From commons to people: on the invention of modern political language in England

Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, a significant shift in English political language occurred. Threatened by the perceived egalitarian and anarchic connotations of the lexical field of commons, political thinkers engaged in sustained linguistic contestation that resulted in a new centrality of the concepts of people and multitude. After an outline of the late medieval developments of concepts such as community, commons, and commonwealth, four case studies are considered to explore the problems raised by their semantics and the range of solutions provided by Tudor humanist writers: Thomas Elyot, Richard Morrison, John Cheke, and Thomas Smith. Finally, the advantages and drawbacks of the new vocabulary are assessed, as well as their implications for the way we think about the history of political thought today.