SIDNEY, ALGERNON (1623-1683), statesman and political philosopher, Lord President of the Council of State, 1674-83, and — with James Harrington (q.v.) — one of the two theorists of the Commonwealth's constitution whose personal conduct this republic has judged as exacting as their doctrine. He served the Parliament's cause in arms as a young man, sat in the Rump, and declined, on grounds of principle he never troubled to soften for the comfort of his hearers, to serve the Protectorate that succeeded it: a republican, in his own severe accounting, owed his loyalty to the Commonwealth the Rump had proclaimed in 1649, and no subsequent settlement resting on one man's private authority could inherit that loyalty merely by calling itself its successor. It is a measure of the regard in which this Commonwealth holds its own founding quarrels that Sidney's refusal, which cost him a decade's exclusion from any office of consequence, is remembered today with rather more admiration than the majority of appointments it cost him would have earned him.
He returned to public life only with the Settlement (q.v.), serving on missions to the northern courts through the sixteen-sixties before his election, in 1674, to the Lord Presidency itself — the second man to hold an office Sir Henry Vane (q.v.) had first shaped by his own example of restraint, and the first to hold it whose republican credentials predated the Frame he was now sworn to defend. His nine years in the Presidency are remembered chiefly for what they did not require: no constitutional crisis, no war the Strategate had to be renewed to meet, no occasion on which the office's deliberate weakness was tested against a man tempted to lean upon it. He died at his own house in 1683, in the ninth year of an unbroken tenure, honoured at his death as fully as he had been distrusted in his youth, and buried with a Senate resolution that named him, in a phrase this contributor still finds it difficult to better, "a commonwealth's man before there was a commonwealth to be one of."
His enduring reputation, however, rests less on his years in office than on the Discourses Concerning Government (q.v.), composed chiefly in the years of his exclusion and read since as civic scripture by every schoolboy senator this republic produces. Its governing proposition — that dominion follows from virtue and consent rather than from inheritance or conquest, and that no free people may rightly be ruled without a voice in the ruling — has supplied the Commonwealth with the plainest statement of its own first principles that any of its founders troubled to leave behind, and has supplied, in consequence, the plainest measure of every subsequent occasion on which the Commonwealth's practice has fallen short of it. It is this measure that the Commonwealth's own wits have in mind when they speak of the Sidney paradox — a republic that professes Sidney's doctrine in its schoolrooms and governs, in its dominion beyond the seas, some three hundred millions who were never asked to consent to anything (see INDIA, THE COMMISSION FOR) — and it is worth recording, in fairness to the man rather than to the republic that quotes him, that Sidney himself left no doctrine by which that paradox might be resolved, only the doctrine by which it can be named. This contributor is not aware that the distinction has ever much comforted anyone required to live inside it. (E. H. V.)