"Free Democracy" and "Restricted Democracy" in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation

The Holy Roman Empire is not usually considered a place of democratic innovation, but this article demonstrates that numerous seventeenth-century academic authors in the Empire explored democracy within the newly established university discipline of political science. They published extensive textbooks and dissertations and examined democracy in unprecedented detail, arriving at a novel understanding of its character. They distinguished between two different kinds of democracy, often called "free democracy" and "restricted democracy," and argued that the latter was a viable constitutional form, even the best form of the state.