Maloy retells the story of the origins of modern democratic ideas, examining debates about institutional design in England and in England's New World colonies during the seventeenth century. Many accounts of modern democratic origins look to the revolutions of the late eighteenth century; Maloy makes a compelling case for the historical and intellectual importance of earlier fights over the form of popular rule. Drawing on those debates, Maloy argues that “the principle of accountability” ought to be the “magnetic north” (1) of contemporary normative democratic theory. However, his excellent spadework in the field of intellectual history is not as easily compatible with purely normative modes of political theory as he intends it to be.

Maloy proposes that modern democratic theory was born from debates about new constitutions written for places like Virginia, Bermuda, and the New England colonies, debates that were echoed a few years later during the English revolution. (Maloy comments that this timeline elevates America's place in intellectual history. It is also worth noting that Maloy's work might prompt us to reassess the prominent position of revolutions per se—not just the American and French—in the democratic imagination.) Elections and constitutional limits on political power were essential ideas for the seventeenth-century democrats to whom Maloy introduces us, but equally important for them was the idea that citizens should be able to hold government officials accountable through nonelectoral mechanisms such as public audits, impeachment, or legal liability of government officials. Indeed, Maloy convincingly establishes that it was the antidemocrats in the seventeenth century who saw elections as a sufficient criterion for popular government. Allowing citizens to choose government officials through elections may provide for popular consent, but to provide for meaningful popular control of government requires something more than choice and consent. Constitutions that give institutional shape to the principle of accountability, Maloy argues, combine the elements of scrutiny and sanction in a way elections alone cannot. (Maloy discusses this conceptual system at 7–10.)

When seventeenth-century democrats proposed models that would make officials accountable to the people through regular constitutional procedures, they defined democratic criteria that have been largely neglected in recent academic discussions of participation, deliberation, and representation. Following the seventeenth-century model he has reconstructed, then, Maloy proposes nonpartisan “constituent juries” (187–89), one for each elected official, that would have the legal authority to audit and sanction those officials between elections.

This is a proposal oddly out of tune with the history of democratic politics since the seventeenth century and of doubtful appeal to citizens today. Maloy writes that he sees the idea of democratic accountability as “a kind of third way between the paradigmatic liberal quest to tame democratic power and the extreme anticonstitutional view of ‘fugitive democracy’” (22), in part because it entails a theory of democratic agency “lying somewhere between the impotent act of voting and the improbable vocation of professional citizen” (2). These are promising criteria for democratic theory, and one of Maloy's signal achievements in this book is to suggest that the concept of accountability can help us articulate a politics that meets them. However, Maloy has so circumscribed his intellectual history that he makes it needlessly difficult to figure out what contemporary forms a politics of democratic accountability might take.

Interestingly, it is Maloy's very effort to insist on the relevance of his research into intellectual history that leads him away from a more relevant discussion of accountability. Maloy declares at the outset that he is concerned with the seventeenth-century democrats’ ideas about political forms and not their ideas about political substance—that is, about constitutional design but not about the membership of political communities. He draws this line because he is worried that contemporary democrats will “[rule] out of court” any previous thinkers who did not call for universal suffrage and religious pluralism (6–7). If seventeenth-century democrats thus lost their democratic credentials, their ideas would not be available for inclusion in the “conceptual toolbox” (25, with similar phrases elsewhere) of democratic thinkers today. However, what if debates about the substance of the polity have been among the struggles through which the idea of democratic accountability has been developed in more recent times? As religious and cultural minorities, the poor, women, and former slaves or their descendents have fought for full membership in the polity—and even more as they have achieved it—they have framed the principle of accountability in new ways. Where Maloy's seventeenth-century democrats were wont to speak of the “trust” between citizens and government, citizens who demand accountability from government today are more likely to speak in terms of issues and interests, policies and programs. About these things, there are more fundamental disagreements than there are about the value of trust. If we applied Maloy's method of careful intellectual history to debates about democratic accountability in the past century or two, it seems unlikely that we would uncover significant public efforts to achieve something resembling nonpartisan constituent juries. We would more likely find claims that parties, unions, community organizations, and social movements can be forms for democratic accountability.

Setting aside questions of political substance, Maloy is ill equipped to comment on these shifts or to appraise the twentieth century's models of democratic accountability. The central problem here seems to be that the idea of a “conceptual toolbox” involves too abrupt a separation between normative political theory and the history of ideas, because it reduces political ideas to tools. Tools are discrete objects, and each is used for a specific and unchanging purpose. Political ideas are not like that. They are interwoven with other ideas, and while they are developed to confront complex and concrete political problems, their histories carry them into new contexts where their advocates find for them new and even unprecedented uses. Seventeenth-century democrats had different ideas about the substance of the political community than do democrats today; this does not make them irrelevant, but it does mean that their idea of accountability might most usefully be understood in terms of the ways it has changed and been changed by the political contexts of which it has been a part. Maloy lays the groundwork for a rich developmental account of the principle of democratic accountability, but his intention of uncovering conceptual tools—and then re-using those tools in almost exactly the form in which he found them—is quite a different project. To link normative theory to history is surely not impossible, but to conceive this linkage as a search for conceptual “tools” seems to lead the political theorist into problems.