding discourse of modern schooling, and the ‘developer’ as the individual embodiment of social and national progress. Third comes disability history, concerning institutions and asylums, which has encouraged a single reified notion of developmental disability; a critical conceptual history should make it possible to stand outside this. The fourth area is literature. The novel is the classic literary ‘form’ of a linear developmental narrative, but its historical examples reveal it to be a constant subversion rather than reflection of the developmental idea, even in the typical novel of personal formation (Bildungsroman).

The historiography of seventeenth-century English republicanism has focused largely on the Civil War and Interregnum period in the British Isles. Much less is known about the survival of republican ideas beyond the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, even though historians widely acknowledge the legacy of Civil War political thought in the debates of the Exclusion Crisis during the late 1670s and 1680s. It is also acknowledged that seventeenth-century English republicanism had a significant impact on the ideas of the American Founding Fathers, while its legacy in Europe is much less well understood. The Introduction to this book argues that a study of the English republican exiles and their political and religious networks on the Continent provides a key to the understanding of this legacy, while also acknowledging contemporary European influences on England.

The modern state is built upon the principle that political power belongs to the people. Yet this principle has no uniform meaning. The very institutional structure of the modern state testifies to the plurality of understandings about the meaning, extent and implications of popular power. A quick look at modern European states reveals how each of their institutions is based upon a specific way of understanding and framing the power of the people. More strikingly, even within a single institution different conceptions of the people’s power play out simultaneously. As an example, it may suffice to think about how different the principle of popular power looks when invoked to justify the role of legislative assemblies and that of constitutional courts. The first institution is considered the forum where popular concerns and interests are elaborated, compromised upon and transformed into law by representatives.

Hannah Arendt’s theory of constituent power is radically different from Sieyès’s. Although in both cases constituent power offers a conceptualisation of popular power alternative to sovereignty, in Arendt’s case this alternative coincides withself-government. In Sieyès’s case, meanwhile, it entails the delegation of power to elected representatives. The differences and similarities between these two accounts show the interest and purpose of reconstructing the history of constituent power.

By looking at the language of constituent power and putting its uses into historical perspective, it becomes clear that, in the past two centuries, constituent power has been endowed with different, even opposite, meanings. It follows that the notion of pouvoir constituant has contributed in varying ways to the conceptualisation and institutionalisation of the principle of popular power within the framework of post-revolutionary European states.