scholarly journals ROBERT PERSONS, POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY, AND THE LATE ELIZABETHAN SUCCESSION DEBATE

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. M. INNES
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Direct Consequence ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Political Resistance

AbstractThis article explores how, and why, Robert Persons's A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland (1594) scandalized late Elizabethan England. By invoking the spectres of popular sovereignty and political resistance, Persons, as is well known, threatened to disrupt the succession of James VI of Scotland to Elizabeth I's throne. In doing so, however, he also undermined the very notion that the English crown passed by succession at all. After discussing Persons's political thought, this article examines the responses to it by such writers as John Hayward, Henry Constable, Peter Wentworth, and James VI himself. Their turn towards natural law as a basis for James's title was, it is argued, a direct consequence of the Conference’s argument. As well as shining long-overdue light on Hayward's political thought, the article thus argues that the reception of Persons's Conference was a significant influence on the development of English political thought in the early seventeenth century.

Epilogue and Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-272
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Church

This chapter draws together the themes of the book and looks forward to the later-seventeenth century. It argues that for much of the sixteenth century politics was subordinate to religion; temporal authorities needed the additional sanctions provided by religious belief if they were to exert any power over the consciences of individuals. The effect was to entangle temporal power in the deepening conflicts over religious truth, and thus to reveal the brittleness of any conception of political authority which relied on the support of the Church. At the same time, older traditions of political thought did not go away and often became stronger. The circulation of classical ideas, the discovery of new peoples, the growing interest in historical change and development all suggested alternative ways of legitimizing political power, often using natural law and avoiding any reliance on specifically Christian commitments. What happened in the early-seventeenth century, and most obviously in the writing of Hugo Grotius, was a move not only to ground political society in a particular conception of human nature (conceived of juridically, as a source of rights and obligations) but also to detach Christianity from that view of human nature. It was this understanding of human beings which enabled the development of a social contract tradition through the seventeenth century and beyond, and became an important source for modern liberalism. The questions it raised would help to shape the thought of the next century.

SACRED HISTORY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT: NEAPOLITAN RESPONSES TO THE PROBLEM OF SOCIABILITY AFTER HOBBES

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN ROBERTSON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Near East ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Giambattista Vico ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Sacred History

ABSTRACTFrom the mid-seventeenth century, the problem of human sociability, long a staple of natural jurisprudence, became even more central to political thought. Faced with Hobbes's insistence on man's natural unsociability, Protestant thinkers continued to treat the question from within natural law. For reasons we do not yet understand, however, Catholic thinkers did not. Instead, it is argued here, they turned to sacred history, and in particular to the Old Testament, as the earliest record of the formation of human societies, Hebrew and gentile. The materials for this enquiry were provided by new critical scholarship on the Bible and the peoples of the ancient Near East. Despite the hostility of the authorities in Rome to its findings, this scholarship was widely available in the Catholic world, notably so in contemporary Naples. Two of the most remarkable applications of sacred history to the problem of sociability were by the Neapolitans Pietro Giannone, in his ‘Triregno’ (1731–3), and Giambattista Vico, in the Scienza nuova (1725–44). These works explored the ways in which family relations, religious practices, and war enabled the ancient Hebrews and their gentile neighbours to form and maintain societies, notwithstanding the unsocial tendency of human passions.

scholarly journals Natural Equality and Natural Law in Locke’s Two Treatises

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Kari Saastamoinen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Successful Attempt ◽  
Democratic Societies

This chapter discusses John Locke’s account of natural equality as presented in his Two Treatises of Government. Together with its sister concept natural liberty, natural equality is often associated with the idea of Locke as an early representative of liberal political thought. Locke’s notions of natural liberty and equality are seen as sings of his commitment to the values of individual autonomy and political equality held central in liberal-democratic societies of today, and his political theory is read as a more or less successful attempt to articulate those values. The chapter argues that such approach to Locke’s remarks on natural equality is historically misleading, and they are best understood when we take seriously the fact that he developed his political theory within the parameters of seventeenth-century natural law.

scholarly journals Catholic Political Thought and Calvinist Ecclesiology in Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex (1644)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Karie Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Human Liberty ◽  
The Church ◽  
Civil Government

Abstract This article presents a significant reinterpretation of an essential text in Scottish (and British) political thought, Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, by analyzing its relationship with Catholic scholasticism. While scholars have observed Rutherford's use of Catholic authors, there has been no sustained analysis of how Rutherford strategically applied this intellectual tradition to the religious and political context of the British civil wars. Ideas about human liberty, the law of nations, and popular sovereignty that were developed by Catholic scholastics in the School of Salamanca allowed Rutherford to defend limited monarchy and fulfill an ecclesiological purpose in seventeenth-century Britain. He, and the majority of his Covenanter contemporaries, believed in jure divino presbyterianism: scripture mandated that elders and synods, not bishops, should rule the church. To ensure a presbyterian settlement, Rutherford needed to disprove royalist absolutists who claimed that presbyterianism threatened absolute monarchy (the divinely ordained form of civil government) by limiting royal supremacy over the church. By building on Catholic scholastic political ideas, Rutherford was able to argue that human beings could change the form of civil government and that absolute monarchy was not required by God. Ironically, to make a civil state safe for presbyterianism, Rutherford resorted to Catholic scholastics rather than those of his own confessional tradition. This analysis urges reconsideration of not only the porosity of traditional confessional boundaries in early modern political thought but the respective positions of both Calvinism and Catholicism in shaping the political ideas underlying the British revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century.

Cicero

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-62
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The People ◽  
Ultimate Source ◽  
Moral Duties ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores Cicero’s republican political philosophy. It argues that Cicero’s political thought has two fundamental principles. First, Cicero argues that there are universally applicable moral duties—the natural law—that are binding on everyone always. These principles have their basis in humans’ nature as rational beings. Second, he argues that a legitimate regime will recognize the people as the ultimate source of authority. No political regime can be just without resting on this basis. But these two principles threaten to come into conflict whenever the people’s will contradicts natural law. The chapter examines Cicero’s attempt to mediate this conflict. It also explores Cicero’s conceptions of liberty, justice, property, and empire, all of which emerge out of the relationship between the claims of natural law and popular sovereignty.

An ‘Embellisher’ of Grotius?

Grotiana ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-48
Author(s):  
Alberto Clerici
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Controversial Issue ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Giambattista Vico ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Urban Elite

Willem Van der Muelen (1659–1739), jurist and member of the Dutch urban elite, was the author of a huge and widely read commentary on Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis. Defined by the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico as a simple ‘embellisher’ of Grotius, but in recent times hailed as ‘the Dutch Locke’, Van der Muelen certainly deserves more attention. The essay will focus on the justification of political resistance to the sovereign, a particularly controversial issue both in early-modern political thought and in Grotius himself. I argue that Van der Muelen, far from being a simple ‘embellisher’ of Grotius, adopts a more radical view based on a strong individualistic and utilitarian anthropology, bridging the Scholastic and monarchomach ideas of resistance – to which he is still indebted – with modern natural law jurisprudence. Thus he offers an interesting companion to Locke as well as a source of inspiration for later commentators such as Jean Barbeyrac.

Cardinal Richelieu between Vattel and Machiavelli

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Carty
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Rule Of Reason

The view that no form of international law existed in seventeenth-century France, and that this time was a part of ‘prehistory’, and thus irrelevant for international legal thought today is challenged. In addition, the traditional claim of Richelieu to be an admirer of Machiavelli and his Ragion di Stato doctrine to the detriment of the aim of concluding treaties and keeping them (as sacred), is refuted by careful historical research. In Richelieu’s thinking, there is a role for law to play but it is law as justice, law in the classical natural law tradition. Those who rule are subject to the rule of law as justice, the rule of God, or the rule of reason. In Richelieu’s world, kings and ministers are rational instruments of the practical implementation of God’s will on earth.

JOHN DARBY AND THE WHIG CANON

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
JOSEPH HONE
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract Through a co-ordinated series of publications in the final years of the seventeenth century, a diverse set of commonwealth texts was entrenched into the canon of whig political thought. This article explores that canon through the lens of the history of the book. A key figure in the formation of this canon was the printer and bookseller John Darby. This article reconstructs Darby's role in the commonwealth opposition to the perceived failures of the Williamite revolution. Using bibliographical methods to establish his output, it shows that from the earliest days of the revolution Darby reprinted a broad range of historic whig texts, ranging from works of history and memoir to collections of poems. These texts provided a language, a rationale, and a model for opposition activity. He also manufactured pamphlets that adapted country principles to contemporary political circumstances. By shifting the focus from John Toland to his printer, the article suggests that the canonical whig texts were one part of a much broader and more ambitious programme to establish an historic canon of oppositional literature.

scholarly journals Ethnic Hatred and Universal Benevolence: Ethnicity and Loyalty in Precolonial Myanmar, and Britain

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-338
Author(s):  
Victor Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Pressures ◽  
Legal Equality ◽  
The One

AbstractInsisting on a radical divide between post-1750 ideologies in Europe and earlier political thought in both Europe and Asia, modernist scholars of nationalism have called attention, quite justifiably, to European nationalisms’ unique focus on popular sovereignty, legal equality, territorial fixity, and the primacy of secular over universal religious loyalties. Yet this essay argues that nationalism also shared basic developmental and expressive features with political thought in pre-1750 Europe as well as in rimland—that is to say outlying—sectors of Asia. Polities in Western Europe and rimland Asia were all protected against Inner Asian occupation, all enjoyed relatively cohesive local geographies, and all experienced economic and social pressures to integration that were not only sustained but surprisingly synchronized throughout the second millennium. In Western Europe and rimland Asia each major state came to identify with a named ethnicity, specific artifacts became badges of inclusion, and central ethnicity expanded and grew more standardized. Using Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain as case studies, this essay reconstructs these centuries-long similarities in process and form between “political ethnicity,” on the one hand, and modern nationalism, on the other. Finally, however, this essay explores cultural and material answers to the obvious question: if political ethnicities in Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain were indeed comparable, why did the latter realm alone generate recognizable expressions of nationalism? As such, this essay both strengthens and weakens claims for European exceptionalism.

scholarly journals When Hell is Other People. Interiority and Skepticism in António Lopes da Veiga

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 012
Author(s):  
Fernando Rodríguez Mediano ◽  
Carlos Cañete
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
International Scale ◽  
Close Study ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

The study of the process of construction of modern subjectivity offers an image of constant tensions between universality and particularity, which could be considered a manifestation of the conflictual nature of Modernity itself. As a way to solve the problems derived of the separation between universal and particular dimensions of this process -that has resulted in opposing interpretations regarding its confesional nature- a close study of the particular experience of the seventeenth-century thinker António Lopes da Veiga is presented here. This study is intended to provide some insight of the way in which similar intelectual concerns -of an international scale- over interiority and exteriority in epistemology, political thought, philology, theology and history, resulted in the constitution of a particular perspective regarding the individual.

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