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Aristocratic reform and the extirpation of parliament in Early Georgian Britain: Andrew Michael Ramsay and French ideas of monarchy

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 14:10 authored by Andrew Mansfield
In 'An Essay upon Civil Government' (1722), Andrew Michael Ramsay mounted a sustained attack upon the development throughout English history of popular government. According to Ramsay, popular involvement in sovereignty had led to the decline of society and the revolutions of the seventeenth century. In his own time, Parliament had become a despotic instrument of government, riven with faction and driven by a multiplicity of laws that manifested a widespread corruption in the state. Ramsay's solution to this degeneracy was the extirpation of Parliament, and its substitution with a monarchy moderated by an aristocratic senate. Ramsay's adoption of certain “Country” elements, including a return to the first principles of the constitution, claimed to reflect the principles of contemporary French aristocratic theory which called for the reform of government through the nobility. In his desire to exclude popular government, and reverse the decline of the state, however, Ramsay utilised the theory with which Bossuet had defended Louis XIV's absolute France. Intriguingly, traces of the natural law system which fortified Ramsay's theory can be found in Viscount Bolingbroke's subsequent attack on Walpole's Whig ministry and the corruption of the state.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

European History of Ideas

ISSN

0191-6599

Publisher

Taylor and Francis

Issue

2

Volume

40

Page range

185-203

Department affiliated with

  • History Publications

Notes

Published online by the journal on 24/12/2012, and will be also published in print during 2013.

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2013-01-03

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