Isle of Pines

The Isle of Pines and Plato redivivus / Henry Neville ; edited and with an Introduction by David Womersley.

Carmel, Indiana : Liberty Fund, Inc., [2020]

lv, 489 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

"Summary of Liberty Fund's Neville for CIP This volume combines two important works by seventeenth-century writer, politician, and political thinker Henry Neville (1620-1694), whose writings were important interventions in the volatile politics of Restoration England, when a series of crises raised fundamental political questions. His works are remarkable for both their political audacity and their literary imagination. The Isle of Pines (1668), seems at initial glance to be a slight, even salacious, shipwreck fantasy in which a fictional Elizabethan castaway, George Pines, and four female cosurvivors populate a luxuriant tropical island with a thriving community that numbers, after two generations, almost two thousand. But like Harrington before him, albeit less overtly, Neville also uses the island trope for purposes of political implication, showing, ultimately, how Pines's fool's paradise of lust and license has decayed into a dystopic blend of sanctimonious Cromwellian authoritarianism and divine-right Stuart hubris. Neville's pursues similar republican themes more fully and directly in his major work of 1680, Plato Redivivus. Often read as a moderate adaptation of Harringtonian principles to the realities of a monarchical system that was now again entrenched, the treatise is notable for its insistence on kingship as a trust from the people, on the duty of kings to relegate their own interests beneath those of their subjects, and on constitutional sanctions such as annual parliaments as necessary checks on royal power. "Mixed monarchy" and "limited monarchy" are emphatic terms throughout the work, and the idea of the ancient constitution is pervasive, with evidence of medieval parliaments adduced to demonstrate, prior to erosions by the Tudors and Stuarts, "how ancient the rights of the people of England are." As editor David Womersley writes, "Neville has existed in the shadow of the giants of seventeenth-century English political thought-Hobbes, Harrington, Locke. . . . More than any of those three greater political theorists, however, Neville was a practical politician . . . , participating in public life at a pitch which none of them approached. . . . [Neville's writings] are the products of an experienced political actor who united a practitioner's sense of possibility with literary flair and imagination as he struggled to achieve headway for his republican commitments in the deceptive waters of late Stuart monarchy. It is this combination of fundamental staunch republicanism with the tactical acuity and flexibility of the politician which makes Plato Redivivus such a distinctive contribution to late-seventeenth-century English political writing.""-- Provided by publisher.

Plato redivivus

Online version: Neville, Henry, 1620- The isle of pines and plato redivivus 1st edition. Carmel : Liberty Fund, Inc., 2021.

English

August 20, 2021

Includes bibliographical references and index.