Surveying the two centuries that have been described here, we can identify four phases in the development of a modern political culture. In 1813 William i had assumed sovereignty ‘under the guarantee of a wise constitution’; but he told his son that a constitution should be seen only as ‘a plaything in the hands of the crowd, as an illusion of liberty, while one adapts it to the circumstances’. The king thought that this illusion would be sufficient to allow him to pursue an international dynastic politics whilst exercising patriarchal authority at the national level. But he thereby underestimated the importance of the phenomenon of a constitution such as that which had been introduced in the Netherlands in 1798. The constitution might have been the product of a revolutionary age, but it proved to have its own dynamic, one that brought with it the core of a new political culture. Gradually, in many countries the dynastic politics of kings gave way to the constitutional politics of citizens.

This constitutional politics was to have been carried by citizens who saw themselves as the heirs of classical Athens, the birthplace of democracy, of government by the people. Revolutionaries at the end of the eighteenth century such as Ockerse, however, already had doubts about the suitability of the citizens. They were familiar with Montesquieu's warning: ‘The principle of democracy is corrupted not only when the spirit of equality is lost, but likewise when it becomes a spirit of extreme equality…’. This was a risk that could not be avoided, however, given that the ‘spirit of the age’ was pushing unstoppably for more equality in almost every respect: as Tocqueville would remark, wanting to hold back democracy was comparable to going into battle with God himself. King William ii, for example, stubbornly refused to permit any constitutional reform for years, but finally yielded to what he saw as ‘the spirit of the age’. In 1848 this led to the resumption of the path that had been taken in 1798.

A second phase thereby began, one that started with a liberal constitution. For this reason, the liberals were referred to as the ‘constitutionalists’ in the mid-nineteenth century. The central role in the polity was fulfilled by parliament.