The Roots of American Politics: From Antiquity to the Early Republic

This book examines the ways in which American habits and politics replaced the traditional European republican canon.

Before the modern era, European republics relied on procedural complexity in office-filling to arrive at neutral government. They did so with such technical consistency over a long span of time as to create a republican procedural tradition. That tradition collided with conditions in the Anglo-American world: with entrenched social deference in politics, quasi-representative ...