I haven't had much time lately, but I'll reply to this, anyway...
Alexander wrote:Do you actually know what the Glorious Revolution was?
Harold Saxon wrote:I'm not sure he does. Let's give him a hint: it's about a William and a Mary, and not a university in Virginia.
Admittedly, the shift in houses marked a transition to a more Parliament-centered rule to be sure, but Great Britain in no sense became a democracy
J Oswald wrote:And you seem to believe that the Glorious Revolution led to democracy in Great Britain.
The four of you ignore a very important detail there: the meaning of democracy has changed with time. Modern democracy has absolutely nothing to do with the original concept of Greek democracy, except for the basic principle. And it certainly evolved a lot since the rise of the "modern" concept of liberal democracy. Democracy, as it is understood today, involves a series of civil rights and isonomia principles that weren't there at first. Women, for example, didn't get the right to vote until up into the 20th century, in most of the world. Yet most of those countries were already considered liberal democracies. Suffrage, in early liberal days, was never understood as needing to be universal in order to configure a democracy. With that in mind, we have to consider what exactly was understood as "democracy", for early liberal thinkers. And democracy is normally understood as the power of the 'people'. The people there, taken on context, is a synonym for 'commons', 'commoners' or 'bourgeoisie', that is, people who were not royals, nobles or clergymen.
I'll even go a bit far now, because most people will probably not agree with this, but 'democratic', taken into the same context, referring to the same time period, was also synonymous with 'liberal' or 'constitutional'. When we refer to a 'constitutional monarchy', for example, we are talking about a monarchy that is democratic, unlike an ábsolute monarchy'. And yes, nowadays those three words are not synonyms, anymore. The way we understand it now, a democracy doesn't need to be liberal or constitutional. But the point remains that, when talking about the liberal revolutions, 'becoming a democracy' meant having the poer shift from the aristocratic nobility to the liberal bourgeoisie.
With that said, we need to get back into context here. The Parliament of England had been 'quasi-democratic' since the 13th century, when the House of Commons started being elected by means of popular vote. The real issue there was whether the House of Commons was powerful or simply an advisory council. And it was the latter up to the Glorious Revolution, when the power started shifting from the monarch towards the parliament. It was from that point that Britain made the transition from absolutism to liberalism. And that itself wasn't even the beginning of the entire process. Legislation was already starting in the parliament since a few centuries before that. And it certainly wasn't when the monarch's power dropped to becoming merely ceremonial. After the Revolution, legislation would always start and end in the Parliament. The last time a bill was vetoed by the Crown, for example, was in 1707.
Making this transition, the actual power started taking into consideration the opinions of elected officials, representing the common people. Starting then, it would be quite complicated for a king to defy the Commons on his own. Heck, the last monarch to
enter the House of Commons was Charles I.
This argument you guys are using is the same kind of argument people use when they start claiming that the French Revolution was socialist, and that the conservatives won, because Napoleon ended in the throne. The revolution (actually, neither of them) was not about that at all. It was about the commons/commoners/people/bourgeois/third estate rebelling against the Ancient Regime and establishing a liberal democracy in its place. Certainly, it was quite chaotic up to the rise of Napoleon as Emperor. Certainly, a lot of people died unfairly. But the main purpose of the entire revolution ended up coming true. The First French Empire was a liberal, constitutional and democratic (as I said, these three are synonymous with each other) monarchy. The Parliament was elected, and the power was shared between the executive and the legislative. Case closed.
You also seem to believe that what Donald once termed 'passive-aggressive emoticon spam' helps your arguments.
Straw man and an ad-hom (kind of)... For some reason, you seem to believe that me being used to using many smileys since I was little has anything to do with my argument
Like I said the last time someone accused me of this, if you believe I'm breaking a rule (there are rules against spamming - which I'm not breaking) by using more smileys than what would make you happy, the proper way to deal with it would be to make a thread in the basement complaining. Ad-homs are not tolerable in respectable debates....
PoFo ethnic party statistics: http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8&p=14042520#p14042520