NO REPRESENTATION WITHOUT TAXATION:

On vacation one day in the village of Whitchurch, in Dorset, I was awakened by the bells of the parish church. It is descended from a church founded by Alfred the Great in the 9th century and deeded in the 11th century by William the Conqueror to Benedictine monks. The most famous of the Benedictines--the Cluniacs, named after Cluny Abbey in Saône-et-Loire, France--were founders in more than the architectural sense. Among their other legacies to us is the idea of the self-governing city, a critical foundation of the modern rule of law, representative democracy, and the territorial state.

At least since the posthumous publication of Max Weber's essay "The City" in 1921, urban self-government--that is, government by town councils whose members were chosen by at least a part of the citizenry--has been recognized as critical to the formation of European states. It led to the "free" towns that Weber saw as distinguishing features of Western and Central Europe. These politically autonomous and often wealthy towns, in turn, were a driving force behind the parliaments and other representative institutions that cropped up across medieval and early modern Europe. They were part and parcel of a bottom-up state-building process in which strong social groups--primarily nobles, clergy, and townsmen--could not only balance rulers but often keep them on a tight leash, a development that presaged modern representative democracy and the rule of law. Tocqueville pointed out that the medieval self-governing town was also "transported overseas" as a model for the townships of New England, among the foundations of American democracy. According to Tocqueville, local institutions of self-government are vital for democracy because they create vigilant citizens and local political authorities who mobilize to fend off undemocratic measures taken by the powers-that-be at the national level. We are currently seeing these Tocquevillian dynamics play out as U.S. state-level institutions, including those led by Republicans, vigorously resist the Trump administration's attempt to discredit the outcome of the presidential election in a number of swing states.

This foundational importance explains why, in the current millennium, social scientists have redoubled their attempts to understand the origins of urban self-government, or the medieval "communal revolution."

This scholarship has been dominated by two perspectives. One sees urban self-government as intimately associated with war and taxation. According to this "bellicist" perspective--identified in particular with the work of the late American sociologist Charles Tilly--rulers' need to raise the wherewithal for warfare forced them to bargain with town elites. The results of this bargaining were charters of liberties for medieval towns, often including the right of town councils to govern their own affairs.

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