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Referring this to a British-derived concept of 'monarchic' rule is misleading, I think. Me being British, I immediately noticed, when I started reading the serious American press, that Calvinism had had a much more profound effect on the USA than it had on Britain. The Calvinist axioms include the notion that an absolute morality should be revealed to each virtuous individual by an interior revelation. Thus, morality is non-negotiable, every individual being expected to proceed by the interior light of his own revealed moral sense. This makes impossible demands on the law, so the law too ends up being treated as a revealed text. This requires that the whole system of legal philosophy also bases itself on an imagined non-negotiable revelation derived from 'Judeo-Christian values.' Everything else is regarded as debauched, and I think this is why 'liberals' (not to mention Leftists in the proper, radically sceptical, sense) are regarded as, at best, a sort of demi-monde. My impression is that our monarchy, at the time of your revolution, while famously oppressive and barbaric in its colonial policy, was forced to deal with our own bourgeoisie on the basis of a quite cynical, Lockean moral philosophy, not at all 'the divine right of kings.'
