This study set out to investigate the political debate that took place in the Rhaetian Freestate in the early seventeenth century, and to determine the foundations and contours of the system that was at stake. During the political crisis of 1607–20, a few Rhaetian authors found it plausible and expedient to call their form of government “democratic”, and to ascribe all political authority to “the common man” in the Freestate of the Three Leagues. My argument has been that the unusual social order, institutional organization, and political practice that Rhaetian citizens experienced in their communes provided a substrate for such statements, a political culture that included widely accepted assumptions and beliefs about the Freestate's past and about the nature of legitimate authority within it. When foreign pressure and social tension both increased after 1600, such unreflected ideas became the common ground from which most contemporary polemicists argued, even if they occasionally borrowed vocabulary and concepts from other sources.

I also maintain that while the origins of Rhaetian political culture must be sought in the social practice of local communities, its subsequent elaboration depended on the political and institutional development of the Freestate as a whole. The rural commune, with its specific combination of autonomous family labor and collective economic and social discipline, effectively incubated certain ideas about the sources of legitimate authority, and about specific methods for reaching decisions and distributing common resources and burdens.