Conclusion

Abstract Besides succinctly presenting the novel findings of the book, the Conclusion stimulates new considerations vis-à-vis anti-democracy both in the early modern context and afterwards. In particular, it argues how in Elizabethan and early Stuart England—despite the fact that almost nobody was a democrat—democracy was everywhere. Reflections on democracy conditioned people’s thinking about the common good; prompted much debate on the nature of political and ecclesiastical government as well as on individuals’ moral values and intellectual capacities; and produced a plethora of explanations as to why democracy had to be avoided if society was to be preserved. Discussions about democracy defined the constitutional landscape of State and Church in ways not recognized in the historiographical mainstream. Democracy was thus a major bugbear of the authorities and an important barometer of the ideological mood between the 1570s and the 1640s. The Conclusion underlines that a change occurred in the 1640s, when some authors began to view democracy in a more positive light. This situation was concomitant with the advancement of new notions of popular sovereignty, whereby democracy was associated with representation. Direct popular rule, though, remained the bane of political analysis: its procedures were now identified with those of the Polybian ‘ochlocracy’. Ultimately, the profound mistrust manifested towards the lower orders, which time and again blocked their access to politics, evinces a major feature of the history of Western democracy: its being a chronicle of the stuttered extensions with which new categories of individuals were by degree admitted to be part of the democratic ‘people’.