The Concept of "Commonwealth" in Political Writings of the Civil War

This article examines the history of the use of the term "commonwealth" in the English Civil War. In the 17th century the term "commonwealth" had three meanings: religious community, monarchical republicanism, and popular republicanism. The article attempts to trace how royalists and parliamentarians manipulated these meanings using the positive semantic field of the term: order, justice, stability, welfare, freedom. Monarchical republicanism was the dominant current in seventeenth-century English political thought and both sides of the conflict understood "commonwealth" as the harmonious rule of a "king-in-parliament" . The establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649 was the beginning of the development of classical republicanism in England, although the basic idea of the "commonwealth" as a political body in which different forms of government were possible did not undergo significant changes. After the Stuart Restoration, the construction of a negative image of Cromwell's regime began, which created an opposite semantic field around the concept of "commonwealth": civil war, rebellion, revolt, anarchy. The example of several ordinal writers shows how the use of the term in political polemics became awkward and ambiguous, leading to the displacement of the concept from public speech and the use of the word "republic"