Classical republicanism or just plain republicanism refers to political ideals in early-modern Europe inspired by the Classical Greek or Roman republican models. The centres of republican thought in early-modern Europe were the city states of Renaissance Italy, Holland and England.

The period of the English Civil War and the Republic (1640–60) and the following decades with their political crises were not only formative for the key political thinkers of the era, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, they also drew attention to the near forgotten tradition of republican thought.

According to this tradition, the central value of political life is freedom, and above all the kind of freedom where a person is independent of the will of another person. This doesn’t need to be a question of the actual limitation of individual freedom; according to republicans, freedom is not realised if there is even the possibility of another person’s arbitrary will limiting the freedom of another.

Republican thinkers pondered various political alternatives for ensuring the preservation of this kind of freedom. In my doctoral dissertation and subsequent book based on the dissertation, Classical humanism and republicanism in English political thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), I presented a new interpretation of the foundations of republican political thought in England.