Countervailing power

Countervailing Power, or countervailence, is the idea in political theory of institutionalized mechanisms that the wielding of power within a ^[1] or in modern examples of totalitarian governments.

History

Countervailance in formal political theory dates back at least to Medieval times, especially in constitutionalism."^[1]

In the 20th century, "Countervailing Power" is a theory of political modification of markets, formulated by American

References

Seventeenth century England was an active time for the development of countervailance theory. Although much political discourse during the period was focused on the matter of sovereignty, or absolutism for the sovereign as, for example, we observe in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, the principle "significance of seventeenth-century England for constitutional theory was that during this period the concept of sovereignty was replaced by the concept of checks and balances."^[3] The evolution of political practice in England paralleled the evolution in theory, for it was during this period that "the operational dynamics of the system developed in accordance with the countervailance model of government."^[3] While the trend reversed somewhat under the power of Oliver Cromwell and the era of the later Stuarts, and was therefore rather uneven over the flow of the 17th century, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 "firmly established the principles of dispersed power and checks and balances as the central pillars of English constitutionalism."^[3]

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