Discourses concerning Government. by SIDNEY, Algernon - 1698

London: Printed, and are to be sold by the Booksellers of London and Westminster,, 1698. Published from an Original Manuscript of the Author. Folio (314 x 187 mm). Contemporary calf, raised bands to spine, panelled boards decoratively stamped in blind, edges sprinkled red. Contemporary ownership inscription, "Arundell Wastfeild", to front endpaper, a few neat pencil annotations to contents. Joints, edges, and corners skilfully repaired, contents evenly browned, leaves Ll2-3 heavily so, chip to head of front free endpaper and short tear to upper margin of leaf Z2, otherwise a very good copy. First edition of this major text of republican theory written between 1681 and 1683 and originally circulated as a manuscript. "Although long and sometimes repetitive the Discourses places Sidney alongside Milton as the master of republican eloquence. It is the power of its prose, as much as any aspect of its content, which helps to account for the work's exceptional subsequent impact in Britain, continental Europe, and America. Polemically a refutation of Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (1680), the practical purpose of the Discourses is again to argue for armed resistance to oppression ... for subsequent influence in Enlightenment Britain, America, the United Provinces, Germany, and France, he had no seventeenth-century rival except John Locke" (ODNB). "Sidney was executed in 1683 for complicity in the Rye House Plot, his papers, including the [unpublished] Discourses, being used against him. The indictment cited sentences saying that the king is subject to law, is responsible to the people, and may be deposed, as a 'false, seditious, and traitorous libel'… Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government was not published until 1698" (Sabine, 512). Thomas Jefferson was one of many influenced by Sidney's ideas. In 1804, he wrote of the Discourses: "They are in truth a rich treasure of republican principles, supported by copious & cogent arguments, and adorned with the finest flowers of science. It is probably the best elementary book of the principles of government… which has ever been published in any language" (Sowerby III: J6). "Jefferson identified Sidney as one of four writers who provided the intellectual foundations of the Declaration of Independence" (A Covenanted People, 56).