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The Birth of Democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
The origins of modern democracy are so closely bound up with the history of liberalism that it is a matter of considerable difficulty to disentangle them and to distinguish their distinctive contributions to the common political tradition of modern Western culture. For this question also involves that of the relation between the three revolutions, the English, the American, and the French, which transformed the Europe of the ancien régime, with its absolute monarchies and state churches, into the modern world. Now all these three revolutions were liberal revolutions and all of them were political expressions of the movement of the European enlightenment in its successive phases. But this movement was not originally a democratic one and it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the democratic ideal was clearly formulated. On the continent of Europe the revolution of ideas preceded the political and economic revolutions by half a century, and the revolution of ideas was not in any sense of the word a democratic movement; it was the work of a small minority of men of letters who looked to the nobles and the princes of Europe rather than to the common people, and whose ideal of government was a benevolent and enlightened absolutism, like that of Frederick the Great or the Empress Catherine of Russia. There was an immense gulf between the ideas of Voltaire and Turgot, of Diderot and D'Alembert, and the opinions of the average man. The liberalism of the philosophers was a hothouse growth which could not be easily acclimatized to the open air of the fields and the market place.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1957
References
1 Protestant mystic and religious poet 1697–1764 of Muhlheim on Rühr.
2 (1694–1775), founder of the Passionist Order in Italy, 1720.
3 Letters from the Mountain.
4 Helvetius was himself a financier, Mme. D'Epinay was the wife of one, and Mme. Dupin was the daughter of the great banker, Samuel Bernard.
5 “Having undertaken for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and honour of our King and countrie, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, (we) do by these present solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civill body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and forthcome of the ends aforesaid; by virtue hereof to enacte, constitute and frame such just and equall Lawes, ordinances, Acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the generall good of the colonie: unto which we promise all due submission and obedience, in witness wherof we have hereunder subscribed our names, at Cape Cod the eleventh of November—a.d. 1620.” Bradford, J., History of the Plymouth Plantation, ed. C. Deane (1861), pp. 89ff.Google Scholar
6 The institutional unit in the South was the parish, but owing to the scattered population on the plantations strung out for miles along the rivers, the Southern parish never had the social importance of the New England town.
7 John Adams wrote that “if a collection could be made of all the gazettes of Europe for the latter half of the eighteenth century, a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon ‘le grand Franklin’ would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever lived.”
8 The importance of this religious motive is shown by the fact that Anglicanism throughout the Northern Colonies was almost solidly loyalist, while even in Virginia an attack on the position of the Established church, led by the Presbyterian Patrick Henry, preceded the constitutional struggle.
9 Common Sense (2nd. ed., 1776), pp. 58 and 59.Google Scholar
10 “What we formerly called Revolutions,” wrote Paine fifteen years later, “were little more than a change of persons, or an alteration of local circumstances. They rose and fell like things of course, and had nothing in their existence or their fate that could influence beyond the spot that produced them. But what we now see in the world, from the Revolutions of America and France, are a renovation of the natural order of things, a system of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man, and combining moral with political happiness and national prosperity.”