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but the main point of the article, and the reason i pulled it into here (apart from thinking it interesting on it's own, if not exactly News) is...you are more "free" under the modern state system than you would have been in the 18th century american context **if** your sensibility is shaped by contemporary realities (which it is, like it or not). partly because that earlier context would be repressive to you. but mostly because you wouldn't be able to appeal to any institution to change any of it, and that because much of what's being pointed to in the article was at the time **not** matters of law, but rather of the rules of the social game.
it's also the case that under the present capitalist arrangement, you are **much** more free politically and culturally---and this without saying that this capitalist arrangement is rational or even desirable. it simply is, from a certain viewpoint. this for the same basic reason--the transfer of what were in the 18th century private, so informal rules that shaped social conduct on the part of the dominant class to spaces with formal/public mediation--which make of them political---which make of them something that can, in theory anyway, be changed through pressure.
keep in mind too that the 18th century american situation was a pretty radically class stratified one, and that as happened over and over again across the "age of revolutions" you had a group of elites who came to be the "founders" who used popular agitation in their revolution phase only to turn against it once the revolution had "ended"--which means (of course) once they had power as a social group. alot of these account of social mores can be seen as indicating that class division, with the founders being a whole lot more reactionary, puritanical and rigid than the "people"---whom the "founders" were not, by virtue of their social positions.
for what it's worth, i actually think direct democracy is something to be argued for and at the end of a revolutionary process a form of self-governance that would be desirable. but the thing that really separates your position from mine---more than anything else, really----is that i dont think it makes any sense to look to the past. nostalgia is for chumps. there's no going back. but that's another story.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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