scholarly journals THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION AND THE LANGUAGES OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK GOLDIE
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Civic Humanism ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Status ◽  
Ancient Constitution ◽  
European Thought

AbstractHistorians of political thought speak of ‘languages’ of politics. A language provides a lexicon, an available resource for legitimating positions. It is looser than a ‘theory’, because protean, and not predictive of particular doctrines. Some languages attract considerable scholarly attention, while others languish, for all that they were ambient in past cultures. In recent scholarship on early modern European thought, natural law and civic humanism have dominated. Yet prescriptive appeals to national historiographies were equally pervasive. Many European cultures appealed to Tacitean mythologies of a Gothic ur-constitution. The Anglophone variant dwelt on putative Saxon freedoms, the status of the Norman ‘Conquest’, whether feudalism ruptured the Gothic inheritance, and how common law related to ‘reason’, natural law, and divine law. Whigs rooted parliaments in the Saxonwitenagemot; though, by the eighteenth century, ‘modern’ Whigs discerned liberty as the fruit of recent socio-economic change. Levellers and Chartists alike talked of liberation from the ‘Norman Yoke’. These themes were explored from the 1940s onwards under the stimulus of Herbert Butterfield; one result was J. G. A. Pocock's classicAncient constitution and the feudal law(1957).

The Status of Classical Natural Law: Plato and the Parochialism of Modern Theory

2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Heinze
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
Justice Theories

The concept of modernity has long been central to legal theory. It is an intrinsically temporal concept, expressly or implicitly defined in contrast to pre-modernity. Legal theorists sometimes draw comparisons between, on the one hand, various post-Renaissance positivist, liberal, realist or critical theories, and, on the other hand, the classical natural law or justice theories of antiquity or the middle ages, including such figures as Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine or Aquinas. Many theorists, however, while acknowledging superficial differences among the various classical theories, fail to appreciate the variety and complexity of pre-modern thought. Unduly simplifying pre-modern understandings of law, they end up drawing false distinctions between modern and pre-modern legal theory. The pre-modern example considered in this article is Plato. Unlike scholars within the Humanities, who have continued to revise their approaches to pre-modern thought (often reflecting changes in ethical or political thought today), legal theorists, including many who claim to challenge much of traditional positivism, have scarcely moved beyond traditional positivists’ ahistorical and reductionist views.

Personification and the Political Imagination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2016 ◽  
pp. 399-418
Author(s):  
Amanda Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Individual

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, consciousness, agency, and embodiment are not always in concert. Legal personification serves as the backdrop of my discussion of Bottom’s metamorphosis, which I see as evocative of developments within common law around the creation of artificial persons. In early modern jurisprudence, disembodiment offered an occasion for incorporation, such that the non-consensual human could be transformed into an artificial entity with agentic capacity. Through the staging of metamorphosis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream elaborates the surreal transformation of the human into the non-human as a theatrical effect with political implications, insofar as personification is an enabling condition of the collective rather than a crisis of the individual. The play’s sensitivity to artificial assemblage puts it in conversation with a strand of contemporary political thought interested in the complexity of the will beyond the human body.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction sets out the main themes of the book and the approach taken. It characterizes political thought as the analysis and examination of how earthly communities flourish, as distinct from other kinds of communities like churches or households. It argues that although the period began with the consolidation of large empires, there was a growing concern to understand and to defend local or regional political communities, and that these developments were shaped by social and economic change. It emphasizes the need to see the political ideas and aspirations of early modern people within the context of their other desires and aspirations, and the context of their specific historical situations. It shows how the approach taken in this book builds upon the existing work of scholars and historians. It also sets out the distinctive features of the book: the inclusion of lands beyond Europe, the emphasis on natural law, and the relationship between political thought and social change.

Zeno’s Republic, Plato’s Laws, and the Early Development of Stoic Natural Law Theory

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-190
Author(s):  
Jed W. Atkins
Keyword(s):  
Early Development ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Philosophical Framework ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The Relationship

Recent scholarship on Stoic political thought has sought to explain the relationship between Zeno’s Republic and the concept of a natural law regulating a cosmic city of gods and human beings that is attributed to later Stoics. This paper provides a reassessment of this relationship by exploring the underappreciated influence of Plato’s Laws on Zeno’s Republic and, through Zeno, on the subsequent Stoic tradition. Zeno’s attempt to remove perceived inconsistencies in Plato’s treatment of ‘law’ and ‘nature’ established a philosophical framework that overturned the republicanism of Plato and Aristotle; this same framework established the preconditions for the cosmic city of gods and human beings regulated by natural law. Thus, the early Stoic tradition on the topic of natural law is characterized by continuity rather than by discontinuity.

Dramatic Judgments Measure for Measure, Revenge, and the Institution of the Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-74
Author(s):  
Bernadette Meyler
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Institutional Form ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
The Law

Analyzing William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure as the paradigm for theaters of pardoning, this chapter examines the relationships among judgment, pardoning and sovereignty in the play. It posits that Measure for Measure relies on a judicial model of pardoning and at the same time pits a more bureaucratic, institutional form of judgment against a vision of judgment as emanating from a sovereign decision on both the law and its application. The chapter further explains the connection between the institutional form of judgment staged in Measure for Measure and the work of early modern jurist Sir Edward Coke, who promoted a form of common law that he suggested derived from ancient Greek sources rather than the inheritance of Roman law from the Norman conquest. Drawing on this link with ancient Greece, the chapter then concludes with a comparison between Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Measure for Measure, contrasting both their genres and visions of justice.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Stephanie Elsky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ancient Constitution ◽  
Definition Of

The introduction offers a definition of custom as the basis of England’s common law and provides a lexicon of legal custom, including terms like time immemorial, the ancient constitution, consent, and commons, each of which contribute to the significance and power of custom as a legal concept. It argues that custom appealed to English literary writers who were experimenting with genre and form because of their society’s broad skepticism of novelty and thus it was crucial to ideas of Renaissance authorship. It situates the project within the larger body of work on early modern law and literature by showing how the latter can illuminate changes in the former. It further argues that the study of early modern law and literature should inform how we understand periodization because it offers different models of how the Renaissance understood itself and the past.

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