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

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.

Beyond Weber and Kafka: Conceptualizing a Critical Realist Model of Bureaucracy

Max Weber and Franz Kafka are seminal writers on bureaucracy and administration. While Weber suggests the technical superiority of a bureaucratic “iron cage,” Kafka speaks from within that cage, seeing its repressive rationality as being confounded by recalcitrant citizens searching for freedom. However, if individuals are embedded in a bureaucracy that limits the parameters of actions from which they can choose, how could they ever defy structural control? Articulating the conditions for human liberty, this article uses critical realism to reveal the potential emancipatory nature of bureaucracy as a way out of Kafka’s powerlessness and Weber’s iron cage via citizen engagement.

Machiavelli’s Rule and Human Liberty

This chapter determines that, by perverting the previous understandings to which Niccolò Machiavelli explicitly appeals, he furnishes the impetus for a new understanding. He thus can be taken to be a type of ruler. A consideration of his rule—its envisioned extent, its intended effects, and its manner of attainment—allows this chapter to liken his dispensation to, and to distinguish it from, the rule he wants to overturn. Although fear will reign in the republic he envisions, in gathering adherents he avails himself of an appeal to love. Unlike the current prince, however, he offers his love for the people on the condition that they hear his call to arms. In his capacity as ruler he intends to allow human beings what they have been denied for so long: honor and glory for their earthly exploits. Indeed, he endeavors to replace the divine and natural realms with the human one. By his assumption of his exalted position and his imposition of human necessity, human beings will cultivate the faculties—those of the soldier—that will allow them to establish a human republic.

Divine Decrees and Human Choices: Grotius on the Law of Fate and Punishment

Hugo Grotius’s Philosophorum sententiae de fato et de eo quod in nostra est potestate (from hereafter: psf ) has, so far, received little scholarly attention, even though it provides us with an interesting insight into Grotius’s philosophical interests (and the intellectual debates that these interests were reacting to). This text, published posthumously in 1648 (Paris and Amsterdam) by Grotius’s wife, Maria van Reigensberg, contains translations of texts from various philosophers on the question of fate. The aim of this article is to 1) place the debate on fate, in which Grotius was actively involved throughout all his life and career, in the wider context of the theological and philosophical debates on free will and divine foreknowledge; 2) acknowledge the importance played by Grotius’s psf , a gnomological collection of philosophical sources ranging from Pythagorean philosophers to early patristic authors all providing different, although converging arguments in favor of the existence of free will; and 3) suggest that debates on fate are distinctively linked by Grotius with those on the importance of law and punishment as a guarantee of order. This “legalistic” interpretation of fate ultimately allows Grotius to reconcile divine decrees with human liberty.