Download or read book Debating – and Creating – Authority written by Elizabeth Dale and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2001. In the tight frame of its first twenty years, Massachusetts Bay dramatically altered its constitutional order from a theocracy to an oligarchy, led by magistrates who created their own authority and defined the limits on their almost unlimited power. Debating-and Creating-Authority examines this shift in constitutional order at various levels and looks in particular at the efforts to create the theocracy and its subsequent collapse in terms of a fundamental democratical flaw at the centre of the theocratic ideal.