Works like The Prince and those of some pre-English Civil War thinkers and a group of American Revolutionary personalities all faced similar such moments and offered related sets of answers.

In this article, Pocock analyzed Machiavelli's focus on armed militancy in the Discorsi as a recourse for temporal stability in polities subject to the whims of fortuna.

Pocock nuanced his previous interpretations of James Harrington's writings and allowed for the possibility of freeholder entrepreneurship, but still held that "government" was more manifest than "trade" in his ideas.

[7] Pocock wished to further research and elaborate on this project: "...what I propose to do is investigate the significance in the eighteenth century of a current of ideas that stems mainly from James Harrington, but can be traced additionally to the seventeenth-century theorists studied some years ago by Z. S. Fink under the name of the 'classical republicans'...[Caroline Robbins' The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman illustrated] how regularly recourse was made, throughout the century, to a group of writers essentially the same as Fink's Venetian theorists.

The Machiavellian promotion of armed militancy became a possible recourse for temporal stability in polities, connected not only to "reversals of fortune," but to "revolution" as a technical problem solved only by multiple approaches to mixed government.

"[10] It was the eighteenth-century "neo-Harringtonians" who narrated a "Gothic commonwealth of freeholders...an economy of masters and servants, defined mainly in agrarian and traditional terms," that had been lost to the early modern "corruption" of "money in government: of public finance...[and] a well-financed court bureaucracy... a Marxist might say that this was a [neo-]mercantilist rather than an entrepreneurial consciousness, if that were not probably revisionism.