Why Does the Majority Rule?A Detective Story about Its Origins Jack N. Rakove (bio) William J. Bulman, The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xiv + 279 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. William J. Bulman, The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xiv + 279 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. It is rare to begin an academic book review by entering a personal plea to disinterested readers, but here a statement of authorial purpose is in order. William J. Bulman's splendid monograph on the origins of majority rule in the English Parliament is not a book that most readers of this journal would expect to see reviewed here. True, its final chapter does discuss the colonial American assemblies. But this imperial chapter is more an afterthought to Bulman's dominant concern, which is to provide an extended analysis of rules of deliberation and decision-making in the seventeenth-century House of Commons. The very thought of navigating the dense scholarly terrain of seventeenth-century British history will daunt many readers, even those of us trained as early American historians. After all, what history of any nation over a similar span of years has ever been studied more intensely? Yet at this precarious moment in American history, when our own conventions of majority rule have become both deeply controversial and gravely vulnerable, Bulman's scrupulously argued book deserves close attention. At one level, The Rise of Majority Rule is a tightly focused monograph that depends on the careful analysis of one main evidentiary source, the legislative journals of the House of Commons, complemented by a few textual sources conveying how its members perceived the changes they were witnessing. Yet the book is also an interpretive work of the first order of significance. It starts with a simple, seemingly naïve question that one would think barely merits an answer: why do we allow majorities to govern? Is this rule of decision not so obvious and self-evident (in the axiomatic sense of the term) that no explanation of its origins is needed? In fact, Bulman demonstrates, this development, like all others, has its own distinctive history. He makes his key claims at the outset: the institutional "turn to majority voting [within Parliament] is more essential to the history of majority rule than the gradual attainment of universal suffrage" or the invention of political parties (p. 1), and this shift in legislative [End Page 535] behavior in Britain and its empire "turned out to be a pivotal event in world history" (p. 3). Explaining how and when this shift took place thus turns this book into something of a detective story.1 Yet The Rise of Majority Rule is also a venture in social science history, with a hypothesis to propose, alternative explanations to weigh, a data set to measure the results, and the analytical premise "that institutions are path-dependent" in their evolution (p. 2). It is, in short, an exemplary work with many facets, and one we badly need right now, not because it provides a quiver of lessons for our quavering body politic, but because it sets a point of departure, a historical base line, for thinking critically about the variations of majority rule embedded in the political system of the United States. Bulman refutes the simple presumption that majority rule was always the default mode of legislative procedure. He shows instead that its invention was a contingent result of historical events, explaining that a condition we take as a given in fact embodied a radical shift in norms and practices driven by the political circumstances of the English Civil War and its tumultuous aftermath. Americanist readers need not know every nuance of Stuart-era politics to grasp Bulman's general argument. Prior to the 1640s, decision-making in the House of Commons was essentially consensual in nature. Members regarded Parliament as the political voice of one nation, acting in the terms that scholars know best from Edmund Burke's oft-quoted speech to his electors in Bristol. "Parliament," Burke famously argued, "is not a congress of...
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Dec 7, 2023
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