ABSTRACT
The principles of liberal democracy as we understand them today grew out of the bourgeois critique of autocracy in early modern Europe, beginning in the sixteenth century and culminating in the French Revolution of 1789, with its slogan of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. In the political structures of autocratic societies, such as those typical of the absolutist monarchies of European feudalism, power resided in the king or queen, whose right to rule was divinely ordained by God. Subordinate classes – the peasantry and artisans – were subject to divine order, lacking political rights of any kind. Even the aristocracy, ‘lording’ it over the lower classes in society, owed unquestioning allegiance to the monarch. The institutions of state were directed primarily to the maintenance of this hierarchical system, and to the suppression of dissent, from wherever it came.
