The Ancient Constitution

John Selden and the Western Political Tradition
by Ofir Haivry
Cambridge UP, 2017, 504 pages, $160
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The last decades of the sixteenth century and the first of the seventeenth witnessed the great flowering of English Renaissance culture. Shakespeare and Jonson transformed the theatre, Donne and Herbert poetry, Bacon and Hobbes philosophy and science. Drake circumnavigated the globe, Raleigh introduced tobacco to the English palate and thought he could find El Dorado. Ofir Haivry’s new biography claims that in an era of remarkable men and women, John Selden (1584–1654) stands out, “as the most learned man in an unusually learned age and of no less intellectual significance than contemporaries [like] Grotius and Hobbes”.

Considering the opposition, and the fact that outside a specialist community of scholars Selden remains an obscure figure, this is a remarkable claim, but it is not without substance. In recent decades, Selden has assumed…