Constitutional Consensus Research Articles

The consensus-clarifying role of deliberative mini-publics in constitutional amendment: A reply to Oran Doyle and Rachael Walsh

Abstract Oran Doyle and Rachael Walsh’s article “Constitutional Amendment and Public Will Formation: Deliberative Mini-Publics as a Tool for Consensus Democracy” is a welcome addition to the literature on Ireland’s efforts to integrate deliberative citizen-involved structures into its constitutional amendment process. We agree that the Citizens’ Assembly on abortion played a role in shaping the legal position that ultimately emerged in Irish law; we disagree, however, with the authors’ account of how that occurred. In particular, we do not believe the Irish experience supports the claim that deliberative mini-publics help to build the consensus for constitutional amendment. On the contrary, on each occasion where amendment processes incorporating a deliberative element have succeeded in Ireland, there has been clear evidence of an enduring pre-existing public consensus over the core of the amendment proposed. We suggest that the potential value of deliberative mini-publics might more accurately be seen as one of consensus-clarifying rather than consensus-building. While a mini-public may be unlikely to create a novel constitutional consensus, it can have a significant—potentially causal—role in converting a general and disparate desire for change into a specific form. That, in our view, is what occurred with the repeal and replacement of Ireland’s constitutional position on abortion. We argue that a careful analysis of the process provides tangible evidence that the Assembly affected the outcome in clear and specific ways: its significant impact was not in creating a constitutional consensus that had previously been absent, but rather, we argue, in putting on the agenda, and coalescing support around, a specific form of legal change.

Institutional ‘Presence’ and the Indian State: The Long Narrative

The long durée narrative of the state in independent India is one of accumulation of incremental and aggregate power relations arrayed in and through political institutions inhabiting a field of power. These relationships are protean, exhibiting conflicts and contestations among institutions that compete for power within the domain of the state. The ‘ebbs’ and ‘flows’ in power are visible in the state-space represented by institutional arrangements and the patterns of relationship among them. While institutions perform the function of legitimation for the state, they also manifest the crisis that besets the state, reflecting dissonance between its moral–political goals of bringing about socio-economic transformation and its ability to achieve them through ‘state-bureaucratic’ practices. The constitutional state in India can be seen as the setting where the state-idea as limited by law and as an ‘instrument’ for bringing about transformative change was situated. Institutional crises during the emergency and the uneven trajectories of institutional presence in the ensuing period show the marginalization of institutions such as Parliament and the ambivalence of the judiciary in articulating the principles underlying the constitutional consensus. A dominative presence of the executive corroding deliberative spaces making them sites of adversarial combat and the populist appeal of the ‘leader’ drawing upon communitarian emotions has paved the way for a majoritarian state.

Rethinking Royalism in Herrick’s Hesperides

Abstract The scholarly consensus holds that Robert Herrick’s printed book of poems, Hesperides (1648), is the work of a royalist partisan. Yet for all its clear signs of royalism—from the large crown on the title page to the dedication to Prince Charles—Hesperides contains a much wider range of ideological and social commitments. Alongside the absolutist couplets are constitutionalist epigrams; mixed in with the pro-Stuart panegyrics, we find praises of parliamentarians. I trace this diversity to the book’s literary model: the silva or miscellany. Largely seen as a site of royalist community, seventeenth-century manuscript miscellanies were also marked by contestation and fracture. Hesperides likewise ranges across the varieties of royalism (and occasionally even republicanism), reflecting the real ideological diversity among the king’s supporters and sympathizers. The result is a profoundly polyvocal royalism increasingly tending towards constitutional consensus.

Постсоветские де-факто государства: траектории борьбы за суверенитет

The de-facto statehood is a multi-faceted phenomenon of the international politics. They are key elements of the ethno-political conflicts in the contexts of collapse of multi-ethnic federations, empires as well as processes of decolonization. In spite of growing scientific interest to this phenomenon de-facto states’ studies face a clear lack of interdisciplinary research. Most of papers are devoted to the conflict dynamics, issues of theory and international law issues or cover some particular country cases. The topical perspectives of de-facto states are often studied with no special attention to their historical background. The offered article examines the trajectories of the struggle for the sovereignty of Post-Soviet de facto entities. The author provides a comprehensive analysis of their evolution in the last years of the existence of the Soviet Union and in the period after of the USSR dissolution. The article offers a typology of de facto states. From the author’s point of view, we can talk about two generations of such formations. If the first generation was a result of the once single state collapse as well as growing fight for revisiting statuses of former union and autonomous entities, the second one was a consequence of the crisis of nation-building in the newly independent states and the growing competition between Russia and the West for influence in Eurasia. The article presents the evolution of the trajectories of the de facto states struggle for sovereignty in the context of three successive Post-Soviet regional orders. According to the author, all the Post-Soviet unrecognized republics were formed in the conditions of the destruction of the constitutional consensus of 1977–1978. However, then the trajectories of asserting and protecting the sovereignty of the de facto entities diverged significantly. The author evaluates the general and special features of these processes. In his view, this dynamic has depended on the regional context changes (revision of “the Belavezha order”) but at the same time, changes within de facto states seriously influenced the international environment.

The Emergence of Conservatism as a Political Concept in the United States before the Civil War

The Emergence of Conservatism as a Political Concept in the United States before the Civil War Adam I. P. Smith (bio) In 1848, the writer for a religious weekly noted that conservative and conservatism were now used "so frequently" that it "becomes a matter of some surprise how our predecessors managed to dispense with them so generally."1 The author might have added—though it barely needed saying—that these were terms laden with weighty, sometimes contradictory but almost always positive connotations. So self-evidently important were these political concepts that newspaper editors, ministers, and politicians all offered disquisitions on their meaning and significance, earnestly distinguishing between "true" and "false" conservatism. In the widest sense, the self-described conservatism of nineteenth-century Americans was a reflection of a political culture that placed the highest moral value on defense of the Constitution and the Union.2 US politics was hardly short of profound division, yet compared to most European states the extent of the constitutional consensus was striking. This was a "postrevolutionary" politics in the sense that the break from the British Empire and the nation-building project that followed was so culturally and politically sacrosanct that any prospect of future revolution was [End Page 231] regarded as revanchism of the most dangerous kind—as the secessionists of 1861 were to discover. This was what Nathaniel Hawthorne meant when he proclaimed in his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce that "all the greatest statesmen of America stand in the attitude of a conservative," and it was what Daniel Webster had in mind when he said in 1848 that "the whole progress of the American system, [is] marked by a peculiar conservatism."3 It was why British Chartists or revolutionary émigrés from continental Europe sometimes declared themselves conservatives; as James Fennimore Cooper put it, "here [in America], the democrat is the conservative, and thank God he has something worth preserving."4 Under a monarchy, explained an Ohio newspaper in 1858, conservatism was "the foe of popular liberty," but in a republic "where political and social movements, being accorded the largest liberty, tend to extremes," it operates as a "wholesome check, retraining excesses."5 Americans fought bitterly over the meaning of their experiment in popular sovereignty, but they shared the assumption that it was the responsibility of each generation to perpetuate the republican institutions they had inherited. And so, in this general sense, a certain sort of "peculiar" (because it was postrevolutionary) conservatism came naturally. Yet when the term conservative initially appeared in America in the 1790s, it was used in a very specific way in reports of French politics as a translation of conservatuer. Only in the mid-1830s did the term begin to be applied to American politics, and only in the 1840s did it really take hold and acquire its generally positive value-laden meaning. By the late 1850s, as the nation's institutions, and indeed its very existence, came under unprecedented threat, conservative became a language of legitimation—to claim to be a conservative was to be in favor of protecting something everyone agreed had moral value, such as the legacy of 1776, justice, or the Union. The timing and circumstances of the emergence of the language of conservatism in American politics has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Indeed, such is the lingering influence of Hartzian assumptions about the underlying "liberalism" of American political culture that it is still quite frequently assumed that there was no "real" conservatism in antebellum America at all.6 Most of the scholarship on the [End Page 232] pre–New Deal history of conservatism takes what might be called a "genealogical" approach. That is, it aims to identify a conservative "tradition"—of people whose politics make them conservative according to some normative definition, whether or not they thought of themselves as such.7 The bulk of this scholarship concentrates, for understandable reasons, on the South, though occasionally some crusty northern Whigs of the Rufus Choate variety are also thrown in.8 At the same time, historians of antebellum politics deploy the term conservative to describe the politics of anyone who defended slavery. The implication is that the antebellum antislavery to proslavery political spectrum can...

Democracy-Assisting Judicial Review and the Challenge of Partisan Polarization

Democracy-assisting judicial review is a theme that has recently reemerged in normative constitutional scholarship. It asks the Supreme Court to use its power to vindicate the people’s views that have been stymied by a dysfunctional political process, a problem that has worsened in recent years. The main deficiency in this prescription is that it overstates the Court’s ability to compensate for problems like polarization and gridlock since it is a part of the interbranch strategies employed by partisan regimes. This was demonstrated in the area of reapportionment, typically seen as a classic example of democracy-assisting judicial review. It is also evident in recent Roberts Court decisions in the election-law field. This Article recommends abandoning the democracy-assisting idea and instead exploring ways to prevent the Court from being enlisted in extreme and unrepresentative causes. Reform ideas should focus on increasing and regularizing turnover on the Court and encouraging the selection of more representative Justices, an outcome made more likely by increasing the representativeness of the elected officials who choose the Justices. Absent a crisis, of course, it is highly unlikely that any such reforms will be adopted. Nonetheless, it is a worthwhile exercise to think about how to enhance representational and consensus-building processes in the presence of growing partisan polarization. And it is a more valuable exercise than simply imploring the Justices be less partisan or suggesting that they defer to today’s laws that represent such fragile legislative compromises. Institutions and processes, and the incentives they create, must be changed if behavior is to be changed. The best we can do for the Court and for American democracy in 2020 and beyond is to construct better electoral processes that produce more representative leaders who, in turn, select more representative Justices, which aids the quest for true constitutional consensus.

Wielopoziomowy konstytucjonalizm Unii Europejskiej a stosowanie praw podstawowych

The aim of the article is to analyse the application of fundamental rights in the complex political and legal system of the European Union, which can be described as a multilevel constitutionalism. Because the standards of individual protection are created both at the level of national constitutions as well as at the supranational, EU level, it is possible that individual fundamental rights will be understood differently in the Member States. The article tries to answer the question how to solve such an interpretation conflict. A way out is suggested in the form of the need to conduct a constitutional dialogue on the understanding of fundamental rights. The conditions necessary to conduct such a dialogue are also identified. It will lead to achieving the European constitutional consensus. The article puts forward a thesis that the development of a European consensus as to the understanding of fundamental rights leads irrevocably to the formation of a European constitutional identity.

A Holy Alliance between the Catholic Church and Constitution-Makers? The Diffusion of the Clause of Cooperation in Third Wave Democracies

AbstractWhat explains the adoption of the regime of cooperation between church and the state in the democratic constitutions of Spain and Poland, while Portugal maintained a regime of strict separation in the United States and French tradition? The explanation could be that a consensual constitution-making process resulted in a constitutional formula accommodating religion and guaranteeing religious freedoms. Alternatively, the constitutional regime of cooperation could result from the diffusion of international norms to national constitutions, in this case, the cosmopolitan law of the church. The article process-traces the constitution drafting processes and finds that the emergence of a constitutional consensus among secularist and constitutional drafters in Spain and Poland was based on the Vatican Council II doctrine and facilitated by the intervention of the Catholic hierarchies. In Portugal, the violent context of the revolution excluded the church, and the constitutional regime of strict separation between church and state was adopted.

Regeneración ética y compromiso político para una sociedad democrática avanzada

El comentario reflexiona sobre la responsabilidad política en el deterioro del sistema democrático e intenta contribuir a la regeneración ética del mismo. Puesto que la comunidad universitaria ha de jugar un papel esencial en la búsqueda y el diálogo que conducen a esa regeneración responsable, hemos de subrayar el papel de la educación cívica y política de los estudiantes universitarios para capacitarles en el ejercicio de ese arte como servicio al bien común.En el comentario partimos de la actual situación española de quiebra democrática y de deslegitimación de los partidos y de la “clase política” en su conjunto. La pregunta por la democracia representativa, en este momento en que muchos cuestionan los consensos constitucionales, es incisiva e inquietante. El editorial aborda también el análisis de la deslegitimación del sistema democrático y hace algunas propuestas para la regeneración democrática de nuestra sociedad, a partir de una cultura política de una democracia de calidad, impregnada de valores.

La reforma del artículo 135 de la Constitución Española : ¿pueden los mercados quebrar el consenso constitucional?

Este trabajo analiza la reciente reforma del artículo 135 de la Constitución española, a la luz de los principios y de la doctrina constitucional; centrándose, fundamentalmente, en el estudio crítico del procedimiento de reforma seguido, que cuestiona el consenso constitucional.This work analyzes the reform of article 135 of the Spanish Constitution which was introduced in September 2011, from the perspective of the constitutional principles as well as the decisions taken by the Constitutional Court. The focus is mainly on the analysis of the procedure followed to conduct the reform, which –it was said—severely breaks the constitutional consensus.

Hyper-pluralism and the multivariate democratic polity

In the global world, momentous migratory tides have produced hyper-pluralism on the domestic scale, bringing citizens with radically different conceptions of life, justice and the good to coexist side by side. Conjectural arguments about the acceptance of pluralism, the next best to public reason when shared premises are too thin, may not succeed in convincing all constituencies. What resources, then, can liberal democracy mobilize? The multivariate democratic polity is the original answer to this question, based on an interpretation of Rawls which revisits Political Liberalism in the light of The Law of Peoples. The unscrutinized assumption is highlighted, often read into Rawls’s Political Liberalism, that a polity moves homogeneously and all of a piece from religious conflict to modus vivendi, constitutional consensus and finally to overlapping consensus. Drawing on The Law of Peoples, a different picture can be obtained.

Pactos sociales y justicia constitucional: una visión comparada entre Corea y Colombia

El presente artículo realiza una comparación entre Corea y Colombia abordando los pactos sociales y la justicia Constitucional. Nuevas constituciones fueron adoptadas en Corea del Sur y Colombia y dentro de ellas se establecieroncortes constitucionales. Durante el último cuarto del siglo XX, bajo circunstancias específicas de crisis institucional, dos sociedades políticas y sus respectivos líderes acometieron la tarea de superar dicha crisis a través de la adopción de una nueva constitución. El establecimiento de cortes constitucionales implicaba, en dichos países, la vigencia a futuro del consenso constitucional alcanzado y la superación de la crisis pasada. Las nuevas constituciones en estos países se perciben como la reformulación de un pacto social y lascortes constitucionales juegan un papel importante respecto a la actualización constante de dicho pacto democrático-constitucional.

Where We Came from: Defining the Western Political Science Association

history of the formation and early years of the Political Science Association (WPSA) has been well documented by G. Homer Durham, the founding President of the WPSA in his June 1956 Political Quarterly article, The WPSA: First Ten Years and the Next Ten. Durham described discussing organization during the 1946 annual meeting of the APSA at the Statler Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio. He reported that details of this postwar association were hammered out by a small group of colleagues in the club car of the train returning the founding group from Cleveland to the West. So the WPSA was conceived in a club car, and its first meeting took place in November of 1947 at the University of Utah. At that 1947 meeting, the constitution was adopted and officers were elected. It didn't take long, though, for the WPSA to move from constitutional consensus to division. first identity crisis of the organization occurred in the early 1950s. crisis concerned the meaning of the region. Was WPSA to be a Rockies organization (of mountain men) or a fully Western organization that would include the coastal states? Inclusiveness won out. A crisis of another sort followed on the heels of the first. In 1955, the Executive Council was faced with a difficult choice: Should the meeting scheduled in Logan, Utah, be cancelled or moved to another state because smoking inside public buildings was discovered to be illegal in the state of Utah? To quote the secretary treasurer: [The prohibition of smoking] might cause some consternation among the ranks of the heavy smokers. After much debate, the decision was made to hold the meeting in Logan. 1961 presented the WPSA with yet another crisis, this one constitutional: Should non-Westerners be allowed to chair panels of the WPSA? Showing its tolerant side, the WPSA knowingly permitted a nonWestern colleague (Professor William J. Gore of the University of Indiana) to chair a panel on Metro-Urban Issues. Gore was referred to in a letter to WPSA officers as an outsider. annual meeting in 1964, located in Salt Lake City, offered participants a change of pace from the usual. Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed for attendees at the meeting that year. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was in attendance at the performance. His thank you letter is among the documents in the archives of the WPSA. 1967 marked the beginning of era of resolutions from the floor of WPSA business meetings. Jumpstarting this new tradition, the membership passed a resolution denouncing the threat to academic freedom posed by the CIA's covert financing of academic research. WPSA members were offered opportunity in 1969 that has yet to be repeated. WPSA met that year at the Princess Kaiulani Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii. Although the WPSA had a long-standing involvement with the shaping and growth of the Political Quarterly (now the Political Research Quarterly), the relationship between the WPSA and the WPQ was not codified until 1971 when the Council adopted the Mann Report, which formally set out the terms of this relationship. In the early 1970s, a concern with diversity and diversity-related issues became a major theme for WPSA, a theme that it has consistently embraced ever since. Caucuses were formed, studies were conducted, and official reports were written regarding the status of women, Chicanos, Blacks, and part-time faculty in the profession. Specialized awards were established to honor scholars focusing on these issues. Concern with the rights of women led to a major floor fight at the business meeting in Phoenix in 1977. A resolution was presented there that proposed barring the WPSA from meeting in states that had not approved Equal Rights Amendment or its equivalent. It passed, but not before some very harsh words were exchanged between members of the organization. Mann Report of 1971 did not anticipate some complexities of the relationship between the WPSA and the WPQ, so in 1979 the Executive Council commissioned a report and recommendations from a specially created committee. …

Judging Judges: From 'Principal-Agent Theory' to 'Constitutional Justice' in Multilevel 'Judicial Governance' of Economic Cooperation Among Citizens

How should citizens evaluate the ever more important case law of international economic courts and their sometimes inadequate responses (e.g. by investor-state arbitration) to ‘the governance gaps created by globalization (which) provide the permissive environment for wrongful acts by companies of all kinds without adequate sanctioning or reparation’?1 Section I recalls that the customary law requirement (as codified in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties) of settling ‘disputes concerning treaties, like other international disputes, … in conformity with the principles of justice and international law’, including ‘universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all’ (Preamble VCLT), reflects the constitutional functions of courts to interpret and apply law in conformity with ‘rule of law’, justice and human rights as constitutional restraints on the ‘rule of men’ and their ‘rule by law’. Section II explains why some of the governance problems of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are due to power-oriented conceptions of ‘principal-agent’ relationships as ‘member-driven governance’ without regard to the constitutional functions of WTO bodies to provide collective public goods with due respect for citizens as ‘democratic principals’. Sections III and IV recall how the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) Court developed diverse ‘constitutional methods’ of interpreting treaties among European states as ‘constitutional instruments’ protecting fundamental freedoms and social rights of European producers, investors, traders and consumers. Sections V and VI argue that the worldwide context of international economic law (IEL) differs from multilevel European constitutionalism and requires WTO and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) dispute settlement bodies and investor-state arbitral tribunals to exercise more judicial deference and respect for the diversity of constitutional principles in WTO Members and their regulatory discretion. Section VII concludes that national, regional and worldwide economic courts should promote common conceptions of rule of law and ‘constitutional justice’, following the ‘solange method’ of multilevel cooperation among national and international courts in Europe, in order to protect transnational ‘rule of law communities’ for mutually beneficial economic cooperation among citizens across frontiers.

Human Rights, International Economic Law and 'Constitutional Justice'

According to J. Rawls, ‘in a constitutional regime with judicial review, public reason is the reason of its supreme court’; it is of constitutional importance for the ‘overlapping, constitutional consensus’ necessary for a stable and just society among free, equal, and rational citizens who tend to be deeply divided by conflicting moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines.1 The European Court of Justice (ECJ), the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) Court successfully transformed the intergovernmental European Community (EC) treaties and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into constitutional orders founded on respect for human rights. Their ‘judicial constitutionalization’ of intergovernmental treaty regimes was accepted by citizens, national courts, parliaments, and governments because the judicial ‘European public reason’ protected more effectively individual rights and European ‘public goods’ (like the EC's common market). The ‘Solange method’ of cooperation among European courts ‘as long as’ constitutional rights are adequately protected reflects an ‘overlapping constitutional consensus’ on the need for ‘constitutional justice’ in European law. The power-oriented rationality of governments interested in limiting their judicial accountability is increasingly challenged also in worldwide dispute settlement practices. Judicial interpretation of intergovernmental rules as protecting also individual rights may be justifiable notably in citizen-driven areas of international economic law protecting mutually beneficial cooperation among citizens and individual rights (e.g. of access to courts). Multilevel economic, environmental, and human rights governance can become more reasonable and more effective if national and international courts cooperate in protecting the rule of international law for the benefit of citizens (as ‘democratic principals’ of governments) with due regard for human rights and their constitutional concretization in national and international legal systems.

The Malaise of Islam

��� magine that the senior religious authorities, the most experienced Sharia court judges, and the most prominent Islamist politicians, dissidents, and modernizing reformers from Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Algeria are gathered in a conference hall with the intention of defining an Islamic state. Their assignment is to write a universal constitution for Muslim societies, creating a governance model by which all Muslims would live, in the Islamic state to which they profess to aspire. The constitution is to be specific, laying out details as to form of government, choice of leader and succession, economic structure, courts and judiciary, and the role of the state—if any—in family and personal status matters. It is to specify whether the zakat is to be collected by the state or left to volunteer contributions, and whether the imams of mosques are to be employees of the state. It is to spell out who is to have the authority to say whether traditional practices in some Muslim communities such as honor killings, female genital mutilation, and death for apostasy are required, permitted, or prohibited, and how such rulings are to be enforced. The delegates have no deadline, but are to stay in conference until they reach consensus on a document that will put an end to centuries of disputation about the proper way for Muslims to conduct their affairs. In truth, they are unlikely ever to emerge because the probability that such a consensus could be achieved is close to zero. Nearly 14 centuries after the death of the Prophet Muhammad and decades after the end of colonialism, the world’s Muslims have failed to achieve what the scholar Fazlur Rahman called “a conscious vision of an Islamic sociopolitical order.” 1 The tortured quest for constitutional consensus in Iraq demonstrated anew the difficulties Muslims face in defining the terms of their governance, and it is still too early to predict whether that country’s people—mostly

Explaining the Northern Ireland Agreement: The Sources of an Unlikely Constitutional Consensus

Advocates of one or another set of institutions for new democracies have typically neglected the question of adoptability. The omission is especially evident in institutional prescriptions for the reduction of ethnic conflict in severely divided societies. These have been advanced with little regard for obstacles likely to be encountered in the process of adoption. Yet adoption is problematic. Processes of negotiation and exchange open the possibility of mixed outcomes reflecting the asymmetric preferences of majorities and minorities. The Northern Ireland Agreement of 1998, however, is a glaring exception, for it produced institutions that are intended to be clearly and consistently consociational. An examination of the process by which the agreement was produced suggests that the coherent outcome in Northern Ireland was the result of some very special conditions conducive to a consensus on institutions that spanned party lines. These conditions are unlikely to be widely replicable, and the fact of consensus does not imply that the agreed institutions are apt for the divided society whose problems they are intended to ameliorate.

Constitutional consensus in post communism: The case of Serbia

In the light of the dramatic events in political society in Serbia the author examines the most basic question of political theory of constitutionalism, i.e. how is it possible for a revolution to culminate in a viable form of constitutional government.

Calculation of Self-Interest and Constitutional Consensus: The Role of Ideology

Constitutional political economy's veil of uncertainty prevents citizens from identifying their specific interests under political rules and facilitates agreement on rules by moving all individuals to an “average” position. But the calculation of self-interest in such settings is not straight-forward; citizens require a model of how the economy works to predict the effect of rules on welfare. Political ideologies typically supply such models. Citizens subscribing to different ideological models anticipate differential treatment under a given constitutional rule, breaking down the ability of the veil of uncertainty to achieve consensus. Constitutional consensus is unlikely in the absence of ideological consensus.

Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match

In 1620 Thomas Scott published a notorious pamphlet entitled Vox Populi. This purported to recount the proceedings of the Spanish council of state and denounced the devious machinations of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, and by implication the pro-Spanish policy of King James. Once Scott's authorship became known he took the traditional way out and fled to the Low Countries. There he served as a preacher with the English regiments and as a minister at Utrecht. He also continued his pamphlet commentary on events in England. Scott, then, was that well-known figure, the radical puritan opponent of the Jacobean regime. He has certainly been cast in that role and until recently such a view of his career would have seemed unexceptionable enough. However, of late there has emerged a corpus of work which might be thought to render any such view of Scott untenable. On the one hand, the existence within the mainstream of English protestantism of anything approaching a coherent body of puritan attitudes has been challenged, at least until the emergence of Arminianism polarized religious opinion and almost created a self-conscious and aggressive puritanism where there had been none before. In the political sphere it has been claimed that within the predominant view of constitutional and political propriety any attempt at concerted opposition to royal policy was both conceptually and practically impossible.