The political ideas of seventeenth-century Christendom were shaped by the historical, philosophical, and theological literatures of European societies going back over two millennia. The cumulative lessons of these literatures were usually understood to endorse variations on the theme of one-man rule, and the contemporary prevalence of large and legally centralized monarchic jurisdictions was treated, in print, with broad approval. There were numerous ways of qualifying and limiting monarchic sovereignty, of course, and it was also true that the republics of ancient Sparta and Rome, or of contemporary Venice and Geneva, were lauded by some commentators. But the archetypal democracy of ancient Athens was scarcely considered either a viable or a desirable constitutional option. Macedonian and then Roman hegemony had marked the end not only of Greek democratic practice but also, it seemed, of serious democratic thinking in the West.

This was the intellectual world from which the first English colonists in America came. But the generally anti-democratic consensus of early-modern political thinking was by no means monolithic or invulnerable.