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This chapter assesses the rise of modern liberalism by examining the works of selected theorists and their fellow liberal critics. The first section summarizes the origins and subsequent development of modern liberal thinking on the family by examining the works of Hugo Grotius and Johannes Althusius, followed by contractarian (Thomas Hobbes and John Locke) and Kantian revisions. The following two sections contrast the works of leading liberal theorists John Rawls and Susan Moller Okin with critics Peter and Brigitte Berger and Christopher Lasch.

In the late pre-Reformation period, re-urbanization and increasing monetization impacting on what had become a profoundly rural civilization gave rise to political structures markedly different from those of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. The increasing availability of energy from water power and wind power was one important (and much underestimated) factor enabling economic growth. Another was the expansion of the monetary mass as a result of the establishment of a supralocal financial system (unknown to the ancient world) and the easy availability of credit. This helped to give the more important princes an increasing edge over lesser actors, at the same time that development was both furthered and impeded by conflicting cultural and ideological currents — as reflected in the thinking of such authors as Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Nicolaus Cusanus, Jean Bodin, Johannes Althusius, and Thomas Hobbes. Even 18th-century ‘absolute’ monarchies like the French or Prussian ones remained closer to the ‘heteronomous’ political structures of the pre-Reformation period than to today's state.

Public law emerges as an autonomous field of knowledge in the period between the mid-16th and late 17th centuries. This was a critical period of intense religious conflict in which the character of collective human association was placed in question. The period, marked by the historicization, rationalization, and secularization of political thought, led to the severing of political order from its religious origins and a shift in focus from the sovereign towards the state. The corporate idea of the state became the ground on which an autonomous concept of public law could be built. This chapter explains this transition by reference first to a methodological shift that leads to the promotion of public law as a type of historico-political discourse; secondly to the growth of absolutist thought and the idea of sovereignty; and then to a revolution in natural law thinking leading to the emergence of modern natural right. Sovereignty and right combine to provide the rudiments of the concept of public law.

This chapter explores different conceptions of the principle of subsidiarity and their implications for constitutional and institutional design. It begins with a discussion of four alternative theories of subsidiarity that draw on insights from Althusius, the American Confederalists, economic or fiscal federalism, and Catholic Personalism, respectively. It then considers some areas where the different conceptions of subsidiarity yield surprisingly different recommendations, with particular emphasis on two key issues: who should have the authority to apply the principle of subsidiarity, and which objectives guide the application of subsidiarity—Pareto improvements, human rights, or redistribution across member units. The chapter concludes by highlighting the dilemmas presented by competing traditions of subsidiarity for the European Court of Human Rights, American constitutional federalism, debates in Europe about the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights, and international law.

This chapter begins with a detailed discussion of some unjustly neglected thinkers of the early seventeenth century whose work was integral to thinking through the political and geographical legacy of the Reformation. These include Richard Hooker, Andreas Knichen, and Johannes Althusius. The next part of the chapter offers a reading of the political and geographical implications of the scientific revolution, with special focus on Descartes, Spinoza and the Newton/Leibniz dispute. Hobbes, Filmer and Locke are then discussed in terms of the relation between politics and land (or at times territory) in their work. The colonial context is particularly crucial to understanding Locke. It suggests that Gottfried Leibniz is the most important political thinker of territory of this period. Leibniz, like Theodor Reinking, Bogislaw Philipp von Chemnitz, and Samuel Pufendorf, is trying to make sense of the fractured political geographies of the Holy Roman Empire, especially in the wake of the Peace of Westphalia. In distinguishing between the majesty of the Emperor and the territorial supremacy of the princes, Leibniz provides a strikingly modern definition.

Early modern state consolidation, centralization, and absolutism were met with appeals to an old normative order, the so-called Gothic constitution or ancient constitution. This resistance to centralization joined the defenders of the old medieval intermediate bodies with supporters of the aristocratic estate, provincial self-government, and, in the French case, parlements. This chapter describes the emergence of an ancient constitutionalist discourse, the direct antecedent of pluralist liberalism, and discusses the contributions to that discourse by the monarchomachs, Althusius, and Molesworth. It contrasts ancient constitutionalism with social contract theory, the early modern antecedent of rationalist liberalism, as well as with contemporaneous civic republicanism.

In 1576 Louis Le Roy published a new and expanded edition of his translation of Aristotle’s Politics. In the late-sixteenth century, the starting point for academic political reflection remained the Politics, a text which underlined the importance of participation in the constitution. Although Bodin’s alternative concept of sovereignty was widely admired, many readers were troubled by Bodin’s political and religious ideas and wanted to preserve a role for the Aristotelian idea of political justice and for the Church. The effect was a revitalization of politics as an academic disciple or science, in which the civil community was examined alongside the Church. Leading figures in this process include John Case and Richard Hooker in England and Pierre Grégoire in France. In Emden, Johannes Althusius developed a political theory which he described as a reworking of Aristotle; he emphasized the concept of ‘consociation’ and used it to defend the sovereignty of the people. Henning Arnisaeus challenged Althusius’s claims, preferring to see sovereignty as divisible, shared in the Holy Roman Empire between the Emperor and the Princes, and requiring the use of arcana imperii or secrets of state. This chapter shows that the Aristotelian tradition remained important as a way of portraying a hierarchically organized political society as natural to human beings, but that in the wake of Bodin’s writing there was a shift in emphasis away from questions of virtue and distributive justice and towards a discussion of the nature of sovereign power.

This chapter argues that the contribution of Johannes Althusius to system and order in international law lies in his early-modern construction of a federal theory of politics not yet based on the distinction of national and international law and thus of heuristic value for a post-modern system of transnational order. Widely read at the time, Althusius was harshly condemned during the age of absolutism and largely forgotten in a modern world of sovereign nation-states. The rise of the modern federal state with its strict separation of powers and the assumption of indivisible centralized sovereignty also kept him at the margins as a theorist of federalism. As this chapter attempts to show, reading Althusius can help conceptualizing a post-Westphalian international political order in which individual rights would be complemented by the collective or group rights of a plurality of smaller and larger communities.

This chapter considers the critical reception of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty in early modern German political thought, with special focus on the most important German reply to Bodin’s République, the Politica Methodice Digesta of Johannes Althusius. In investigating the Politica, I show that the grounds of Althusius’ principal disagreement with Bodin concerned the latter’s indifferentism on the question of form. For Althusius, sovereignty could only be popular sovereignty, a thesis which he defended with an analysis of the associational, ‘symbiotic’ nature of sovereignty as a collective right activated by a shared communal life. I also stress how much Althusius, despite his populist orientation, nevertheless retained the fundamentals of Bodin’s concept of sovereignty as indivisible. I contrast Althusius’ analysis with later theoretical developments, including the doctrine of double sovereignty, introduced by German Publicist writers such as Arumäeus, Limnaeus, and Besold, as a corrective to Bodin’s analysis of the Empire.

Calvinist jurist Johannes Althusius (1557–1638) developed what he called a ‘universal theory’ of law and politics for war-torn Europe. He called for written constitutions that separated the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of cities, provinces, nations, and empires alike and that guaranteed the natural rights and liberties of all subjects. To be valid, he argued, these constitutions had to respect the universal natural law set out in Christian and classical, biblical, and rational teachings of law, authority, and rights. To be effective, these constitutions had to recognize the symbiotic nature of human beings who are born with a dependence on God and neighbour, family and community, and who are by nature inclined to form covenantal associations to maintain liberty and community. Althusius left comprehensive Christian theory of rule of law and politics that anticipated many of the arguments of later Enlightenment theorists of social and government contracts.