Contributions

Abstract

Modern democracy was created by the competition between political parties and is unthinkable without them. Since, as Professor Chambers contends, the modern political party, strictly defined, was originally an American device, the importance of his subject, early American party development, is patent. Of course, much hangs on how we define a political party, and ifwe make the definition loose enough, the American parties of the 1790s had their obvious predecessors in English history. The author asks that we think of political parties as ‘broadly based social structures that perform crucial political functions in a regularized manner’. Put this way, the party must transcend the largely personal alliances of factional politics based upon the ‘connections’ familiar to the 18th century. They are ‘something more than mere aggregations of men who share certain points of view, such as the Whig and Tory persuasions of 18th century England were’. By the terms of this definition, ‘such parties did indeed emerge first in America,’ Chambers concludes, ‘and they were the earliest examples of their kind’. Needless to say, they owe some debt to the long process of parliamentary development after 1714, through which a legitimate opposition was at last made possible in British politics, but the extent of this debt is obscure. In any case, the United States, by the beginning of the 19th century, was engaged in a very avant-garde experimentation with oppositional politics. The phrase, ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ was first used, in a spirit of levity, in the House of Commons in 1826 by Sir John Cam Hobhouse; at that point the Americans had had more than a quarter of a century of fitful experimentation with partisan opposition, and their two-party politics was even then, after the lapse of a decade, being resuscitated. If the modern procedure for a change of ministry in Britain may be dated from 1830, the f is t American precedent for the transfer of power from government to opposition dates from 1801. If one is concerned with the development of the popular party and mass participation in an orderly political system, the avant-garde character of American party development is more striking. Popular participation in American politics, based upon a broad suffrage and intensified in those states of the union where party competition was keen, frequently reached remarkable intensity well before the Reform Bill of 1832 achieved its modest changes. But Chambers is only incidentally interested in questions of priority.