Legislative Supremacy: Myth or Reality?

• Author: James Oakes
• Position: Professor of History, and Chair of the History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center
• Pages: 21-24

James Oakes - Graduate School Humanities Professor, Professor of History, and Chair of the History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center, and author of The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders and Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Oid South, both published in hardcover by Knopf and in paperback by W. W. Norton.

Page21

Jack Rakove is somewhat less inclined than I am to look to the history of political thought or to political theory for guidance on the issues of democracy that are under discussion today. Nevertheless, the principie of which he speaks-the supremacy of the legislative branch of the government-was theorized as early as the late I600s by John Locke. Legislative supremacy, or at least the popular myth of legislative supremacy, was firmly established in English political culture in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Since American colonists were Englishmen, they participated in that mythology. It became a staple of eighteenth-century "liberalism," the single most important body of political thought influencing the American Revolution. The principie of legislative supremacy was iterated and reiterated in the most significant political treatises of the eighteenth century in America, particularly those of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the socalled "Whig opposition" ideologists. Similarly, the...