Democracy and Anti-Democracy in Early Modern England 1603-1689

317 Pages·2019·2.318 MB·English

by  Cesare Cuttica, Marku Peltonen

Democracy and Anti- democracy in Early Modern England 1603– 1689
History of European Political
and Constitutional Thought
Series Editors
Erica Benner (Yale University)
Cesare Cuttica (Université Paris 8)
László Kontler (Central European University)
Mark Somos (Max Planck Institute for Comparative
Public Law and International Law)
VOLUME 1
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ hepct
Democracy and Anti- democracy

in Early Modern England
1603–1 689
Edited by
Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen
LEIDEN | BOSTON
The Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available online at http:// catalog.loc.gov
LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2019016971
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/b rill- typeface.
issn 2589- 5966
isbn 978- 90- 04- 38598- 6 (hardback)
isbn 978- 90- 04- 40662- 9 (e- book)
Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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Contents

Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations and Conventions x
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction. ‘Gone Missing’: Democracy and Anti- democracy in
Seventeenth- Century England 1
Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen
part 1
Democracy and the People: Citizenship, Representation and the
Commonwealth
1 Imagining Citizenship in the Levellers and Milton 21
Rachel Foxley
2 Democracy, Toleration, and the Interests of the People 45
Alan Cromartie
3 ‘All Government is in the people, from the people, and for the
people’: Democracy in the English Revolution 66
Markku Peltonen
4 The Place of Democracy in Late Stuart England 88
Hannah Dawson
part 2
Democracy and the World- Turned- Upside- Down: Religion,
Emotions and Polemical Fire
5 ‘A most dangerous rudeness’: Anti- populism and the Literary
Justification of Absolutism in the Fiction of John Barclay
(1582– 1621) 113
Matthew Growhoski
vi Contents
6 The Spectre Haunting Early Seventeenth- Century England
(ca. 1603– 1649): Democracy at Its Worst 132
Cesare Cuttica
7 Anti- puritanism as Political Discourse; the Laudian Critique of Puritan
‘Popularity’ 152
Peter Lake
8 Presbyterians, Republicans, and Democracy in Church and State,
ca. 1570– 1660 174
Rachel Hammersley
9 Poetry, the Passions, and Anti- democracy in Later Stuart England 194
John West
part 3
Democracy and the Other: Slaves, Natives and Women
10 Democracy and Anti- democracy: the Roger Williams and John Cotton
Debate Revisited 217
Camilla Boisen
11 ‘The vulgar only scap’d who stood without’: Milton and the Politics of
Exclusion 239
Martin Dzelzainis
12 A Democratic Culture? Women, Citizenship and Subscriptional Texts
in Early Modern England 260
Edward Vallance
13 The Parliament of Women and the Restoration Crisis 279
Gaby Mahlberg
Index 297
Preface

Within the last sixty years democracy has become the political core of our
civilisation. Yet, a now familiar refrain is that democracy is in crisis;1 that de-
spite being a regime that was widely accepted across the world (especially, in
the Western part of it), democracy is instead currently being contested as a
weak and inadequate form of government.2 Although democratic values are
widely shared today, their global attainment is farther away and even in Eu-
rope they meet increasing threats. The democratic deficit has become a com-
mon parlance. Even within the EU there is increasing scepticism about the
people’s resources to scrutinise their governments and supranational organi-
sations. Similarly at the forefront of media talk are the crisis facing democrat-
ic leadership in light of the recent electoral success of far-r ight movements
across Europe; the consequences of the Brexit referendum; the policies of Don-
ald Trump; and the emergence of various illiberal solutions proposed to the
perceived difficulties of democratic governance in countries such as Turkey,
Russia, Poland and Hungary.3 This recent rise of populism and the challeng-
es it poses to our democratic institutions make our project especially timely.
Today, more urgently than ever before, we need to understand what the long
history of democracy really is. It is here that the history of political thought
has a lot to offer. It can show where certain ideas of democracy came from,
1 As for a standard definition, ‘democracy’ is generally characterised as the ‘government by
the people; esp. a system of government in which all the people of a state or polity […] are
involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by voting to elect representatives
to a parliament or similar assembly’ (oed, ‘democracy’, www.oed.com, accessed on 1 June
2018). Modern developments include the notion of equal rights for all citizens regardless of
distinctions of class, race, gender, wealth and so forth as well as principles of toleration and
freedom of speech. It remains that a cornerstone of democratic procedures now is the equal
right to vote in elections through which the people of a nation- state are supposed to exert a
form of control over their governors. The notion and practice of ‘universal suffrage’ is thus a
given of normal democratic intercourse.
2 See e.g. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, ‘The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Dem-
ocratic Disconnect’, Journal of Democracy, 27 (2016), pp. 5–1 7, esp. p. 16.
3 Be it sufficient to check the websites of some of the main European (e.g. The Guardian,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Le Monde, LaStampa, El Pais) or North American newspa-
pers (e.g. The New York Times, The Washington Post) for examples of this phenomenon. For
one journalistic instance specifically addressing the alleged failures of liberal democracy’s
institutions, notably vis- à- vis the consolidation of authoritarianism in countries like Tur-
key, see Simon Jenkins, ‘Blame Liberal Democracy’s Flaws for Erdoğan’s Win, Not the Voters’,
https:// www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/ 2018/ jun/ 25/ blame- liberal- democracy- flaws-
erdogan- win- turkish, accessed on 26 June 2018.
viii Preface
highlight their contingencies and the context in which they emerged. It can
illustrate how embracing a certain idea of democracy was itself a choice, that
there were other choices and ideas of democracy available – other paths, as it
were, which were not taken. By examining crucial, though hitherto neglected,
aspects of democracy, and providing a new historical account of its develop-
ment, the volume will offer new perspectives on the history and present- day
civil philosophy as well as discussions of political participation and democracy
in the global world.
…
Whether concerned with the ‘representative versus direct democracy’ ques-
tion, or with the coexistence of economic, gender, ethnic disparities (caused
by capitalism’s advanced phase) and the legal requirements of equal citizen-
ship, or with the exportability of democratic procedures and values to areas
of the planet that might be less receptive to them, multidisciplinary research
on democracy is growing steadily.4 Democracy is thus the object of myriad
theoretical and political reflections as well as public discussion with regard
to its nature, identity and fortune. We would make a mistake though if we
thought that this was not also the case long ago. We would not do better either
by maintaining that before the twenty- first century this process only occurred
in classical Athens. In fact, democracy was a highly disputed notion in seven-
teenth- century England. By investigating how this came to be so during that
historically eventful and intellectually rich century, we might come closer to
a better, less blinkered, and perhaps inspiring understanding of democracy
and of how it worked/ s or of why it did not/ does not work (as it should). This
means to avoid the history of democracy Plato-t o- NATO style, which turns out
to be profoundly disconnected from the realities of socio- economic, cultural
and political dynamics going on at a specific point in time in a given context.
This tunnel- vision type of reading neglects the importance of context in the
study of ideas as well as the latter’s practical impact on society, politics and
intellectual life. Our book intends to rectify this tendency.
4 See e.g. David Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World
War I to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
Acknowledgements

This volume originated as a workshop that took place on 18– 19 July 2017 at
the Max Weber Kolleg, University of Erfurt (Germany). This event was part
of a COFUND-F ellowship project that received funding from the European
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie
Skłodowska- Curie grant agreement No 665958. It also received financial aid
from the ‘Staff Unit ProUni – Research and Graduate Studies at the University
of Erfurt’ and from the University of Helsinki. We should like to thank all insti-
tutions for their financial support, especially Margrit Elsner of the University
of Erfurt for her help with various aspects of the internal grant application.
The mwk proved to be a very congenial place where to organise the workshop
and tried our ideas out. A huge ‘thank you’ to the Kolleg for invaluable aca-
demic and logistic support. Bettina Hollstein showed enthusiasm for our proj-
ect since day one and was immensely helpful with all sorts of technical issues
related to it; Knud Haakonssen provided (as usual) extremely generous advice
during the organisation of the workshop and took an active role in the dis-
cussion that went on on those two very productive days. Elisabeth Begemann,
Claudia D. Bergmann, Maximilian Gutberlet and Doreen Hochberg helped
with our event’s preparation, including advertisements, posters and more. Last
but not least, we should express our extreme gratitude to Diana Blanke and
Oliver Schmerbauch without whose assistance, patience, efficiency and sense
of humour we would have struggled to put together such a good event. At-
tendants and participants to the workshop asked stimulating questions and
contributed to enliven the two days’ exchanges. At Brill, Arjan van Dijk and Ivo
Romein have been ideal editors.
Fellowships from the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the Uni-
versity of Helsinki and the Huntington Library at San Marino, California en-
abled us to work on the volume.
Cesare Cuttica and Markku Peltonen
February 2019, Helsinki
Abbreviations and Conventions

odnb Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http:// www.oxforddnb.com/.
oed Oxford English Dictionary, http:// www.oed.com/.