Discourses Concerning Government (Liberty Fund Studies in Political Theory)

I have lately undertaken to read Algernon Sidney on government. . . . As often as I have read it, and fumbled it over, it now excites fresh admiration that this work has excited so little interest in the literary world. As splendid an edition of it as the art of printing can produce—as well for the intrinsic merit of the work, as for the proof it brings of the bitter sufferings of the advocates of liberty from that time to this, and to show the slow progress of moral, philosophical, and political illumination in the world—ought to be now printed in America.

—John Adams to Thomas Jefferson (1823)

Written in response to Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (1680), the Discourses Concerning Government by Algernon Sidney (1623–1683) has been treasured for more than three centuries as a classic defense of republicanism and popular government.

Sidney rejected Filmer's theories of royal absolutism and divine right of kings, insisting that title to rule should be based on merit rather than birth; and republics, he thought, were more likely to honor merit than were monarchies. Like John Milton, Sidney revered and idealized the Commonwealth (1649–1660) as England's noble achievement in the grand tradition of ancient Greece and Rome.

Sidney's treatise was published posthumously in 1698, fifteen years after he was executed for complicity in a plot to assassinate Charles II. Sidney's papers, including a draft of the Discourses, were used as evidence against him. Although there is nothing in the work incompatible with constitutional monarchy, the indictment claimed that it was a "false, seditious, and traitorous libel," citing sentences which stated that the king is subject to law and is responsible to the people.

Sidney's Discourses was widely read in the colonies and influenced a number of American revolutionary leaders.

Thomas G. West is Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas.