ABSTRACT
It is widely assumed that Britons and Americans share a common commitment to democracy. Yet this assumption raises many questions: how long have the two nations believed in democracy and have they always meant the same thing by the term? These comparative questions have been little studied, but historians are now showing a new interest in transatlantic political discourse. J. C. D. Clark, in The Language of Liberty, has argued that 'liberty' was the key term in the conflicts which rent the English-speaking world in the early-modern period, but that after the creation of the American republic, 'democracy' came to be regarded as 'the essence of the American experiment'. 1 Andrew Robertson has claimed, in The Language of Democracy, that the nineteenthcentury transition from government by government to government for the people evolved more quickly in the United States than it did in Britain.2 Yet Robertson, despite his book's title, did not examine the use of the term 'democracy' and no one has made a comparative study of democratic discourse in twentieth-century Britain and America. Thus there is ample scope for further study of the evolution of Anglo-American attitudes to democracy.
