A work of magisterial erudition.—Journal of American History

This is the first comprehensive study of republicanism, ancient and modern, written for our time. Among its many virtues is a rediscovery of the difference between ancient and modern republicanism and a critique of the notion of civic humanism.—Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University

This extraordinary book enters the generation-old controversy concerning the influence of classical republicanism on the American Revolution. . . . Rahe's text is a splendid series of learned lectures for interested citizens, while his notes are a home school course for graduate study in the foundation of the American republic.—Journal of the Early Republic

[An] extraordinary book. . . . It is a great achievement and will stay as a landmark.—Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Spectator (London)

This is a work vast in scale, soaring in its scholarly ambition, and magnificent . . . in its achievement. The author's command of the primary sources is staggering in breadth and depth, deftly orchestrated and rich with insight. . . . Deploying an avalanche of evidence. . . Rahe shows how alien the modern project, in all its diverse versions, was to the classics as well as the Bible.—Thomas L. Pangle, Political Theory

The subject is enormously important and terribly difficult, requiring a detailed knowledge of the ancient world, of the thinking and experience of the Founding Fathers of the American republic, and of the entire history of western political thought through the eighteenth century. Rahe has that knowledge, an original and convincing understanding of the realities and thinking of life in ancient Greece, and a powerful and compelling thesis that explains how ancient republican ideas have changed almost totally as they have been transformed into the modern republic.—Donald Kagan, Yale University

A stunning feat of scholarship, presented with uncommon grace and ease—the sort of big, important book that comes along a few times in a generation. In an age of narrow specialists, it ranges through the centuries from classical Greece to the new American Republic, unfolding a coherent new interpretation of the rise of modern republicanism. . . . World-class, and sure to have a quite extraordinary impact.—Lance Banning, University of Kentucky