Paving the Way for Revolution: Calvinism and the Struggle for a Democratic Constitutional State: 6 (V U studies on Protestant history) Sap, J.W.

In his approach to the relationship between Calvinism and democracy, the Dutch neo-Calvinistic politician Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) made the link between the political principles of Calvinism and the revolutions in the Netherlands, England and North America, which he considered to be the three countries of political liberty. It is striking that Kuyper presented the American Revolution as a belated consequence of Calvinism, but excluded the principles of the French Revolution. The sovereignty of the people, as promoted during the French Revolution, was rejected by him as contradictory to the sovereignty of God. This book, which won the De Savornin Lohman Award, seeks to explain and evaluate the political theory of early Calvinism and compare it with the political principles of the great Western revolutions from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.