CHAPTER VI.
THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA THE WITNESS OF THE MIDDLE AGES The idea of constitutional government has its witnesses in the Middle Ages, democratic theories are common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is not till the eighteenth century that France, aflame to realise a political ideal, proves that democracy has passed from the books of schoolmen and philosophers, and is to be put in practice by a nation in arms.
In the thirteenth century the friars rallied to Simon of Montfort and preached, not democracy, but constitutional liberty.[70] Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominican doctor, became the chief exponent of political theory, and maintained that sovereignty expressed in legislative power should be exercised for the common good, and that a mixed government of monarch, nobles, and people, with the Pope as a final Court of Appeal, would best attain that end.[71] A hundred years later, John Ball and his fellow agitators preached a gospel of social equality that inspired the Peasant Revolt.

But communism was the goal of the peasant leaders in 1381, and freedom from actual oppression the desire of their followers.

No conception of political democracy can be found in the speeches and demands of Wat Tyler.
In the sixteenth century Robert Ket in Norfolk renewed the old cries of social revolution, and roused the countryside to stop the enclosures by armed revolt.

And again the popular rising is an agrarian war to end intolerable conditions, not a movement for popular government.
THE "SOCIAL CONTRACT" THEORY The theory of a pact or contract between the Government and the people became the favourite assumption of political writers from the sixteenth century onward, and it was this theory that Rousseau popularised in his "Social Contract," the theory, too, which triumphed for a season in the French Revolution.
The theory is, of course, pure assumption, without any basis in history, and resting on no foundation of fact.

It assumes that primitive man was born with enlightened views on civil government, and that for the greater well-being of his tribe or nation he deposited the sovereign authority which belonged to himself, in a prince or king--or in some other form of executive government--retaining the right to withdraw his allegiance from the government if the authority is abused, and the contract which conferred sovereignty violated.