This short but ambitious work, according to its author, is “a hybrid book” that explores democratic thought in the mid-seventeenth century while offering its readers an opportunity to learn “something important about democracy itself” (p. vii). With these goals, Maloy joins intellectual history with contemporary democratic political theory. The author hopes to show that in exploring seventeenth-century thought, much can be learned about a rich and largely lost understanding of populist democratic accountability. What Maloy means by “accountability” includes procedures that extend beyond voting to replace elected officials (deselection); he has in mind various means that lead to scrutiny and sanction that he believes “must be regarded as essential to democratic thought” (p. 7). It is the commitment to these procedures that he seeks to uncover in seventeenth-century English practices and writings, both metropolitan and colonial, and to recommend them to contemporary democratic theorists for their consideration. In this pursuit, he considers the thought of the Levellers, those debating the nature of the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay companies, and the international Calvinist community's discussion of church governance with its spillover into New England domestic politics.

After brief discussions of Greek and Roman political practices (p. 27–31) and seventeenth-century Catholic and Protestant resistant theory (p. 31–33), we come to what is of critical importance to the author's argument. He claims that mid-seventeenth-century English followers of Bodin (in the second book of The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, 1606) endorsed his challenge to Aristotelian regime analysis and, in spite of Bodin's royal absolutism and the English authors' universal denunciation of democracy, were also engaged, though surreptitiously and possibly even unconsciously, in a form of democratic theorizing (p. 33–36). That is, resting on Bodin's denigration of the idea of a mixed regime and his differentiation between a truly sovereign state and mere government—and that either may take one of the three simple forms—Maloy argues that those authors he explores were, in truth, defending a democratic state, government, or church polity.

The next four chapters (3 through 6) are the historical and intellectual center of this book. Here, the author uses well his talents as a close reader of texts. He discusses insightfully the debates surrounding the Virginia Company, the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay companies, the contentious political and religious squabbling that marked the first two decades of English colonization of New England, and more particularly, the controversies that led to the settling of the Connecticut River Valley and Rhode Island. Maloy explores in illuminating ways the tensions rife in the North American English colonies and at home in England. In particular, he draws useful attention to the debates, in England and in the colonies, concerning the manner in which joint-stock companies and reformed congregations, after relocating to North America, would be governed. Thus, for instance, Maloy describes how “just as debates were getting under way in London over whether the ‘democratic’ joint-stock regime in the Virginia Company should be discontinued (see Chapter 3 above), the Pilgrims' financial backers wrote to Governor Bradford complaining of rumors that Plymouth had a democratic government,” which the governor quickly rebutted (p. 110).

Maloy convincingly demonstrates that these debates concerned differing views of the power to be exercised by freemen and church members vis-à-vis various magisterial bodies in polity and congregation, in the colonies and at home in England. Yet, it is just as clear from his faithful account that “no record survives in which reformist deputies used the term ‘democracy’ as a banner of aspirations … [for, as they persistently argued,] the Massachusetts regime was ‘mixed’ between aristocracy and democracy” (p. 130–31). Similarly, in Connecticut, no one was defending democracy, for “the traditional association of that term with anarchy and mob rule was powerful” (p. 148). His demonstration of these tensions between popular and elite forces is convincing and most welcome, but anything approaching a defense of wholly popular government (i.e., democracy) demanded a far less persuasive use of Bodin's regime analysis and its unsubstantiated embrace by seventeenth-century followers in polity and congregation.

In the last chapter, the author's focus shifts from historical exegesis back to contemporary democratic theory. He, thus, claims that “the first modern [seventeenth-century] democrats' structures of regular accountability offer a straighter path [than contemporary ones] to popular control” and that, accordingly, “their formal principles might yet be institutionalized today” (p. 182). Here, he has in mind “constituent juries,” that is, groups of ordinary citizens chosen by lottery that would be “assigned to every elected officer of the United States and given powers not of advice but of scrutiny and sanction” (p. 188). Maloy, thus, intends to use what he gleaned from streams of 1630s and 1640s English political and ecclesiastical thought to reshape contemporary American constitutionalism.

There is much to like in this book. The author persuasively challenges the democratic bona fides of contemporary deliberative “democratic” theorists; he creatively draws attention to an important early-modern challenge to Aristotle's regime theory; he usefully recovers for political scientists and even many historians the theoretically rich political and ecclesiastical debates of the English seventeenth century; and possibly, most important, he boldly stakes out the centrality of English joint-stock and municipal corporate law structures, and Calvinist ecclesiology in the creation of popular political and Protestant congregational institutions in North America. That is, Maloy helps explain the seventeenth-century origins of political institutions in North America that would, over time, become what we today understand to be democratic ones.

Unfortunately, the author's exploration of these subjects is, in most cases, also flawed. The author's discussion of his critical claim regarding how Bodin was read and understood among seventeenth-century audiences fails, for example, to explore in depth Bodin's argument in the Second Book and, possibly still more important, how his readers made use of his argument. Above all else, it is far from evident that anything that Bodin wrote in this section applied to subordinate political institutions, such as corporations, that lacked sovereign authority.

Similarly troubling is the insufficient attention paid by Maloy to the fact that the North American colonies, as English joint-stock companies, were governed under English corporate law and that, accordingly, most of the voting privileges they enjoyed were typical (see William Blackstone, Commentaries [1765], volume 1, chapter 18) of such entities. If they were unusual—a matter, if true, of critical importance—the author would have needed to show this by comparing English corporate and municipal practices in the colonies to those in England. That these various bodies were corporations meant that they were not sovereign and that the rules they made were legal by-laws subject to absolute royal oversight (eventually Parliamentary, too, but this was and would be a matter of considerable disagreement). That the English colonies were all over 3,000 miles away from their sovereign government and that England was in the seventeenth century often, well, busy was of great practical but not theoretical importance. Accordingly, Maloy needed to have added both geographical distance and historical circumstances to that of English corporate and municipal law and reformed church ecclesiology in reconstructing the origins of what would become American democratic practices.

Maloy's discussion of the ecclesiastical structures of New England's congregational religious institutions is essential and a courageous move for a contemporary political theorist, but his total inattention to the reformed theological grounds on which they rested—indeed preferring to explain these structures by recurrence to pagan humanists—renders this discussion unsatisfying. It is errant, for example, to ignore the importance of the Christian concept of original sin in the formation of Calvinist views of church governance, yet he never mentions it, nor does he ever mention the centrality of Christ to man's imputed potential.

Indeed, given the centrality of Reform Protestant theology and practice to the majority of the mid-seventeenth-century authors explored by Maloy, one might want to ask whether their powerful and anachronistic religious views matter in how we understand their political and moral goals, and if they do, as seems likely, why then their political and ecclesiastical musings should be used, unrevised, as blueprints in the reconstruction of contemporary American constitutional government. Similarly, one might also want to place greater emphasis than has Maloy on the fact that the popular elements he uncovers in the mid-seventeenth century were consistently rejected by 150 years of Anglo-American thinkers who, like the authors themselves, endorsed the need for balanced government to prevent the exercise of arbitrary power, by the one, the few, or the many. That is, until the 1780s, if not later, democracy was a political pathology that almost all Anglo-American thinkers and political actors sought to repudiate.

This book has very real strengths and, almost as significant, weaknesses. Both, one might argue, are reflections of the author's commitment to political theory. As a political theorist, Maloy reads deeply and carefully from long-forgotten but important mid-seventeenth-century texts as he creatively draws out their latent, and too often overlooked, political theories. Similarly, though, his theorist's focus on political texts may have led him to give insufficient attention to comparative legal institutions in England and Reformed Protestant theology that, had they, too, been examined, would have importantly strengthened his argument. Still more unsatisfying, though, are Maloy's too ready efforts to distill from mid-seventeenth-century authors, in the main pious Reformed Protestants who viewed democracy with abhorrence, lessons in democratic theory and constitutional organization that might be applied to contemporary American political life.

Leaving aside the hubris of his goals, his insufficient attention to historical circumstances and his seeming belief that ideas can be easily drawn from one world and effortlessly applied to another far different one capture well the difficulties of mining historical materials for theory-rich purposes. This is not to claim that abstract political principles cannot be extracted from historical accounts and that theorists must limit themselves to offering historical description and no more. Rather, this thoughtful work would seem to confirm that such theoretical harvesting must be done with apt attention to historical circumstances—indeed, more so than is done here. Maloy's careful historical reconstruction of neglected mid-seventeenth-century political and ecclesiastical texts and his flawed but bold efforts to use them to inform contemporary political theory, thus, usefully draws our attention to the difficult relationship between intellectual history and political theory. This work should serve as an invitation for a useful discussion of this complicated and tense relationship.