The Foundations of English Anti-Democratic Thought c.1630s–1880s: Historiography, Method and History

This article proposes a synchronic-diachronic reading of a specific antidemocratic language that shaped the intellectual history of England. It suggests that, from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, an ideologically diverse body of thinkers similarly and consistently criticized democracy not just as a government but as a plebeian way of life dominated by the licentious and cruel multitude-mob-mass — not by the people and not by liberty. It thus presents a significant series of texts that — in reaction to calls for manhood suffrage and for increased political participation expressed around the times of the 1640s Civil Wars, the internationally revolutionary 1780s–90s and the reform acts concerning the extension of the franchise (1832, 1867, 1884) — attacked democracy for its devastating consequences on politics, morality and civilization. These texts aimed to prove that vicious individuals wanted ‘extreme’ democracy so as to give their vices free rein, while, in turn, encouraging a morally wicked disposition among the lower orders (‘doing as one likes’).