ABSTRACT
In recent decades, social scientists have redoubled their efforts to understand the deep roots of representative democracy. This chapter starts by reviewing three recent books that nest the attempt to analyse these deep roots in an even more ambitious attempt to understand trajectories of political development throughout human history. These books provide a common ground in the form of an emphasis on the balance of power between rulers and society. However, they also differ profoundly in their views of the political and economic landscape in medieval and early modern Europe. This chapter discusses these agreements and disagreements and introduces another strand of recent research which has emphasized the collapse of state power in the tenth century and the new role of the Catholic church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as crucial to understanding the development of representative institutions. The chapter ends by identifying some of the signal developments – in the form of political revolutions – that led from these medieval institutions and the state–society balance in general to modern representative democracy.
