Search Results

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.

This chapter is the first of several which attempt to locate the typical usages of words in historical documents, in this case the Formularies of Faith of Henry VIII. Whatever differences did or did not exist between Luther, Calvin, the Catholic Church, Henry VIII, or his Bishops on the correct understanding of the relation between Church and State, none of them thought in terms of a modern separation between religion and a neutral, nonreligious polity. Religion as encompassing Christian Truth does not suddenly disappear with the Reformation challenge to the Catholic Church State but is fundamental to the thinking of both Luther and Calvin, albeit formulated in significantly different ways. Though the stress on interiority and ethical intention, and the rejection of “outward” rituals and merely “external” shows of faith, was a crucial ingredient in the development of the later essentializations of “religion” and “the secular,” a close examination of Protestant texts shows that we can only retrospectively claim to find possible glimmerings of these later distinctions.

The fifth chapter analyses the private papers of the Valori dating from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In particular, the chapter examines a collection of documents gathered by Baccio Valori that considers the relationship of the family to the Medici during key moments of political flux during the preceding century and that examines at a broader level the general impact of the family's traditions and activities on Florentine history. The documents continue to elaborate on the family's special connection to Savonarolan religion and politics and the family's distinguished and privileged role in the efflorescence of Neoplatonism in Renaissance Florence, but subtly recast the family's political past more in terms of friendship and alliance with the Medici than in the more clearly conflicting terms found in several members entries in the family diary.

In the late 15th century Fortescue in England and Commynes in France compared the governance of the two commonwealths under the strain of war. The influence of Renaissance humanism is seen in the 16th century in More's Utopia with its vision of an ideal state, and Montaigne's superb essays ranging over the whole field of human experience in the midst of the French Wars of Religion. The same crisis inspired Jean Bodin, a third lawyer-humanist, to set out in his Six Livres de la République a model regime based on a methodical study of historical states. The problem of how to defend royal sovereignty in the face of aggressive religious sects also preoccupied James VI of Scotland and I of England. In 1649 Parliament would execute James' son and set up a ‘Commonwealth and Free State’ without kings, who were seen as naturally promoting ‘their own power and will above the laws’.

The chapter begins by questioning Philip Larkin's argument that W. H. Auden's early poems are “successful” because they assert a relationship of identity among dialect, audience, and social theme. Identifying this as a “major” discourse of the vernacular, the chapter uses the work of Jean Bodin and Giorgio Agamben to explore the importance of “major” vernacular discourse to the hegemonic function of nation‐states. The chapter then identifies “synthetic vernacular” poetry as verse that reworks “minor” vernacular discourses, thereby opening a gap within the homology among languages, peoples, and states. The chapter finally illustrates the limits of the synthetic vernacular concept via Ezra Pound's translation of Sophocles' Women of Trachis (1957).

John Selden in 1616 presented the State as a civil society conceptually prior to the laws that governed it; for Thomas Hobbes in his great work of 1651 on that Great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State, written like Bodin's under the shadow of civil war, it was the unrestricted power necessary to preserve society in existence. At the same time, a Leveller tract declared it ‘a most sure Rule in State policy, that all the Laws that are made in favour of liberty, spring first from the disagreement of the people with their Governors.’ The essence of the Modern State may be described as an unresolvable tension between government and people, which can be traced from the making and challenging of laws as they developed in the Middle Ages.

This chapter begins by gathering evidence for the medieval understanding of hostageship. How did people react when a king received or granted hostages? Or when a hostage was executed? Stray remarks of chroniclers offer some answers. It also examines more closely the words and deeds of the papacy, which provide the closest thing to an interpretation that was meant to be pan-European. Certain words and deeds of the popes, those that were included in the basic texts of canon law and were much discussed by medieval commentators, prove to be at the root of our modern understanding of hostages. The book closes by following the history of hostageship to the present day, tracing the decline of medieval hostageship in the early modern era, and its replacement by the modern form addressed by the Nuremburg courts and the United Nations.

This chapter examines the idea of a disgraced, even forgotten Pericles. In the accounts of Athens from Antiquity right down to the eighteenth century, Pericles, ignored and sometimes discredited, was reduced to a marginal figure. The stratēgos was for the most part judged with disdain, if not arrogantly ignored. The chapter first considers a number of structural factors that explain why the memory of Pericles remained in limbo in the Western imagination, including the remarkable success of Plutarch. It then discusses various writings offering a range of views on Pericles, such as those by Jean Bodin and Michel de Montaigne. It also analyzes Pericles' marginal role in the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, Thomas Hobbes's admiration for Pericles, and how Pericles was regarded by the men of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the revolutionary era.

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.

The concluding chapter looks at republican regimes, noting that the prerogatives associated with plenitude of power were taken for granted by the government of Florence and other regimes based on popular sovereignty. It is noted that absolute power was discredited in Italy just at the time when it was coming into vogue in France. But the author shows that thinkers such as Guillaume Budé and Jean Bodin accepted the teachings of Alciato and others that the king had an obligation not to infringe the fundamental rights of subjects. The early seventeenth‐century lawyer Ludovico Rodolfini summed up earlier opinion, coming down firmly on the side of the rule of law.

One way of illustrating the affinities that have been the subject of this last group of chapters would be to pay attention to those authors who published significant contributions to the literature of witchcraft and also made public pronouncements about the nature of politics. In 1576 Jean Bodin published a book that made a decisive impact not only on political theory in France but on discussions of the idea of sovereignty wherever they were later attempted. And in 1580 he published another book whose currency among those interested in witchcraft matters made it the Malleus maleficarum of the next hundred years.

The construction of various models of society and the state that veered away from the concepts of traditional theology were mainly rooted in radical scepticism. Bodin played no small part in this transformation, as Bodin was the first to express a societal framework not encompassed by the Christian doctrine. Also, Bodin discovered how sovereignty was to be treated as a political reality that excluded religious undertones, aside from how economic policies should be based on the state's general social and material interests. Along with such shifts in thinking, it is important to note that the natural law and raison dʼÉtat was gradually being separated from church teachings, which started to consider the state's various responsibilities and duties to society.

The medieval jurists on the Continent discussed the Roman distinction between public and private law but did not attribute it practical significance in a feudal setting to which it was unsuited for want of any approximations to a distinct state administration. This chapter shows how the distinction only acquired significance in France after pre- and post-Revolutionary administrative centralization, and related changes in the way the state and its executive power came to be conceived. Those changes were brought about, inter alia, through the work of Bodin, Montesquieu, and Rousseau and through post-Revolutionary liberal apprehension of administrative centralization expressed by Constant, the Doctrinaire liberals, and Tocqueville, amongst others. The 19th-century outcome was the attribution of qualities to the state administration that justified the special rules, institutions, and procedures of public law. By the time the conception of a distinct state administration had become blurred through the promotion of decentralization, the influence of Durkheim's social theory, the impact of Duguit's legal and political writings, and the proliferation of hybrid institutions neither clearly public or private, a fundamental public/private distinction was both widely accepted and deeply entrenched in the French legal and political tradition.

This chapter investigates what is special about the method of public law. It explains that the tendency to confine the idea of law to positive law is due to the phenomenon of juridification, which is the tendency to conceptualize extensive spheres of public life in legal terms. It examines Henry de Bracton’s texts that contain numerous statements regarding law and royal authority that don't seem to be compatible. It also evaluates Jean Bodin’s views on sovereignty. It evaluates the ideas regarding ‘fundamental laws’ and droit politique. It also assesses the relations between politics and morality. It explains that the method of public law is the method of prudence. It adds that this prudential method is a juristic interpretation of Machiavelli’s thought. It clarifies that the prudential method is a form of practical reason in which rules serve as maxims whose meaning and application vary according to circumstance.

Shakespeare’s arguably most searching investigation into the nature of the human, King Lear, also offers his most varied and polysemous zoology. Older interpretations that see in the play a telos of redemption in which humanity is purified in suffering and ultimately reclaimed from the bestial must founder on the rocks of un-distinction which the play strews out in its staging of order and chaos, sovereign and savage, man and beast. From the initial eruption of Lear’s self-bestializing wrath to the two trial scenes in Act 3, the play exposes the ascendancy of brute force over human ‘kindness’, the regression into a proto-Hobbesian state of nature revealing the bestial wildness lurking in the very core of the social order. This trajectory of bestialization intersects with a perception of the animal not as an emblem of human degeneracy but as fellow creature.

This chapter begins by contrasting Gentili with the thought of Francisco de Vitoria. In doing so it focuses on Gentili's De iure belli libri tres as well as his De legationibus libri tres and the two works by Vitoria, the Relectio de Indiis and De Indi Relectio Posterior, sive de iure belli. The first part of this chapter thus discusses Vitoria's theory and shows that it necessarily differs from Gentili's views at a fundamental level, precisely because Vitoria's argument is a theological one and hence concerns itself little with jurisprudence but rather with theology, sin, and morality. A brief elaboration of Vitoria's position shows the extent to which Gentili breaks new ground through a juridical and political approach which eliminates the medieval notion of bellum iustum and instead introduces the concept of a iustus hostis. The second part of the chapter argues that Gentili's focus on the laws of war and his complementary treatise on embassies provide a purely political theory which first takes seriously the implications of Bodin's rigorous theory of sovereignty, and secondly attempts — similarly to Bodin's endeavour in the context of inner-state relations at the height of the French civil and religious wars — to do away with religious disputes as an additional undermining factor of inter-state relations with its potentially devastating consequences. The chapter concludes by discussing where to place Gentili in the history of early modern political thought of international relations.

Sixteenth century historians and jurists in France elaborated a position of legal relativism as a means of asserting independence from canons of Roman law and the domination of the Roman Catholic Church. Drawing on the premise that different peoples required different laws and political institutions, Jean Bodin elaborated a comparative scheme, based on Hippocrates, and Aristotle’s theories of the effect of climate upon the body’s humors. Those who lived in hot, cold, and temperate climates had different dispositions, with denizens of temperate climates best suited to rule. Large parts of Europe were outside the temperate zone, which also included Turkey, Persia, and China. Cold climates were associated with the development of the body as opposed to the mind, as opposed to hot climates, including Morocco and Abyssinia, praised for their religiosity. Bodin also wrote a long dialogue between partisans of different religions, promoting an ideal of religious harmony rather than the exclusive domination of any single religion.