It's certainly a gross error to apply the values or meanings of the present day to the past: it is a far country, and they do things differently there. A wider franchise (as you say) wouldn't have had any chance of emerging in that society; one has to take "Parliamentary democracy" in a very different sense than one would take it today, you are quite right.
It's interesting to speculate, though, how much the dictatorship was mediated by Cromwell as an individual versus Cromwell as the tool of the rest of the army, and how Parliament was able to keep hold on the purse-strings after the dictatorship collapsed.
I think the evolution of modern Parliamentary processes (in contrast to other aspects of democracy) was hastened during this period, perhaps moreso than in any other. Just as the mechanisms of the European Commission have tremendous effects on Euro-democracy, so did the mechanisms of Parliament. And the example of both sets of leaders and followers - venial though many may have been - seem to me to have modern echoes, and to have given a number of different cultures (India, for example) an interesting set of patterns to discuss and to some extent emulate, when they wanted to initiate a regime change.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chiming
Re: things you learn...
Date: October 4th, 2007 03:58 pm (UTC)From:It's interesting to speculate, though, how much the dictatorship was mediated by Cromwell as an individual versus Cromwell as the tool of the rest of the army, and how Parliament was able to keep hold on the purse-strings after the dictatorship collapsed.
I think the evolution of modern Parliamentary processes (in contrast to other aspects of democracy) was hastened during this period, perhaps moreso than in any other. Just as the mechanisms of the European Commission have tremendous effects on Euro-democracy, so did the mechanisms of Parliament. And the example of both sets of leaders and followers - venial though many may have been - seem to me to have modern echoes, and to have given a number of different cultures (India, for example) an interesting set of patterns to discuss and to some extent emulate, when they wanted to initiate a regime change.