State and Commonwealth

Recent years have seen the emergence of a social history of state formation in early modern England, most notably in the form of major monographs by Steve Hindle and Michael Braddick. Together with work by Phil Withington, which has dealt with popular engagement in urban governance, the result has been a vision of state formation from the bottom up. What remains missing is some fuller sense of the ruling ideas that underwrote the flexible, relatively inclusive state structures of Tudor and Stuart England. While Withington, in particular, has dealt with Aristotelian notions of authority, and has shown how they inflected political discourse in towns and cities, historians of political thought have yet to return the compliment, and to engage with theories of the state and of authority that are socially grounded. Noah Dauber’s book promises to do just that. Dauber says that he intends to set the social history of early modern England in contact with the history of political thought. Such an approach could have delivered much in terms of the stated aim of the book—getting at ‘the theory of the state’ in the period. But the social history of the period is rarely invoked, and when it is, it is all too partial. Instead, Dauber sticks to a select group of canonical authors: Philipp Melanchthon, Thomas Starkey, Sir Thomas Smith, John Case, Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes. Dauber says that ‘The works studied were chosen for their importance to the scholarship in either social history or the history of political thought in the hopes of bringing the textual basis of the two fields into a single conversation’ (p. 15). This was a missed opportunity, and what the reader mostly gets is a fairly conventional top-down account of political theory, usually shorn of any social context

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