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.

List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the invention of the modern republic Biancamaria Fontana; 1. Ancient and modern republicanism: 'mixed constitution' and 'ephors' Wilfried Nippel; 2. Checks, balances and boundaries: the separation of powers in the constitutional debate of 1787 Bernard Manin; 3. From Utopia to repulicanism: the case of Diderot Gerolamo Imbruglia; 4. Cordeliers and Girondins: the prehistory of the republic? Patrice Gueniffey; 5. The constitutional republicanism of Emmanuel Sieyès Pasquale Pasquino; 6. The Thermidorian republic and its principles Biancamaria Fontana; 7. Francesco Mario Pagano's 'Republic of Virtue': Naples 1799 Anthony Pagden; 8. Kant, the French revolution and the definition of the republic Gareth Stedman Jones; 9. French historians and the reconstruction of the republican tradition, 1800¿1848 François Furet; 10. The republic of universal suffrage Pierre Rosanvallon; 11. The identity of the bourgeois liberal republic John Dunn; Bibliography; Index.