Going Back to Our Seventeenth-Century Roots

Nowadays, we Americans equate "democracy" with voting rights and regular elections, and we look back to eighteenth-century Revolutionary thinkers for the founding theory of that system. In an intriguing, intricate, and compact book, however, political scientist J. S. Maloy urges us to rethink the historical origins of American democratic thought, and indeed, to rethink the nature of democracy itself. Described as the first scholarly examination of seventeenth-century American political thought in forty years, his Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought challenges the prevailing assumption that modern democratic theory originated among late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European intellectuals, and it pushes the beginnings back to seventeenth-century American religious dissidents and colonizers. Modern democratic ideas, he says, started in early colonial British America and flowed back to England—not in England to be conveyed to America. Accountability and control were the true linchpins of early American democratic thought, not electoral selection and consent.

A major contribution of Colonial American Origins is its meticulous genealogy of early-modern democratic ideas, which will be most accessible to academic professionals already familiar with Western religious and political thought. The book constructs its genealogy on a deep reconsideration of original sixteenth-and seventeenth-century political and religious texts and on a broad reading of modern political science literature, though its use of historical scholarship is uneven. The book principally engages historical scholarship from the period between 1930 and1970, with a particularly critical eye on Perry Miller's work; but Maloy overlooks Edmund Morgan's more recent Inventing the People (1988), which does examine seventeenth-century thought, and he neglects important literature on the ideological transformation surrounding the American Revolution. Nonetheless, Maloy's book brings exceptional precision and insight to the analysis of seventeenth-century political theory and illuminates its lineage better than ever before.

Colonial American Origins opens with a look at how the idea of "democracy" evolved in Western thought. It originated with the Greeks who conceived of political arrangements that blended demos (the people) with kratos (power), but the key to their philosophy was accountability over public officials through elite bodies, not by popular elections. Maloy's interest lay in how early-modern Western thinkers came to link accountability to popular participation in politics. He begins by tracing how early-modern thinkers at various times drew upon Classical republican (Aristotelian), Calvinist ecclesiastical, or Roman and English fiduciary models of political trust; and he concludes that more conservative Classical and ecclesiastical schemes ultimately prevailed in Western democratic thinking. Maloy observes, however, that religious dissenters in colonial New England embraced fiduciary ideas, leading them to cultivate what he regards as the true beginning of modern democratic theory based on popular accountability.

It certainly was true, Maloy concedes, that Englishmen themselves began working out the modern conception of political accountability during the seventeenth-century English Civil War. French Huguenots, Scottish intellectuals, and Spanish thinkers had earlier theorized a right of popular rebellion as a just response to monarchs who had violated their public trusts; but it was French jurist Jean Bodin who exerted the most important influence on evolving English political ideas, Maloy asserts. Scholars will recognize Bodin as the difficult theorist who founded the modern idea of sovereignty—it was an indivisible supreme power, one that Bodin thought ought to be lodged in the French monarch. Digging deep into Bodin's Six Books of the Republic (1576), Maloy explains how this arch-monarchist surprisingly became the inspiration for modern democratic thinking. According to Maloy, Bodin classified political society into "monarchical," "aristocratic," and "democratic" "regime types," and then crucially distinguished l'etat from le gouvernment—that is, "state" from government administration—so that while he held that ultimate sovereignty rested among the people in the "state," his disdain for democracy led him to advocate "unaccountable sovereign monarchy" in governmental operations (p. 36). Subsequent thinkers took what they wanted from Bodin's work. In England, James I and Charles I used it to...