hist2.pdf

The Canadian Historical Review 100, 4, December 2019
© University of Toronto Press doi: 10.3138/chr.2019-0028

ELIZABETH MANCKE

The Age of Constitutionalism and the
New Political History

Abstract: Over the long eighteenth century (1689–1848), participatory government
and imperialism expanded rapidly throughout the world, often accompanied by
revolutionary upheaval and always accompanied by constitutional debates and
reforms. This article argues for calling the era the Age of Constitutionalism, an
Atlantic, indeed global, phenomenon that includes revolutions as one response
to a constitutional crisis but does not marginalize non-violent movements for
constitutional change and reform. This framing shifts the epistemological emphasis
and meta-narrative to an object of change – namely, constitutional reform – and away
from an extreme tool of constitutional change – revolution. It is especially critical
for the political history of early Canada, which had no revolutions but underwent
significant and contentious constitutional changes that were shaped by Indigenous
peoples, settlers, and imperial officials. By shifting the focus away from the din of
revolutions to constitutional debates, the sense of the range of political actors during
these decades of global upheaval expands dramatically.

Keywords: constitution, revolution, Royal Proclamation of 1763, Quebec Act,
public sphere, civic society, new political history

Résumé : Souvent accompagnés de bouleversements révolutionnaires et toujours
assortis de débats constitutionnels et de réformes, le gouvernement participatif
et l’impérialisme se sont rapidement développés dans le monde entier au cours du
long xviiie siècle (1689–1848). Selon l’auteure, cette période devrait s’appeler l’Ère
du constitutionnalisme, expression désignant un phénomène atlantique, voire
mondial, qui inclut les révolutions à titre de réponse à une crise constitutionnelle,
sans pour autant marginaliser les mouvements non violents prônant le changement
constitutionnel et la réforme. Ce recadrage déplace l’insistance épistémologique
et le métarécit vers un objet de changement – les réformes constitutionnelles –
l’éloignant ainsi de la révolution, outil extrême de changement constitutionnel. La
chose est particulièrement importante pour l’histoire politique des débuts du Canada,
qui n’a pas connu de révolutions, mais a subi des changements constitutionnels
déterminants et controversés, lesquels ont été façonnés par les peuples autochtones,
les colons et les fonctionnaires impériaux. Si l’on détourne l’attention du tumulte des
révolutions et qu’on la porte vers les débats constitutionnels, on constate que l’éventail
des acteurs politiques durant ces décennies de bouleversements mondiaux s’élargit
considérablement.

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The Age of Constitutionalism 621

1 Peter H. Russell, Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017); Terry Fenge and Jim Aldridge, eds.,
Keeping Promises: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Aboriginal Rights, and Treaties in
Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015).

2 The start date is the Glorious Revolution in England (1688–9) and the
development of the Crown in Parliament; the end date is the 1848 revolutions
in Europe. The decades in between saw a marked expansion in the idea that
participatory government should be the norm, not the exception, in the European
world, including European colonies overseas, and that the terms of participation
would be defined by constitutions.

Mots clés : constitution, révolution, Proclamation royale de 1763, Acte de
Québec, sphère publique, société civile, nouvelle histoire politique

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act, passed by Parliament in
1774, are widely acknowledged as integral parts of the Canadian Constitution.1
Less well known is the role of the office of the governor general. Dating from 1786,
it anticipated a need for greater federal coordination and cooperation among the
British North American colonies. Each of these parts of Canada’s Constitution
is representative of the challenges and debates of the eighteenth-century world
as well as the ongoing concerns in every part of the country: relations among
Indigenous peoples, the Crown, and settler populations; the integration of for-
merly French subjects into the British Empire; and a jurisdictional vision for
British North America. Historical frameworks for understanding the intercon-
nections among these concerns and similar constitutional developments, how-
ever, are limited.

This article makes the case for analyzing early Canada’s constitutional and
political developments within the long eighteenth century, circa 1689–1848, and
in terms of an “Age of Constitutionalism,” an era that encompasses revolutions
as one kind of response to constitutional crises but that does not make them the
overarching framework.2 This reframing, discussed in the first part of the article,
responds to how scholars are now approaching the new political and constitu-
tional histories of the Atlantic world. Their subjects are more diverse, less focused
on the big powers – Britain, France, and then the United States – and more on
middling and small powers, and less centred on the emergence of the nation-state.
As well, historians are analyzing a diverse array of cultural and political develop-
ments, such as culturally specific expressions of the public sphere, many of which
are relevant to post-1783 British North America. The second part of this article
focuses more closely on British North America and on how the concept of an “Age
of Revolutions” is a highly problematic epistemological frame and filter, especially
for peoples in northern North America as well as in other contexts. The third
section concludes with a discussion of how a long eighteenth-century and Age of
Constitutionalism frame might affect historical analyses, using the Proclamation
of 1763, the Quebec Act, and the creation of the office of the governor general as
examples. They were inflection points in power configurations and constitutional
debates, ones that illuminate deeper changes in the power dynamics of north-
ern North America and the Atlantic world and, in turn, suggest how an Age of
Constitutionalism frame might shift our scholarly perspectives.

622 The Canadian Historical Review

3 Sugar Act, 1764, 4 Geo. 3, c. 15; John Borrows, “Wampum at Niagara: The Royal
Proclamation, Canadian Legal History, and Self-Government,” in Aboriginal
and Treaty Rights in Canada: Essays on Law, Equality and Respect for Difference,
ed. Michael Asch (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1997), 155–72, 256–67. The Sugar Act
is mentioned in twelve of ninety essays in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds.,
A Companion to the American Revolution (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2000), but none
mention the Treaty of Fort Niagara.

4 Taxation of the Colonies Act, 18 Geo. 3, c. 12; John Phillip Reid, Constitutional
History of the American Revolution: The Authority to Tax (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1993), 131–6, 143–4.

5 Statute of Westminster, 1931, 22 & 23 Geo. v, c 4, s 2.
6 See the essays by Robert Travers, “Constitutions, Contact Zones, and Imperial

Ricochets: Sovereignty and Law in British Asia,” in Britain’s Oceanic Empire:
Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850, ed. H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke,
and John G. Reid, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 98–129; Philip
J. Stern, “Company, State, and Empire: Governance and Regulatory Frameworks
in Asia,” in Bowen, Mancke, and Reid, Britain’s Oceanic Empire, 130–50; Jerry
Bannister, “The Oriental Atlantic: Governance and Regulatory Frameworks in the
British Atlantic World,” in Bowen, Mancke, and Reid, Britain’s Oceanic Empire,
151–76.

In its totality, this article reminds us to pay attention to the temporal regis-
ters that guide our work, particularly in the new political history. The frame of
the Age of Revolutions conventionally begins with the end of the Seven Years’
War, Pontiac’s War, and the Proclamation of 1763 and continues with such inten-
sity that volatile events and their immediate antecedents tend to be prioritized
over the analysis of long-term developments, such as constitutional change. For
example, the 1764 Sugar Act is part of the conventional narrative of the Age of
Revolutions, while historians only mention the Treaty of Fort Niagara that same
year if they are emphasizing Indigenous issues, though the long-term impact of
the latter is arguably far more important.3 Similarly, the rebels rejected the olive
branch offered by the Carlisle Commission in 1778, and, thus, historians seldom
analyze it in histories of the “Age of Revolutions” because it did not affect the
outcome of the American Revolution. Yet it had a lasting impact on constitu-
tional developments in the British Empire. The commission’s peace package
included the Taxation of the Colonies Act of 1778, in which Parliament relin-
quished its right to pass tax legislation affecting the colonies.4 That principle
became a key development in the imperial constitution affecting British North
America and then Canada up to the 1931 Statute of Westminster.5 While revo-
lutions created the conditions for rebels to write new constitutions and thereby
transform constitution making from an incremental, decades-long process
into a revolutionary event, older patterns of incremental constitutional devel-
opment also continued in the British world. Indeed, British imperial officials
were increasingly analyzing patterns of constitutional practice in the non-Brit-
ish societies that became part of the British world, seeking to identify elements
that could be adapted and incorporated into British constitutional arrangements
overseas and thereby avoid unrest.6

This article embraces many of the objectives of the new political history.
Although addressing a conventional theme of political history – constitutional

The Age of Constitutionalism 623

7 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: New American
Library, 1962); R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political
History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton, nj: Princeton University
Press, 2014).

8 Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven,
ct: Yale University Press, 1996); Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A
Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009); David Patrick
Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia:
University of South Carolina, 2001); David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering,
eds., The World of the Haitian Revolution: Blacks in the Diaspora (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution
and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004); Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion
(Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

9 David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global
Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Suzanne
Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, eds., The French Revolution in Global
Perspective (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2013).

10 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Manisha Sinha, The
Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2016);
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and
the Atlantic World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011).

development – its approach is international more than national, arguing that a
Canadian perspective of incremental constitutional change obliges us to think
about constitutional pressures that were not solely elite controlled. One of its
arguments is that the Age of Constitutionalism allows historians of Canada
to better position British North Americans within late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century struggles and debates over how power should be structured
and limited in the world. These struggles and debates may not have resulted in
revolutionary violence, but they influenced constitutional and political arrange-
ments, many of which continue to the present day.

an age of constitutionalism, circa 1689–1848

In the 1990s, scholarly interest in the Age of Revolutions made a renaissance,
and the number of books and articles with “Age of Revolution(s)” in the title
exploded. In reviewing the literature, it is possible to identify at least four bod-
ies of relevant scholarship. The first, of course, is scholarship on revolution-
ary movements, but unlike the older Age of Revolution scholarship, à la Eric
Hobsbawm or R. R. Palmer,7 much of the newer scholarship looks closely at
political movements by subaltern groups, such as the uprising led by Tupac
Amaru ii in the Andes (1780), the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), or the Second
Maroon War (1796–7) in Jamaica.8 A second line of scholarship examines polit-
ical upheavals across Asia, such as in the Mughal, Safavid, and Qing empires.9
A third focuses on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reform move-
ments, not only for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery but also for
Catholic emancipation in the British world.10 These movements adopted the

624 The Canadian Historical Review

11 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1989).

12 Christopher A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism
and Empire (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

13 Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of
International Law, 1800–1850 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2016).

14 Manuela Albertone and Antonino De Francesco, Rethinking the Atlantic World:
Europe and America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions (Basingstoke, uk: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).

15 Pasi Ihalainen and Kaarin Sennefelt, “General Introduction,” in Scandinavia in
the Age of Revolution: Nordic Political Cultures, 1740–1820, ed. Pasi Ihalainen et al.
(Farnham, uk: Ashgate, 2011), 1–13.

language of universal rights that revolutionaries used and redeployed for
emancipation. In some places, revolution and emancipation overlapped; all of
the Spanish American republics abolished slavery, with only Spain’s Caribbean
island colonies continuing slave regimes. A fourth took shape in response to
the writings of German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, par-
ticularly The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, which was first published in English in 1989. This
scholarship focuses on the growth of civil society, on public interaction and
discourse in coffee houses, salons, newspapers, periodicals, associations such
as the Freemasons, and venues and media in which people often discussed gov-
ernment and politics. These public sphere or civil society forums fostered con-
versations and debates, some of which were associated with political change
and emancipatory movements.11

The capaciousness of the concept of the Age of Revolutions notwithstand-
ing, scholars are increasingly acknowledging its limits, in part because of the
unavoidable emphasis on actual armed revolutions rather than the myriad
political movements that effected change without armed upheaval. Indeed,
scholarship on the public sphere fits awkwardly within an Age of Revolutions
frame because of its emphasis on rational discourse to address political prob-
lems; revolution, in contrast, suggests an abandonment of it. Christopher
A. Bayly wrote the book Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of
Liberalism and Empire.12 In Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins
of International Law, 1800–1850, Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford analyze poli-
cies designed to avoid the kind of political unrest that led to the American
Revolution.13 The contributors to Rethinking the Atlantic World: Europe and
America in the Age of Revolutions focus on transatlantic intellectual exchanges
between continental Europe and the non-anglophone parts of the Americas.14
The historians who contributed to Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution: Nordic
Political Cultures, 1740–1820 acknowledge that the region did not have revolu-
tions like those in the Americas and France, yet debates about popular sov-
ereignty, absolutism, constitutionalism, the concept of democracy, and the
relationship of citizens to the state were widespread and transformative in
Nordic countries.15 Responding to many of these scholarly trends, the legal
historian, Matthew C. Mirow, whose specialty is Spanish America, writes about
“The Age of Constitutions in the Americas,” and the British historian Linda

The Age of Constitutionalism 625

16 M. C. Mirow, “The Age of Constitutions in the Americas,” Law and History Review
32, no. 2 (2014): 229–35; Linda Colley, “Empires of Writing: Britain, America and
Constitutions, 1776–1848,” Law and History Review 32, no. 2 (2014): 237–66.

17 For broad overviews, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World
History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, nj: Princeton University
Press, 2010), 219–50; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global
Connections and Comparisons (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2004), 86–120.

18 Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776
(Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Cecilia Louise Morgan,
Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada (Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017); Paul Grant-Costa and Elizabeth
Mancke, “Anglo-Amerindian Commercial Relations,” in Bowen, Mancke, and
Reid, Britain’s Oceanic Empire, 370–406.

Colley analyzes “Empires of Writing” and “the contagion of constitutions” in
the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.16

All of these qualifications about the Age of Revolutions apply to early Canada;
indeed, no country’s history has been more overshadowed by the American
Revolution than that of Canada. But the concerns raised in this article are not
specific to Canada. Rather, they are peculiarly pronounced in Canadian history.
Like Mirow and Colley, I emphasize constitutions rather than revolutions as
the defining characteristic of the era. To label it an “Age of Constitutionalism”
includes revolution as one response to a constitutional crisis, but it does not
marginalize non-violent movements for constitutional change and reform. The
Age of Constitutionalism also shifts the epistemological emphasis and meta-nar-
rative to an object of change – namely, constitutional reforms – and away from
an extreme tool of constitutional change – revolution. Over the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, hundreds of propositions, petitions, deliberations,
pamphlets, and treatises on constitutional matters circulated. People in many
parts of the world debated how governments should be structured, what delib-
erative processes were appropriate, what limits on power should be imposed on
authorities, who had a right to participate in government and hold office, and
what rights were guaranteed to be protected.17 In some instances, these debates
resulted in a document we might call a constitution, but often they resulted
in the implementation of practices that became constitutional; the abolition of
slavery had profound constitutional implications in every place it happened,
even when abolition happened by statute law, judicial decision, or atrophy.

The Age of Constitutionalism was an Atlantic, indeed global, phenome-
non, spanning about a century and a half from the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury through the first half of the nineteenth century. Not ethnically specific,
it included Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, people of African
descent in Africa and the Americas, Asians, and Europeans wherever they
found themselves in the world. In North America in the late seventeenth cen-
tury, for example, Indigenous peoples began to reposition themselves vis-à-vis
European settlers, increasingly trying to circumvent colonial officials in favour
of imperial officials and, in some cases, going directly to Europe.18 Treaties
that defined Indigenous–settler relations and are recognized in the Canadian
courts were first negotiated in the early eighteenth century. In England in 1689,

626 The Canadian Historical Review

19 Bill of Rights 1689, 1 Wm. & M. 2, c. 2.
20 Massachusetts Charter, 7 October 1691; Michael G. Hall, Lawrence H. Leder, and

Michael G. Kammen, eds., The Glorious Revolution in America: Documents on the
Colonial Crisis of 1689 (Charlotte, nc: University of North Carolina Press, 1964),
76–79; David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (Middletown,ct:
Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 346–8.

21 Jeffrey L. McNairn, The Capacity to Judge: Public Opinion and Deliberative
Democracy in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2000).

22 Michel Ducharme, Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque des Révolutions
atlantiques, 1776–1838 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2010).

Parliament passed the Bill of Rights, making into statute law the Declaration
of Rights that Parliament had read to William and Mary when it asked them to
ascend the throne.19 In British America, constitutionally protected rights were
expanding; the Crown required the expansion of religious toleration, most nota-
bly in the Massachusetts Charter of 1691.20 Internationally, Europe’s belligerents
met in Utrecht to negotiate peace and a balance of power to end the War of the
Spanish Succession, an attempt at a kind of international constitutionalism that
continues to the present. The eighteenth-century growth of colonies reinforced
governing practices in ways that settlers could argue were constitutional. The
rapid expansion of print news, particularly periodicals, papers, and pamphlets,
expanded both the content of political discourse and the numbers of informed
and engaged participants. Debates over who was a subject and the rights inher-
ing in subjecthood were intense, spilling over into a growing movement to abol-
ish the slave trade and then slavery itself.

The Age of Constitutionalism allows historians of Canada to step outside
the shadow of the American Revolution and examine political and constitu-
tional change in light of developments elsewhere in the world. Jeffrey McNairn
eloquently and insightfully analyzes the emergence of the public sphere in
Upper Canada from 1791 to 1854, carefully documents the diverse ways that
Upper Canadians participated in and shaped political and social discussions,
and thereby challenges the idea that residents of British North America did
not experience and contribute to the political debates transforming societies
throughout the Atlantic Basin.21 In Le concept de liberté au Canada à l’époque
des Révolutions atlantiques, 1776–1838, Michel Ducharme analyzes two dom-
inant ideas of liberty in the Canadas. One he calls modern liberty, which
emphasized individual liberty, and the other he calls republican liberty, which
emphasized participatory, and particularly representative, government, but
both within the currents of ideas that were circulating in the Atlantic world.22
As McNairn and Ducharme show, Canadians were actively involved in the
constitutional debates of the era. Even though McNairn eschews the framing
of the Age of Revolutions and Ducharme embraces it, scholars outside of
Canada conventionally ignore their contributions. As Wim Klooster observes,
“historians have long excluded Canada’s history from the Enlightenment and
the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Since both Upper and Lower Canada did not
exit the British Empire when the thirteen colonies to the south did, their story

The Age of Constitutionalism 627

23 Wim Klooster, “Review of The Idea of Liberty in Canada during the Age of Atlantic
Revolutions, 1776–1838,” Canadian Historical Review 98, no. 1 (2017): 180–1. For an
assessment of how Upper Canadian history might inform us history, see Alan
Taylor, “The Late Loyalists: Northern Reflection of the Early American Republic,”
Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 1 (2007): 1–34.

24 Ann Gorman Condon, “1783-1800: Loyalist Arrival, Acadian Return, Imperial
Reform,” in The Atlantic Region to Confederation: A History, ed. Phillip A. Buckner
and John G. Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 184–7; Taylor, “Late
Loyalists,” 4, 19–20.

was not deemed worthy of inclusion, despite the momentous rebellions of
1837–8.”23

The long eighteenth century includes the early decades of political moderniza-
tion when people first began raising constitutional concerns about royal absolut-
ism, questioning the relationship between individuals as subjects of a monarch
or citizens of a state, questioning what rights and privileges they could expect. In
some places, religious liberties shrank, such as in France with the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes in 1685; in other places, they expanded, such as in the British world.
Over the eighteenth century, the public sphere took form in countries throughout
Europe through the rapid expansion and circulation of print, when salons and cof-
fee houses became meeting places to discuss government or explore and defend
ideas about freedom of speech, the press, and assembly. In the early eighteenth
century, many of these ideas were considered radical. By the mid- nineteenth cen-
tury, they had become quite conventional, though still contested, and societies
were dealing with new political questions, such as the rights of workers, the expan-
sion of the franchise, and whether to include women as members of the public
sphere – issues that marked another shift in political modernization.

loyalists and the age of revolutions

The value of the Age of Constitutionalism frame does not mean driving out
the Age of Revolutions perspective. It has influenced scholarship for so long,
and we have become so accustomed to its tropes and assumptions, that we are
often unaware of the consequences of its impact, even when profound. For his-
torians of British North America, it is still important to understand the Age of
Revolutions frame, partly because of its continued relevance and partly because
of the distorting effect it has had on Canadian history. This section begins with
a note on the constitutional and political relevance of the Age of Revolutions in
Canadian history and ends with an assessment of its serious distortions for the
historical analysis of British North America.

Early Canada’s political and constitutional histories have a Gordian knot
that has captured the attention of scholars for decades – namely, how did the
American Revolution influence political and constitutional developments in
British North America and then Canada? Many attempts to answer this ques-
tion focus on the legacy of the loyalists. The influx of approximately 40,000
Loyalist refugees into Quebec and Nova Scotia during and after the American
Revolution had constitutional implications beyond the creation of the new col-
onies of New Brunswick and Cape Breton in 1784 and Upper Canada in 1791.24

628 The Canadian Historical Review

25 David Bell, Early Loyalist Saint John: The Origin of New Brunswick Politics, 1783–
1786 (Fredericton, nb: New Ireland Press, 1983).

26 Neil MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil: The Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia, 1783–
1791 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988).

27 Campbell v. Hall, [1774] 98 Eng. Rep. 1045.
28 R. J. Morgan, Early Cape Breton: From Founding to Famine, 1784–1851: Essays, Talks,

and Conversations (Wreck Cove, ns: Breton Books, 2000).
29 C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830

(London: Longman, 1989).

Loyalists expected and received participatory government in the form of elected
assemblies. New …