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EDITOR’S NOTE - Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government [1698]

Edition used:

Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1996).

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


EDITOR’S NOTE

Reading the Discourses

Second, Sidney rarely gives his complete account of a theme or topic in one place. Instead, he repeats himself often, on each occasion giving a brief and partial version of the argument. Thus his understanding of, say, equality has to be culled from the many occasions on which he touches the subject.

Readers who do not have time or energy for the whole book may wish to look at these sections, which contain the meat of Sidney’s argument:

Chapter One, sections 1, 3, 5, 10, 13, 16, 20.

Chapter Two, sections 1, 4, 8, 9, first eight paragraphs of 11, 13, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 28, 32.

Chapter Three, last three paragraphs of section 7, and sections 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 19, 23, 25, 28, 33, 36, 37, 38, 41, 45.

The Text

Although Sidney did not live to finish the Discourses, the book as we have it appears to be a nearly complete draft; all but the final chapter of Filmer’s Patriarcha are covered. Shortly before his arrest in 1683 he told a friend that it was “not like to be finished in a long time.” He may have planned a thorough revision, removing repetitions and tightening a long, sometimes rambling argument. He said he had no “other thoughts concerning it, than when I had finished and examined it, if I was satisfied with it, to show it to some prudent friends, and then either to publish it, keep, or burn it, as they should advise.”

The text of this edition is based on the first edition of 1698, published fifteen years after Sidney’s death by John Toland, whose editor’s note reports that the manuscript was “put into the hands of a person of eminent quality and integrity by the author himself,” and from that person Toland, presumably, got it. Toland’s was the only edition of the Discourses that claimed to be based on the original manuscript. The later editions appear to be founded on his. Accordingly, the 1698 text seems to be the closest we have to what Sidney wrote, and that is what is printed here.

The same cannot be said for Toland’s edition of Edmund Ludlow’s autobiography, which Blair Worden pronounces “radically unfaithful.” However, Worden gives “two grounds for reassurance” that Toland’s Sidney is reasonably faithful to the original:

We may conclude that the 1698 edition is fairly close to what Sidney actually wrote.

The present edition departs from the 1698 text in one place. At the end of Chapter Two we print the excerpt from the Discourses that was read at Sidney’s trial. Worden explains:

The passage printed at the end of Chapter Two is taken from the 1684 trial record, The Arraignment, Tryal, & Condemnation of Algernon Sidney, Esq; for High-Treason.

MODERNIZATION OF THE TEXT

Our intention has been to print an edition of the Discourses that is accurate yet easily accessible to today’s readers. To this end it has been modernized in several minor respects.

Capitalization in the 1698 Discourses is generally consistent with surviving manuscripts of letters in Sidney’s own hand. By today’s standards it looks haphazard. The section titles, which Sidney wrote as complete sentences, were not capitalized differently from the body of the text. In the body of the text we have changed capitalization to conform to today’s usage, but we have set the section titles with their original capitalization.

Italics in the 1698 edition were used for proper names, foreign language phrases, and terms under discussion, such as aristocracy. Quotations and paraphrases from other works were also generally given in italics. In Sidney’s surviving letters proper names are not underlined. Therefore we have retained all italics except for proper names. (A few of Sidney’s quotations were placed, inconsistently, in quotation marks. We did not change these.) We did not add italics except when proper names within italic quotations and book titles had been set in Roman type.

Spelling. Sidney’s irregular spelling in his letters was typical of his day. The same words, including names, were sometimes spelled differently even within the same sentence. The 1698 editor, it appears, regularized Sidney’s spelling, but according to standards no longer in use today. Spelling in this edition was determined as follows:

Except for King Lewis of France, we modernized proper names: Hobbs became Hobbes, King Ralph became Rudolph, in a radical instance. For Greek and Latin names we used the Oxford Classical Dictionary; for Biblical names, the King James Bible. For British and other names we followed accepted modern usage, with an occasional reliance upon spellings appearing in Webster’s Second International Dictionary. This prompted us to retain Sidney’s Britains, though Britons is preferred today. We let stand Switzers to refer to the Swiss.

A number of old, often familiar, spellings were retained: chuse, compleat, shew, publick (and other -ck endings), compell’d (and other contracted -ed endings, but rendred became rendered, and so on). Tho, without an apostrophe, seems quite contemporary, but it is Sidney’s, and we let it stand.

Other old spellings, although easy to guess at, are unfamiliar today and were modernized: bin is been, alledge is allege,sute is suit, and so on. Expresly, which could be taken for a contemporary typographical error, became expressly. And finally, we modernized constructions like no where and every thing, making them one word, according to today’s usage.

In the Latin, the -que endings that Sidney represented by -q; are spelled out.

Other changes. We retained Sidney’s use of the ampersand (&) in the text and in his notes. Obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. We changed Sidney’s (or Toland’s) punctuation in a very few instances where the sense was unclear. Sidney’s nouns in the possessive did not always have apostrophes; we have added them, so that mens affairs became men’s affairs. Sidney also used, and we retained, the old-fashioned possessive Brutus his sons where we would write Brutus’s sons. An occasional word has been added where Sidney or the first typesetter seems to have slipped. These are placed in brackets.

FOOTNOTES

The notes that Sidney wrote were printed in the first edition either in the margins or as unnumbered footnotes. In our edition all his original notes are printed, without corrections, as unbracketed footnotes.

There are quite a few errors in Sidney’s notes, which are often too brief to track down easily. Many of his notes may have been written from memory. With the help of later editions, and with reference to the original texts, the notes have been supplemented with corrected versions wherever possible. But any and all such editorial additions, which appear in the footnotes, are printed within brackets.

For easily accessible authors, such as Livy, Tacitus, and Aristotle, passages have been cited in the notes according to standard book, chapter, and (sometimes) page divisions as they appear in most modern translations. For more obscure authors, additional information is given where known. In the first footnote reference to an author, a relatively full citation on the work is given if available. Later citations will be abbreviated. The index will help the reader locate full citations.

The bracketed footnotes also include translations, by the editor or his assistants, of Sidney’s foreign language quotations wherever Sidney has not provided a translation himself.

As is common in seventeenth-century writing, and as implied above, Sidney’s quotations are rarely exact, and they are often better described as paraphrases. Occasionally there are outright errors. Again, no attempt has been made to correct these.

Classical references, Biblical names, regal names, and contemporary names and events are not generally identified unless they are necessary to understand the text. Readers who want further help may consult standard reference works located in most libraries, such as the Oxford Classical Dictionary and the New Century Cyclopedia of Names.

Acknowledgments

For research assistance with the notes, translations, and proper names, I thank J. Jackson Barlow, Daniel McCarthy, and Michael Cusick. Grace West helped with the proofreading and the Latin. William C. Dennis and Charles H. Hamilton, two successive Directors of Publications at Liberty Fund, Inc., gave excellent editorial advice. Thanks also to The Heritage Foundation, where I was able to finish this book during my year there as Bradley Resident Scholar.

Finally, the generosity of the late Pierre F. Goodrich of Indianapolis, founder of Liberty Fund, has made possible the publication, in inexpensive and handsome volumes, of this and other classics in the history of thought on political liberty.

T.G.W.