From: Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

On such fundamental issues - representation and consent, the nature of constitutions and of rights, the meaning of sovereignty - and in such basic ways, did the colonists probe and alter their inheritance of thought concerning liberty and its preservation. To conceive of legislative assemblies as mirrors of society and their voices as mechanically exact expressions of the people; to assume, and act upon assumption, that human rights exist above the law and stand as the measure of the law's validity; to understand constitutions to be ideal designs of government, and fixed, limiting definitions of its permissible sphere of action; and to consider the possibility that absolute sovereignty in government need not be the monopoly of a single all-engrossing agency but (imperium in imperio) the shared possession of several agencies each limited by the boundaries of the others but all-powerful within its own - to think in these ways, as Americans were doing before Independence, was to reconceive the fundamentals of government and of society's relation to government. (230)