The Invention of the Modern Republic

An investigation of the origins of republican government, by some of the world's leading historians of ideas.

Why are republics the most common form of political organization, and the one most readily associated with modern democracy? A team of highly distinguished historians of ideas answers these questions, and examines the origins of republican governments in America and Europe.Why are republics the most common form of political organization, and the one most readily associated with modern democracy, when until the late eighteenth-century it was generally believed that republics could function only in small urban territories with considerable ethical and political cohesion? In The Invention of the Modern Republic a team of highly distinguished historians of ideas answers this question, and examines the origins of republican governments in America and Europe. These essays explain why from 1776 onwards republics took the place of monarchies as the dominant form of government in the modern world. Given the renewed interest in the functioning and evolution of democratic institutions (especially in their relation with market economies) the issues discussed in The Invention of the Modern Republic have a powerful contemporary resonance.