Alan Houston is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph. D. from Harvard, and has been Mellon Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Columbia University (1988-89) and Laurence S. Rockefeller Fellow in the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University (1993-94). In 1990 he received the Leo Strauss award from the American Political Science Association for the best doctoral dissertation in political philosophy. His book Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton UP, 1991) received the APSA Award for the best book in the field of political theory. Currently he is working on the Levellers and on the political writings of Benjamin Franklin. Steve Pincus was junior fellow in Harvard's prestigious Society of Fellows before joining the faculty at Chicago. His first book Protestantism and Patriotism was published by Cambridge UP in 1996, and he is now working on a major reinterpretation of the 'Glorious Revolution'. also to be published by Cambridge UP. He is also writing, with Adam Fox, a volume of the 'New Oxford History of England'.

• Introduction: modernity and later seventeenth-century England Alan Houston and Steve Pincus; 1. The question of secularisation Blair Worden; 2. 'Meer religion' and the 'church-state' of Restoration England: the impact and ideology of James II's Declarations of indulgence Mark Knights; 3. Radicals, reformers and republicans: academic language and political discourse in Restoration London Gary DeKrey; 4. The family in the Exclusion Crisis: Locke vs Filmer revisited Rachel Weil; 5. Understanding popular politics in Restoration Britain Tim Harris; 6. The war in heaven and the Miltonic sublime Nicholas von Maltzahn; 7. The Cowleyan Pindaric ode and sublime diversions Joshua Scodel; 8. Plays as property, 1660–1710 Paulina Kewes; 9. Republicanism, the politics of necessity, and the rule of law Alan Houston; 10. From holy cause to economic interest: the transformation of reason of state thinking in seventeenth-century England Steve Pincus; 11. Natural philosophy and political periodisation: interregnum, restoration, and revolution Barbara Shapiro.

Review of the hardback: ' … an exhilarating and challenging discussion of the theme from various viewpoints.' Lancet