Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649-1653. By Sean Kelsey (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) 254 pp. $49.50
Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649-1653. By Sean Kelsey (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) 254 pp. $49.50
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发明一个共和国：英联邦的政治文化，1649-1653。
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发表时间：
1998
影响因子：
0.5
通讯作者：
Derek Hirst
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Derek Hirst
德里克·赫斯特似乎很容易驳斥短命的英国共和国及其支持者的姿态：政治思想史学家可能会重视古典化，但其他人发现它空洞，对必要性的呼吁也减弱了。然而，最近我们变得更加适应其他形式的意义，例如手势、比喻和象征。从这种新的角度来看，英联邦似乎并不像敌人所声称的那样不幸，他们战胜了残部议会的尸体，而他们命名只是为了嘲笑残部议会。英国革命的一些狂热分子宣称一切形式和仪式都已结束，但那些走在权力走廊上的人却没有被说服。千禧年论者和理论家——约翰·弥尔顿，甚至是才华横溢的普及者马尔查蒙特·尼达姆——都把自己的地位让给了那些从事治理工作的人，正如凯尔西所主张的英国本土共和主义一样。有人声称，尽管君主制已经存在了几个世纪，但共和主义绝不是一种外来的东西。在柯林森的重要著作的基础上，凯尔西观察到，英国政体长期以来一直以“半”或“士绅共和主义”为特征，地方和议会的社区治理实践很容易导致“无头”。1但“无头”并不是故事的全部；凯尔西提供了许多引人入胜的细节，讲述了英联邦的主人们决心将新共和国的目光集中在这一点上。他们侵占宫殿和装饰品，完善军事和丧葬展示，要求外国大使和国内恳求者遵守适当的形式和仪式，他们力求在权威上与他们所拥有的权力相匹配。他们还互相争夺优先权，因为文职推手——意识到他们在执政方面的成功以及他们（部分）体现了宪法连续性——坚决反对那些为事业带来胜利和荣耀的士兵。对于所有这些人来说，执政经验具有一种直觉力量，为理论家枯燥的论点注入了生命力。凯尔西对人们熟悉的军民对抗故事的新转折构成了本书的学术意义：他很有可能地提出，备受争议的对“后裔”的驱逐并非源于官员们对“后裔”即将把权力移交给复兴的保皇党的怀疑，而是源于对文官统治者日益自信和自信的不满。对摩擦的大部分描述都建立在对君主制残余物质命运的仔细分析之上。士兵和平民争夺
DEREK HIRST It has seemed easy to dismiss the posturings of the short-lived English republic and its supporters: Historians of political thought might prize the classicizing, but others found it empty, and the appeals to necessity wan. Lately, however, we have become more attuned to other forms of meaning, such as gesture, trope, and symbol. By such new light, the Commonwealth appears less hapless than its enemies alleged in their triumphs over the corpse of a Rump Parliament that they had named only to deride. Some enthusiasts of the English revolution proclaimed the end of all forms and ceremonies, but those who walked the corridors of power were unpersuaded. The millenarians and the theorists—John Milton, even the brilliant popularizer Marchamont Nedham—yield pride of place to those who got on with the business of governing, as Kelsey argues for a vernacular English republicanism. The claim is that despite all the long centuries of monarchy, republicanism was by no means an exotic import. Building on the important work of Collinson, Kelsey observes that the English polity had long been characterized by a “semi-” or “gentry republicanism,” by practices of community governance both in locality and parliament that lent themselves readily enough to acephalousness.1 But acephalousness is not the whole story; Kelsey provides much fascinating detail about the determination with which the Commonwealth’s masters set about centering the new republic’s gaze. Appropriating palaces and ornaments, perfecting military and funerary display, enjoining due form and ceremonial on foreign ambassadors and domestic supplicants, they sought to match in authority what they possessed in power. They also vied among themselves for precedence, as civilian Rumpers—conscious of their success in governing as well as of their (partial) embodiment of constitutional continuity—asserted themselves against the soldiers who had brought both victory and glory to the cause. For all these men, the experience of governing possessed a gut force that gave life to the dry arguments of the theorists. Kelsey’s new twist to the familiar tale of military/civilian rivalry constitutes the scholarly signiacance of this book: He suggests, with considerable plausibility, that the much-debated expulsion of the Rump stemmed not from the ofacers’ suspicions that the Rumpers were about to hand over power to resurgent royalists but rather from resentment at the growing conadence and assertiveness of the civilian rulers. Much of the account of friction rests on careful analysis of the fate of the material residue of monarchy. Soldiers and civilians competed for