Cesare Cuttica offers a paper on 'Democracy and Crisis in the 1640s in England: The Ochlocratic Moment'

This paper, which is here presented in its very first (and long) draft, wants to provisionally do three things. First, it discusses – at an inevitably general but hopefully helpful and explanatory level – the currently much-debated term ‘crisis’ as well as some philosophical and historiographical views of it. In particular, relying on Reinhart Koselleck’s work, the paper focuses on one of its key (and historically original) meanings: the medical one.

Second, the following pages briefly illustrate the origins of the not-oft-heard classical political concept ‘ochlocracy’ (‘government of the rabble’). Subsequently, by connecting the medical connotation of crisis to the surge in use of ‘ochlocracy’ in the 1640s in England, the paper claims that the politico-religious situation of that troubled, and novelty-soaked, decade can be better understood in some of its central ideological features. In so doing, a few important methodological questions (inspired by Hannah Arendt’s essay The Crisis in Education) are also advanced: how does political thought react to critical moments in history? Does political thought produce ‘crisis/es’? Are moments of ‘crisis’ moments of creativity for the history of political thought and political theory?

Third, the paper pays specific attention to a series of texts composed in the heat of the polemics of the 1640s where various groups of political and religious actors – Levellers, sectaries, Independents – were attacked as people who attempted to erect an ‘ochlocracy’. This analysis will show the relevance of the medical meaning of crisis in these debates in that the already unhealthy democracy (indeed, a disease) was then thought to have degenerated into the even worse (that is, lethal) ochlocracy. Thus, the medical sense of a disease (democracy) that had reached an acute phase (ochlocracy), out of which either life or death of the body politic arose, will serve to put forward some general considerations on the potential outcomes of a deeply critical moment in political practice and theory.

Ultimately, the paper intends to present a contextually-defined instance of a crisis and of how some people reacted to it. It also wants to offer some reflections on the role of the history of political thought and intellectual history as disciplines engaged in reading the past through the study of language as well as chart the development of ideas through time.