Sidney, Algernon Discourses concerning Government. Published from an Original Manuscript of the London: to be sold by the booksellers, 1698. Folio (31 x 19.5cm), contemporary mottled calf panelled in blind, rebacked and recornered, endpapers renewed, quire B with 3 leaves only as usual (the pagination and text continuous), small worm-tracks to lower fore corners of 2D3-2F1 and to gutter of quires 3C-3O, 2K3 with short closed tear in top margin, 2L2-3 browned, a few trivial marks [ESTC R11837; Wing S3761]

Note: Principally a justification of armed resistance to oppressive government, the Discourses was a major influence on the Founding Fathers of the United States, its fame owing much to the prominence it attained in Sidney's trial and execution for treason in 1683. 'For subsequent influence in Enlightenment Britain, America, the United Provinces, Germany, and France [Sidney] had no seventeenth-century rival except John Locke. For modern scholars his claim to a major place among early modern political writers rests upon two foundations. The first, alongside Locke, is as one of the two pre-eminent seventeenth-century English resistance theorists ... The other is as the most influential of the English republicans' (ODNB). Provenance: Professor G. E. Aylmer FBA (1926-2000), historian of 17th-century England and sometime master of St Peter’s College, Oxford (with his bookplate).