The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought [Paperback]

This book explores the profound impact of seventeenth-century American political thought on modern democratic ideas.Maloys examination of seventeenth-century American political ideas concludes that the origins of distinctively modern democratic thinking can be located, not in eighteenth-century America and France, but in the tiny New England colonies in the previous century, and that the key idea was not electoral consent but rather non-electoral accountability.Maloys examination of seventeenth-century American political ideas concludes that the origins of distinctively modern democratic thinking can be located, not in eighteenth-century America and France, but in the tiny New England colonies in the previous century, and that the key idea was not electoral consent but rather non-electoral accountability.This first examination in almost 40 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 that 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 Connectil¨