Why Does the Majority Rule? A Detective Story about Its Origins

IF 0.2 4区 历史学 Q2 HISTORY
Jack N. Rakove
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

It is rare to begin an academic book review by entering a personal plea to disinterested readers, but here a statement of authorial purpose is in order. William J. Bulman’s splendid monograph on the origins of majority rule in the English Parliament is not a book that most readers of this journal would expect to see reviewed here. True, its final chapter does discuss the colonial American assemblies. But this imperial chapter is more an afterthought to Bulman’s dominant concern, which is to provide an extended analysis of rules of deliberation and decision-making in the seventeenth-century House of Commons. The very thought of navigating the dense scholarly terrain of seventeenth-century British history will daunt many readers, even those of us trained as early American historians. After all, what history of any nation over a similar span of years has ever been studied more intensely? Yet at this precarious moment in American history, when our own conventions of majority rule have become both deeply controversial and gravely vulnerable, Bulman’s scrupulously argued book deserves close attention. At one level, The Rise of Majority Rule is a tightly focused monograph that depends on the careful analysis of one main evidentiary source, the legislative journals of the House of Commons, complemented by a few textual sources conveying how its members perceived the changes they were witnessing. Yet the book is also an interpretive work of the first order of significance. It starts with a simple, seemingly naïve question that one would think barely merits an answer: why do we allow majorities to govern? Is this rule of decision not so obvious and self-evident (in the axiomatic sense of the term) that no explanation of its origins is needed? In fact, Bulman demonstrates, this development, like all others, has its own distinctive history. He makes his key claims at the outset: the institutional “turn to majority voting [within Parliament] is more essential to the history of majority rule than the gradual attainment of universal suffrage” or the invention of political parties (p. 1), and this shift in legislative
为什么多数决定原则?关于起源的侦探故事
很少会在学术书评开始时向无私的读者发出个人恳求,但在这里,作者的目的是合理的。威廉·J·布尔曼(William J.Bulman)关于英国议会多数统治起源的精彩专著,并不是本杂志的大多数读者希望在这里看到的一本书。的确,它的最后一章确实讨论了殖民地时期的美国议会。但这一帝国章节更多的是对布尔曼主要关注的事后思考,即对17世纪下议院的议事和决策规则进行扩展分析。一想到要在17世纪英国历史的密集学术领域中航行,就会让许多读者感到害怕,甚至是我们这些受过早期美国历史学家训练的读者。毕竟,在类似的年份里,有哪个国家的历史被研究得更深入?然而,在美国历史上这个不稳定的时刻,当我们自己的多数统治惯例变得既有争议又极易受到攻击时,布尔曼的这本精心论证的书值得密切关注。在某种程度上,《多数人规则的兴起》是一本重点突出的专著,它依赖于对下议院立法期刊这一主要证据来源的仔细分析,并辅以一些文本来源,传达其成员如何看待他们所目睹的变化。然而,这本书也是一部具有重要意义的解释性作品。它从一个简单、看似天真的问题开始,人们认为这个问题几乎不值得回答:为什么我们允许多数人执政?这个决定规则是不是不那么明显和不言自明(在这个术语的公理意义上),以至于不需要解释它的起源?事实上,布尔曼证明,这种发展和其他发展一样,有其独特的历史。他从一开始就提出了自己的关键主张:体制上的“转向(议会内)多数投票对多数统治的历史来说比逐步实现普选更重要”或政党的发明(第1页),以及立法上的这种转变
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.10
自引率
0.00%
发文量
14
期刊介绍: Reviews in American History provides an effective means for scholars and students of American history to stay up to date in their discipline. Each issue presents in-depth reviews of over thirty of the newest books in American history. Retrospective essays examining landmark works by major historians are also regularly featured. The journal covers all areas of American history including economics, military history, women in history, law, political history and philosophy, religion, social history, intellectual history, and cultural history. Readers can expect continued coverage of both traditional and new subjects of American history, always blending the recognition of recent developments with the ongoing importance of the core matter of the field.
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