The book provides a thematic examination of republican theory from the Italian Renaissance, through seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England, the late- eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the experiences of the early American republic to contemporary debates. It maps out a republican ideal type according to four themes - popular sovereignty, a view of history which is sensitive to systemic corruption, an insistence on civic virtue and, following Philip Pettit, a conception of liberty as non-domination. It evaluates the attractiveness of those themes to liberals, communitarians, socialists, environmentalists and feminists and examines their relevance to inhabitants of the non-Western world. The book contributes to several topical debates dealing with the