Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

The study of British political thought has a long, contentious history, to which Whitney R. D. Jones himself contributed with The Tudor Commonwealth, 1529–1559 (1970). In this book, Jones has undertaken a wider temporal study but one narrower in focus. From a medieval view in which "commonwealth" had corporate social and religious overtones, to a late eighteenth-century concept emphasizing individual rights and religious toleration, the term has undergone numerous transformations. Why, then, write a book to profile an expression that, as Jones admits, has meant so many things over a period of three and a half centuries? Perhaps the best answer is that, despite changing understandings, the idea of a "commonwealth" persisted. Thus the focus of this book is less on continuity than change, with the underlying theme that, despite shifting definitions, "the term 'commonwealth' was recurrently and quite consciously envisaged as embodying a set of values—usually but not always desirable" (p. 14).

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Jones breaks his study into six periods. A brief consideration of medieval "roots and branches" emphasizes the corporate model, with king as head and people as body of a state, the health of which depends on each playing their proper, God-given, roles. This static and idealistic view is exemplified by Edmund Dudley's The Tree of Common Wealth (1509–1510), from which the present book drew its title.

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