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The Origins Of American Democracy, Or How The People Became Judges In Their Own Causes, The Sixty-Ninth Cleveland-Marshall Fund Lecture , Gordon S. Wood

Cleveland State Law Review

The awesome power of this democratic polity, with people becoming judges in their own causes, was such that our political leaders over the past two centuries have struggled to constrain and mitigate its effects. In fact, that is what our current concern with campaign financing is all about. From the very beginning of our national history we Americans have used a variety of devices and institutions to immunize ourselves from the harmful consequences of too much democracy, too much factious promotion of private interests in the name of the people. No doubt the most important of these devices has been …