8 - Conclusion

Summary

The Conclusion demonstrates the global-historical and interdisciplinary importance of early modern developments in the history of majority rule. It sketches the modern history of majoritarian decision-making in the elected assemblies of the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and the postcolonial polities that emerged from their empires and the tumult of the two world wars. It then explains the basic ways in which the history of the rise of the majority in early modern Britain and its empire recasts majority rule as a political problem in a way that has important implications for political science, political theory, and wider public debate. It shows that all of the basic maladies identified today in debates over the state of representative democracy were present, identified, and discussed in the seventeenth century. In particular, contemporaries experienced and described the threat that majority rule posed to the role of rational, informed argument and inclusion in national decision-making.