A Cultural History of Democracy in the Age of Enlightenment

Michael Mosher is Professor of Political Science at the University of Tulsa, USA.Anna Plassart is Senior Lecturer in History at the Open University, UK.

This volume surveys the burst of political imagination that created multiple Enlightenment cultures in an era widely understood as an age of democratic revolutions. Enlightenment as precursor to liberal democratic modernity was once secular catechism for generations of readers. Yet democracy did not elicit much enthusiasm among contemporaries, while democracy as a political system remained virtually nonexistent through much of the period. If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas did underwrite the democracies of succeeding centuries, they were often inheritances from monarchical governments that had encouraged plural structures of power competition. But in revolutions across France, Britain, and North America, the republican integration of constitutional principle and popular will established rational hope for public happiness. Nevertheless, the tragic clashes of principle and will in fraught revolutionary projects were also democratic legacies. Each chapter focuses on a distinct theme: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the "common good"; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the transformations of sovereignty-a synoptic survey of the cultural entanglements of "enlightenment" and "democracy."

Richly illustrated

List of IllustrationsGeneral Editor's PrefaceIntroductionMichael Mosher (University of Tulsa, USA) and Anna Plassart (Open University, UK)1. SovereigntyDaniel Lee (University of California, Berkeley, USA)2. Liberty and the Rule of LawYoshie Kawade (University of Tokyo, Japan)3. The "Common Good"Rebecca Kingston (University of Toronto, Canada)4. Economic and Social DemocracyAlexander Schmidt (Vanderbilt University, USA)5. Religion and the Principles of Political ObligationNiall O'Flaherty (King's College London, UK)6. Citizenship and GenderDorinda Outram (University of Rochester, USA)7. Ethnicity, Race and NationalismInder Marwah (McMaster University, Canada)8. Democratic Crises, Revolutions, and Civil ResistanceMichael Mosher (University of Tulsa, USA)9. International RelationsJames Stafford (Columbia University, USA)10. Beyond the Polis, Transforming SovereigntyJoanna Innes (University of Oxford, UK)NotesReferencesNotes on ContributorsIndex