The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought

This book explores the profound impact of seventeenth-century American political thought on modern democratic ideas.

J. S. Maloy (Author)

9780521730556, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 19 July 2010

226 pages
23 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.34 kg

'… Maloy makes a compelling case for the historical and intellectual importance of earlier fights over the form of popular rule. … Maloy lays the groundwork for a rich developmental account of the principle of democratic accountability …' The Review of Politics

This first examination in almost forty years of political ideas in the seventeenth-century American colonies reaches some surprising conclusions about the history of democratic theory more generally. The origins of a distinctively modern kind of thinking about democracy can be located, not in revolutionary America and France in the later eighteenth century, but in the tiny New England colonies in the middle seventeenth. The key feature of this democratic rebirth was honoring not only the principle of popular sovereignty through regular elections but also the principle of accountability through non-electoral procedures for the auditing and impeachment of elected officers. By staking its institutional identity entirely on elections, modern democratic thought has misplaced the sense of robust popular control which originally animated it.

1. Introduction: accountability and democratic theory
2. Radical trust and accountability in the seventeenth century
3. Fidelity and accountability in Virginia and Bermuda
4. Politics and ecclesiastics in Plymouth and Massachusetts
5. Constitutional conflict and political argument at Boston
6. Democratic constitutionalism in Connecticut and Rhode Island
7. Conclusion: anglophone radicalism and popular control.

Subject Areas: Political structures: democracy [JPHV], History of ideas [JFCX], History of the Americas [HBJK]