The Dutch Republic existed from 1579 to 1795, and the word "republic" requires some careful explanation. It was not a democracy in any modern sense. The seven provinces - Guelders, Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overijssel, Friesland and Groningen - each had its own government and clung fiercely to its sovereignty. An eighth, Drenthe, was so poor it was exempt from confederal taxes and got no vote at the table in return. The provinces sent delegates to the States-General in The Hague, but the assembly could not act without provincial consent on matters of consequence. Below the federal level, the cities were run by regenten - the patrician merchant families who controlled town councils through co-option, filling seats for life and gradually closing themselves off as a near-hereditary caste. It was, by 17th-century standards, an extraordinary arrangement. There was no king to bow to, no court to flatter. There was, instead, a permanent argument.

If the republic had a chief executive, it was an official with no command authority and a five-year term. The Grand Pensionary - the raadpensionaris of Holland - was technically just the legal advisor and secretary of the most populous province's assembly. In practice, because his post had continuity, a staff, and the time to actually study issues, he became the man who set agendas and conducted foreign policy. Johan van Oldenbarnevelt held the equivalent earlier office from 1586 to 1619 and effectively ran Dutch policy during the long war with Spain. His protege Hugo Grotius wrote the foundations of international law in those years. "The central fact about De Witt's leadership," wrote one historian of Johan de Witt, who held the office from 1653 to 1672, "was that he was a servant who guided his masters; he had no right of command, only the duty of persuasion." That sentence describes the whole republic.

The republic carried inside itself two opposing visions of what it should be. The States Party - led by De Witt, his brother Cornelis, and the Amsterdam regents - articulated an ideology they called Ware Vrijheid, "True Freedom." In an age when Louis XIV was perfecting absolute monarchy in France, the States Party argued that princes and potentates were inherently bad for business. They wasted tax money on military glory and territorial expansion the merchants would have to pay for. Holland's interests lay at sea, in trade, and in being left alone. On the other side stood the Orangists - the House of Orange and its supporters in the Calvinist clergy and the smaller provinces - who wanted a strong stadholder as commander-in-chief and quasi-monarch. The argument was not academic. In 1672, when French and English armies invaded simultaneously, a panicked Hague mob lynched the De Witt brothers in the street. William III of Orange took power. The republic survived, but the question of what it was for never quite got resolved.

The Act of Abjuration of 1581 reads, two centuries early, like a rough draft of something more famous. It argued that a ruler who tyrannizes his subjects forfeits his right to govern them - that sovereignty rests, in some ultimate sense, with the people the ruler is supposed to serve. The American Declaration of Independence borrows this structure almost step by step, though historians still debate whether Jefferson was directly influenced or simply drinking from the same Enlightenment well. What is certain is that James Madison studied the Dutch Republic carefully for Federalist No. 20, citing its confederal weaknesses as a warning. The Dutch experiment ended in 1795, when French revolutionary armies arrived and a new political fashion took hold. But for two centuries, in this small wedge of low country between river and sea, Europe had been shown that a society of merchants could govern itself without a king - imperfectly, contentiously, and with surprising staying power.

The Binnenhof still functions as the seat of Dutch government. The States-General meets here, in a complex of buildings around a central courtyard that has been continuously used for political deliberation since the 13th century. The Ridderzaal - the Hall of Knights - is where the king now delivers his annual speech from the throne, a constitutional update of the republic's old habit of compromise and consultation. The Hofvijver, the rectangular pond on the north side, reflects the same gabled facades that Johan de Witt would have recognized when he walked to work. It is one of the rare political sites in Europe where the buildings, the institutions, and the geography of power have stayed in the same place for so long. The republic is gone. The room where it argued is still in use.