Political Order and Political Decay Read Free Page B

gentry, and in some cases the bourgeoisie in independent cities. Under feudal law, monarchs were required to go to these bodies to raise taxes, since they represented the asset-owning elites in the agrarian societies of the time.
    Beginning in the late sixteenth century, ambitious monarchs deploying novel theories of absolute sovereignty undertook campaigns to undermine the powers of these estates and to acquire the right to tax their populations directly. In each European country, this struggle played out over the next two centuries. In France and Spain, the monarchy succeeded in reducing the power of the estates, though they remained enmeshed in an existing system of law that continued to limit their ability to simply expropriate the property of their elite subjects. In Poland and Hungary, the estates were victorious over the monarch, creating weak central authorities dominated by rapacious elites that were in time conquered by their neighbors. In Russia, the estates and the elites supporting them were less well established than their Western European counterparts, and law exerted a much weaker influence; as a result, a more robust form of absolutism emerged there.
    Only in England was there a relatively even contest between the king and the estates. When the early Stuart kings sought to build absolutist powers, they found themselves blocked by a well-organized and armed Parliament. Many members of this body were, in contrast to the monarchy’s high church Anglicanism, Puritan Protestants who believed in a more grassroots form of organization. The parliamentary forces fought a civil war, beheaded King Charles I, and briefly established a parliamentary dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell. This conflict continued through the Restoration and culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, wherein the Stuart dynasty was deposed and a new monarch, William of Orange, agreed to a constitutional settlement embodying the principle of “no taxation without representation.”
    Accompanying William and his wife, Mary, from the Netherlands to London was the philosopher John Locke, whose Second Treatise on Government enunciated the principle that obedience to rule should rest on the consent of the governed. Locke argued that rights were natural and inhered in human beings qua human beings; governments existed only to protect these rights and could be overturned if they violated them. These principles—no taxation without representation and consent of the governed—would become the rallying cry of the American colonists when they revolted against British authority less than a century later in 1776. Thomas Jefferson incorporated Locke’s ideas of natural rights into the American Declaration of Independence, and the idea of popular sovereignty would become the basis of the Constitution that was ratified in 1789.
    While these new political orders established the principle of accountability, neither England in 1689 nor the United States in 1789 could be considered a modern democracy. The franchise was restricted in both countries to white male property owners who represented a very small part of the entire population. Neither the Glorious Revolution nor the American Revolution produced anything like a genuine social revolution. The American Revolution was led by a merchant-planter-gentry elite who were jealous of the rights that the British king had infringed. These same elites remained in charge once independence was achieved, and they were the ones who drafted and approved the new country’s constitution.
    To focus on these limitations, however, is to radically underestimate the political dynamic that the new American order set in train and the galvanizing power of ideas. The Declaration of Independence boldly declared that “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The Constitution squarely vested sovereignty not in a king or an amorphous