This chapter provides an overview of the three main objectives of the book. I trace the reception of Plutarch’s work in French and English political thought. This also offers an alternative to dominant narratives regarding the centrality of civic humanism, republicanism and constitutionalism as key idioms in the history of political thought. Through the lens of Plutarch I demonstrate the importance of a tradition of public humanism, focused on a consideration of the unique and complex ethos of public service.

Chapter 11 explores Plutarch reception in political reflection through the work of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743), the Abbé Mably (1709–1785) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau is the culminating figure in my study, and Plutarch’s place in Rousseau’s political reflection is a highly complicated one. It could be suggested that Rousseau’s broader intellectual project was developed on the pillars derived from fundamental Plutarchan tenets of moral education in virtue, exemplarity as a central aspect of moral thinking, and political right as the pursuit of justice and the common good. In a concluding section to the chapter I demonstrate, partly in dialogue with contemporary scholarship on Rousseau in political theory, how Rousseau’s political vision as developed in the Social Contract can be regarded as a turning away from the ideas of public humanism with which Plutarch’s work was associated in the period covered by my overall analysis in this book.

In the conclusion to the book I offer an appeal to the distilled principles of the tradition of public humanism as associated with Plutarch reception and developed in the opening chapters of the book. I argue that the tradition of public humanism can inspire resistance to excessive cynicism towards the possibilities of public life and to renew some faith in contemporary democratic life.

Part II begins with Chapters 3 and 4 offering a study of the first printed vernacular translations of Plutarch’s work in French with special attention to political thought. After an initial discussion of the 1530 translation of Plutarch’s essay “Precepts of Statecraft” by the Royal Printer Geoffroy Tory (c. 1480–1533), a translation which invokes the French term of la chose publique in relation to Plutarch’s idea of politics, I explore Plutarch translations in the French context by scholars who went on to draft important treatises in political theory, namely Claude de Seyssel (1450–1520) and Guillaume Budé (1467–1540). I also explore some of Antoine du Saix’s (c. 1504–1579) translations of Erasmus’s (1466–1536) Latin translations of Plutarch’s Apophthegmata (or Sayings of Kings and Commanders), here shedding light on an important dialogue among these thinkers regarding the specific and unique nature of public life in reference to Plutarch’s work.