Vice, Corruption and Decay

In June I attended the 17th Annual London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought. As several participants noted, it seemed sadly fitting to be at a conference on the theme of 'Vice, Corruption, and Decay' on the opening day of the 2026 World Cup. Despite the potentially depressing theme, the conference proved remarkably stimulating and upbeat. As always, what follows are my personal reflections on the event.

While the three words of the conference title are closely related, each has a different meaning and distinct connotations. One contrast drawn out in the papers was between cyclical and terminal decline. Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of political corruption involve states cycling through a series of constitutional models with a degeneration from one to the next. Consequently, this can be viewed as a process of constant change. By contrast the biological image of decay implies that the decline is terminal and that the result will be complete destruction or death.

Edward Gibbon by Henry Walton, 1773. National Portrait Gallery, NPG 1443. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Several papers explored the possibilities for interrupting or postponing decline. Ming-Yan Shih presented the ideas of Thomas Pownall, a British politician and Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Pownall drew on the medieval idea of Translatio Imperii to suggest that the decline of the British Empire could be delayed by shifting the centre of the empire westward from London to the American continent. Similarly, Harun Ali observed that Edward Gibbon's well-known account of the decline and fall of Rome was complicated by the need for him to address the Eastern portion of the Empire, which survived the fall of Rome albeit in a state of 'premature and perpetual decay'. Harun pointed out that this means that Gibbon's 'decline' narrative is not quite what it seems. Mirza Baig's exploration of Hobbes's use of an apocalyptic narrative presented a similar disruption of the expected model. Having demonstrated that the apocalyptic was a standard literary genre at the time, Mirza went on to show how Hobbes re-temporalised that narrative. He thus presented the apocalyptic as marking the end of a world, rather than the end of the world, and consequently a moment of renewal or regeneration rather than destruction. Finally, Francisca Naranjo pointed out that progress and degeneration are not always in opposition but can exist simultaneously with degeneracy operating as a kind of shadow of development.

These issues were further explored in our closing discussion. Mirza observed that a cyclical model need not always return to the point of departure - as illustrated by the image of a spiral. Paul Sagar raised the question of whether there is a distinction between attitudes to corruption and decline on the Left as compared with the Right. Paul suggested that there is a tendency for the Right to think in terms of decline from a past golden age, whereas those on the Left are perhaps more likely to look forward to a better future. Yet Ionut Vaduva's paper provided an interesting counterpoint to this - in looking at the discourse of the decline and fall of reason in the writings of the Marxist philosophers György Lukács, Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch. They perceived a contrast between the rationalism of the Enlightenment which was then developed by Hegel and Marx and the irrationalism of the ideas of counter-revolutionary thinkers such as Schelling, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, perhaps leading to Fascism. While Ionut's paper and other participants made clear that the picture is more complex, there did seem to be something in the notion of the Right seeing the move from aristocracy to democracy as a sign of corruption. This was, of course, central to Nietzsche's understanding, which was touched on in several papers.

Jack Graveney compared Nietzsche with his contemporary Joseph Burkhardt. For Nietzsche the slavery of the masses was necessary for the flourishing of the few. Burkhardt rejected Nietzsche's notion of the happiness of the past as an optical illusion, suggesting that Nietzsche's idea that the slave was happy on account of being free from modern delusions was a myth. Fergus Cullen showed how Nietzsche's veneration for aristocracy was picked up by the conservative Anthony Ludovici who contrasted a positive image of ancient aristocracy with a notion of modernity as marking the triumph of the weak and ugly. While not presented in the same Nietzschean vein, Gonzalo Lope Prieto's account of Carl Schmitt's idea of the partisan offered a similar notion of decline from an aristocratic original to a corrupt democratic form.

James Beattie, 1735-1803. Poet and moral philosophe. Image engraved by James Heath and published by J. Mawman, 1805. ‘National Galleries of Scotland’.

Other papers reflected the shift from aristocracy to democracy as constituting decline in more practical terms. Botond Rudolf Pap showed that for at least one of the late eighteenth-century Hungarian thinkers he studies, the nobility were the true and sole proprietors of the nation and any weakening of their power was viewed as decline. Seungeun Lee suggested that Mikhail Shcherbatov adopted a similar perspective on corruption in eighteenth-century Russia. He looked back to the noble virtues of the past and insisted on the need for the monarch to be tempered by aristocratic restraint. Similarly, Leo Strauss's concept of a Liberal Education - which was explored by Yiyang Fang - was designed to cultivate the 'perfect gentleman' and motivated by a rejection of mass democracy and culture. A similar sort of aristocratic disdain was even documented in Amit Aizenman's paper on James Beattie. Amit showed that Beattie's concern about Hume's scepticism was less about the ideas themselves, than their becoming fashionable among the general population. As Amit explained, this was why Beattie's solution was to challenge Hume's position via ridicule - since this was a means of damaging the social standing of the ideas and the philosopher associated with them.

As Botond noted, one person's decline is another's progress, and this was brought home in Pim Trommelen's paper on the De la Court brothers. In contrast to many republican thinkers, they did not favour aristocracy over democracy, nor did they believe that the cultivation of virtue was necessary to prevent corruption. Instead, they argued that the advancement of each person's self-love is an expression of the common good and on this basis argued that popular government is actually the best form. Bad behaviour on the part of the mob, they argued, is not due to human nature and so must instead be the result of material inequality. If that inequality is reduced and all are given the opportunity to participate in politics then vicious actions can be avoided.

Pim's paper was not the only one to address potential solutions to the problem of corruption. Some of the solutions explored across the 23 papers were familiar and expected, others less so.

Plaque commemorating Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s birthplace in Geneva. Image by Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

Panel 5 as a whole focused on education, though what was interesting here was the diversity in how education was conceived. Yiyang compared the Liberal Education programmes of Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. Both advocated reading the 'great books' in the history of political thought as crucial training, but Yiyang suggested that whereas for Strauss the goal of this programme was to seek the truth, for Oakeshott it was more about students being initiated into a tradition. Francisca highlighted the importance of music education in the new Equadorian republic in the late nineteenth century. In an historical context in which Latin America was seen as a developing region, while the West was perceived to be in decline, classical music was viewed simultaneously as a symptom of decay and a potential antidote to it. While Rousseau also valued music, his approach to addressing moral decay, as Jinru Zhou demonstrated, centred on the notion of pity. Jinru drew out the contrast between the natural pity of the Second Discourse - which is instinctive and anterior to reason - and the refined pity of Emile, which required imagination and judgement and which, if cultivated, could offer a domestic remedy to human corruption

Legal frameworks offer another conventional solution to the problem of corruption. Laws are a means of controlling the flawed behaviour of human beings and the rule of law can even constrain the actions of the ruler. In this vein, Philip Al-Taiee noted the rejection of personal decrees in a Prussian context and Botond observed that his Hungarian thinkers criticised breaches of the law by rulers such as Joseph and Maria Theresa. As Bram Sturley demonstrated in his discussion of the writings of early twentieth-century Austrian socialists, laws also have to be adapted to fit new circumstances - not least when seeking to incorporate different nationalities within the Hapsburg Empire.

Plaque commemorating the birthplace of Benjamin Constant in Lausanne. Image by Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

Closely linked to the rule of law is the idea of a mixed constitution. The original formulation - dating back to Polybius - featured relatively little in our discussions, but we did explore modern adaptations. Philip revealed that some of his Prussian intellectuals used republican solutions to protect monarchy from slipping into despotism. In the same panel, Nevo Spiegel showed how Benjamin Constant's later writings advocated a monarch as a vertical balancing power to solve the republican problem of resolving conflicts between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the constitution. Pim reminded us that not all republican writers favoured the mixed constitution. Dutch thinkers like the De la Courts explicitly rejected that model on the grounds that it introduces competition into the system and so is liable to generate civil conflict.

For Machiavelli civil conflict was, of course, part of the solution rather than the problem, with active citizenship, tumults, and armed citizens all working to postpone decline. Yet, even here, the papers suggested that the story is more complex than we might think. Haoze Zhou showed that while the account offered in the Discourses is that conflict between the patricians and plebs rendered the Roman republic free and powerful, in the History of Florence civil conflict is a source of political decay. Haoze showed that the key for Machiavelli was to have conflict without sects and that this required good institutions that could contain private interests. Nicolau Lutz's paper complicated another key aspect of Machiavelli's thought - his preference for citizen soldiers over mercenaries. Nicolau showed that while Machiavelli saw mercenaries as morally corrupt, the Straussian critique of the civic humanist position, which suggested that Machiavelli believed strong leadership could make mercenaries more like citizen soldiers, is not entirely incorrect.

Interestingly religion as a solution to the problem of moral corruption was less prominent in the papers. It only surfaced in the final panel when Haoze presented religious institutions as one means by which Machiavelli thought private interests could be contained. Its almost complete absence from our discussions probably says as much about twenty-first-century intellectual historians' preoccupations as the importance of religion to the topic itself.

Map of Barcelona which was remodelled according to Cerdàs’s plan. Taken from narodnatribuna.info.

Alongside these conventional solutions were some that were more surprising. In her paper on the political thought of the architect Ildefons Cerdàs, Laura des Alisal highlighted Cerdàs's belief that making improvements to the environment in which people live not only improves their physical well-being but can also have moral and political implications. She convincingly argued that his book General Theory of Urbanisation, which is usually viewed as a manual for urban planners, can also be read as a text in political thought.

While imperial expansion was a source of corruption in the Roman, British, and Hapsburg cases, two papers presented it as a potential solution. Borbala Pigler showed how in early modern England, colonisation was seen as a solution to the problem of overpopulation. The issue, as she explained, was not simply quantity - that there were too many people - but also quality - the type of people - in particular those who were idle. Following medical models relating to an excess of blood, advocates of colonisation called not merely for bloodletting, but insisted on the need to purge the state of the idle by sending them to the colonies. This would both cleanse the English body politic and reform those individuals through hard work. In her keynote address Shiru Lim suggested a similar model was at work in the Russian Empire. Here Siberian exile was used as a means of purging a sick body politic by using it to absorb prisoners of war and political prisoners.

Early map of Massachusetts Bay from https://pacificpalisadesmap.github.io/new-rdcrrp-charting-the-beginnings-a-journey-through-the-map-of-the-massachusetts-bay-colony-yckbkr-pics/#

Finally, I was struck by the fact that while we did discuss Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau and Nietzsche, we also had many papers on less well-known thinkers who were engaged in day-to-day politics. Ming-Yan showed how Thomas Pownall had interesting things to say about empire and imperial fragility that were influenced by his practical experiences of governing. Philip talked about his thinkers 'grappling' with the problems of the day. Nevo reminded us that constitutional theorists cannot rely solely on rules and idealisations but must attend to their particular historical moment. Perhaps the topic encouraged this practical focus but I cannot help thinking that it is also a reflection of the current state of the field. If that is the case, then we are perhaps heeding Georges Dumézil's point as highlighted in Katie Ebner-Landy's opening talk. Katie compared the methodologies of Harold Bloom and Quentin Skinner and sought to explain why the former is - to use Dumézil's phrase - now of 'mere historical interest', while the latter remains relevant. Dumézil's point was that in order to avoid decline a methodology must continue to be useful. This means that it must not simply be frozen in time but must instead be 'transformed by future generations'.

Lessons on Inequality from the Eighteenth Century

Economic inequality is a perennial issue. Recent news items have reminded me of this, and of the fact that it has sometimes been justified by appeal to the arguments of eighteenth-century writers, notably Adam Smith. This misconceives what he actually wrote, and ignores the arguments of other eighteenth-century thinkers - such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau - against economic inequality.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

In advance of last week's budget there was much speculation as to whether Rachel Reeves was going to break Labour's manifesto pledge and raise income tax. Public services are currently struggling and raising the tax paid by those in the additional rate band (who earn over £125,140 of taxable income per year) and in the higher band (those earning £50,271 to £125,140) would have been the most straightforward way of providing a welcome boost to the public finances. Taxing those in the top two bands more heavily would also have served to reduce the growing inequalities in income within our society.

The Labour Market Statistics published by the Office for National Statistics in October reported that the mean average weekly wage (including bonuses) is £733 before tax - equating to an annual pre-tax average salary of around £38,100. Yet, as Forbes Magazine noted, this hides huge inequalities between individuals. The median annual pay of top chief executives was £4.22 million in 2024, while three million UK workers earn the minimum wage (£12.21 for those over 21, £10 for those aged 18-20 and £7.55 for those aged 16-17) (https://www.forbes.com/uk/advisor/business/average-uk-salary-by-age/#overview_of_earnings_in_the_uk); amounting to around £25,000 a year at best.

Image of Elon Musk from Wikimedia Commons.

Another story this month that highlighted the issue of extreme inequalities in income was the announcement on 7th November that Tesla shareholders had approved a record breaking trillion dollar pay package for Elon Musk (already the world's richest man). The package is dependent on the company raising its market value over ten years and hitting various targets, and Musk will be paid in shares, but it is still an obscene amount of money to award to an individual. The Tesla board justified the deal on the grounds that it feared that without that incentive Musk might leave the company and it could not afford to lose him.

The notion that the outrageous salary package offered to Musk is necessary to keep him at Tesla draws on the argument that it is better for companies (and by extension for society) to keep rich people on side because vast inequalities of wealth within a society actually benefit everyone. Drawing on a (skewed) understanding of Adam Smith's thought, the theory of 'trickle-down economics' reassures us that we are all better off as a result of the huge salaries of the rich. Smith's theory of the invisible hand is taken as an excuse to reject state intervention in income distribution on the grounds that it is likely to be counterproductive (https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/adam-smith-peter-foster-invisible-hand). Yet, as research by David Hope and Julian Limberg has shown, tax cuts for the rich tend to result in further benefits for them rather than improving the lives of workers or stimulating economic growth (https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107919/1/Hope_economic_consequences_of_major_tax_cuts_published.pdf).

Street sign from Geneva commemorating Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

While those who argue that vast inequalities in wealth are good for society sometimes seek eighteenth-century roots for their argument, the counter-argument - that growing inequality has negative rather than positive consequences for society as a whole - was also explored at that time. In his Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau insisted on the need for relative equality within a successful state:

as for wealth, no citizen be so very rich that he can buy another, and none so poor

that he is compelled to sell himself: Which assumes, on the part of the great,

moderation in goods and influence and, on the part of the lowly, moderation in

avarice and covetousness.

In a footnote Rousseau continued:

Do you, then, want to give the State stability? Bring the extremes as close together

as possible; tolerate neither very rich people nor beggars. These two states, which

are naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the common good; from one come the

abettors of tyranny, and from the other tyrants; it is always between these two that

there is trafficking in public freedom; one buys it, the other sells it. (J. J. Rousseau,

Of the Social Contract, ed. V. Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1997, p. 78).

For Rousseau, then, great inequalities of wealth within a state would encourage tyranny and corruption.

Writing just over thirty years later, the Newcastle-born radical Thomas Spence expressed a similar view. He observed the growing inequalities in British society:

Great landlords, and great farmers, now engross the country and these employ

none but great tradesmen. No little masters to be seen now, no medium; but very

great, and very little; very rich, and very poor. (Thomas Spence, 'A Letter from

Ralph Hodge, to his Cousin Thomas Bull, in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed.

H. T. Dickinson. Newcastle: Avero, 1982, p. 22).

In contrast to the theory of 'trickle-down economics', Spence insisted that a more equal division of property was the way to ensure that all had the necessities of life. Under the heading 'A Lesson for Antigallicans' he reprinted the following extract from a contemporary pamphlet in his journal Pigs' Meat:

Title page of Thomas Spence’s periodical Pigs’ Meat (London, 1793). Copy from the Philip Robinson Library, Newcastle University. Reprinted with kind permission.

if property were divided with any tolerable equality, a man would begin by

providing amply for his support, comfort, and enjoyment; and would only suffer

the surplus to be exchanged for foreign superfluities; nor would he for superfluities

condemn himself to incessant labour. (Thomas Spence, Pigs' Meat. London, 1793, p.

18)

Similarly in an earlier work of his own, in which he imagined an island society where land was owned collectively, Spence has his narrator observe of the island:

instead of anarchy, idleness, poverty, and meanness, the natural consequences I

narrowly thought of a ridiculous levelling scheme, [there is] nothing but order,

industry, wealth, and the most pleasing magnificence. (Thomas Spence, A

Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe. Newcastle upon Tyne, 1782, p. )

On what grounds did these thinkers argue that excessive inequality is bad for society? They claimed that as the gap between rich and poor increases, the pursuit of money comes to be valued more than the promotion of the common good. As a result, wealth starts to be viewed as a marker of merit regardless of the means by which that wealth was gained. In the language of the eighteenth century, people start rising to power simply because they are rich rather than because they are virtuous. Looking at the world today, I cannot help feeling that we are well past that point.

For eighteenth-century thinkers, the solution to this problem was easy to understand, though not necessarily straightforward to implement. If excessive inequalities of wealth within society were dangerous to the public as a whole, then it was incumbent on the government to introduce some degree of redistribution of wealth to keep those inequalities in check. This would ensure that the government operated in the public interest.

Image of Spence from the Hedley Papers at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. Reproduced with kind permission.

Spence took a rather extreme view of what this government intervention should involve. While he did not call for the abolition of moveable property, believing this was a spur to industry, he did insist on the communal ownership of land (organised at the level of the parish). That proposal was ridiculed in his own time and seems even less like a workable solution today. But we do have a ready-made system that is designed to allow the government to redistribute wealth in the interest of the public good and to keep a check on the inequalities of income between the richest and poorest in society. That system is income tax. What a shame Rachel Reeves did not find the courage to pull that lever last week.

British Republicans 2: Richard Carlile

The first volume of Richard Carlile’s periodical The Republican. Bodleian Library: Johnson e.3662 Photograph by Alex Plane, courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries.

On Friday 27 August, 1819, there appeared the first issue of a journal entitled The Republican edited by Richard Carlile. Its publication was a direct response to the Peterloo Massacre that had occurred just under two weeks before. Despite the header declaring it to be 'No. 1. Vol. I.', this was not, in fact, an entirely new journal but, as the editorial explained, the continuation of Sherwin's Weekly Political Register, which had been appearing for several years.

The change of title was, however, deliberate. Carlile was publicly identifying as a 'republican'. In his address to readers that prefaced the first volume he took pains to explain his understanding of the term. Noting that 'it has been the practice of ignorant or evil-minded persons' to associate republicanism purely with 'the horrors of the French Revolution' he urged his readers to look more closely at the etymology of the word. A republican government, he explained, is one 'which consults the public interest - the interest of the whole people' (The Republican, I, 'To the Readers of the Republican'). This, as I have argued in a previous blogpost, accorded with the traditional understanding of the term dating right back to ancient times. Yet, because Carlile was writing in the early nineteenth century, he was well aware of the additional connection that had been forged between republicanism and anti-monarchism. He engaged directly with this point, arguing rather cleverly that: 'Although in almost all instances where governments have been denominated Republican, monarchy has been practically abolished; yet it does not argue the necessity of abolishing monarchy to establish a Republican government.' In truth, Carlile believed that securing government in the public interest required a proper system of representation and that if this were to be introduced the abolition of monarchy was likely to follow. Nevertheless, his understanding of the double meaning of 'republican', and his emphasis on establishing government in the public interest rather than simply abolishing the monarchy, indicates continuity with the longer history of English republican thought.

Thomas Paine by Laurent Dubos, c. 1791. National Portrait Gallery. NPG 6805. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Carlile also associated his ideas more directly with those of earlier English republicans. He was a committed disciple of Thomas Paine and was responsible for printing and disseminating Paine's works. He was also an admirer of Thomas Spence, declaring that Spence's Land Plan was 'the most simple and most equitable system of society and government that can be imagined' and that it was 'a subject' about which it was 'worth thinking, worth talking, worth writing, worth printing' (Richard Carlile, Operative, 3 March 1839 as cited in Malcolm Chase, '"The Real Rights of Man": Thomas Spence, Paine and Chartism', in Rogers and Sippel (eds), Thomas Spence and His Legacy: Bicentennial Perspectives, special issue of Miranda 13 2016, pp. 3-4). Spence was himself a disciple of the seventeenth-century English republican James Harrington, and Carlile too made frequent reference in his writings back to the period of the Stuarts. He implied that the tyranny enacted by his own government at Peterloo and in its aftermath was similar to that performed by Charles I and his sons. In an open letter to the Prince Regent, which appeared in the second issue of The Republican, he warned the Prince that if he failed to deal justly with the perpetrators of the Peterloo massacre then 'the fate of Charles or James, is inevitably yours. And justly so.' (The Republican, No. 2 Vol. 1. 3 September 1819). Carlile also celebrated the heroic martyrs of the period, including John Hampden and Algernon Sidney.

Carlile repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to act as a martyr to liberty and to sacrifice his own personal freedom in the greater cause by stoically enduring repeated prison sentences. He was imprisoned for his role in publishing Paine’s works in 1819 soon after launching The Republican. This image was produced to celebrate his release six years later. ‘On his liberation after six years of imprisonment’ (Richard Carlile) by an unknown artist, 1825. National Portrait Gallery. NPG D8083. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

More substantively, The Republican echoed earlier English republican works in celebrating both civil and religious liberty, and in emphasising the interrelationship between the two. In the very first issue, Carlile explicitly declared his willingness to submit to martyrdom 'in the cause of liberty' and in the second issue he accused the despots of Europe of seeking to: 'abridge and destroy the liberties of their subjects, and to make their own authority absolute' (The Republican, No. 1 Vol. 1, 27 August 1819 and No. 2 Vol 1, 3 September 1819). Of particular importance to Carlile were the liberties of free speech and freedom of association. What was particularly galling about the Peterloo Massacre was that the individuals who had been killed had simply been enacting their right, under the British constitution, 'to assemble together for the purpose of deliberating upon public grievances as well as on the legal and constitutional means of obtaining redress' (The Republican, No. 5 Vol. 1, 24 September 1819). Such actions were necessary in Carlile's eyes because, like earlier British commonwealthmen, he believed that the British constitution had become corrupt and its balance disturbed. Echoing the late seventeenth-century thinker Henry Neville, Carlile argued that the balance of the constitution lay too much with the monarch and that too little power was wielded by the House of Commons. It had once dominated the other branches 'but that controul is quite destroyed, and through the influence of Boroughmongering, they are become the base and contemptible tools of every vicious faction that can get into power' (The Republican, No. 4 Vol. 1, 17 September 1819).

Richard Carlile, by an unknown artist. National Portrait Gallery, NPG 1435. Reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Again like earlier English republican authors, Carlile was adamant that citizens should enjoy religious as well as political liberty. Echoing John Milton and other so-called 'godly republicans' of the mid-seventeenth century, he insisted on a clear and complete separation between church and state: 'I maintain on this head, that no government should legislate as to what shall or shall not be the religion of its subjects; or what differences should exist in their creeds' 'an established priesthood, of whatever tenets, is incompatible with civil liberty' (The Republican, I 'To the Readers of the Republican'). Yet in terms of his own personal religious convictions, Carlile had less in common with the 'godly republicans', instead taking the path previously developed by John Toland and his associates at the turn of the eighteenth century, whereby rabid anti-clericalism morphed into deism and even atheism. All forms of religion, Carlile declared, are 'an imposture and fraud practised by base and designing men on the credulous part of mankind' (The Republican, No. 2 Vol. 1, 3 September 1819). By publishing the controversial theological works of Paine, Carlile hoped to be able to emancipate minds from the slavish fears associated with Christianity (The Republican, No. 6 Vol. 1, 1 October 1819). Carlile's readers expressed similar views. In a letter that appeared in the second issue, Joseph Fitch of Old Road Academy, Stepney, praised Carlile for the patriotic firmness with which he faced tyranny after being charged with sedition for publishing the theological works of Paine. He urged those who saw the views voiced by Carlile as a threat to the state to stop being 'the voluntary dupes of priestcraft and corruption' and he ended by urging support for the cause of 'civil and religious liberty' (The Republican, No. 2 Vol. 1, 3 September 1819).

While the continuities between Carlile's understanding of republicanism and that of his predecessors are striking, he also introduced new elements. He was more critical than most earlier English republicans (with the exception of Spence) of the unjust inequalities between rich and poor. In issue six he attacked the 'Prince and Ministers, Sinecurists and Pensioners, Borough-mongers and Fundholders, Bishops and Parsons, Judges and Lawyers' for attacking the lower orders and seeking to keep them down (The Republican, No. 6, Vol. 1, 1 October 1819). He also championed the rights of other marginal groups within society, even asserting that women ought to be accorded political rights (The Republican, No. 5. Vol. 1, 24 September 1819).

Carlile's writings, and the continuity of his arguments with earlier English republicans, challenge the common assumption that the English have no sustained republican tradition. In fact, there is a rich and vibrant vein of republican thinking in this country, one that has been flexible enough to adapt to a variety of different circumstances and issues. The optimism and energy of Carlile's writings stemmed from his firm conviction that the unjust political system of his own day could be completely overturned if only the franchise were extended and the poor were given the vote. On this point history has proved Carlile wrong, which poses challenging questions for democratic republicans today.