scholarly journals Political Consent, Promissory Fidelity and Rights Transfers in Grotius

Grotiana ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Laetitia Ramelet
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Political Obligations ◽  
Salient Characteristic ◽  
Solid Foundation ◽  
The Right

Grotius (1583–1645) is now widely acknowledged as an important figure in early modern contractual and consensual theories of political authority and legitimacy. However, as his thoughts on these debates are disseminated throughout his works rather than systematically ordained, it remains difficult to assess what, if anything, constitutes his distinctive mark. In the present paper, I will argue that his works contain a combination of two conceptual elements that have come to constitute a salient characteristic of early modern contract and consent theories: first, a strong obligation to keep one’s promises, and second, an account of perfect promises as transferrals of rights. In the political sphere, this means that citizens who have promised their obedience to the authorities are obligated to keep faith, which provides a solid foundation for political obligations. In addition, their promise implies that authorities receive the right to rule over them, which accounts for the legitimacy of these authorities’ power.

Jus Tempus in the Magna Carta: The Sovereignty of Time in Modern Politics and Citizenship

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 463-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth F. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Place Of Birth ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Right ◽  
Constitutional Tradition

In the English constitutional tradition, subjecthood has been primarily derived from two circumstances: place of birth and time of birth. People not born in the right place and at the right time are not considered subjects. What political status they hold varies and depends largely on the political history of the territory in which they reside at the exact time of their birth. A genealogy of early modern British subjecthood reveals that law based on dates and temporal durations—what I will call collectivelyjus tempus—creates sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines. This concept has myriad implications for how citizenship comes to be institutionalized in modern politics. In this article, I briefly outline one route through whichjus tempusbecame a constitutive principle within the Anglo-American tradition of citizenship and how this concept works with other principles of membership to create subtle gradations of semi-citizenship beyond the binary of subject and alien. I illustrate two main points aboutjus tempus: first, how specific dates create sovereign boundaries among people and second, how durational time takes on an abstract value in politics that allows certain kinds of attributes, actions, and relationships to be translated into rights-bearing political statuses. I conclude with some remarks about how, once established, the principle ofjus tempusis applied in a diverse array of political contexts.

"FREELY ELECTED IN FEAR": PRINCELY ELECTIONS AND POLITICAL POWER IN EARLY MODERN TRANSYLVANIA

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Murdock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Sufficient Power ◽  
The Right ◽  
Broad Consensus

AbstractTransylvania's survival was threatened by both its Habsburg and Ottoman neighbors. Given this precarious international position, ruling princes required sufficient power to govern effectively, and also needed to maintain a broad consensus for their right to exercise authority over the diverse political elite. A successful balance of power between princes and the estates was built around the freedoms granted to a number of different churches, and around the right of the diet to elect princes. This article examines the elections of Gábor Bethlen and other Calvinist princes in Transylvania during the early seventeenth century. Even though these elections were rarely free or fair, they provided a key basis for the growing political authority of princes who were widely identified as divinely-appointed rulers. Transylvania thus provides a model of a competence for elective monarchy, a form of political organization often thought to lead inevitably to unstable and ineffective government.

Seeking Sanctuary

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon McSheffrey
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
English Law ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
The Right ◽  
Modern Era

Seeking Sanctuary explores a curious aspect of premodern English law: the right of felons to shelter in a church or ecclesiastical precinct, remaining safe from arrest and trial in the king’s courts. This is the first book in more than a century to examine sanctuary in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Looking anew at this subject challenges the prevailing assumptions in the scholarship that this ‘medieval’ practice had become outmoded and little used by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although for decades after 1400 sanctuary-seeking was indeed fairly rare, the evidence in the legal records shows the numbers of felons seeking refuge in churches began to climb again in the late fifteenth century and reached its peak in the period between 1525 and 1535. Sanctuary was not so much a medieval dinosaur accidentally surviving into the early modern era, as it was an organism that had continued to evolve and adapt to new environments and indeed flourished in its adapted state. Sanctuary suited the early Tudor regime: it intersected with rapidly developing ideas about jurisdiction and provided a means of mitigating the harsh capital penalties of the English law of felony that was useful not only to felons but also to the crown and the political elite. Sanctuary’s resurgence after 1480 means we need to rethink how sanctuary worked, and to reconsider more broadly the intersections of culture, law, politics, and religion in the century and a half between 1400 and 1550.

Political Authority and Revolution

Worldview ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 27-34
Author(s):  
Theodore R. Weber
Keyword(s):  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Society ◽  
The Right

Political authority is the right to exercise the power of the polis, the political community, over and on behalf of the members of the community. It implies the obligation of the members to obey those who exercise power by right when they act within the limits set by the criteria of authorization. Every political society this side of the eschaton must embody viable relationships of authority and obedience. If not, the society must either be sustained by tyranny, which is arbitrary force and not authoritative power, or else dissolve into anarchy, which surely then will lead to tyranny.

scholarly journals Metawartości i spór wokół ochrony środowiska naturalnego

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 147-159
Author(s):  
Przemysław Maj
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Value Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
The Right ◽  
Value Model

W przestrzeni debaty publicznej można zaobserwować występowanie antynomicznych postaw dotyczących ochrony środowiska naturalnego. Jedna z nich jest charakterystyczna dla nurtu określanego umownie jako lewicowy, a druga – dla prawicowego. Celem artykułu jest przybliżenie treści i źródeł tych postaw oraz podjęcie próby wyjaśnienia istniejącego na tym gruncie konfliktu politycznego w odniesieniu do psychologicznej teorii wartości Shaloma H. Schwartza. Meta-values and the Conflict over Environmental Protection In the political sphere, two antinomous attitudes towards the nature are permanently present. The first one is characteristic of the left-wing and the second one of the right-wing. The article explains the content and source of these attitudes by referring to Shalom H. Schwartz's psychological value theory (SVT) and the circular meta-value model created on the basis of its adaptation.

The Right to Housing

2018 ◽  
pp. 265-304
Author(s):  
Sandra Fredman
Keyword(s):  
Family Life ◽  
Private Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Alternative Housing ◽  
Property Owners ◽  
Constitutional Right ◽  
The Right

Housing is frequently regarded as a matter for the political sphere, rather than a fundamental human right. At most, housing is seen as a socio-economic right, progressively realizable subject to available resources. By contrast, protection against State intrusion into home, family, or private life is widely accepted as a core human right. Section II contrasts jurisdictions which derive the right to housing from the right to life or the right to respect for home and family life, with jurisdictions with an express constitutional right to housing. Section III examines how the right to a home has been balanced against rights of property owners. This section considers both procedural protections, such as the right to be heard, and substantive protections such as provision of alternative housing. Section IV assesses how courts have approached the substance of the right, and the challenge of defining ‘adequate’ housing. This entails an examination of how courts deal with polycentric issues. Section V considers housing as an equality right.

Shakespeare and Derivatives

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
David Hawkes
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Financial Derivatives ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Popular Resistance ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Twenty First Century

The twenty-first century has witnessed the rise to power of images in every aspect of human endeavour. Speculative financial derivatives have achieved a predominant place in the economy, spin and perception rule the political sphere, and technological media ensure that we spend our lives surrounded by images of all kinds. Reading the works of Shakespeare reveals the roots of this process in the early modern period, when the iconoclasm of the Reformation, popular protests against usury, and the campaign against ritual magic combined to provide an ethically based popular resistance to the power of signs.

scholarly journals THE QUEEN’S QUEENDOM: NEGOTIATING THE RHETORIC OF THE ELIZABETH–ANJOU COURTSHIP (1572–1584)

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-110
Author(s):  
Amritesh Singh
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The Political ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
Male Subjects ◽  
Two Bodies

This article juxtaposes the letters written by Elizabeth I to her last suitor, Francis, Duke of Anjou, with John Stubbs’ virulent tract The discoverie of a gaping gulf (1578) that opposed the match to propose that Elizabeth I challenged her belligerent male subjects in a game of semiotic control. I suggest that Elizabeth I fashioned her own ‘queendom’ – a discursive realm that complemented her political kingdom – where she attempted to formulate a code of masculinity that would celebrate gynaecocracy and facilitate a consummation of her sexuality. I show how, in her correspondence with Anjou, Elizabeth I sought to create a model husband for herself who would be sympathetic and subordinate to her political authority. I tease out the playful intercourse between the amorous and the political in Elizabeth I’s language to argue that she insisted on a unique union of her two bodies (the male body politic and the female body natural) which has largely gone unnoticed in current scholarship. Through a close engagement with Elizabethan rhetorical practices, this article aims to inspire a more nuanced reading of gendered identities in early modern England.

Nazistowski mord na Żydach w prasie polskich komunistów (1942–1944).

2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich
Keyword(s):  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Polish Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Right

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover

“I'd make thee eat the mischief thou hast vented”: Discourse of Law in Ben Jonson's Catiline His Conspiracy

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Gunpowder Plot ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Legal Procedures ◽  
The Way

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.

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