European University Institute Library

The colonial American origins of modern democratic thought, J.S. Maloy

eng

index present

non fiction

The colonial American origins of modern democratic thought

electronic resource

dictionaries

298601620

J.S. Maloy

Cambridge Social Sciences eBooks

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.--, Provided by publisher

Introduction : accountability and democratic theory -- Radical trust and accountability in the seventeenth century -- Fidelity and accountability in Virginia and Bermuda -- Politics and ecclesiastics in Plymouth and Massachusetts -- Constitutional conflict and political argument at Boston -- Democratic constitutionalism in Connecticut and Rhode Island -- Conclusion : Anglophone radicalism and popular control