Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Debating – and Creating – Authority: The Failure of a Constitutional Ideal in Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1649
ISBN: 9781315192390
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Area Studies; Law; American Studies; International Law - Law; Socio-Legal Studies; Land Law; Legal History;

This title was first published in 2001. In the tight frame of its first twenty years, Massachusetts Bay dramatically altered its constitutional order from a theocracy to an oligarchy, led by magistrates who created their own authority and defined the limits on their almost unlimited power. Debating-and Creating-Authority examines this shift in constitutional order at various levels and looks in particular at the efforts to create the theocracy and its subsequent collapse in terms of a fundamental democratical flaw at the centre of the theocratic ideal.