Volume 39, Number 11 · June 11, 1992
The Revolution Over the Revolution
By Lawrence Stone
The Causes of the English Civil War
by Conrad Russell
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 236 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
by Jack A. Goldstone
University of California Press, 608 pp., $34.95
One may well ask why we should care about what happened in England 350 years ago. For Americans it matters a great deal, since if the events were indeed no more than an accidental civil war caused by factional disputes among disaffected noblemen, then the ideology behind the American Revolution and the language of the Declaration of Independence become virtually incomprehensible. If the founding fathers did not have more than a century of individualist and democratic political ideas from England upon which to draw, where else did they get the ideological principles which enabled them first to achieve independence from George III and then to form a union based on the theory of popular sovereignty, the rule of law, the division of powers, and the separation of church and state?
Review, 6573 words
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