Radical Thought and Political Practice: Officeholding and Accountability in Seventeenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Abstract This article connects changes in administrative and bureaucratic processes that historians associate with state formation in early modern Britain with overlooked developments in thinking about political accountability. It blends the social history of state administration with intellectual history, and involves synoptic analysis as well as striking case studies. It argues that innovative political thinking emerged from new forms of political practice, and from the experiences of humble officials in the localities. Such individuals were increasingly professionalized and specialized, and their work was increasingly described using the language of trust, public interest, and state’s service. The mid-seventeenth century accentuated the process by which they came to be accountable to a centralized state, not least through the routinization and intensification of quotidian practices associated with enhanced communication between center and locality. Ultimately, the article argues that such processes, as well as more regular and direct interactions between political elites and humble officials, encouraged new kinds of political thinking. These were not quite unintended, but they may not have been fully anticipated either, and they involved innovative attempts to subject higher officials to oversight from “below,” and to legitimize their accountability to an adjudicating public, in ways that may even have had a lasting effect on English political culture.