scholarly journals Public-Private Concord through Divided Sovereignty: Reframing societas for International Law

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-588
Author(s):  
Hans Blom ◽  
Mark Somos
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Conceptual Innovation ◽  
Actual Reality ◽  
Reason Of State ◽  
Private Corporation

Abstract Grotius is the father of modern international law. The indivisibility of sovereignty was the sine qua non of early-modern conceptual innovation in law. Both statements are axiomatic in the mainstream literature of the last two centuries. Both are profoundly and interestingly wrong. This article shows that Grotius’ systematisation of public and international law involved defining corporations as potentially (and the VOC actually) integral to reason of state, and able to bear and exercise marks of sovereignty under certain conditions. For Grotius, some corporations were not subsumed under the state’s legal authority, nor were they hybrid ‘company-states’. Instead, states and such corporations, able and forced to cooperate, fell under dovetailing natural, international, and municipal systems of law. The article reexamines Grotius’ notion of international trade, public debt, private corporation, and public and private war through the reassembled prism of these dovetailing laws and the category of societas that underpins Grotian associations. It is argued that although formulated around the new East India trade, the actual reality of legal pluralism was available to Grotius in the Dutch trade experience of the sixteenth century.

Early-Modern Literature on International Law and the Usus Modernus

Grotiana ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Wijffels
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
Abstract Section ◽  
Naval Warfare ◽  
General Proposition

AbstractA single, fairly simple proposition lies at the heart of the present contribution, viz. that the development of early-modern literature on international law should be regarded as a specific form of the early usus modernus during the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century.In Section 1 that general proposition and some of its ramifications will receive some further explanation. First, the main characteristics of usus modernus will be set out, and, subsequently, their applicability to early-modern literature on international law will be outlined. In addition, the question should be raised, what purpose the characterisation of that literature as part of the more general usus modernus may serve. These considerations may inevitably appear somewhat abstract. Section 2 will therefore aim to provide a particular illustration, based on two contemporary works on the law of naval warfare, viz. A. Gentili's Hispanicae Advocationis Libri Duo and H. Grotius' De jure praedae.

Mechanisms of the Hue and Cry in Kolozsvár in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 233-255
Author(s):  
Emese Bálint
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Public And Private

AbstractThis essay looks at a voluntary form of law enforcement based on trial records of late sixteenth-century Kolozsvár. It reconstructs mechanisms of hue and cry to show how social processes of control touched on culture and bore on the articulation of public and private domains in the early modern town. In witnesses' depositions hue and cry emerges as a customary practice with agents who could equally engage public opinion on behalf of victims against law-breakers, or make the system fail, and turn against the denouncer. Special attention is paid to the ways the town's landscape and soundscape interacted with raising the hue and cry. People's moves in response to the outcry effaced the usual divide between in and out, between domestic space and street, so with hue and cry, street and house, normally distinct, merged in ways otherwise abnormal.

Domestic space and identity: artisans, shopkeepers and traders in sixteenth-century Siena

Urban History ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAULA HOHTI
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:Historians of early modern Italy have traditionally viewed the city's public spaces, such as streets, quarters, taverns and marketplaces, as the chief locations in which claims to identity were launched into the broader urban community. Recent studies on the domestic interior, however, have shown that the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century urban space was much more complex. In this period, private urban houses became sites for an increasing range of social acitvities that varied from informal evening gatherings to large wedding banquets. Focusing on this ‘public’ dimension of the private urban house, this article explores how the middling classes of artisans and shopkeepers used the domestic space to construct identities and to facilitate social relations in sixteenth-century Siena. The aim is to show that in providing a setting for differing forms of economic and social activity, the urban home together with its objects and furnishings may have provided an increasingly important physical location for craftsmen, shop-owners and traders to negotaite individual and collective identities within the broader communities of the city.

From Crusades to Colonization: Violence in Secular and Religious Political Theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Xavier Scott
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
State Power ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Beliefs And Values

This paper examines the transition in political philosophy between the medieval and early-modern periods by focusing on the emergence of sovereignty doctrine. Scholars such as Charles Taylor and John Rawls have focused on the ability of modern-states to overcome conflicts between different religious confessionals. In contrast, this paper seeks to examine some of the peace-promoting features of Latin-Christendom and some of the conflict-promoting features of modern-secular states. The Christian universalism of the medieval period is contrasted with the colonial ventures promoted by the Peace of Westphalia. This paper’s goal is not to argue that secularism is in fact more violent than religion. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate the major role that religion played in early modern philosophy and the development of sovereignty doctrine. It argues against the view that the modern, secular state is capable of neutrality vis-à-vis religion, and also combats the view that the secular nature of modern international law means that it is neutral to the different beliefs and values of the world’s peoples. These observations emphasize the ways in which state power and legitimacy are at the heart of the secular turn in political philosophy. 

Public and Private Net Savings in Developing Countries: Some Empirical Tests for the Period 1972-88 (Distinguishedl Lecture)

1992 ◽  
Vol 31 (4I) ◽  
pp. 431-447
Author(s):  
Peter A. Cornelisse ◽  
Elma Van De Mortel
Keyword(s):  
Public Debt ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Critical Size ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Critical Dimensions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Empirical Tests ◽  
Financial Issues

The severe shocks that rocked the world economy in the 1970s and the ensuing efforts to adjust and to renew economic growth have had a profound effect on the economic literature. Especially the external and public debt problems which reached critical dimensions in many countries attracted much attention. Thus, in the field of macroeconomics financial issues have gained more prominence over the last two decades. Studies relating to the fiscal deficit have been particularly numerous. The critical size of national public debts, the contribution of the public debt to external debt, the reduced confidence in the state as the guide in socioeconomic development and the role of fiscal policy in adjustment processes are among the main reasons for this increased interest.

FINANCIAL REPORTING AND STEWARDSHIP ACCOUNTING IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patti A. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Financial Reporting

This paper examines an early modern contribution to the literature on stewardship accounting, the Tratado de Cuentas or Treatise on Accounts, by Diego del Castillo, a sixteenth-century Spanish jurist.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.

Place, People, Texts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Nation State

What is Poland? If the meaning of apparently stable words such as ecclesia has been anything but stable historically, the same is of course true of ‘Poland’, a simple noun which masks multiple possible meanings and polemical intents. For the sixteenth century, Poland should be defined not as an ethnic people (a nascent nation state), but rather as a political phenomenon. As such, this study will consider all the peoples and territories under the authority of the Polish Crown in the reign of King Sigismund I, regardless of their ‘ethnic’ or linguistic status. Twenty years ago, John Elliott coined the phrase ‘composite monarchies’, pointing out that most early modern monarchies were patchworks of territories acquired at various times by different means (marriage, conquest, inheritance), held together by one monarch....

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document