The period between the Williamite war and the act of union saw different groups in Irish society forced to reassess their ideas of political and national identity, against the background of a changing society at home and intellectual and political revolution abroad. This volume of essays, deriving from a Folger Library, Washington, seminar, examines radical, patriot and conservative political ideas, from the debates on the meaning of the Revolution of 1688 to the emergence of democratic republicanism, and a redefined conservatism, in the 1790s. A concluding overview by Professor J.G.A. Pocock puts the Irish case in the wider context of the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century.