A Trumpet of Sedition surveys canonical texts by thinkers such as Thomas More, Richard Hooker, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, as well as the ideas of radicals like the Levellers and Gerrard Winstanley and less well known but important figures. The authors explain these texts in clear and lively prose, while situating them in their social and political context in new and original ways and contrasting the English case to others in Europe. By examining political ideas not merely as free-floating abstractions but as living encounters with historical experience - the formation of the English state and the rise of agrarian capitalism - A Trumpet of Sedition illuminates the roots of contemporary Western political thought.