Tudor Institutions
Political Modernization: America vs. Europe
1966
In America, on the other hand, the political system did not undergo any revolutionary changes at all. Instead, the principal elements of the English sixteenth-century constitution were exported to the New World, took root there, and were given new life at precisely the time they were being abandoned in the home country. These Tudor institutions were still partially medieval in character. The Tudor century saw some steps toward modernization in English politics, particularly the establishment of the supremacy of the state over the church, a heightened sense of national identity and consciousness, and a significant increase in the power of the Crown and the executive establishment. Nonetheless, even in Elizabethan government, the first point of importance is "the fundamental factor of continuity with the Middle ages." The sixteenth century saw, as Chrimes says, "The Zenith of the Medieval Constitution." The changes introduced by the Tudor monarchs did not have "the effect of breaking down the essential principles of the medieval Constitution, nor even its structure." Among these principles and structures were the idea of the organic union of society and government, the harmony of authorities within government, the subordination of government to fundamental law, the intermingling of the legal and political realms, the balance of power between Crown and Parliament, the complementary representative roles of these two institutions, the vitality of local governmental authorities, and reliance on local forces for the defense of the realm.
The English colonists took these late medieval and Tudor political ideas, practices, and institutions across the Atlantic with them during the great migrations in the first half of the seventeenth century. The patterns of thought and behavior established in the New World developed and grew but did not substantially change during the century and a half of colonihood. The English generation of 1603-1630, Notestein remarks, was "one in which medieval ideas and practices were by no means forgotten and in which new conceptions and new ways of doing things were coming in. The American tradition, or that part derived from England, was at least in some degree established by the early colonists. The English who came over later must have found the English Americans somewhat settled in their ways." The conflict between the colonists and the British government in the middle of the eighteenth century served only to reinforce the colonists' adherence to their traditional patterns. In the words of our greatest constitutional historian, "The colonists retained to a marked and unusual degree the traditions of Tudor England. In all our study of American institutions, colonial and contemporary, institutions of both public law and private law, this fact must be reckoned with. The breach between colonies and mother country was largely a mutual misunderstanding based, in great part, on the fact of this retention of older ideas in the colonies after parliamentary sovereignty had driven them out in the mother country." In the constitutional debates before the American Revolution, the colonists in effect argued the case of the old English constitution against the merits of the new British constitution which had come into existence during the century after they had left the mother country. "Their theory," as Pollard says, "was essentially medieval."
These ancient practices and ideas were embodied in the state constitutions drafted after independence and in the Federal Constitution of 1787. Not only is the American Constitution the oldest written national constitution in the world, but it is also a constitution which in large part simply codified and formalized on the national level practices and institutions that had long existed on the colonial level. The institutional framework established in 1787 has, in turn, changed remarkably little in 175 years. Hence, the American system "can be properly understood, in its origin, development, workings, and spirit, only in the light of precedents and traditions which run back to the England of the civil wars and the period before the civil wars." The American political system of the twentieth century still bears a closer approximation to the Tudor polity of the sixteenth century than does the British political system of the twentieth century. "Americanisms in politics, like Americanisms in speech," as Henry Jones Ford put it, "are apt to be Anglicisms which died out in England but survived in the new world." The British broke their traditional political patterns in the seventeenth century. The Americans did not do so then and have only partially done so since then. Political modernization in America has thus been strangely attenuated and incomplete. In institutional terms, the American polity has never been underdeveloped, but it has also never been wholly modern." In an age of rationalized authority, functional specialization, mass democracy, and totalitarian dictatorship, the American political system remains a curious anachronism. In today's world, the American political system is unique, if only because it is so antique.