Academic literature on the topic 'Commonwealth Government enquiries'

In early modern England, democracy was seen as something more than one of the three classical forms of government. It was identified with a way of life that had catastrophic consequences on State and Church. Democracy’s deleterious effects on the public and private spheres of a commonweal had political, religious, moral, economic, and epistemic repercussions. The main reason for this series of very negative considerations is that the anti-democratic literature presented in this book drew a fundamental distinction—nowadays lost—between ‘the many-headed multitude’ and ‘the people’. It was thus assumed that in a democratic polity the former, not the latter, ruled. Anti-democratic criticism was not only the result of aristocratic ‘revulsion for democracy’ widespread from ancient Greece onwards. Nor was it simply empty abuse or a shorthand for the overturning of the social order. It was the establishment’s response to what it viewed as both internal and external agents of democratic subversion, and to actual democratizing aspirations in theory and in practice. The Introduction elucidates that in early modern England popular government was associated with different things, and with various mouthpieces. It then explains how scholars have not asked what democracy stood for, nor have they enquired into why democracy was unceasingly criticized. They have not examined how criticism of popular government was articulated, nor have they addressed the ways in which different authors depicted the people and their leaders. They have also failed to investigate which political concerns and social prejudices informed anti-democracy. In order to tackle these questions, this book looks at how democratic ideas and practices were challenged and construed in public discourse during a historically decisive seventy-year period.