Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, The

Caroline Robbins wrote, in her Introduction to The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, that the Commonwealthmen were “a gifted and active minority of the population of the British Isles, who kept alive, during an age of extraordinary complacency and legislative inactivity, a demand for increased liberty of conscience.” Their essays, arguments, pamphlets, and histories – a continual flow from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth – were hugely popular in America, and their themes were revolutionary: separation of powers, natural rights, rotation in office, religious freedom, a supreme court, and resistance to tyranny. They achieved very little political success, but the documents of later generations are full of ideas kept alive by the Commonwealthmen in difficult times.