British Democracy Research Articles

Saints or Citizens? Ideas of Marriage in Seventeenth-Century English Republicanism

'It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of free comes into the foreground', wrote Frederich Engels in 1883.1 Indeed, the English, the French, and the Bolshevik Revolutions all took marriage out of the Church and made it a civil contract. In the French Revolution, there was controversy over Albert-Joseph Hennet's Du Divorce (1789); the French National Assembly established new institutions to deal with family disputes; provisions were made for divorce, marriage without parental consent, rights for illegitimate children, women's property rights; and marriage laws for non-Catholics were clarified.2 In the Russian Revolution, marriage reform was radical: legislative programmes like the Bolshevik 1918 Family Code created civil marriages; provided for equal access to simple divorce; legalised abortion; and made universal provision for alimony and childcare.3 In the English revolutionary period, the Ranters promoted ideas of sexual liberty, Milton advocated divorce, and Parliament passed Acts on Adultery and for the Registering of Marriages.4 These revolutionaries - all anti-monarchical, many republican - focused on marriage not simply because they all did away with royal, hereditary succession. Indeed, there were issues from small to large, involving economic, ethical, political and legal relationships that were under scrutiny in those heady times of radical change. Marriage reform, and the discussions that it provoked, raised questions not simply about love and personal happiness, but also matters of prime importance to the State: issues about the nature of equality and individual liberty; the role of the State or Church (and their institutions of administration, judicature and governance) in personal comportment and affiliation; the nature of the household and of property transfer; duties of individuals to each other; citizenship rights; population increase; the meaning of care and obedience.5 Marriage is, therefore, a significant legitimation strategy in revolutionary discourse. What did English republicanism contribute to this?Apparently, very little. While there has been much scholarly interest recently in the history of the family in Reformation culture, and even in the gendered aspects of English republican thought, marriage within English republicanism has lacked attention.6 It has been left to social historians, religious historians, or to scholars in the history of liberal political thought to explore marriage, whether in its actual social conditions or in its metaphors and consequences after the great changes of the Reformations. Studies on post- Reformation families by Lyndal Roper, Martin Ingram, Ralph Houlbrooke, Robert M. Kingdon and Eric Carlson among others, have highlighted aspects of social, ecclesiastical, and domestic discipline, civic legislation and religious institutions; and have given us a carefully delineated picture of the changes in marital conduct and law in the various communities of reforming Europe.7 As Eric Carlson has explained, the English experience was, of course, exceptional in Europe: unlike continental Protestantism, the Tudor Reformers failed to fix the ecclesiastical marriage law, even as they replaced the traditional sacramental model of marriage with the covenantal and social models drawn from the Continent.8 It seems existing ecclesiastical law sufficed to answer the needs of communities up until the great religious rifts of the mid-seventeenth century. It was not until the 1640s, in Christopher Durston's words, only with the 'determined thrust for cultural change', did marriage come in for reform, with Parliament seeking to control marriages as part of its assignment to the Westminster Assembly in 1643, an adventure culminating in the 'Act touching Marriages and the Registring thereof' passed in 1653.9Rather, in the history of political thought, while scholars of mid-century English republicanism have given little attention to marriage, historians of liberal thought have put the revolution in marriage in relation to contract theory, and as in dialogue with Filmerian patriarchalism. …

A Review of Paul A. Rahe's Against Throne and Altar

A Review of Paul A. Rahe's Against Throne and Altar John Dunn (bio) Paul A. Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Paul Rahe is no believer in concision. For someone of such remarkable energy and breadth of scholarship, it is very striking that Against Throne and Altar should be only his second real book. His debut volume, Republics Ancient and Modern, published by the University of North Carolina Press more than fifteen years ago, was a work of extraordinary scope and confidence. Written on the amplest of scales, Republics Ancient and Modern aimed to recapture the history of republicanism from the influence of J.G.A.Pocock's masterwork The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton University Press, 1975) and put it instead in the hands of Leo Strauss's intellectual progeny. Against Throne and Altar covers more of the same ground than its subtitle suggests and does not noticeably prescind from the viewpoint of its formidable predecessor. But it does have a sharper focus and handles a briefer passage of time over which much ink has recently been spilled. Much of the point of his book is to correct the plethora of errors and misapprehensions that Rahe discerns in this recent literature. But the tone of his discussions of others' views is often curt and dismissive. This not insubstantial element in the book is therefore likely to prove largely an exercise in preaching to the converted. Against Throne and Altar presses a robust thesis of keen interest on a momentous and thrilling topic. It is written with animus and some intermittent wit. It conveys a great deal of compelling judgment, is evidently the work of a very clever person, and must clearly have required an unnerving amount of work. What remains a trifle elusive is its intended audience. The book has two levels, one narrowly scholastic and the other of pressing concern for anyone seriously interested either in modern politics or in modern history. The second of these levels is genuinely ecumenical, while the first tends to the parochial. In mid-17th-century England politicians and soldiers who claimed to speak for the people of England put on trial and executed their monarch and for a few hectic years established an English republic. The political turmoil that swirled around these dramatic events unleashed a flood of thinking and writing unprecedented in any country in the world. In those few [End Page 27] years a range of idiosyncratic and adventurous thinkers reimagined the basis and terms of political community in ways that have marked the world's dispersed political intelligence ever since, and, as Rahe sees the sequence, promise to mark it ever more deeply in centuries to come, unless throne or altar somehowmusters the resources to strike back. In that stark perspective, the political thinking of England's republic lived on long after Charles II's Restoration. It is still unremittingly alive today, and in an even longer run, it may yet inherit the Earth. In these years, as Rahe sees them, at least two very different temporalities intersect. A very lengthy and deeply ambiguous intellectual past enters a maelstrom of political energy and adventure and is permanently altered by the experience. What is left behind, as the storm subsides, is something durably different. If Rahe is right (and he is too painstaking a scholar and too pertinacious a thinker to be simply and decisively wrong), the story he has to tell is as dramatic as any in the history of human reflection. The new vision whose birth Rahe seeks to chronicle is republican in that it desacralizes (and even desecrates) monarchy. But it is also liberal, and carefully parsimonious in the lessons that it selects from the political experience of Greece or Rome. It refuses to desacralize monarchy by sentimentalizing a republican alternative. It is liberal, too (unlike its antique republican predecessors), in its disabused vision and unfastidious acceptance of the purposes of most human beings as they actually are. It aspires to design institutions that take accurate account of these purposes and can reasonably be anticipated to operate effectively in the face of them. The modern republic, unlike...

A Long Way to Go: The Final Report of the Speaker's Conference on Parliamentary Representation

The Speaker's Conference on Parliamentary Representation reported in January 2010. The report calls for a host of measures to improve the representativeness of the House of Commons and to revitalise political parties, as well as to enhance citizenship education, develop youth and community citizenship engagement programmes, and more generally to revitalise British democracy. Early responses indicate that the government and political parties will take the report seriously. The report is thoughtful, thorough and extensive, a treasure trove for policy makers, advocates and researchers. If it has a weakness, it is that it shows a better understanding of parliamentary reform than of party reform.

Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century: Dreaming of Another Game – By Gaby Mahlberg

Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century: Dreaming of Another Game – By Gaby Mahlberg

New Labour, Constitutional Change and Representative Democracy

THE PURPOSE of this article is to review and assess the constitutional reforms that were made by the Labour Government between 1997 and 2010. Most commentators agree that this was a momentous period of constitutional change—indeed, arguably the most important period of constitutional change in Britain since the introduction of universal suffrage. While it is too soon to assess the full impact of the reforms of the past 13 years, it is already clear that they have altered British democracy for good. The big constitutional question now is: what next? This article attempts to provide answers. In order to do so it is necessary to review what happened since 1997 but also why it happened. For a frequent criticism of Labour's constitutional reform agenda has been that it was all rather haphazard; that there was no blueprint or guiding set of principles behind it.1 So this article is also intended as a response to that charge, by outlining the constitutional changes of the past 13 years and the principles that underpinned them as well as looking ahead to possible future reforms. And finally, in looking to the future, this article engages with the fundamental issue that is emerging in contemporary constitutional debates about the future of British politics, which is the argument between those who advocate a shift from representative to direct democracy. My intention is to argue on the side of those who wish to preserve the essential qualities of our representative system, and in making that argument I hope to inject some realism into the debate about how far constitutional reform can stimulate public engagement in politics—which can at times become a little far fetched.

Introduction – South Asian diasporas and the BBC World Service: contacts, conflicts, and contestations

This article sets out the analytical framework of this special issue and outlines the development of BBC radio broadcasting in South Asia. It analyses the ways in which the BBC in South Asia is integrally and indissolubly intertwined with ‘critical events’ and shifting geopolitical priorities: from the imperial and diasporic imaginings of the Empire Service, to its dissolution and the expansion of South Asian language services during World War II for the purpose of countering ‘enemy broadcasts’; from independence, partition and decolonisation, including the BBC's subsequent role in mediating postcolonial conflicts and wars and Cold War tensions, to its most recent ‘war on terror’ phase with its unspoken aim of promoting a British version liberal democracy around the globe. The article highlights how the often intimate engagements of diverse audiences in South Asia and its diasporas with the BBC have changed in response to technological innovation and geopolitics. We emphasise the distinctiveness of the BBC voice, especially the ‘right kind of diasporic voice’, and its acoustic power and presence in South Asia. We highlight how the rapid expansion of South Asian mediascapes – especially in India is unsettling the privileged position that the BBC South Asian services have enjoyed for nearly eight decades. Digital technologies are facilitating the emergence of ‘digital diasporas’ as South Asians across the world log on to consume news with alternative perspectives to news providers in South Asia and to engage in diasporic debates, often with unintended and unforeseen consequences.

Logic Terms of the English Republic

IN 1654 Zachary Coke introduced the ‘Procatarctick’ and ‘Proëgumene’ cause to the terminological storehouse of English vernacular logic textbooks for the first time in his manual, The Art of Logick. He defined these respectively as that ‘which outwardly moveth to do’ and that ‘which within moveth to do’, or in other words, externally and internally impelling causes.1 Whilst not the first usage of these words per se in the English vernacular, Coke’s was the first work to pioneer them in the explicitly pedagogical setting of a textbook providing instruction in formal logical analysis; moreover his appears to be the first of any known vernacular logic manual in the early modern period to employ these terms.2 This is important both from a technical perspective in understanding developments taking place in early modern logic, and also because of the other writer of a logic text in England in this period who, although writing in Latin, likewise (and probably first) used these unusual terms: John Milton in his Artis Plenior Logicae (c.1640s).3 Why did Coke and Milton use these terms, contra to all of their English predecessors, both those writing in Latin and those in the vernacular? This article suggests links between the lexicological heritage of the terms and the overarching aims of their writers, in particular in the context of the English Republic.

Выборы 2010 года в Великобритании: слом двухпартийной системы или очередной сбой?

The inability of either Labourists or Conservatives to form a parliamentary majority government after elections, and Liberal-Democratic Party's assuming a position that allows to qualify for a real participation in the state administration, change not only the balance of power, but also the contry's party-political system functioning principles themselves. Not less essential is the change in relations between society and government which became apparent during the electoral campaign and allows to raise an issue of a qualitative shift in the British democracy model.

Charter 88, New Labour and Constitutional Anomie

Charter 88 was committed to achieving one central aim-shifting the nature of British democracy from a highly majoritarian polity to a more pluralistic or consensual model of democracy. This article argues that New Labour has not demonstrated a clear commitment to a more consensual or pluralist model of democracy but has instead implemented a bi-constitutional system whereby a system of ‘modified majoritarianism’ has been retained at the national level while at the same time creating more consensual and pluralistic polities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. However bi-constitutionalism within a unitary state is unlikely to prove unstable in the long-term. A focus on future dynamics opens up space not only for the assertion that it may still be too soon to comprehend the legacy and impact of Charter 88 (because the organisation's work planted certain seeds that may in the long-term indirectly lead to systemic change of the nature it campaigned for) but also because there exists a contemporary need for groups like Charter 88 in providing a new narrative in the form of a holist approach to understanding and shaping the constitutional configuration, thereby providing a form of constitutional morality and ending the current situation of constitutional anomie.

Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy

Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy

British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876-1906

British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876-1906

British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 – By Eugenio F. Biagini

British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 – By Eugenio F. Biagini

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issue. Britain's four political traditions Britain since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy, by David Marquand. The darker side of nudging Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. The almost‐forgotten Korean War The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam. Reasoning about risk Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years, by Vaclav Smil. The great war on terror Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty‐first Century, by Philip Bobbitt. From terrorism to pop cultural icons? Baader‐Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left‐wing Terrorism, edited by Gerrit‐Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils. An incoherent critique of New Labour? The End of Politics: New Labour and the Folly of Managerialism, by Chris Dillow. Top of the paps Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel, by Gordon Burn. The slight hand of history Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, by Jonathan Powell. Israel–Palestine: insiders and outsiders Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, by Saree Makdisi.

EDWARD HOLBERTON. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions

The key term in Holberton's title is the (prima facie uninspiring) ‘institutions’. By examining poetry and entertainments ‘written for the occasions of embassies, universities, parliaments, mayoral elections, dynastic marriages, and state funerals’, Holberton seeks to show that ‘Protectorate poetry is not as preoccupied with the charisma of [Oliver] Cromwell as some critics have argued’. It should be said that the marriages are those of Cromwell's daughters and the funeral is Cromwell's, while the analysis of the embassy, university, and parliamentary verse has much to do with Cromwell's ambiguous status as ‘Protector’. What Holberton means is a literature which does not portray Cromwell, as simply (in that tired phrase) ‘a king in all but name’, but as a figure ‘who has influence, but by no means complete control, over the Protectorate's infrastructure and matrix of cultural institutions’. The book's claim to originality lies in its series of decentred perspectives, from the vantage-point of very specific and contained historical moments, on the literary culture of Cromwellian rule. This method, Holberton maintains, allows him to avoid the potentially distorting binaries of republican/monarchical in which Protectorate culture tends to be discussed, even (or especially) in major recent studies such as David Norbrook's Writing the English Republic (1999). This is certainly not a book which aspires to be a comprehensive survey: Holberton is not interested in openly hostile literature, whether royalist or republican, but writing on behalf of the Protectorate or which takes a broadly open-minded approach to the possibilities of the Protectorate as an institution.

La démocratie britannique face au modèle parlementaire écossais

British democracy faced with the Scottish parliamentary model Like other great democracies, the UK has been under attack since at least the 1980s from constitutional reformers who have pointed out the limits of representative democracy and of the British model of majoritarian democracy (or “Westminster model”). It is in this context that the new Scottish parliamentary model was imagined. The creation of a Scottish Parliament in 1999 was seen as a unique opportunity to put into practice the “new politics” which groups such as Charter88 were advocating. It was hoped that the Scottish Parliament could then serve as a “model for democracy”, and at the very least as a model for the Westminster Parliament. Ten years after the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, this article aims at establishing whether British MPs have taken an interest in the procedural novelties tried out in Edinburgh and to what extent the Scottish Parliament has had an institutional influence over Westminster. It concludes that the creation of the Scottish Parliament has only had a marginal effect on Westminster and explores several possible reasons for Westminster’s unwillingness to reform.

British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876-1906, by Eugenio F. Biagini.

<i>British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876-1906</i>, by Eugenio F. Biagini.

Tensions and Contradictions Left and Right: The Predictable Disappointments of Planning under New Labour in Historical Perspective

This article situates the disappointments of New Labour's record over environmental planning within the longer historical perspective of British post-Second World War social democracy and planning. It makes two main claims. First, that New Labour ideology should be viewed (as proponents of so-called ‘Third-Way’ ideology have held) as a version of social democracy, albeit a new, more liberalized version than that propounded by ‘old Labour’. And second, that, in its commitment to some combination of both state and private action within the context of market capitalism, social democracy has always been liable to internal tensions, if not contradictions, so that any tensions and contradictions in New Labour's record over planning should not surprise us. On the contrary, they were as predictable as were the contradictions in Conservative government policy through the 1980s and 1990s.

&lt;em&gt;British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876-1906&lt;/em&gt;, by Eugenio F. Biagini

&lt;em&gt;British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876-1906&lt;/em&gt;, by Eugenio F. Biagini

:British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906

:British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906

Rousseau and Tacitus: republican inflections in the Shelleys' History of a Six Weeks' Tour

This essay examines a relatively unexplored dimension of History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley – its republican orientation. I argue that the writings of both Tacitus and Rousseau are key to one of the volume's principal functions, which is to serve as a commentary on the Bourbon Restoration and Napoleon's legacy on the continent. Classical, feudal and eighteenth‐century struggles between liberty and tyranny are recorded throughout History of a Six Weeks' Tour in its references to ruins, monuments and vistas and in language that resonates with Roman writings. In these ways, different moments of Europe's past are set in dialogue with one another in such a way as to engage the early nineteenth‐century reader critically with recent and current instances of monarchy and empire. The essay proposes that Percy Shelley's interest in the Tacitean tradition may extend further than has been acknowledged, for example, to include Justus Lipsius's dialogue On Constancy (1584). Finally the presence of Rousseau, prioritized over Gibbon in this volume, is assessed in respect of his interest in Tacitus and in English republican thought.