Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel 0813215811, 9780813215815

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Why Study Medieval Political Thought?
Part I . Historiographies of the Early European Tradition: Continuity and Change
1. The Legacy of Walter Ullmann
2. Quentin Skinner’s State: Historical Methodology and the Formation of a European Tradition
3. Pathologies of Continuity: The Neo-Figgisites
4. A Middle Path: Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves
Part II . Dissenting Voices and the Limits of Power
5. Toleration and Community: Functionalist Foundations of Liberty
6. The Royal Will and the Baronial Bridle: The Bractonian Contribution
7. Political Representation: Modern Theory and Medieval Practices
8. For Love and Money: Theorizing Revolt in Fourteenth-Century Europe
Part III . Republican Self-Governance and Universal Empire
9. Brunetto Latini’s Commerical Republicanism
10. Marsiglio of Padua: Between Empire and Republic
11. Translatio Imperii: Medieval and Modern
12. Christianity and Republicanism: Another Look
Part IV. The Virtues of Necessity: Economic Principles of Politics
13. The Origins of “Policy” in Twelfth-Century England
14. Economic Liberty and the Politics of Wealth
15. Money and Community: Nicole Oresme
16. Christine de Pizan’s Expanding Body Politic
Part V. Modern Receptions of Medieval Ideas
17. The Persistence of Economic Nationalism: John Fortescue
18. Virtù, Foresight, and Grace: Machiavelli’s Medieval Moments
19. Arguing Sovereignty in the Seventeenth Century: Bracton’s Readers
20. Hegel on the Medieval Foundations of the Modern State
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Lineages of European Political ought

Lineages of European Political ought   Explorations along the Medieval/ Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel

    Cary J. Nederman

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nederman, Cary J. Lineages of European political thought : explorations along the medieval/modern divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel / Cary J. Nederman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8132-1581-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)  1. Political science—Europe—History.  2. Political science—Early works to 1800.  3. Philosophy, Medieval.  I. Title. JC111.N43 2009 320.092'24—dc22

2008042403



For Karen Lynn Bollermann, rough good times—and bad

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction. Why Study Medieval Political Thought?  xiii

Pa rt I . Historiographies of the Early European T radition: Continuity and Change

1. The Legacy of Walter Ullmann  3 2. Quentin Skinner’s State: Historical Methodology and the Formation of a European Tradition  13 3. Pathologies of Continuity: The Neo-Figgisites  29 4. A Middle Path: Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves  49

Pa rt I I . Dissenting Voices and the Limits of Power 5. Toleration and Community: Functionalist Foundations of Liberty  63 6. The Royal Will and the Baronial Bridle: The Bractonian Contribution  81 7. Political Representation: Modern Theory and Medieval Practices  99 8. For Love and Money: Theorizing Revolt in Fourteenth-Century Europe  122 Pa rt I I I . Republican Self-Governance and Universal Empire 9. Brunetto Latini’s Commerical Republicanism  141 10. Marsiglio of Padua: Between Empire and Republic  160 11. Translatio Imperii: Medieval and Modern  177 12. Christianity and Republicanism: Another Look  190

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contents

Pa rt I V. The Virtues of Necessity: Economic Principles of Politics 13. The Origins of “Policy” in Twelfth-Century England  201 14. Economic Liberty and the Politics of Wealth  222 15. Money and Community: Nicole Oresme  235 16. Christine de Pizan’s Expanding Body Politic  248

Pa rt V. Modern Receptions of Medieval Ideas 17. The Persistence of Economic Nationalism: John Fortescue  261 18. Virtù, Foresight, and Grace: Machiavelli’s Medieval Moments  277 19. Arguing Sovereignty in the Seventeenth Century: Bracton’s Readers  304 20. Hegel on the Medieval Foundations of the Modern State  323 Bibliography  343 Index  369

Acknowledgments

I never intended to make a career out of the study of medieval political theory. But twenty-five years after I completed a dissertation on the development of national traditions of state theory in France and England between 1250 and 1350, I find myself still churning the waters of a field of research that continues to be compelling and infinitely rewarding. Many friends and fellow scholars have nurtured me over the past quarter of a century in pursuing this endeavor. The litany of those to whom I owe a debt begins with my doctoral supervisors, John Brückmann and Neal Wood (now, sadly, both deceased), and runs through colleagues of long standing, such as Kate Forhan, Paul Sigmund, Constantin Fasolt, Marcia Colish, Walter Nicgorski, Jim Muldoon, Antony Black, John O. Ward, and Constant Mews, as well as of more recent vintage, including Bettina Koch, Takashi Shogimen, Gerson Moreno-Riaño, and Vasileios Syros. Finally, my colleagues in political theory at Texas A & M—Judy Baer, Lisa Ellis, Ed Portis, and Diego Von Vacano—have been an important source of support and also criticism of many of the ideas contained in this volume. I hold none of the above responsible for my mistakes (which I may perhaps be seen to be repeating in the present book), but I do thank them for rendering my work less error-ridden as a result of their careful and patient appraisals of my scholarship. The impetus for this volume came from David McGonagle, director of the Catholic University of America Press. Dave not only solicited the manuscript but convinced me of the viability of drawing together a series of my investigations, published and unpublished, around the theme of the relationship between medieval and modern categories in the history of Western political thought. ix

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My current doctoral student Mary Elizabeth Sullivan provided vital technical assistance as well as proving to be a fount of precise advice and helpful commentary. She also prepared the bibliography and the index. Additionally, I wish to acknowledge the next generation of scholars whom I have had the privilege of teaching at Texas A & M as well as with whom I have sometimes collaborated. These include Hassan Bahsir, Daniel Betti, Michael Burnside, Jesse Chupp, Phil Gray, Sara Jordan, Roberto Loureiro, Christie Maloyed, Mary Beth Sullivan, Ann Wilson, and Peyton Wofford. They have indeed taught me infinitely more than any knowledge I have conveyed to them. The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A & M University supported some of the research represented in this book, as did the Political Science departments at several institutions with which I have been affiliated over the years, including the University of Alberta, the University of Canterbury, Siena College, the University of Arizona, and Texas A & M. To all of these institutional homes I owe a large measure of gratitude. A number of the chapters contained in this volume are significantly revised and updated versions of papers that have appeared previously as book chapters and journal articles. I wish to thank the following journals and publishers for their kind permission to draw upon these already published materials: Chapter 1, Pensiero Politico Medievale 2 (2004): 11– 19; Chapter 2, Canadian Journal of Political Science 18 (June 1985): 339–52; Chapter 3, History of Political Thought 17 (Summer 1996): 179–94; Chapter 5, Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, eds., Difference and Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 17–37; Chapter 6, History of Political Thought 9 (Winter 1988): 415–29; Chapter 7, Alberto Melloni and Massimo Faggioli, eds., Representatio: Mapping a Key Word for Churches and Governance. Proceedings of the San Miniato International Workshop, October 13– 16, 2004 (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2006), 41–59; Chapter 8, István P. Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, 1200–1500 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007), 179–201; Chapter 9, Political Theory 31 (2003): 644–63; Chapter 10, History of Political Thought 16 (Autumn 1995): 313–29; Chapter 11, Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2005): 1–15; Chapter 12, American Political Science Review 92 (December 1998): 913–18; Chapter 13, Constant J. Mews, Cary J. Nederman, and Rodney Thomson, eds., Rhetoric and Renewal in the Latin West 1100–1500: Essays in Hon-

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or of John O. Ward (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 149–68; Chapter 14, Robert J. Bast and Andrew C. Gow, eds., Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late-Medieval and Reformation History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 3–19; Chapter 15, History of Political Thought 21 (Spring 2000): 1–15; Chapter 16, Eric Hicks, ed., Au Champ des écritures: Actes du IIIe Colloque International sur Christine de Pizan (Lausanne, 18–22 juillet 1998) (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2000), 383–97; Chapter 17, History of Political Thought 26 (2005): 266–83; Chapter 19, Political Science 40 (July 1988): 49–66; Chapter 20, Journal of Politics 49 (1987): 499–519. This book almost didn’t see the light of print at all. In the winter of 2006–2007, I despaired that I could accomplish the kind of synthetic project that I originally envisioned. But a magical week as the guest of Karen Bollermann in Scottsdale, Arizona, turned around my thinking and permitted me to write what forms the introduction to the present volume as well as to conceptualize its contents with clarity. I dedicate this book to Karen in love and deep appreciation for the myriad ways in which she has made me a better scholar and a better person.



Introduction

W h y S t u d y M e d i e va l P o l i t ica l Thought?

There is surely no field of study within the broad tradition of Western political theory that has been so grossly underrepresented in recent English-language scholarship as the Latin Middle Ages. Numerous reasons may be adduced for this fact, but I suspect that many of them can be traced to a deeply ingrained pedagogical prejudice that is reproduced each semester in classrooms throughout the English-speaking world. Princeton University’s Paul Sigmund—himself one of the few political scientists whose career has run counter to this trend—is fond of citing a survey in which college-level political theory instructors identified the teaching of medieval thought as among their most onerous and unpleasant tasks.1 Consequently, student exposure to the Middle Ages, when it occurs at all, is generally confined to St. Augustine (who is more properly a late classical figure) and St. Thomas Aquinas (who, for all his brilliance and originality, represents merely one current in the stream of medieval thought). Academic discomfort with a millennium of theory has effectively achieved canonical status: shunned in graduate as well as undergraduate curricula, the topic is likewise disregarded in textbooks and anthologies, a situation that only exacerbates the ignorance of another generation of students of Western political philosophy about the Latin Middle Ages.2 1. The survey was by Steven Brzezinski and Sami Hajjar, Teaching Political Theory: Preliminary Findings (Laramie: University of Wyoming [mimeo], n.d.).

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Scholars who favor the introduction of issues such as gender, class, and race into the teaching of political theory will likely recognize this resistance to change as a source of their own intellectual frustrations. But just as they have scored considerable success in breaking the patterns that keep a static canon in place, so there is some hope for those dissatisfied with the deep reluctance of political theorists to confront fully and accurately the ideas of the Middle Ages. As contemporary political theorists redefine the canon and explore the margins of the Western tradition, the opportunity exists for a reevaluation of the chronological and conceptual constructions that have forced the Middle Ages deep into the background of scholarly attention. Perhaps a growth of interest in the vast body of political literature written during the Middle Ages will be hastened by the discovery, for example, that medieval Europe produced one of the earliest and most profound feminist theorists, Christine de Pizan, or that medieval thinkers were deeply concerned with such issues as group and individual rights, diversity, community, economic and social exclusion and deprivation, and political and religious dissent, which continue to be salient in recent times. The prospect of recovering and renewing the largely overlooked medieval dimension of Western political theory thus offers a source of stimulation and challenge. This is not merely true in the case of discovering what 2. For example, only Augustine and Aquinas are represented in Michael L. Morgan, ed., Classics of Moral and Political Theory (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992) and in Peter J. Steinberger, ed., Readings in Classical Political Thought (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), while the medieval selections in Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon, eds., Princeton Readings in Political Thought: Essential Texts since Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) are limited to Augustine, Aquinas, and Christine de Pizan, the same authors singled out by Joseph Losco and Leonard Williams, eds., Political Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (2nd ed.; Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing, 2003). Slightly more coverage is afforded by Andrew Bailey et al., The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2008), which includes Al-Farabi and Marsiglio of Padua as well as Augustine, Aquinas, and Christine. Likewise, among recent textbooks, Brian R. Nelson, Western Political Thought from Socrates to the Age of Ideology (2nd ed.; Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1996) covers only Augustine and Aquinas; Edward Bryan Portis, Reconstructing the Classics: Political Theory from Plato to Marx (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1994) leaps from Augustine directly to Machiavelli, and Leslie Paul Thiele, Thinking Politics (Chatham, N.J.; Chatham House, 1997) devotes one paragraph each to Augustine and Aquinas. Such nearly complete omission of the Middle Ages is almost universal in texts and collections of readings designed for undergraduate students. There have been a couple of notable counterexamples, however: George Klosko gives considerable coverage to medieval authors and topics in his two-volume History of Political Theory: An Introduction (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993–1995); and the second volume of the multivolume sequence on A History of Political Thought authored by Janet Coleman and Iain Hampsher-Monk (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992–2000) concentrates on the medieval and Renaissance periods; but note that its author, Coleman, is one of the few political theorists who specializes in that field.

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we share with the thought of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the very “otherness,” the foreignness, of the medieval world may have salutary decentering effects upon our complaisant contemporary assumptions about political life and its relation to a whole host of other philosophical questions. The hollowness of an “end of history” thesis, for instance, is problematized once we see how pervasive that claim has been in past times as well. We continue to live on the edge of history, and what Janet Coleman says of William of Ockham holds no less true at the beginning of the twenty-first century: “By knowing one’s past, one understands one’s present and one makes one’s future.”3 The proposal that familiarity with the works of medieval political philosophy has resonance in the present must be distinguished from sheer “presentism” or uncritical anachronism. It is folly to turn to the past (ancient, medieval, or modern) to solve all the current problems of Western political theory. But confronting the intellectual power and range of medieval authors extends our own horizons, helping us to appreciate both the particular dilemmas and the more enduring challenges posed by politics, while also supplementing and enriching the discourses and frameworks available to us.4 In speaking of the role that political theory ought to play in the inquiries of political scientists, Terence Ball has called for Lakatosian pluralism and tolerance toward a variety of theoretical research programs.5 It seems that a similar plea must be made for the study of the political ideas of the Latin Middle Ages. Careful investigation of medieval political theory proliferates and diversifes the tools that political theorists today have at their disposal for discussion and debate about the fundamental issues of politics. Crying that this represents a “postmodern patina”6 only defers and submerges the question of why we ought to bother reading medieval texts at all in the twenty-first (or any subsequent) century. 3. Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 537. 4. Some of these methodological issues have received more complete attention from Margaret Leslie, “In Defence of Anachronism,” Political Studies 18 (1970): 433–47. Leslie’s position, in sum, is that “the contemporary thinker, whether he calls himself political philosopher or political scientist, must suffer if he has not available to him for use in grasping the political experience of his own time the rich vocabulary of the past” (443). 5. Terence Ball, “Is There Progress in Political Science?” in Terence Ball, ed., Idioms of Inquiry: Critique and Renewal in Political Science (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 13–44. 6. A phrase that historian George Garnett thoughtlessly employs to describe my own work on Marsiglio of Padua; see Garnett, Marsilius of Padua and “The Truth of History” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8.

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At the same time, we must be prepared to accept the “medievalness” of medieval thought, that is, to recognize that the authors and texts under examination cannot be extracted from important intellectual, cultural, and historical assumptions characteristic of the Latin Middle Ages. This may not seem exceptional, but it represents a trend that runs counter to a great deal of recent scholarship, the aim of which has been to demonstrate important and unbroken continuities between medieval and early modern thought. In his introduction to The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, for instance, J. H. Burns noted the increasing erosion of traditional lines of demarcation between “medieval” and “modern”: “..... the period from the late fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth saw neither innovation nor even the unfolding of what had been implicit or latent, but rather the fuller and faster development of tendencies already explicitly present and manifest in late medieval society.”7 Brian Tierney, Francis Oakley, and Kenneth Pennington—historians all, it should be noted—have in recent times taken to constructing direct genealogies from medieval to modern political discourse regarding such topics as individual rights, constitutional government, consent, and popular sovereignty.8 The larger warrant for this trend seems to be Quentin Skinner’s influential two-volume text, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, a work noteworthy not least for uncovering the medieval, often Scholastic, roots of ideas that have conventionally been regarded as “modern” in provenance. The central thesis of Foundations is the claim that between “the late thirteenth century, and ..... the end of the sixteenth,...... the main elements of a recognisably modern concept of the State were gradually acquired.”9 Although Tierney, Oakley, Pennington, and their devotees had pursued lines of research similar to Skinner’s for a number of years before publication of the Foundations, the impressive success of the latter 7. J. H. Burns, “Introduction,” The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, ed. Burns with Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2, 3. 8. Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Tierney, “Origins of Natural Rights Language: Texts and Contexts, 1150–1250,” History of Political Thought 10 (1989): 615–46; Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Francis Oakley, “Christian Obedience and Authority, 1520–1550,” in Burns and Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 159–92; Oakley, “Nederman, Gerson, Conciliar Theory and Constitutionalism: Sed Contra,” History of Political Thought 16 (Spring 1995): 1–19. More will be said about this school of interpretation in chapter 3 of the present volume. 9. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1: ix.

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has licensed these “neo-Figgisites” (as I have termed them, for reasons discussed in chapter 3 below) to become far more speculative, and even reckless, in their claims about the “modernity” of important features of medieval political thought, especially (although not exclusively) its ecclesiology. In pursuing this position so baldly, the neo-Figgistes filter out much of the uniquely “medieval” character of their subject matter. Ironically, this school falls victim to an especially virulent strain of “presentism.” Consider Tierney’s comment in the conclusion to his Wiles Lectures concerning the epoch between 1150 and 1650: The period we have been discussing is one of significant change in almost every sphere of activity. Arts changed, and architecture—and artillery. Science changed, and society. New theologies appeared, and new ways of economic life. Astronomers discovered a new heaven, and explorers a New World. But through this all, improbably, patterns of constitutional theory persisted that had originally grown out of the structure of medieval society and the encounter of medieval Christian intellectuals with the secular thought of Greece and Rome.10

In sum, the changes separating medieval from modern patterns of political thought were largely cosmetic and unworthy of sustained analysis. Constitutionalism, as well as natural rights and sovereignty, which are all supposedly modern doctrines, can in fact be traced to medieval origins, according to proponents of the neo-Figgisite framework.11 At the same time, a different group of scholars, unconvinced by the advocates of unremitting continuity, have swung the historiographical pendulum in the diametrically opposite direction. The spirit of this position has been captured by Marcia Colish in her splendid set of reflections on the question “When Did the Middle Ages End?” Surveying the question from the perspective of each of the major topics of interest to the intellectual historian, she has this to say about political thought: The issue of the location of sovereignty within the state was not settled for early modern Europe until the seventeenth century in most countries....... These early modern arrangements, departures as they were from medieval political thought at its most basic, sometimes made use of it, from the conciliarists to Marsilio of Padua to 10. Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 105 (emphasis added). 11. For a sampling of the relevant scholarship, see Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997); Pennington, The Prince and the Law; and Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

xviii  in t r o d u c t i o n Aquinas to Magna Carta to the theological distinction between God’s absolute and ordained power. Still, the discontinuities are clearer here than the continuities, and the passing of medieval paradigms more visible in political theory than elsewhere.12

Various grounds have been adduced for this “passing.” Perhaps the best known argument is that proposed by John Pocock. In his magisterial opus The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock demonstrated precious little patience with the positing of any persistent structure of political thought—in general, and especially in Florence—before and after c. 1400. Thus, “fourteenthcentury minds visualized Florentine citizenship in a context of universal order and authority, which could be both hierarchically and apocalyptically expressed.”13 A century later, by contrast, “to affirm the republic ..... was to break up a timeless continuity of the hierarchical universe.”14 Pocock’s conscious inspiration for his argument was the so-called civic humanist thesis associated with the name of Hans Baron.15 Baron famously, if not uncontroversially, asserted that the political crisis of Florentine governance in 1402 generated a rapid transformation of thought and practice that swept throughout Europe and fundamentally altered the terms of public discourse.16 Baron’s argument entailed, then, the postulation of a profound break between early modern and medieval conceptions of politics and the nature of political life—in particular, concerning the active character of citizenship—to which Pocock more or less wholly subscribes. Nor has Pocock eschewed this argument in his later historical investigations. In the third installment (titled The First Decline and Fall) of Barbarism and Civilization, the grand work that has mainly occupied him for the last three decades,17 Pocock returns to the postulation of historical discontinuity. Pocock’s principal historiographical project in that volume is the demonstration that the “Decline and Fall” trope highlighted by Gibbon reflects a clear-cut Renaissance invention arising from the innovations (or perhaps renovations) of the Florentine civic humanist circle. Pocock 12. Marcia Colish, “When Did the Middle Ages End? Reflections of an Intellectual Historian,” in Alasdair A. MacDonald and Michael W. Twomey, eds., Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 222. 13. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 50. 14. Ibid., 53. 15. Ibid., 55–58. 16. For recent evaluations of the Baron thesis, see the contributions to James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 17. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Vol. 3. The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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himself repeatedly invokes this in order to identify “Decline and Fall” as a standard for delineating “medieval political thought” from succeeding modes of engaging in the enterprise of political theory.18 Pocock sees one important emblem of univeralism (translatio imperii) replaced by a token of historicism (Decline and Fall). Constantin Fasolt, in The Limits of History, goes Pocock one better. Fasolt focuses on a single discursive formation, the “lord of the world,” and argues that the logic of dominus mundi is mutually incomprehensible on either side of the medieval/modern divide. Hence, the meaning of world empire for a medieval individual such as Bartolus of Sassaferrato remains ever hidden from and inscrutable to a modern person like Hermann Conring in the early seventeenth century, let alone to later historians.19 Fasolt’s major thesis is in effect a corollary to Pocock’s insistence upon an overarching view of history that emphasizes break and rupture. Fasolt merely adds that if we take the incommensurability of the worldviews (theologies/cosmologies/ historiographies) on either side of what Sverre Bagge calls the “great divide”20 between “medieval” and “modern” seriously, then the medieval mind-set, with its emphasis on universalism, providentialism, and so forth, is permanently inaccessible to the modern mode of thinking. The period of the Latin Middle Ages becomes, in Fasolt’s terms, “Orientalized,” rendered Other in a manner that simultaneously attracts and repulses.21 The persistence of historians’ efforts to cross this insurmountable divide simply reflects their attraction to and longing for an Otherness that is permanently beyond their grasp. This, so it seems, is the core of the “politics” of history. One irony here is that the harder the historian works on the project of recuperating the Middle Ages through the deployment of the techniques of modern historical scholarship (data, evidence, textual fidelity, and the like), the less “accurate” she or he will be in the task of historical recovery.22 We seem confronted, then, with two wholly incommensurable historiographical visions: the “continuity thesis” and the “rupture thesis.” So, 18. Ibid., 98–100. 19. Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. 16–45. 20. Sverre Bagge, “Medieval and Renaissance Historiography: Break or Continuity?” European Legacy 2 (1998): 1337. See also Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 21. Fasolt, The Limits of History, 49, 227–28. 22. For a more extensive critical appraisal of Fasolt’s historiographical principles, see Ian Hunter, “The State of History and the Empire of Metaphysics,” History and Theory 44 (2005): 289–303.

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how are we to evaluate these competing claims about the “great divide” between medieval and modern mind-sets? My own view, evolved over a quarter-century of study and reflection concerning the matter, is that “balance” is the key to conceptualizing the multiple lineages of European political thought. There are some good reasons for adopting a Heraclitean approach to these questions—namely, conceiving of the river of history as a site of continuity as well as of change.23 As Jacques Barzan once wrote, “History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.”24 In this vein, I think that it is simply mistaken to endorse the historical conclusion that there was no divide to be crossed from the Middle Ages to modernity.25 Yet to cut off the Middle Ages as a frame or context for modern trends in political thought seems to me to dismiss without reason the compelling observation once made by Janet Coleman: There are important reasons why certain issues keep cropping up over the centuries in philosophical, theological and scientific circles, and one of these is that as a literate civilisation, we have constructed our pasts from inherited texts, taken what we see as relevant to our own situations while discarding the rest until the next generation picks up the threads dropped by its fathers. Certain kinds of questions do not seem to have received definitive answers at any time, and we repeat the analyses, moving backwards and forwards, in every generation.26

The obvious solution is to “split the difference” in Heraclitean fashion by moving beyond either/or dichotomies and acknowledging that the flow of history involves both difference and sameness. What we reap from this approach is the recognition that categories such as “medieval” and “modern” 23. I am unconcerned about the question of whether this represents the “authentic” teaching of Heraclitus himself. What I am trying to express is well captured by the entry on Heraclitus in Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 352: “..... structure is ..... ‘unity-of-opposites.’ This appears in many examples, static or dynamic, from everyday life: ‘People step into the same rivers, and different waters flow on them’; ‘A road, uphill and downhill, one and the same.’ ..... These remarks and their generalizations are not meant to infringe the law of non-contradiction; rather they trade on it to point out a systematic ambivalence (between polar opposites) in the essential nature of things.” 24. Quoted by Arthur Krystal, “Age of Reason,” The New Yorker, 22 October 2007, p. 103. 25. Bettina Koch does an admirable job of enumerating some of these reasons in the introduction to her Zur Dis-/Kontinuität mitttelelterlichen politischen Denkens in der neuzeitlichen politischen Theorie (Berlin: Duncker & Himblot, 2005), 13–55. 26. Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories, xvii.

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can and should be gainfully deployed, yet always with the understanding that they are provisional and potentially fluid. If we fail utterly to invoke the terminology of “medieval” and “modern,” however, then we lose some important elements in the understanding of the distinctive contributions of each era to the history of Western political ideas. Yet if we insist on the absolute character of the language of periodization, then we likewise do not comprehend the complex interplay between doctrines articulated at one time and those at another. As scholars of intellectual history, the comparison of texts to contexts, as well as of texts to other texts, form key features of our enterprise and calling. There is, however, no reason to suppose that such contexts must be absolute, self-contained, and fixed in order for there to be a point to contextualization. I am untroubled by the possibility that one might interpret and evaluate texts in a multiplicity of contexts, whereas some scholars have evinced discomfort with such hermeneutical uncertainty. Constantin Fasolt, for example, worries, “The real question is, Which context? Historical, linguistic, philosophical, divine and deconstructive? Or dancing, cookery, and sports?”27 My answer is, “Yes!” By this, I mean that there may be many contexts that enrich the meaning of words and concepts in different ways. We can and should, if we are careful, invoke each and all of them to explore and expand myriad interpretations. One or more of those meanings may instruct us in how the authors and readers of the original time and place would have understood a text. But other contexts and attendant meanings, equally valid and fruitful in their own ways, may reveal ideas that, although never intended by their authors, are nonetheless compelling. My point here, quite simply, is that historically minded scholars need to become comfortable on the unsteady ground that stems from the recognition that there are many potentially necessary, indispensable, or useful contexts for a given text, rather than some single correct and final context. In turn, this realization in no way undermines the worthiness or validity of the quest of serious historians to achieve more accurate (or at any rate, plausible) understandings. A multiplicity of contexts and interpretations is not a counsel of despair, but an invitation to explore. The chapters contained in the present book all illustrate facets of the historiographical and methodological considerations and reservations that I have expressed. Part I surveys in greater detail some of the major contributions to the debate about the historiography of “medieval” and “mod27. Fasolt, The Limits of History, 210.

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ern” political thought. The doyen of the field for much of the twentieth century, Walter Ullmann, has long ceased to be widely cited by scholars, but his influence lingers in many of the views held by later figures such as Quentin Skinner, Brian Tierney, and Francis Oakley. The chapters contained in Part I aim to provide a critical assessment of the strengths and limitations of these historians. I close the section with an examination of the moderate and nuanced views of Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves—a little-remembered, but still meritorious, contemporary of Ullmann—who sought to “split the difference” in understanding the relation between the Middle Ages and modernity. Part II turns to one of the major themes addressed by political theorists in the modern as well as medieval worlds, namely, the expression of political, cultural, and religious discontent about the uses of power. It has often been pointed out that the materials of modern constitutionalism and political liberalism may be found in the soil of the Middle Ages. The studies in this section both confirm and challenge this view: we find authors such as John of Salisbury and Marsiglio of Padua who defended liberty of conscience and judgment, as well as thinkers in the vein of Henry de Bracton and William of Pagula who proposed the need for political remedies to the abuse of power. Yet these theories assumed a profoundly different conception of political life and the foundations of legitimate power than one finds in the modern era: the universal acceptance of certain theological and moral premises, and doctrines of communal solidarity, precluded the articulation of recognizably secular and liberal principles of toleration, dissent, protest, and revolt. Part III addresses the recurrent medieval obsession with the twin political institutions of empire and republic. In particular, I examine the complex relationship between the key themes of republicanism and universal empire moving into the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, revealing that they are not mutually exclusive doctrines either philosophically or chronologically. Against the view held by Baron and Pocock, the chapters contained in this section reveal important continuities in republican arguments over four centuries or so starting with Brunetto Latini in the 1260s. Yet other authors, such as Jean Gerson, followed paths to republicanism that proved to be dead-ends in the modern period and thus deserve to be conceived of as distinctively medieval. At the same time, as my examinations of Marsiglio of Padua in the fourteenth century and Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century suggest, republican doctrines persisted side-

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by-side with the belief in the legitimacy of imperial power expressed by a universal lord over all of the world. Empire was not strangled to death by the force of a republican renewal starting in the fifteenth century (or at any other time). Rather, the imperial ideal in its essentially medieval form enjoyed a long and fruitful life well into modernity. Part IV, on political economy, shows how questions about the regulation and organization of the material welfare of the members of the political community constituted a widespread and persistent theme of political thought from the twelfth century onward. This claim stands in marked contrast to the standard view of the Latin Middle Ages as highly moralistic, if not ascetic, in its general attitude toward questions of economic exchange and physical improvement. On his journey to God, man needs bodily sustenance as well as spiritual guidance. Moreover, because that journey is not, by most men, undertaken alone but as members of societies, part of their spiritual guidance must relate to the means of their corporeal existence. Thus, from the High Middle Ages onward, political theorists recognized that one of the indispensable roles of government was the promotion of the material well-being of the populace, alongside moral and religious ends. This constituted, indeed, one of the principal bequests of medieval European political thought to its modern heirs. By way of a coda, the concluding set of chapters in Part V investigates several examples of the uses of medieval themes by more modern authors. I start with John Fortescue’s economic nationalism at the end of the fifteenth century, and move through Machiavelli and various seventeenthcentury English writers, closing with Hegel’s effort to revive significant features of medieval political life as a remedy for some of the discontents of the modern liberal and capitalist order. This part illustrates the large variety of ways in which medieval ideas might shape and impact modern thought, stressing the diversity of receptions found during later times. The modern audience for medieval thought proves as broad and also as capacious as do the ideas contained in medieval texts themselves. Beyond their specific contributions to the expanding literature on medieval political ideas and discourse, the studies contained in this volume are meant to alert political theorists to the many exciting prospects afforded by study of the Latin Middle Ages. The latter, indeed, has impelled much of my work as a political theorist, in which role, as Fasolt has observed, I have “been especially active in drawing medieval subjects to modernists’ attention.”28 I believe that it is possible to achieve this goal without plead-

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ing for full-blown anachronism or for a return to a problematic “perennial ideas” approach to intellectual inquiry. It is necessary to acknowledge the pastness of the Middle Ages in relation to modern and postmodern concerns. Likewise, we should heed Fasolt’s pointed caution against the recent scholarly tendency (which he associates with Tierney and Pennington) to “praise medieval people for being just as enlightened as modern people.”29 While I doubt that the present book will satisfy the historiographical hardliners on either side of the question about the medieval/modern divide (and it may well infuriate both), I hope that my plea for moderation, supported by myriad examples of why a nuanced approach to interpretation is necessary and fruitful, will find a receptive audience among those who are prepared to read the historical record in its own terms, not on the basis of a fixed schema. On the whole, I seek to protect against a most egregious kind of forgetting—albeit a loss of memory encouraged by the conceits of the Renaissance and of modernity in general—occasioned by the erasure of a millennium of Western culture and thought from our historical memories. Such a lacuna does not mean that the Latin Middle Ages lacks impact upon us: it is present, although subterranean, in the written record of civilization of which Janet Coleman speaks. If we refrain from showing any conscious regard for the Middle Ages, however, we ignore (at our real peril) some of the main defining elements of our intellectual inheritance. To incorporate sensitivity to the theoretical complexities of the Latin Middle Ages into the study of Western political thought neither glorifies the medieval past nor yields to the cries of cultural conservatives. History is not a shackle, just as it is not the fount of all wisdom. To forget moments of our intellectual history because they cannot be made immediately relevant to the present— or indeed to render them relevant by wrenching them from their historical situation—denies the manifold ways in which contemporary political paradigms and discourses have emerged and been built up over the millennia. This is a lesson of which scholars in many fields—political theorists, philosophers, and even some historians—seem increasingly to need reminder.

28. Ibid., 241, n. 13. 29. Constantin Fasolt, “Sovereignty and Heresy,” in Max Reinhard, ed., Infinite Boundaries: Order, Disorder and Reorder in Early Modern German Culture (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998), 383, n. 4.

Pa rt I

Historiographies of the Early European Tradition Continuity and Change

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o r s t u d e n t s o f m e d i e va l political thought who worked during the second half of the twentieth century, it was impossible to escape the influence of the doyen of that field, the Cambridge University professor of medieval history Walter Ullmann.1 A generation ago, Ullmann was ubiquitous. Yet the reputation of Ullmann (who died in 1983) has undergone a precipitous decline, to the point that now he is all but invisible. As of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Ullmann’s voluminous writings are almost entirely out of print.2 It is indeed remarkable that a defining figure of twentieth-century medieval studies should disappear from the scholarly scene at a rate of speed that is truly breathtaking. During the 1960s, it would have been nearly unthinkable to write about medieval legal, political, and social thought without substantial reliance upon and reference to Ullmann’s erudition. By the early 1980s, when J. H. Burns prepared his introduction to the Cambridge History of Me1. The initial impetus for this chapter was an observation about Ullmann’s fate I heard twice (and independently) during the 2001 Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, Michigan—made once by James Muldoon and again by Francis Oakley. For those unfamiliar with Ullmann, a place to start is the forward and bibliography contained in Brian Tierney and Peter Linehan, eds., Authority and Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government Presented to Walter Ullmann on His Seventieth Birthday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), vii–viiii, 257–74. 2. One of Ullmann’s Variorum Collected Studies Series volumes remains available, according to the online Books in Print, along with a German edition of A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages; several more of Ullmann’s works can be obtained from Books on Demand.

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dieval Political Thought—which did not, however, see the light of print until 1988—Ullmann was already classed with Otto von Gierke and the Carlyle brothers as magisterial but passé figures.3 I do not propose to offer any definitive explanation of this state of affairs, although I have heard several offered in recent times. Many scholars probably know some of the reasons why Ullmann came to be discarded. His difficult personality apparently alienated many of his own research students; his increasingly rigid style of interpretation made it difficult to extend research beyond the famous fixed paradigm he constructed; his tendency in his later years to find creative new ways to repeat himself was surely maddening. I also suspect that the larger political context of the waning of cold war rhetoric—and eventually, the end of the cold war itself—may have had some impact on Ullmann’s declining status, especially among those who did not read him carefully to start with. Doubtless, other plausible explanations for Ullmann’s vanishing act may be adduced. Before meditating on the legacy of Walter Ullmann as a scholar, it may be necessary to offer some preliminary observations about the course of his career. His publications from the 1940s, such as his book on Lucas de Penna and his Maitland lectures (published as Medieval Papalism), live up to the highest standards of rigorous scholarly inquiry.4 In particular, Ullmann worked out the main elements of one of his pet themes, namely, how legal ideas shaped the central trends of medieval political thought. The scholarship in these early works is meticulous, and although some of it has clearly been superceded in the ordinary course of academic progress, what he wrote remains worthy of attention. I see little inkling in this first phase of his career of the later Ullmann. By contrast, it is clear that by the middle 1950s, Ullmann had turned to the textbookish simplifications for which he became well known and eventually notorious. The “hierocratic thesis” gets fleshed out in The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (1955) 3. J. H. Burns, “Introduction,” in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4–6. On the connection between these three figures, and especially Ullmann and Gierke, see Antony Black, “Editor’s Introduction” to Otto von Gierke, Community in Historical Perspective, ed. Antony Black, trans. Mary Fischer (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1991), xxix. Some further context for Ullmann is provided by Francisco Bertelloni, “Die Entmicklung der Historiographie des Mittelalterichen Politischen Denkens in den Letzten Hundert Jahren,” in Ruedi Imbach and Alfonso Majierù, eds., Gli studi di filosofia medievale fra otto e novecento (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1991), 209–31. 4. Walter Ullmann, The Medieval Idea of Law as Represented by Lucas de Penna: A Study in Fourteenth Century Legal Scholarship (London: Methuen, 1946) and Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists (London: Methuen, 1949).

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and the full contrast between “ascending” and “descending” models of authority debuts in Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages.5 By the time Ullmann produced his widely read and influential A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages, published by Penguin in 1965 and reprinted many times, the fundamentals of his interpretation were well established.6 The ensuing years until his death were to witness numerous additional books, but few novel ideas and instead increasingly shrill restatements of already familiar views. The intellectual arc of Ullmann’s scholarly career, then, might lead one to expect mainly a catalogue of discredited ideas. In fact, however, this conclusion is not fully justified. While some of his major teachings have indeed been demolished, his impact lingers in less obvious, but equally important, ways. Thus, any death notice for Ullmann’s historiography of early European political thought, while it may yet prove to be necessary, is presently premature. In the current chapter, I shall defend this claim. But before I do so, it may be useful to identify the elements in Ullmann’s scholarship that have been already laid to rest. I have in mind two of Ullmann’s better known large “theses”: first, the modeling of the entire sweep of medieval thought as a conflict between descending or hierocratic or theocratic and ascending or populist conceptions of power; and second, the treatment of the mid-thirteenth century introduction of Aristotle’s Politics as a watershed in medieval political philosophy that directly produced the transformation to modernity. For those who have not been exposed to the weight of Ullmann’s scholarship, it will be helpful first to recount these two teachings prior to explaining the reasons for their ultimate rejection. According to Ullmann, rulers during the Middle Ages claimed for themselves, and generally conducted themselves on the basis of, theocratic and hierocratic authority. “The theocratic king,” he said, “so far from belonging to the people, stood in principle and in his government outside and above the people....... All power came ‘from above’ to the king, who transmitted parts of it ‘downwards.’”7 The authority of the ruler, in other words, descended from God through him. Ullmann did not view this thesis as merely ideological; on the contrary, hierocratic doctrine was implemented by medi5. Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1955) and Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1961). 6. Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965) and reprinted under the title Medieval Political Thought. 7. Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics, 128, 130.

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eval royal governments and accepted by their subjects as the basis of legitimacy. In turn, several implications followed from the fundamental thesis. First, no subject possessed “any right against the king,” since the royal head alone was the ultimate bearer of authority.8 Second, the monarch was the sole and authoritative judge of the public good and utility: “The theocratic ruler alone was considered to be in a position to determine what was required to promote the public weal.”9 Finally, participants in royal administration held no jurisdiction independent of the king because “the power of all hierarchically lower-placed officers could eventually be traced back to the royal origin.”10 Ullmann admits that the diffusion of the descending model was not uniform throughout Europe—establishing itself more firmly in France, for instance, than in either England or Italy—yet he asserts that its marks are to be found in every region.11 Standing alongside the descending doctrine is a conception of power that is diametrically opposed to it, namely, the ascending thesis. On this contrasting view, the authority of government arises from a grant of the people, in whom ultimate authority resides and whose will limits the independence of rulers. Ullmann claimed that the sources of this idea during the Middle Ages varied widely. One was feudalism, which conceived the king as legally bound to seek the “counsel and aid” of his nobles in all matters touching upon the common needs of the realm. In this regard, the relation between the ruler and his people—or at any rate, those of aristocratic birth—took on a noticeably contractual cast: the latter cooperate on condition of their consultation about and consent to the king’s enterprises. Consequently, Ullmann noted, “The feudal function of the king provided the only platform on which a law—and hence government—could be conceived to which he himself was subjected.”12 The second element of the ascending theme in the Middle Ages derived from the historical soil of local public associations, such as guilds, villages, urban communes, and religious orders. Developments on the lower rungs of society put into practice the populist themes of communal consent, limited government, and participatory citizenship. While these “populist manifestations on the lower and lowest levels of medieval society” were “harmless and not influential,” they nonetheless enlivened the idea that government arises from a mandate from the masses.13 Finally, and most importantly for Ullmann, the ascending thesis was invigorated by the translation and circulation af8. Ibid., 131. 10. Ibid., 135. 12. Ibid., 152.

9. Ibid., 134. 11. See ibid., 210–11. 13. Ibid., 24.

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ter about 1250 of Aristotle’s Politics, the naturalistic and populist doctrines of which confirmed previous expressions of ascending thought and legitimated a nonhierocratic vision of political order. According to Ullmann, “The influence of Aristotle from the second half of the thirteenth century onwards wrought a transmutation in thought that amounts to a conceptual revolution.”14 Specifically, the Politics revealed to the Middle Ages the fundamentally natural ends and purposes of human society, the citizen as an active participant in politics, and the urban community as the basic building block or unit of human association. Moreover, Aristotle upheld the principle that political philosophy itself constituted a distinct discipline, with its own unique vocabulary, independent of theological considerations and worthy in its own right for the sake of human happiness. All of these Aristotelian notions were intellectually hostile to long-maintained Christian attitudes toward the foundations of earthly political life. Ullmann presented these theses as an historical narrative of alternation. In the era of the Roman Republic, and among the Germanic tribes of northern Europe, the ascending model predominated. But as these two sociopolitical cultures fused, and came under the sway of the Christian religion and church, the descending conception spread to the point of achieving hegemony in the European society of the early Middle Ages. To be sure, the ascending theme did not entirely disappear: feudal and popular manifestations maintained it in muted form throughout the medieval period. But the main stimulus for the replacement of the hierocratic with the populist perspective in the later Middle Ages was the reintroduction of Aristotelian political theory. Ullmann’s account of the transformation of the political world of medieval Europe is in an important sense idealistic, that is, idea-driven: feudalism and local associations may have prepared the ground for Aristotle’s reception, but it was the “new” Aristotelian teachings about the state that directly produced “the supercession of the descending by the ascending theme.”15 The Philosopher “caused the conceptual revolution” through which hierocratic models of society and government were displaced. In turn, this overcoming of the theocratic doctrine after 1250 ushers in modernity for Ullmann: “In fact and in theory the Aristotelian avalanche in the thirteenth century marks the watershed between the Middle Ages and the modern period.”16 Ullmann’s historiography thus directly challenges the customary picture of the European Renaissance and Refor14. Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages, 159. 15. Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics, 24. 16. Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages, 159.

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mation as affording the decisive chronological break with “the Dark Ages.” The salient themes of modern social thought and institutions, already implicit in the populism of feudalism and voluntary local groupings, were rendered explicit and compelling by the Aristotelian revolution. The bases of modern public life—constitutional, democratic, naturalistic—may be found lurking in the intellectual terrain of medieval Europe. The broad contours of Ullmann’s interpretive edifice have long since been definitively demolished. In 1973, Francis Oakley published “Celestial Hierarchies Revisited,” a sweeping critique of Ullmann that appeared in Past and Present.17 Oakley effectively destroyed the ascending/descending framework that Ullmann had posited as the key means of organizing political thought and practice during the Middle Ages. Oakley also challenged many of the details of Ullmann’s readings of figures and texts central to the validation of his larger interpretive project. Oakley, whose wit and intelligence are always most penetrating when he is engaged in critique of other scholars, produced a tour-de-force that defies summary. It is not too great an exaggeration to say that the rapid decline of Ullmann’s fortunes during the last three decades can be traced quite directly to Oakley’s article. While Ullmann’s work continued to be cited for some years following Oakley’s attack, reliance upon his ascending/descending scheme became increasingly reserved and qualified among scholars, who often made reference to the caveats noted in “Celestial Hierarchies Revisited.” Following in Oakley’s wake, other scholars commenced a more or less systematic reappraisal of Ullmann’s leading hypotheses. Some research demonstrated how Aristotle was appropriated by medieval thinkers with equal or greater force as a proponent of absolutistic monarchy, papal as well as secular. Hence, there was nothing intrinsically “populist” about Aristotle or the medieval interpretation of him. Other scholars—myself included—showed how the circulation of the Politics did not induce the “conceptual revolution” posited by Ullmann, but instead reconfirmed and reinforced doctrines that were widely known and employed before the middle of the thirteenth century.18 Finally, additional research revealed that the alleged philosophical incommensurability between the ascending and the descending schemes did 17. Francis Oakley, “Celestial Hierarchies Revisited: Walter Ullmann’s Vision of Medieval Politics,” Past and Present 60 (1973): 3–48. 18. Cary J. Nederman, “Nature, Sin and the Origins of Society: The Ciceronian Tradition in Medieval Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (January–March 1988): 3–26, and “Aristotelianism and the Origins of ‘Political Science’ in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (April–June 1991): 179–94.

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not correspond to the actual writings and statements of many medieval authors. Thus, the elements of Ullmann’s framework that were most provocative and attracted the greatest attention may safely be declared dead and buried among serious scholars. By 1992, Antony Black was able to declare the ascending/descending model “simplistic,” calling it the kind of generalization “that would be laughed at by specialists in other fields.”19 So why did I claim earlier that much remains alive that derives from Ullmann’s thought? Permit me to enumerate a few contributions of Ullmann that persist today (for good or for ill). One of the main features of Ullmann’s general historiographical outlook was his insistence upon an essential continuity of Western political thought commencing in circa 1250: pace a once-dominant trend of scholarship, modernity was not a radical break with the past, via the humanism of the Renaissance or the religious pluralism of the Reformation. Rather, the primary lessons of modern political writing resonated with the doctrines of the later Middle Ages. At present, Ullmann’s general conclusion represents a view to which historians of Western political thought widely subscribe. In the introduction to the Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, J. H. Burns eloquently summarizes this trend: “Neither humanism nor Protestantism—to say nothing of the continuing vitality of other intellectual and spiritual traditions—retains in recent historiography quite the appearance it formerly had. This is in part a result of lengthening the chronological perspectives, of recognizing the significance of what might be called protohumanism and of earlier instances of the genus ‘renaissance’; or of acknowledging that the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation are themselves part of a much longer ‘age of reform’ in western Christendom.”20 Walter Ullmann could hardly have made the point more succinctly. The emphasis on continuity that he pioneered is now everywhere on display. The words of Brian Tierney, widely regarded to be the most influential historian of medieval political ideas of the last generation in the English-speaking world, may suffice: “It is impossible really to understand the growth of Western constitutional thought ..... unless we consider the whole period from 1150 to 1650 as a single era of essentially continuous development.”21 Or more 19. Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12. 20. J. H. Burns, “Introduction,” in J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3. 21. Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1.

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briefly still: “Seventeenth-century writers were often thinking medieval thoughts,”22 a claim that Tierney supports with reference to consent, legitimation, rights, representation, sovereignty, and a host of other political concepts. Tierney, who wrote his first major book, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory (published in 1955), as a thesis under Ullmann’s supervision, must be credited with keeping alive two other aspects of his supervisor’s scholarship: one substantive, the other methodological. One of Tierney’s best known views is the claim that the roots of modern constitutionalism may be traced, via the conciliarism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to lessons derived from canon law. (This is a position, of course, to which many others, such as Oakley, James Muldoon, and Kenneth Pennington, also subscribe.)23 It perhaps needs to be remembered, however, that this idea was pioneered by Ullmann himself in the appendix to his 1948 book The Origins of the Great Schism.24 Focusing on Cardinal Zabarella, who would also be a pivotal figure in Tierney’s book, Ullmann demonstrated how Zabarella’s training as a canon lawyer shaped his conciliar commitments, so that the cardinal derived “his theory of the superiority of the Council..... through interpretations of canon law by thirteenthcentury canonists.”25 Ullmann’s remarkable observation puts his vision of conciliarism at a distance from the Carlyles, John Neville Figgis, Charles McIlwain, and others who had written on the topic: for him, as for later scholars, conciliar theory arose not as an external and heretical challenge to papal authority but as an entirely orthodox expression of long-standing teachings about ecclesiology. Hence, a major component of the current historiography of European political ideas has definite roots in Ullmann’s scholarship. A second living dimension of Ullmann’s legacy that resonates in Tierney (and others) concerns the reduction of historically complex patterns of intellectual continuity and change to a simplistic and rigid scheme of interpretation. Certainly, this reductionism constitutes one of the most bothersome features of the ascending/descending model, in the sense that it eliminates theoretical nuance and ambiguity, filters out authors who do 22. Ibid., 105. 23. Most recently, see Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 24. Walter Ullmann, The Origins of the Great Schism: A Study in Fourteenth-Century Ecclesiastical History (London: Methuen, 1948), 191–231. 25. Ibid., 202.

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not fit the structure, and imposes cramped interpretations upon texts. Yet it seems to me that Tierney and some of his fellow scholars follow the same sort of reductionist path, inasmuch as they ascribe the main contributions of medieval thought to modern times—including rights, constitutionalism, and rule of law—to a single and exclusive source: the doctrines of high medieval jurists (especially canonists). Given this master narrative, nonjuristic authors are judged by the yardstick of their dependence upon legal texts and ideas. The importance or irrelevance of a given medieval writing is evaluated according to the measure of reliance: John of Paris, or Marsiglio of Padua, or William of Ockham is significant in the historical record solely because he incorporates legal materials and thus fits the preexisting scheme. Such an approach imposes artificial and forced interpretations upon texts just as surely as did Ullmann’s discredited dualistic model. Tierney and those who share his framework thus seem susceptible to the identical charge of a priorism that Oakley and other scholars once leveled against Ullmann. The Tierneyite school would be well admonished to heed the warning (in the spirit of Fustel de Coulanges) made by Oakley about Ullmann, namely, that he succumbs to “the dangers of anachronism, of historical narcissism, of finding their own attitudes reflected all too readily in those of ancient peoples whose modes of thought were in reality fundamentally alien to theirs.”26 This hermeneutic tendency associated with Ullmann lives on. Perhaps the most popular manifestation of Ullmann’s legacy is one that has received, to my knowledge, no previous attention. Several members of the British comedy troupe Monty Python were students at Cambridge or Oxford during the 1960s and two of them specialized in the subject of medieval studies.27 Whether they heard Ullmann lecture, or merely read one or more of his then-ubiquitous books, they evidently were exposed to his ascending/descending model and eventually incorporated it into one of the most famous scenes of their 1974 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. From what origin other than the magisterial Walter Ullmann might have arisen the following dialogue?

26. Oakley, “Celestial Hierarchies Revisited,” 47. 27. Terry Jones, of course, continues to research and publish as an independent scholar of late medieval English literature; see Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London: Methuen, 1985).

12  h is t o r i o g r ap h i e s o f t h e e a r ly t r a d i t i o n arthur: I am your king. old woman: Well, I didn’t vote for you. arthur: You don’t vote for kings. old woman: Well, how did you become king, then? arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in purest shimmering samite, held Excalibur aloft from the bosom of the waters to signify that by Divine Providence ..... I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur ..... that is why I am your king. dennis the peasant: Look, strange women lying on their backs in ponds handing over swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. arthur: Be quiet! dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you. arthur: Shut up! dennis: I mean, if I went around saying I was an Emperor because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away. arthur: Shut up, will you. Shut up! dennis: Ah! Now, we see the violence inherent in the system. Come see the violence inherent in the system. Help, help, I’m being repressed!28

I can think of no more fitting memorialization of Walter Ullmann’s vision of medieval political thought than this tribute by the Pythons. The idea of which Ullmann ultimately failed to convince the scholarly community enjoys a far more robust and vital existence at the cinemas and on the video screens of the world than in academic texts. And so, this feature of Ullmann’s scholarship, academically deceased though it is, is perhaps far more alive than most of us could possibly dream for our own intellectual visions. 28. Monty Python and the Holy Grail [screenplay final draft] (London: Methuen, 1977), 9–11.



2

Q u e n t in S k inn e r ’s S t at e Historical Methodology and the Formation of a European Tradition



h e e x t e n t to which the work of Quentin Skinner, particular ly following publication of The Foundations of Modern Politi cal Thought,1 has captured the attention and imagination of political theorists is little short of remarkable. As Kari Palonen recently commented, “Skinner’s international reputation is due above all to his two volume book The Foundations.......”2 Seldom has a scholarly endeavor generated such extensive dissection as the Foundations—a function, no doubt, of the breadth and scope of its intellectual vision. Briefly, the Foundations concentrates upon three aims: first, to narrate the development of early modern political thought through its late medieval background; second, to illustrate Skinner’s “intentional” method of historical inquiry, through which linguistic conventions and ideologies become the central focus for the study of political ideas; and third, to account for the appearance in sixteenth-century Europe of a demonstrably modern concept of the state.3 In light of the vast range of materi1. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); henceforth cited as Foundations. 2. Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (Oxford: Polity Press, 2003), 61. A volume assessing the magnitude of Skinner’s accomplishment has lately been published by Annabel Brett and James Tully, with Holly HamiltonBleakley, eds., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3. Skinner, Foundations, 1: ix–xvi.

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als that Skinner is compelled by his goals to address, it is hardly surprising that the Foundations failed to generate much consensus among those who have offered evaluations of its merits. Some have lauded Skinner’s interpretive skill with the texts, authors, and problems treated by the Foundations, while others have declared his analyses unoriginal, superficial, and even deceptive. Some have praised the rigor of the Foundations, while others have maintained that many of its failings may be attributed to Skinner’s adherence to precisely these rigid strictures of method.4 Considered as a whole, the critical literature inspired by the Foundations speaks not in a single tongue, but with a confusion of voices. Yet with regard to one aspect of the Foundations at least, there appears to be consensus. Skinner’s critics have expressed virtually unanimous suspicion that in his attempt to elucidate the formation of a modern theory of the state, he moved away from the methodological principles he espoused, in both the Foundations and his earlier writings. “In the Foundations,” Kenneth Minogue observes, “Skinner takes us through the acts and responses of Europeans over several centuries, only to arrive at a point outside of history when we have acquired an unhistorical something called ‘the modern concept of the state.’ Suddenly at this point, we move into analysis and schema, and Skinner has abandoned history.”5 Antony Black similarly concluded that “Skinner himself departs from his strictly contextual approach when he says that sixteenth-century theories of the state ..... were long-standing ‘acquisitions,’ taken up by later thinkers.”6 For Michael Oakeshott also the identification of the state as a theoretical construct in the Foundations is “unhistorical” and “anachronistic,”7 while Ian Shapiro maintained that Skinner’s treatment of the state “ignores” the intentionalist historical methodology that he had previously defended.8 Regardless 4. Essentially positive reviews of the Foundations include those by Julian Franklin in Political Theory 7 (November 1979): 552–58; Ralph Giesey in Renaissance Quarterly 33 (Spring 1980): 60–62; S. T. Holmes in American Political Science Review 73 (1979): 1133–35; and John Pocock in Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 3 (Autumn 1979): 95–113. Stern criticism of the Foundations is offered by Antony Black in Political Studies 28 (1979): 451–57; Donald Kelley in Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 663–73; Cary J. Nederman in Renaissance and Reformation 17 (1981): 229–33; Michael Oakeshott in Historical Journal 23 (1980): 449–53; and Judith Shklar in Political Theory 7 (November 1979): 449–52. 5. K. R. Minogue, “Method in Intellectual History: Quentin Skinner’s Foundations,” Philosophy 56 (October 1981): 543. 6. Black review in Political Studies, 454. 7. Oakeshott review in Historical Journal, 452. 8. Ian Shapiro, “Realism in the Study of the History of Ideas,” History of Political Thought 3 (Winter 1982): 548.

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of whether they generally applaud or condemn Skinner, these commentators (and others besides)9 agree that the Foundations contains a tension between its emphasis on the “theme” of the state and the methodological precepts it upholds. In the present chapter, I propose a different evaluation of Skinner’s achievement. First, I demonstrate that Skinner’s description of the emergence of the concept of the state in the Foundations is in fact fully consistent with his long-standing methodological precepts. But second, I indicate how this consistency imposes upon Skinner an impoverished view of the historical basis for any coherent tradition of discourse such as that of the modern state. Accordingly, I suggest some correctives to Skinner that allow us to address theoretical traditions in a more intelligible relation to the actual contours of historical practice. Whereas most critics of the Foundations would argue that the concept of the state and analogous persistent traditions of discourse resist historical analysis, it is my contention that we must revise our view of the manner in which history is relevant to the study of such traditions of political thought. Skinner’s claim in the Foundations to have produced “a history of political thought with a genuinely historical character”10 stems from his previous investigations into the issues posed by the connections between political theory and action. To this inquiry, Skinner imported many of the tools provided by linguistic analysis and literary hermeneutics. Skinner’s methodological scheme rests on the principle that an adequate historical account of any text of political theory may be given just by recovering the author’s intention (or intended meaning) in writing. In turn, Skinner says that we locate a theorist’s intention (what he was doing)11 by setting his text within the context of the prevailing ideological conventions and debates of his time. As a result, Skinner asserts that the “history of political theory” must “be written essentially as a history of ideologies.” Skinner 9. Others who have pointed to the same problem include D. E. G. Boucher, “On Shklar’s and Franklin’s Reviews of Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,” Political Theory 8 (August 1980): 407, and “New Histories of Political Thought for Old?” Political Studies 31 (1983): 118; and John Gunnell, “Interpretation and the History of Political Theory: Apology and Epistemology,” American Political Science Review 76 (June 1982): 325. 10. Skinner, Foundations, 1: xi. 11. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 5–7, discusses the connection between saying and doing. Although Skinner has republished this and his other main methodological essays as volume 1 of Visions of Politics: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), I will refer to the original versions of these papers.

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construes “ideology” as “the normative vocabulary available to any given agent for the description of his political behavior,” from which the theorist draws his language by virtue of his status as a social and political actor.12 Ideology thus bridges the realms of political theory and political practice, and constitutes the primary object of study for the historian of political thought. A salient feature of Skinner’s methodological statements has been rejection of the usual techniques of the intellectual historian. Skinner is a stern critic of the “anachronism” and “reification” that result from the attempt to identify “perennial problems” or to describe the evolution of an “idea.”13 He insists that “there simply are no perennial problems,” so that “it must be a mistake even to try ..... to write histories of ideas tracing the morphology of a given concept over time.”14 Skinner renounces these contrivances of the intellectual historian on the grounds that they all rest on a crucial fallacy: that an “agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done.”15 A text cannot truly mean anything that its author himself could not have intended it to mean. This point may seem trivial. But as Skinner has amply documented, much of the scholarship that passes for the “history of political theory” has disregarded exactly the requirement that any reading of a text be historically credible as well as exegetically plausible.16 How, according to Skinner, is the historian to establish the actual meaning, or at least the range of possible meanings, of a statement or text? Skinner’s dismissal of any and all traditions, that is, of “ideas” whose “essential meaning” remains “the same” over a long stretch of time,17 leads him to confine meaning to a narrow boundary, both linguistically and historically. In a remark that has often been quoted, Skinner declares that in every instance political language “is inescapably the embodiment of a particular intention, on a particular occasion, addressed to the solution of a particular problem, and thus specific to its situation in a way that it can only be naive to try to transcend.”18 This interpretive precept lies at the 12. Skinner, Foundations, 1: xiii. 13. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” 8, 11. 14. Ibid., 50, 48. 15. Ibid., 28. 16. Quentin Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” Political Theory 2 (August 1974): 279. 17. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” 37. 18. Ibid., 50.

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core of Skinner’s method and he has sought to illustrate it through his detailed analyses of various texts and issues. A series of articles on Hobbes’s Leviathan offers a cogent application of the historical method Skinner has devised. Skinner views the theory of obligation in the Leviathan as an adaptation, refinement, and extension of an ideological debate immediately present to him. The composition of the Leviathan, he points out, coincided with the so-called Engagement Controversy that occurred during the English Civil War.19 The “Controversy” was formed out of the partisan conflict over the grounds of obligation to government, which arose from the need of political agents of Presbyterian and Royalist persuasion to legitimize a shift in allegiance from the English Crown to the de facto authority of the Commonwealth. The aim of the participants in the debate (known as “engagers” for their advocacy of “engagement” to the Commonwealth) was to convince “the Presbyterians and even the Royalists of their duty to obey the new government.”20 Ultimately, their arguments produced the assertion of the right of a de facto power to rule over loyal subjects by virtue of conquest. In turn, Skinner claims that this controversy not only provided Hobbes with significant primary source materials, but also constituted the most appropriate context for grasping Hobbes’s intentions in composing the Leviathan. Hobbes “intended his great work precisely as a contribution to the existing debate around the rights of de facto powers.” Indeed, the main arguments of the Leviathan cannot even be seen as “particularly novel or original.”21 In this instance, the consistency of method and application is beyond doubt; Skinner has assimilated the Leviathan to a particularized intention, occasion, and problem in just the fashion he elsewhere advocates. It should be stressed that in both his methodological and his substantive work Skinner retains a commitment to an implicit conception of history imbedded in his insistence on the strict specificity of intentions, occasions, and problems. In principle and in practice, Skinner’s approach requires a direct correspondence between an ideological debate or event and a political theory or idea, because theory is wholly concerned with ex19. The details of the debate are summarized by Skinner in “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660 (London: Archon Books, 1972), 79–98; and “The Context of Hobbes’ Theory of Political Obligation,” in Maurice Cranston and R. S. Peters, eds., Hobbes and Rousseau (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Doubleday, 1972), 109–42. 20. Skinner, “Conquest and Consent,” 80. 21. Ibid., 97.

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hibiting a legitimate basis for a definite action or set of actions.22 No matter how abstract or general a theorist’s language and concepts, his project is still located essentially within the narrow context of tangible political occurrences and ideological controversies. As a corollary to this emphasis on specificity, Skinner views history itself as a chain of atomized historical “units” extended without interconnection across time. Skinner’s history is episodic, composed of isolated events and conflicts (like the “Engagement Controversy”), multiplied and strung along a chronological scale. To an extent, Joseph Femia has already recognized Skinner’s implicit atomization of history: “Skinner writes the history of political thought as if it were merely a series of disconnected intellectual events. But if every historical utterance and action is a unique event, historical inquiry itself becomes impossible....... If historical events are sui generis, then we cannot write history; we can only pile up documents.”23 But even Femia insufficiently appreciates how crucial an atomized history is to Skinner’s methodology. Indeed, the entire notion of an author’s intention, at least on Skinner’s treatment, depends upon the historian’s ability to relate it to some well-defined occurrence. Similarly, the conception of history as a series of unrelated episodes allows Skinner to reject the existence of “determinate” ideas “to which various writers contribute,”24 insofar as the reference points of political language and concepts are irredeemably altered from one momentary context to another. Thus, Skinner’s atomized history forms neither an arbitrary nor a contingent aspect of his approach to historical inquiry. By construing history solely in terms of particularized and unconnected events, and by assigning the historical dimension of theory wholly to these isolated episodes, Skinner purports to detect the possible meanings that an author might have intended to convey. It might seem correct, then, to charge that Skinner introduces into The Foundations of Modern Political Thought an unhistorical (in his sense) element when he seeks “to indicate something of the process by which the modern concept of the State came to be formed.”25 Here we encounter 22. Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” 298. 23. Joseph V. Femia, “An Historicist Critique of ‘Revisionist’ Methods for Studying the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 20 (1981): 127. 24. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” 38. 25. Skinner, Foundations, 1: ix. As Skinner remarks in the final sentence of the Foundations, “With this analysis of the State as an omnipotent yet impersonal power, we may be said to enter the modern world: the modern theory of the State remains to be constructed, but its foundations are now complete” (ibid., 2: 358).

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the source of the allegation that the Foundations embraces an unresolved tension. On the one hand, at the heart of Skinner’s investigations in the Foundations lies the argument that the evolution of political thought between 1300 and 1600 was inextricably linked to the emergence of “the idea that there is a separate legal and constitutional order, that of the State,” conceived as “the basis of government” and “the sole source of law and legitimate force within its own territory, and ..... the sole appropriate object of its citizens’ allegiance.”26 In effect, a “decisive shift” occurs for Skinner with the progressive reorientation of political theory away from the ideal of personal monarchic rule and toward the recognition of an administrative entity distinct from its head. Echoing the lesson of Walter Ullmann, Skinner asserts that this shift commenced with the recovery of Aristotle’s Politics at the end of the thirteenth century and was completed only in the sixteenth century when the vocabulary of the state proper (status) replaced in common parlance that of the medieval kingdom (regnum) and the corporation (universitas). Skinner would therefore appear to maintain that a sort of “thematic unity” governed the course of European political writing over a period of more than three hundred years. Yet, on the other hand, the precepts of Skinner’s approach demand that political concepts and texts be “historiodegradable: dissolvable into circumstance.”27 Since the modern idea of the state, which constitutes the focus of a continuous tradition, resists such episodic treatment, Skinner seems to have violated his own methodological code. It is little wonder that we hear the accusation that Skinner is at odds with himself regarding his treatment of the state as a theoretical construct in the Foundations. Nevertheless, to infer the existence of an irresolvable contradiction within the Foundations, the presence of which Skinner (with all his methodological acumen) was unaware, is to draw a hasty conclusion. In fact, Skinner himself speaks of “preconditions” provided by a set of otherwise unrelated intellectual events imbedded in quite narrowly conceived controversies. To seek these preconditions for the notion of the modern state requires the scholar to investigate totally unconnected occurrences spread in no special order throughout the late medieval and early modern periods. The principle that “the supreme authority within each independent regnum should be recognized as having no rivals within its territories,” for instance, arose from the early fourteenth century “dismissal of the legal and jurisdictional 26. Ibid., 1: x. 27. Minogue, “Method in Intellectual History,” 545.

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powers of the Church.”28 Similarly, the notion of the state as a secular entity “held to exist solely for political purposes” originated in the realization during the Religious Wars of the sixteenth century that “if there were to be any prospect of achieving civic peace, the powers of the State would have to be divorced from the duty to uphold any particular faith.”29 In short, each characteristic aspect of the modern concept of the state was devised incrementally, in isolation from the other components out of which the idea of the state was to be molded. Consequently, history in the Foundations remains essentially episodic, although Skinner is now addressing several particularized events instead of a single one. But not only is Skinner not concerned about the formation of the state as a historical phenomenon, it is thoroughly irrelevant to his argument how (or even whether) the state as a historical phenomenon was being formed. The historical factors that served as a catalyst for the theoretical preconditions for the modern notion of the state are treated by Skinner as scattered and unconnected. The “process” by which the theory itself was created stands in no relation to any actual, essential historical process. The intellectual elements that contributed to the founding of the state as a theoretical construct would have appeared, Skinner implies, regardless of the historical appearance of any political institution or system resembling the modern state itself. Still, we may be justified in asking, would these scattered elements have coalesced into a coherent theory without some minimal historical model or exemplar of the modern state? Here Skinner hints that France, England, and perhaps Spain provide the “material preconditions”—“a relatively unified central authority, an increasing apparatus of bureaucratic control, and a clearly defined set of national boundaries”—for the consolidation of various “intellectual preconditions” into the singular conceptual and linguistic construct of the state.30 Yet Skinner makes no effort to associate these “material preconditions” with specific ideological debates or controversies. Nor could he assimilate the “material” circumstances he identifies to any well-defined dispute. For centralization, bureaucratization, and territorial unification must be treated as long-term historical processes rather than as definite events. The actual formation of the state in early modern Europe, unlike one of Skinner’s historical episodes, necessarily involved a subtle and continuous development, characterized by a long series of occurrences that did have some essential interconnection. This fact is regularly ac28. Skinner, Foundations, 2: 351. 30. Ibid., 2: 354.

29. Ibid., 2: 352.

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knowledged by historians of all historiographical predilections. Perry Anderson describes the transformation of the medieval monarchy into the early modern absolutist state as “a protracted and difficult process of adaptation and conversion, across succeeding generations” necessitated by a “great, silent, structural force impelling a complete reorganization of feudal class power.”31 Joseph Strayer similarly concludes that the historian must study the whole period from 1100 to 1600 in order to account fully for the shift in loyalty from family, local community or religious organization to the state....... At the end of the process, subjects accept the idea that the interests of the state must prevail, that the preservation of the state is the highest social good. But the change is usually so gradual that the process is hard to document; it is impossible to say that at a certain point on the time scale loyalty to the state becomes the dominant loyalty.32

Although their reasons are very different, both Anderson and Strayer insist that the historical appearance of the modern state occurred neither suddenly nor as the result of a particular incident or set of events. Rather, centralization and the other crucial aspects of the development of sixteenthcentury states in Western Europe can only be fully comprehended when their origins are traced well back into the Middle Ages.33 The relationship between the modern state in theory and in practice thus cannot be reduced to several (or any number) of narrowly specified moments or episodes. So, in propounding his interpretation of the emergence of the modern idea of the state, Skinner becomes constrained by his own atomized conception of history. For the isolated intellectual “preconditions” to coalesce into an “analysis of the State as an omnipotent yet impersonal power,”34 the long-term historical process of state formation must be underway or have reached something of a culmination, as even Skinner tacitly admits. Yet because the Foundations remains dedicated to a conception of history as wholly composed of discrete ideological conflicts, Skinner is prevented from offering a truly historical account of the manner in which such dispersed “preconditions” were integrated into a coherent theoretical state 31. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), 47. 32. Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 9–10. 33. An excellent example of how these broad historical processes might be narrated is afforded by Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). 34. Skinner, Foundations, 2: 358.

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tradition unique to early modern Europe. In a sense, then, the widespread criticism of Skinner’s treatment of the “modern theory of the state” in the Foundations has merit. But this does not mean, as one might consequently assume, that the appearance of uniquely modern discourse about the state cannot be assimilated to history at all. The difficulty, on the contrary, lies not with historical interpretation generally, but with Skinner’s artificial and narrow vision of history. It should therefore be possible to specify corrective measures to Skinner’s approach that allow us to address the state tradition in a manner precluded by his method. To understand why authors conceptualized the state in its modern form at the time and place they did, it is necessary to investigate two factors. First, we must establish how the special historical qualities of the modern state coalesced as a result of the patterns of class relations, political institutions, property holding, and other relevant features of European society already beginning in medieval times. Second, we must integrate the intellectual antecedents of the notion of the modern state—the elements that Skinner takes to reflect scattered ideological debates—into this process of historical development. Taken together, these two spheres of inquiry help to explain why the supposedly unconnected intellectual preconditions of early modern state theory were retained and transmitted by thinkers in the decades and even centuries prior to their amalgamation. This approach to the modern tradition of the state does not require us to revert to the technique of tracing the self-contained history of a “determinate” idea in order to disclose the existence of “perennial” or “recurrent” issues. Rather, what is sought is the incorporation of a historical dimension within our very notion of an intellectual “tradition.”35 And the starting point for this rethinking of tradition must be the elaboration of our assumptions about history. Tradition-oriented interpretations of the history of political thought 35. This distinguishes my approach from the concept of tradition proposed by J. G. A. Pocock. For Pocock, whose fear of “reductionism” has long been apparent (see Politics, Language and Time [New York: Atheneum, 1971], 10, and his “Communication” in Political Theory 3 [August 1975]: 318), what is crucial is the “autonomy of the history of political language” (Politics, Language and Time, 13). As a consequence, when Pocock sets out to write “history” (as in The Machiavellian Moment), his “historical agents are players of language games. The contextual effort is not primarily one of identifying economic interests, or affective political connexions, or psychic motivations, but the recovery of linguistic conventions” (Mark Goldie, “Obligations, Utopias, and Their Historical Context,” Historical Journal 26 [1983]: 730). Pocock’s “traditionalism,” as the “history of abstraction” (Politics, Language and Time, 39, 40–41, 237– 39), is not very far removed from the customary “history of ideas” approach that Skinner has so effectively criticized.

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may be viable and valuable when the basis for the continuity of the tradition is taken to be the continuity of history itself. The historian of political ideas must acknowledge, in particular, that “historical social contexts are not separate, isolated, water tight compartments. Despite fundamental changes and disjunctions, there is always continuity in the form of a residue of the past in the present, of persistent social structures, institutions, arrangements, and patterns of human conduct.”36 If from the outset we understand history in this fashion, it becomes possible to speak of recurrent questions and issues presented to a theorist during any given age that are nevertheless historically constituted. A historically charged conception of “tradition” must, in the first place, rest on the recognition that political language and ideas are born and continue to exist as tools with which to confront problems raised by historical practice. Insofar as questions reappear to successive generations of theorists, even if they are answered quite differently, a tradition is formed and will persist until its historical source has evaporated. For example, the development of modern theories of the state may be described in terms of the historical displacement of the fragmented and particularized medieval organization of political power in favor of the entrenchment of public authority in a singular institutional body. This process continued to be problematic in various late medieval and early modern European locales until the hegemony of the state was itself firmly established—that is, until sometime after 1600. During the 1320s, Marsiglio of Padua sought to establish order among the various lords and corporate bodies competing for the primary loyalty of the populace by insisting upon superior obligations and jurisdiction. But Marsiglio is careful never to claim that lesser “intermediary” powers should be suppressed.37 In the sixteenth century, Bodin was still faced with such particularistic units of association and was pressed to reconcile them with the authority of territorial monarchic rule. Bodin, too, upholds the necessity of “intermediary” political bodies, as do late medieval and early modern European authors generally.38 But for Rousseau, working in the mideighteenth century, the suppression of particularism is viewed as a crucial precondition for social harmony. The political assumptions that unite 360.

36. Neal Wood, “The Social History of Political Theory,” Political Theory 6 (August 1978):

37. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor Pacis, ed. Richard Scholz (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1933), 1: 12. 38. Jean Bodin, The Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. Kenneth D. McRae (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), Book 4, chaps. 4–6.

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Marsiglio and Bodin are much more distant from Rousseau, writing in the shadow of fully formed modern states.39 As this example illustrates, historical developments apparent only over long periods of time can regulate traditions by posing recurrent issues in need of theoretical inspection and also by fixing the limits of those very traditions. A genuinely historical reading of a theoretical text must therefore transcend the author’s self-ascribed intention regarding his own activity. As Femia has acknowledged, “Because expressions may contain more than an agent is aware of, the analyst can never, in his quest for understanding, concentrate exclusively on the reconstruction of conscious purposes.”40 But we are thereby left with a difficulty that is largely obviated by an intentionalist approach such as Skinner’s. How is the historian of political thought to establish with precision the appropriate historical context for an author’s work? How do we know which historical processes and forces were of concern to a given text or thinker? How do we know what to include, and what to exclude, in a historical analysis of political theory? Any adequate response to these questions must begin by acknowledging that a theorist brings to the text a vast range of historically constituted principles, assumptions, and values, imbedded deep in his contemporary experience, which influences both the shape and the substance of his thought. Insofar as the elements of an author’s historical experience function as hidden premises, unexamined postulates buried far beneath his stated words and concepts, it becomes the primary task of the historian to uncover them and to relate them to a particular text or tradition. Consequently, the study of the history of political theory must aim at reconstituting the theorist’s subject matter, his historical world. What is required, in effect, is the integration of a constellation of available historical information—political, social, economic, intellectual, biographical— into a coherent picture of the setting in which a text was composed. The historian of political thought must therefore be apprised of the research of colleagues in other fields of historical study so as to reconstruct with the greatest accuracy the range of historical contexts relevant to a given theory.41 In this way, we are able to go beyond the generalized injunction 39. On the importance of these themes, see Ellen Wood, “The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 4 (Summer 1983): 294–98, 301–15. 40. Femia, “An Historicist Critique of ‘Revisionist’ Methods for Studying the History of Ideas,” 132. 41. A recommendation already proposed by Wood, in “The Social History of Political Theory,” 345–46, and Shapiro, in “Realism in the Study of the History of Ideas,” 578.

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to “be historical.” By familiarizing ourselves with the theorist’s historical world, we may begin to identify what problems might have been posed for theoretical inspection during his era. And it is for the attempted solutions to these problems that we must turn to the text or texts. The recognition that fourteenth-century European society was beset with conflict between privatized lordship and the emerging power of the centralized royal state, for example, facilitates a more thorough and precise insight into Marsiglio of Padua’s ordering of political units in a community and his doctrine of individualized consent to rulership.42 Furthermore, when a variety of authors over a period of time address the same problem(s), and especially when they do so within a shared linguistic or conceptual framework, it becomes possible to speak of a tradition. So, to continue the example, Marsiglio’s thought shares important features not only with his direct contemporaries, but also with historically distant authors, such as Bodin and the Huguenot constitutionalists, who confronted quite similar problems about relations between autonomous forms of political power, arising recurrently during the process through which the modern state crystallized.43 Note that his approach does not presume intention. Instead, it allows that the real or full significance of the “problems” that history presents may not have been consciously acknowledged by the theorist. Whether such an express realization in fact occurs does not matter, since it is unreasonable to ascribe to any person at any time a full measure of critical self-awareness about the assumptions imbedded in one’s experience of historical circumstances and conditions. In the study of past political thought, what counts is the historian’s discovery of the problems that may have been thrust upon and addressed by an historically located theorist in the very activity of theorizing about politics during a given age. Once these historical problems are identified, the hidden premises, assumptions, and experiences that led a thinker to articulate the theoretical perspective ultimately adopted begin to come into focus. In this way, the historian arrives at a text with more precise knowledge of the principles that its author utilized in writing, but which remained always unelaborated because they formed so common an element of daily existence as to be inconspicuous. “Historical problem” rather than “ideological/conventional intention” ought thus to be taken as the constitutive feature of the language, ideas, and texts that the historian of political thought investigates. 42. For the relevant passages from Marsiglio, see Defensor Pacis, 1: 12. 43. See Bettina Koch, Zur Dis-/Kontinuität mitttelelterlichen politischen Denkens in der neuzeitlichen politischen Theorie (Berlin: Duncker & Himblot, 2005), esp. 140–68.

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The methodological approach proposed at present does not implicitly attribute to the study of history the status of an objective “science.” Obviously, no form of historical investigation is utterly immune from the intellectual and ideological presumptions of its own age. Yet, in light of the tools and techniques afforded by modern historical scholarship, it requires no leap of faith to admit the possibility of minimizing the impact of one’s own immediate historical experiences and of increasing one’s understanding of a past era in depth and scope. Indeed, to assert the contrary is to place oneself under pain of historical solipsism. But the opinions and paradigms adopted by historians change and grow in response to historiographical criticism and factual discoveries. As a result of the refinement of historical concepts, and the general improvement of historical knowledge, one must be prepared to reexamine and revise interpretations of political texts and theories. Acknowledging the historicity of texts does not imply the discredited positivistic claim that there can be only one “true” reading of any treatise or doctrine. Rather, the study of the history of political theory, like all forms of historical scholarship, is a matter of degree. Some interpretations are bound to be more valid or more plausible than others when judged in historical terms.44 No scholar would dream of approaching Hobbes as though he were writing about the fifth-century Greek polis instead of the seventeenth-century state. What gives the thought of Hobbes, or any author, its unique contours is the specificity of the circumstances it confronts and the intellectual materials on which it draws. It is left to the historian of theory, relying on the available textual and historical evidence, to capture and identify the ways in which the theoretical ideas and principles of the past interacted with their surroundings. The study of the past can, if we allow it, build a bridge between the present and the future through which our own attitudes and values are reshaped. “Contextualizing” political theory should not mean that we reduce its classic or even minor texts to mere relics or fossils. On the contrary, truly historical interpretations of past theories and traditions should assist us in liberating ourselves from our own unelaborated premises and experiences and should generate critical self-reflection. For example, evaluation of the usefulness of the “state” as a category of political analysis and an object of political discourse currently is inseparable from a historical under44. Richard Ashcraft, “One Step Backward, Two Steps Forward: Reflections on Contemporary Political Theory,” in John S. Nelson, ed., What Should Political Theory Be Now? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 537 and passim.

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standing of the modern concept of the state. While the idea of the modern state has proven remarkably elastic,45 it cannot be stretched infinitely. Have the political, economic, and technical trends of recent times—such as superpower politics, multinational corporations, global terror networks, and intercontinental nuclear delivery capabilities—rendered the state in its modern incarnation dispensable and irrelevant? Or does the state remain a significant factor in the lives and behavior of political agents and a force with which political theorists (and political scientists generally) need to reckon? Any formulation of an answer to these questions already assumes that the respondent has adopted a view of what the modern state is (or ought to be) and how it functions (or ought to function) within the existing range of political institutions and concepts. In turn, the persuasiveness of one’s answers rests on identifying the features that lend the modern state its characteristic form. So far from deducing these factors out of philosophical thin air, they are to be found only through the historical study of the theory and practice of the state. Just in order to comprehend the relevance of the state to contemporary political investigation and reflection, we must come to terms with the historical dimensions of the modern state tradition. We today are faced with much of the intellectual and material “residue” of past thought and practice. Our own concepts and problems have been fixed by our inheritance. If we can discover what this “residue” meant in its earlier applications, we shall be better qualified to assess some of the presuppositions that haunt our political world. Recovering the historical dimension of political theories provides indispensable aid in solving the problems and conflicts that currently demand our attention. To locate the historical dimension of a tradition in the fashion advocated in the present chapter is to determine the common limitations within which a set of theorists worked by identifying the historical problems which all those sharing the tradition took to be crucial and indispensable. The continued existence of such historical limitations “regulates” the tradition, endowing it with coherence and unity as a tradition. In the case of the emergence of the modern concept of the state, we may speak of a sequential historical process (involving the accretion of “public” functions by territorial monarchs, the suppression of traditional localized and privatized rights and liberties, and so forth) that began to pose urgent problems for political authors perhaps as early as the twelfth century. These 45. Kenneth H. F. Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe (Oxford: Martin Robinson, 1980), 2.

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problems presented a persistent challenge to the organization of Western European political life during the following centuries, thus encouraging a series of theoretical confrontations with political reality that, taken as a whole, compose a singular tradition of thought. While the solutions varied widely, depending upon a given author’s education, class loyalty, locale, and the like, the essential similarity of the questions that history pressed upon thinkers assured that all were contributing to a fundamentally cohesive tradition. Only when history is conceived as such a continuous process, instead of as a string of disconnected episodes, may we begin to elucidate a genuinely historical account of the formation of a recognizably modern theory of the state.





3

P at h o l o g i e s o f C o n t in u i t y The Neo-Figgisites

lt h o u g h t h e cas u a l o bs e rv e r might presume that the study of medieval political thought is a staid and perhaps even arcane enterprise, scholarship in the field has undergone dramatic, almost cataclysmic, changes during the past half-century. Large numbers of previously unknown or unavailable texts have been edited or translated, surprising new connections have been uncovered, and entirely fresh lines of interpretation have been pursued. Scholarly interest in medieval topics has been stimulated, in particular, by the growing recognition that we must abandon a strict division between “medieval” and “modern” political mentalities. As the introduction to the present volume revealed, a sizeable body of literature now emphasizes instead the presence of important continuities between medieval and early modern theories of government and community. To appreciate the extent and depth of these developments, one need only turn to a group of scholars who broadly owe their inspiration to John Neville Figgis’s Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius: 1414–1625, a set of lectures originally delivered in 1900 but largely neglected during the early part of the twentieth century.1 Figgis maintained that the essential elements 1. Figgis’s book began as the Birkbeck Lectures; it was first published in 1907, with a second edition in 1916 and a later reprint with a new introduction by Garrett Mattingly (New York: Harper & Row, 1960).

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of modern political thought—in particular, the idea of limited or constitutional government and of popular sovereignty—emerged out of the crisis in church government created by the Great Schism and were given earliest theoretical expression by the conciliarist authors of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.2 Thus, for Figgis, the year 1414, which marked the settlement of the schism at the Council of Constance, ushered in the dawn of the modern age of political thought. That a General Council, representative of the whole church, could actually depose a legitimately elected pope and appoint its own candidate—and could do so on the basis of a theory of conciliar supremacy—constituted, according to Figgis, a definitive break with all previous ideas of government and its relation to the community over which it rules. More recent scholars who have found inspiration in Figgis’s basic thesis—most prominently, Brian Tierney, Francis Oakley, Kenneth Pennington, and Antony Black—have not been content simply to repeat his historiography, but instead have greatly expanded his insights both chronologically and conceptually.3 In particular, this group of scholars has developed Figgis’s basic doctrine in two important directions. First, where Figgis had drawn his conclusions based on brief and generalized observations about the figures associated with conciliarism, his successors have undertaken more thorough and detailed study of the major and minor contributors to the conciliar theory of Constance and his era. Specifically, the neo-Figgisite literature has sought to examine the differences as well as the similarities that distinguish the various proponents of conciliar doctrines.4 2. The substance of Figgis’s argument is contained in ibid., pp. 41–70. 3. It is for this reason that I once broadly described them (and will continue to do so in this chapter) not simply as “Figgisites,” but as “neo-Figgisites.” See Cary J. Nederman, “Constitutionalism—Medieval and Modern: Against Neo-Figgisite Orthodoxy (Again),” History of Political Thought 17 (Summer 1996): 179–94. Explicit recognition and appreciation of the contribution of Figgis may be found in Francis Oakley, “Figgis, Constance, and the Divine of Paris,” American History Review 75 (1969): 368–86. and Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 2–6. 4. Among these contributions to the study of conciliar theory may be included Francis Oakley, The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); Oakley, Natural Law, Conciliarism and Consent in the Middle Ages (London: Ashgate/Variorum Reprints, 1984); Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Paul E. Sigmund Jr., Nicholas of Cusa and Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); John B. Morrall, Gerson and the Great Schism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960); Antony J. Black, Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy, 1430–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and Black, Council and Commune: The Conciliar Movement and the Fifteenth Century Heritage (London: Burns & Oates, 1979).

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The second major aspect of the renovation of Figgis was the realization enunciated by Walter Ullmann (as we saw in chapter 1) and fully fleshed out by later scholars who were mainly his students (Brian Tierney, most especially) that the basic precepts of conciliar thought were themselves rooted in a tradition of canon law that dated as far back as the twelfth-century decretists.5 While challenging Figgis’s view that conciliarism was strictly a product of its time and place, the neo-Figgisites have lent the weight of several centuries of legal and political convention to the main claim that central modern political doctrines had their genesis in the ecclesiological thought of the Latin Middle Ages. The termini of the continuity between medieval and modern remain a matter of debate among those who subscribe to the neo-Figgisite framework. For some, the period of continuity is extensive. Tierney, for instance, has traced a direct lineage from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, or as he succinctly states, “from Gratian to Madison.”6 Likewise, the genealogy of the ius commune recounted by Pennington stretches from 1100 to 1600.7 Other scholars have remained closer to Figgis’s original emphasis on the decisive character of the relationship between the conciliarism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the parliamentarianism of early modern times. Thus, for Oakley, “the road from Constance to 1688 was a direct one”8 and “the constitutionalist tradition to which the Conciliarists had given so powerful an expression flowed on into the sixteenth, seventeenth, and, indeed, eighteenth centuries.”9 Similarly, for Black “conciliarist writings were a major source of precedent and, occasionally, inspiration for men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”10 The precise dates of 5. Among Tierney’s more significant studies in this connection are “The Canonists and the Mediaeval State,” Review of Politics 15 (1953): 378–89; Foundations of the Conciliar Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955); “Medieval Canon Law and Western Constitutionalism,” Catholic Historical Review 52 (April 1966): 1–17; and Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought. Many of Tierney’s other studies have been collected and published under the title Church Law and Constitutional Thought in the Middle Ages (London: Ashgate/ Varorium Reprints, 1979). 6. Tierney, Religion, Law and the Growth of Constututional Thought, xi. 7. Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 8. 8. Francis Oakley, “On the Road from Constance to 1688: The Political Thought of John Major and George Buchanan,” Journal of British Studies 1 (1962): 31. 9. Francis Oakley, “Legitimation by Consent: The Question of Medieval Roots,” Viator 14 (1983): 323. 10. Antony Black, “The Conciliar Movement,” in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 587.

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the chronology seem less significant to me than the broad agreement on the part of all associated with the neo-Figgisite school that modern Western political theory took shape under the enormous force and impact of the preceding religious culture of the Latin Middle Ages to such an extent that there is an unbroken line of influence. In turn, these developments in the way in which medieval political writings are approached have become virtually a new orthodoxy—enshrined in reference works and textbooks such as the Cambridge History of Political Thought series.11 In many ways, the contributions made by neo-Figgiste scholarship have reinvigorated the study of European political theory in the medieval and early modern period by drawing our attention to the cultural, religious, and political prejudices that have lead to the postulation of a “great divide” between the Latin Middle Ages and modernity. Specifically, the recognition that theories of spiritual governance might provide a rich source for doctrines such as rights, limited government, and the rule of law adds a new and valuable dimension to the study of European political ideas. But this does not mean that postulation of important continuities can or should be universalized any more than the imputation of a complete break between “medieval” and “modern” mind-sets. In the present chapter, I wish to explore some reasons for doubting the thesis of more or less total continuity between the political thought of the Middle Ages (regardless of whether the terminus a quo is fixed in the twelfth century or in the fourteenth) and of modernity. To some extent, the difficulties I see with the neo-Figgisite stance are purely methodological, in the sense that its proponents embrace a highly problematic approach to the study of political theory. At the same time, I also believe that Tierney, Oakley, and others concentrate so heavily on the unique features of conciliarism that they lack appreciation for the points of contact (indeed, profound intellectual congruence) between conciliar theory and broader trends within medieval political thought. My aim is not to diminish the importance of conciliarism as a contribution to Western political thought so much as to place it within a more appropriate series of contexts. I do not deny that conciliar theory played an important role in the history of “constitutionalism,” but I insist that conciliarism was a form of constitutional thought 11. For some important examples, see ibid., pp. 650–52; J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 1–6; and Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 191.

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and practice deeply rooted in the mental world of the Latin Middle Ages and not directly germane to our own modern political framework and dilemmas. This caveat ultimately separates the recent advocates of the neoFiggisite position most deeply from my own viewpoint. A major problem with the work of Figgis and his followers arises from their unstable and imprecise use of the idea of “medieval constitutionalism” (or “constitutionalism” in any form) by imputing a priori a straight and uniform trajectory of intellectual development. Yet inasmuch as they uphold such a direct lineage from medieval conciliar (or canonistic) ideas to early modern constitutional theory, they fall prey to a nontrivial methodological objection: the so-called fallacy of the unit idea exposed so powerfully by Quentin Skinner. A cursory glance through Figgis’s work suggests that his position was profoundly imbued with the belief that fixed “ideas” have a kind of life of their own tied in no important way to their historical context or origins. In Figgis’s first, introductory lecture, this stance is repeatedly encountered: These men whose names are only an inquiry for the curious, are bone of our bone, and their thought ..... is so much our common heritage that its originators remain unknown.12 [Conciliar theorists] are, though we do not know it, a part of our own world....... It is not to revive the corpse of past erudition that I have any desire, but rather to make more vivid the life of to-day, and to help us envisage its problems with a more accurate perspective.13 Perhaps the most valuable of all lessons which the study of this subject affords is that of the permanence of fundamental notions amid the most varying forms of expression and argument.14

Such remarks suggest a scholar who is trying to illuminate the predicament of the present through the prism of the past.15 Figgis accepted the existence of “core ideas” that persisted across time without essential change or development. But such an idea-centered recounting of the history of political thought has been widely and firmly discredited.16 Ideas are not 12. Figgis, Studies in Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 2 13. Ibid., 3. 14. Ibid., 31. 15. Figgis’s own contributions as a political theorist are examined by Avigail I. Isenberg, Reconstructing Political Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 16. Notwithstanding Francis Oakley’s recent strenuous effort to revive the “unit idea” ap-

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independent of language, and language itself is always fluid and composed of ever-shifting spheres of meaning.17 To think otherwise is to suffer from a case of what Conal Condren has termed “Sandwich Island Syndrome,” that is, the distortions arising from the uncritically enthusiastic translation of the representations of a foreign or historically distant cultural or intellectual system directly into one’s own language.18 Figgis’s efforts to locate medieval forebears for early modern constitutionalism depend upon the sort of “categorical anachronism” that “is a negation of the whole historical enterprise.”19 Of course, neo-Figgisites could claim that they reject this idealistic and anachronistic feature of Figgis’s own approach to the study of constitutional thought, just as they eschew (according to Oakley) other of his teachings that have been discredited.20 But to surrender Figgis’s belief in “permanent fundamental notions” entails a rejection of the controlling precept of the neo-Figgisite project, namely, that a certain set of political doctrines recurred over a period of several hundred years of medieval and early modern European history in many different contexts and were expressed in identical ways. As Tierney remarks in the conclusion to his Wiles Lectures, “During the Middle Ages an unusual structure of constitutional thought arose,” the central themes of which “are common to medieval law, to fifteenth-century conciliarism, and to seventeenth-century constitutional theory. The resemblances are too striking to be mere coincidences.......”21 Likewise, Oakley has declared that the conciliarists “succeeded in formulating the theoretical principles underlying medieval constitutionalism in general with such clarity and universality that their formulations reverberated right down to the mid-seventeenth century.”22 The “universality” of proach in contrast to Skinner and other Cambridge historians in chapter 5 (entitled “‘Anxieties of Influence’: Skinner, Figgis, Conciliarism, and Early Modern Constitutionalism”) of Politics and Eternity: Studies in the History of Medieval and Early-Modern Political Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999), 138–87. Oakley seems to me in this chapter only to illustrate by way of his examples precisely the strength of the position taken by Skinner that pristine “ideas” do not resonate (or “travel”) across time and space. 17. This point has lately been stressed by Antony Black, “Political Languages in Later Medieval Europe,” in Diana Wood., ed., The Church and Sovereignty, c. 590–1918 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 313–28, and Political Thought in Europe, 7–11. 18. Conal Condren, “Radicals, Conservatives and Moderates in Early Modern Political Thought: A Case of Sandwich Island Syndrome?” History of Political Thought 10 (1989): 525–42. 19. Ibid., 527 20. Francis Oakley, “Nederman, Gerson, Conciliar Theory and Constitutionalism: Sed Contra,” History of Political Thought 15 (1995): 9. 21. Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 103. 22. Oakley, “Legitimation by Consent,” 321.

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certain ideas in fact appears to be a hallmark of the neo-Figgisite enterprise. In speaking of the special nature of conciliarism, Figgis remarked, “The constitutionalism of the past three centuries [was raised] to a higher power; expressed ..... in a more universal form.......”23 One finds this claim repeated even in Oakley’s most recent work as an explanation for the unique status of conciliar constitutional doctrine.24 The methodological premise is evident: an idea that achieves such “universal” appeal is thereby susceptible to transmission and translation in relatively “pristine” form from one historical epoch to another. If this premise is rejected—as it has been by scholars such as Antony Black, whose own work was originally grounded firmly in neo-Figgisite orthodoxy25—then the entire foundation of the Figgis thesis crumbles. Part of the problem is that the neo-Figgiste project presumes a problematic and outmoded model of transhistorical intellectual “influence.” Evidence for the perpetuation of conciliar constitutional doctrines rests primarily upon the ability to trace quotations or citations employed by sixteenth- or seventeenth-century figures back to their medieval sources.26 Thus, for instance, Oakley proudly points to passages in the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos or in certain English writings of the seventeenth century that contain direct echoes of or even quotations from the conciliar “divines of Paris.”27 But as a medievalist especially should know, the frequency with which an author quotes from a source is by no means evidence for genuine understanding of (let alone concern for) the original meaning or significance of the exemplar.28 Early modern authors, no less than their medieval predecessors, played the game of multiplying authorities in order to lend the veneer of historical support to their own positions.29 To demonstrate 23. Figgis, Studies in Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 40. 24. Oakley, “Nederman, Gerson, Conciliar Theory and Constitutionalism,” 13–14, and The Conciliarist Tradition. 25. Black, “Political Languages in Later Medieval Europe,” 315–17. 26. Oakley, “Legitimation by Consent,” 321–22, and “Figgis, Constance, and the Divines of Paris,” 373–76. In “Nederman, Gerson, Conciliar Theory and Constitutionalism,” Oakley remarks that seventeenth-century constitutionalists “turned instinctively” to conciliar writings (13) and that “about their reading of those conciliarists there was nothing at all anachronistic” (14). For a critical view of the “influence” issue, see Black, “Political Languages in Later Medieval Europe,” 314–15. 27. Oakley, Politics and Eternity, 155–72. 28. A point underscored by Conal Condren, in “‘Marsilius of Padua’s Argument from Authority: A Study of Its Significance in the Defensor Pacis,” Political Theory 5 (May 1977): 205– 18; and Cary J. Nederman, “The Meaning of ‘Aristotelianism’ in Medieval Moral and Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (October–December 1996): 563–85. 29. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cam-

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that conciliar texts were read and cited in later centuries only proves “influence” (in the sense the neo-Figgisites are seeking to uphold) if we embrace the previously mentioned “unit idea” and “perennial problem” approach to the study of the history of political thought.30 If we consider quotation and reference, by contrast, to be rhetorical strategies deployed by authors who are attempting to convince their audience of the validity of given political theories and practices, then the claim that one thinker or idea may “influence” another across a vast expanse of time becomes problematic. Another difficulty with the neo-Figgisite devotion to a “unit idea” framework is its encouragement of the illusion that the conciliar “tradition” has an internally coherent history. I do not wish to dwell too long on this point, since it has already been the subject of dissection by Constantin Fasolt in the course of his attempt to recover the intellectual framework of William Durandus the Younger. Durandus seems on the face of it to be a highly contradictory figure: a proponent of “republican” and conciliar theory who neverthless “maintained papal supremacy” and who, unlike rough contemporaries such as Marsiglio of Padua, “never went far enough to overturn the papal plenitude of power.”31 The apparent conflicts within Durandus’s thought Fasolt ascribes instead to the rigid categorical distinction between “papalism” and “conciliarism” (or perhaps more broadly, “absolutism” and “constitutionalism”) that has arisen in modern scholarship.32 Fasolt sees the issue as methodological in nature: in direct contrast to Oakley, to whom Fasolt refers by name, he shares “Quentin Skinner’s judgement that it is fundamentally misguided to write intellectual history in terms of the history of doctrines.”33 For Fasolt, Durandus affords a prime instance of this, inasmuch as his positions only seem conceptually inconsistent to the extent that modern classifications are imposed upon them from without. Our view of the matter changes once we realize that bridge University Press, 1957); Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St. Edward’s “Laws” in Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Also see chapters 17 and 19 of the present volume. 30. A more elaborate discussion of the underlying methodological issues is presented by Conal Condren, “Ideas and the Model of Political Events: A Problem of Historicity in the History of Ideas,” Political Science 36 (1984): 53–66. 31. Constantin Fasolt, Council and Hierarchy: The Political Thought of William Durant the Younger (Cambridge, 1991), 317. 32. Ibid., 316–17. 33. Ibid., 318 and note 3.

  t h e n e o - f i g g isi t e s   37 the conceptual distinction between conciliar and papal theories of government is a useful heuristic tool to select and arrange the evidence for the history of medieval political thought, but it is not appropriate to capture that history itself. To put it bluntly, there can be no history of the conciliar theory, and therefore no foundations of the conciliar theory, because no such thing as the conciliar theory was ever an historical reality....... The truth of the matter seems to be that both the growth of papal government and that of constitutional thought are different aspects of a single history.34

The confusion arises from the attempt to impose upon medieval authors, for whom the unity of the Church and the maintenance of the faith were paramount, theoretical categories extrinsic to their own concerns. Although sixteenth- and seventeenth-century secular authors may have cited the authority of conciliar theorists, then, their references were necessarily partial and distorted. The issues animating the former—the distribution of power among earthly authorities and peoples for the sake of temporal public welfare—were fundamentally distinct from the conceptual underpinnings of the latter—the reform of the Church for the sake of reconciling believers, individually and as a community, with God. The importance of the fact that conciliar and papalist thinkers shared profoundly the same goals, as well as a common intellectual and linguistic matrix, is perhaps underscored by the apparent ease with which some of them, such as Nicholas of Cusa, Juan de Segovia, and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, changed “sides” in the course of their careers, as Fasolt notes.35 Papal and conciliar theories occupied far more common ground than the neo-Figgisite account, with its assumption of an “internal” history of conciliarism, is prepared or able to admit. And precisely insofar as this is the case, the very enterprise of constructing a coherent “constitutional” tradition spanning the centuries from 1300 (or 1100) to 1700 is exposed as unsatisfactory. I do not wish to suggest that the case of ecclesiology should be treated separately from other types of political institutions, however. On the contrary, conciliarists (and indeed papalists as well) shared a good deal not only with one another, but also with other strains of political discourse present within medieval Europe. In the past, I have defended at some length a conception of “medieval constitutionalism” that revolves around a set of principles very distant indeed from modern constitutional debate: 34. Ibid., 318–19. 35. Ibid., 318; for a similar point, see Black, “Political Languages in Later Medieval Europe,” 314.

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(1) a personalized conception of rulership; (2) moral-theological rather than formal limitations on the exercise of political power; (3) political rights circumscribed by a doctrine of “common utility” or “public welfare”; and (4) accountability of government to a corporate or spiritual power rather than to citizens as free and equal individuals.36 Interwoven into these various themes, in my view, is the deeply “organic” quality of medieval constitutionalism; head and members are interdependent and reciprocally interrelated segments of a living body, characterized by hierarchy but also by inclusiveness and mutual respect. The constitutio of the medieval political organism was, metaphorically, a matter of physiological health and good order. In turn, widespread reliance upon organic discourse and imagery itself reflected a broader Christian cosmology, a conception of the universe as an ordered and living whole composed of microcosm and macrocosm. John of Salisbury, a central creative figure in the development of medieval organic thinking, expressed this cosmological position succinctly in an 1159 letter to his friend Peter of Celle: Everything consists in mutual aid, and heavy things are reciprocally [vicissim] intermingled with light things, and indeed in this way things always proceed, because the same spirit of unanimity within things nurtures the concordance of things dissident and the dissidence of things concordant, and disposes the parts of the cosmos [mundani] as though the members of a body, so that they may be in accord reciprocally for the ministering of each to the other. Thus it is in the human body that the members faithfully serve each other reciprocally and individual duties are assigned for the public advantage. Some have more or less of these than others on account of the mass of the body, but all are united by the goal of its health; they have various functions, but if you consider the advantage of health, they contribute to the same totality [universa]. Yet they are not all coequal, but the inferiors submit to the superiors. For the foot which is planted in the mud by no means aspires to the dignity of the head; but also the head, which is raised up towards the heavens, does not scorn the foot which moves around in the mud.37

John’s key themes are repeated often in medieval writing: the universe is an organic whole, composed of many different parts, each of which is itself 36. Cary J. Nederman, “Conciliarism and Constitutionalism: Jean Gerson and European Political Thought,” History of European Ideas 12 (1990): 193–95. 37. W. J. Millor, H. E. Butler, and C. N. L. Brooke, eds., The Letters of John of Salisbury, Volume One, The Early Years (1153–1161) (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1955), Letter #111, 181–82.

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an organic unit that partakes both of the greater whole and has a distinct purpose within the larger scheme. Within each organic unit, there is higher and lower, superior and inferior, yet this hierarchical ordering does not exclude the lesser members of the body from a proper and worthwhile role within the whole. Bernard Sylvester, for example, describes the structure of the universe in essentially this manner in his mid-twelfth-century Cosmographia;38 and John of Salisbury himself adapts the metaphor at great length to political offices and institutions in his Policraticus.39 The principal idea here is reciprocity, that is, mutual support and respect among the various parts of the whole necessary for the common good.40 This implies, in turn, the need for the active inclusion of all members for the sake of the welfare of the whole. Each segment makes its own unique contribution; the organism cannot survive without the coordination and cooperation of every function into its smooth operation. These themes coalesce into a coherent constitutional position: the ruler is restricted in what he can do by the reciprocity built into the body politic. The participation of the other members of the organism in the business of the common welfare both sets limits on the actions of the head—he cannot properly interfere with their unique tasks—and establishes a sort of “check” on the head in cases where it oversteps its appropriate scope of activity. The fundamental elements of such an organic conception of community may be encountered throughout medieval political thought, secular as well as ecclesiastical.41 It was among the most common of intellectual currencies for centuries. Note that organic political thought was not a single, fixed idea.42 Rather, it is perhaps more accurate to characterize the image of the body politic as a site of intellectual and political struggle among many contending interpretations and interests. On the one hand, some of its features were 38. Bernard Silvester, Cosmographia, ed. Peter Dronke (Leiden: Brill, 1978). 39. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. C. C. J. Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), Books 5 and 6. 40. For a more thorough examination of the themes discussed in this paragraph, see Cary J. Nederman, “The Physiological Significance of the Organic Metaphor in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus,” History of Political Thought 8 (1987): 211–23, and Nederman, “Freedom, Community and Function: Communitarian Lessons of Medieval Political Theory,” American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992): 978–83. 41. The best general introduction to the subject is Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der Organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersmann, 1978). 42. As is documented by Cary J. Nederman, in “Body Politics: The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in the Later Middle Ages,” Pensiero Politico Medievale 2 (2004): 59–87.

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taken as given by all parties to the discourse. For instance, the necessity for the sake of the body’s health of some ruling part (generally, but not always, the head) was taken for granted; a headless body was doomed to misery and destruction. Likewise, it was incontestable that law was the medium through which the members of the organism cooperated and to which all parts must submit; law formed the muscles and sinews, or perhaps the central nervous system, of the animate polity. And no one seriously challenged the existence of some common good or welfare shared among all parts of the body and greater than all of them taken individually. Yet even while creating a framework for discussion, the organic model raised a large number of questions that stimulated wide-ranging debates among medieval political theorists. Could the head be corrected or removed if it engaged in conduct detrimental to the health of the body? By whom? In what way(s)? What duties and powers did members retain under ordinary circumstances? How did they coordinate their specialized roles and tasks with one another? The fact that authors otherwise as disparate as John of Salisbury and Marsiglio of Padua could equally embrace organic doctrines, as we will see in chapter 5, suggests that these questions were by no means closed or settled in the medieval mind. The body politic provided a matrix within which central issues about the nature of rulership, governance, and community could be addressed in a manner consonant with deeply held cosmological and theological beliefs. It thus formed a “tradition” of theorizing in the sense described previously in chapter 2. Medieval ecclesiology, no less than secular theory, commonly embraced this organic model of communal life and its organization. The Church had long styled itself corpus Christi mysticum, “the mystical body of Christ”; but although that phrase had traditionally denoted the sacramental powers with which the Church was endowed, a change in usage is noticeable around the middle of the twelfth century. As Oakley rightly points out, the sacral functions associated with the Church came to be denoted by the words corpus Christi verum, while “the expression corpus Christi mysticum ..... [began] to acquire political and juristic connotations so that by the fourteenth century ‘mystical body’ has become almost a synonym for ‘moral and political body.’”43 With the development of a political di43. Oakley, “Figgis, Constance, and the Divines of Paris,” 380; cf. The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly, 55–61, and “Natural Law, the Corpus Mysticum, and Consent,” Speculum 56 (1981): 800–801. Oakley ascribes the discovery of this development to Henri de Lubac, but Figgis had made essentially the same observation in Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 48–49.

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mension to the Church’s organic structure, not surprisingly, the naturalistic ideas that were also in use in the temporal sphere became relevant. One notes significant overlap between the discourses employed by authors discussing ecclesiological and secular affairs: the language associated with the body politic raised essentially the same questions in the context of the governance and organization of the Church as it posed in the case of the earthly community. Conciliar authors were no exception. Simply stated, they articulated their constitutional understanding of the Church within a linguistic and conceptual universe that was already widespread and richly endowed. This is apparent regardless of where one turns within the corpus of conciliar literature, as Oakley’s own research has amply demonstrated.44 From d’Ailly and Gerson through the major figures of mid-fifteenth century conciliarism, the organic model of the Church was commonly embraced and extended as a framework within which the ultimate superiority of the jurisdiction of the General Council must be justified.45 The conciliar reliance upon the body politic is perhaps most striking in the De concordantia catholica of Nicholas of Cusa, a work of particular prominence in the history of conciliar theory. Cusa, who, as Antony Black remarks, “paid careful attention to the underlying principles of Conciliarism,”46 constructs the edifice of the Church upon expressly organic foundations. Citing Jerome and other Fathers to the effect that the Church is a concordant body of disparate members, headed by Christ,47 Cusa ties this to a general cosmological observation: “..... it is most evident that everything existing and living has been created in concord....... But every concordance is made up of differences. And the less opposition among the differences, the greater the concordance and the longer the life.”48 He proceeds to investigate the arrangement of this universal concordance and dissonance in some detail, arguing that it is hierarchical yet also reciprocal and participatory. He concludes that the organization of the natural and the supernatural worlds offers a model for the proper conceptualization of the Church: 44. Oakley, “Natural Law, the Corpus Mysticum, and Consent,” 802–3. 45. See Oakley, The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly, 59–60; Morrall, Gerson and the Great Schism, 64, 82–83, and passim; and Black, Monarchy and Community, 13–21. 46. Ibid., 24. 47. Nicholas of Cusa, De concordantia catholica, 3 vols, ed. Gerhard Kallen (Hamburg: Meiner, 1959–1968), Book 1, chap. 1, para. 5. I have relied upon the fine translation by Paul E. Sigmund, The Catholic Concordance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), but have sometimes retranslated passages of Cusa’s text. 48. Ibid., 1.1.6.

42  h is t o r i o g r ap h i e s o f t h e e a r ly t r a d i t i o n When the concordance of differences in the whole universe is examined, the wise recognize that there is a wonderful combination in nature, the entire world shares in a mutual spherical interaction, and everything is ordered to a single end. It suffices for the present to know for our investigation that just as all created beings ..... are preserved in union and concordance with their natural originating source, so our Church, which is our topic of discussion, is made up of rational spirits and human beings who are united with Christ, although not in the same way, but in gradations.49

The Church partakes, as a mystical body, of the same ordering principles as the rest of the universe, according to Cusa. Therefore, to understand these principles is to grasp the appropriate arrangement and interrelation of the parts of the Church. Specifically, Cusa concludes from his organic model that no single member of the Church may represent fully the powers inhering in the body as a totality. Hence, neither the pope nor any other individual or group within the Church may claim supremacy over the whole. At best, Christ alone, as the true Head of the Church, may command with finality; and Christ’s presence occurs virtually when a body representative of the whole Church—namely, a General Council—meets and is imbued with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.50 Yet this does not lead Cusa to deny the primacy of the See of St. Peter or the plenitude of papal power in matters of ecclesiastical leadership. Indeed, he attacks Marsiglio of Padua by name for upholding just such a position.51 Cusa acknowledges that there must be superior and inferior, ruling and ruled, in all organic structures. Like other conciliarists, he regards the papacy to be of divine origination and thus to be a necessary and permanent feature of the mystical body. Indeed, Cusa is prepared on organic grounds to cede to the pope a measure of “coercive” power for the sake of maintaining the Church: “.....unless an ecclesiastical ruler has some coercive power—although not that lordship by which [secular] rulers hold sway—unity cannot be preserved. For it is necessary that the rotten member and foot should be cut off and the eye that scandalizes torn out if the health of the body of the Church is to be preserved.”52 Ordinarily, responsibility for securing such health pertains to the pope; acting to achieve the unity of the faith is one of the central duties assigned to the Roman bishop by divine ordination. 49. Cusa, De concordantia catholica, 1.2.12. 50. Ibid., 2.18.156, 2.34.248. 52. Ibid., 2.34.261.

51. Ibid., 2.34.256, 2.34.265.

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Consequently, no Council of the Church has the authority to eliminate the papal office or to control the pope when he is engaged in the proper execution of his functions. Indeed, no Council would wish to do so, given the papacy’s divine ordination and established role in the process of salvation. The real problem arises, instead, when a ruler disorders the body by performing duties other than those attached to his office. This was a common way of formulating the issue of the control of governmental power in all forms of medieval constitutionalism, secular as well as ecclesiastical. The principle at work derives from what I have elsewhere termed the “communal functionalism” of medieval organic theory.53 As Cusa states, “All the members of the one Church and the mystical body of Christ have their specific duties, the exercise of which cannot be impeded without the disturbance of order.”54 The General Council, as the agent of universal ecclesiastical reform, is charged with overseeing these functions and with scrutinizing parts that are either abdicating or exceeding their proper tasks: “If it were the case that every power governed in accordance with the regulations established by the universal councils, the best possible reform would necessarily follow.”55 This is especially true for the papacy, which exercises superior powers within the order of the Church. Like John of Salisbury three hundred years earlier, Cusa fears that the infection of the leading member of the political organism will readily spread to the rest of the body: If we know what is proper for each member according to the rules of the ancients, then we may see how the body of the church becomes deformed. For it would not be deformed had not an excess or abuse occurred. And since when the head is ill, the other members suffer, it follows that the salvation of the subjects depends upon the health of the rulers....... No greater deformity can, therefore, arise than when one believes that, because of one’s great power, anything may be permitted and that person violates the rights of subjects.56

The complaint of abuse of power is, of course, a chronic one in medieval Europe, and a central constitutional concern was to establish how and by whom such violations could be remedied. By framing the issue with reference to a functional analysis of the organic community, and by conceptual53. Nederman, “Freedom, Community and Function,” 978. 54. Cusa, De concordantia catholica, 2.27.214. 55. Ibid., 2.27.213. 56. Ibid., 2.27.214.

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izing the General Council as the only truly “representative” body within the Church, Cusa proceeds to demonstrate that it falls to the Council uniquely to reform the limbs and organs, and especially the papal part, whenever the good order of the whole is threatened. The Council is the sole valid embodiment of the welfare of the Church, and it alone may determine what and where reform must occur. Cusa and other conciliarists thus extend the organic framework by positing the existence of the Council as a sort of “meta-government” (to borrow James Blythe’s term)57 infallibly capable of discovering and mandating the true and objective interests of the Church as a united entity. Although this is in some ways a novel and innovative development within organic political theory, it is still deeply imbedded in a common ground of intellectual interchange during the Latin Middle Ages. Indeed, this common ground extended even to the most dedicated enemies of conciliar thinking. John of Turrecremata’s Summa de ecclesia, for example, examines the body of the Church in light of a papal claim to a plenitude of power undiluted by conciliarism. Turrecremata’s strategy was often to reconceptualize the analogy between Church and natural organism so as to reveal its viability as a tool for the papal cause.58 Like other medieval theorists, papalists found that they could readily adapt organic imagery to their political requirements, and thereby could argue for papal supremacy using premises that their opponents could not directly challenge. Precisely this sort of commonality between conciliar and papal positions lends support to Fasolt’s previously cited contention that the histories of the two doctrines cannot accurately be recounted in isolation from one another. The contrast with modern modes of constitutional thought is striking. The distinctively modern connotation of constitutionalism requires political rule to be organized on the basis of a set of features that includes: (1) an impersonal conception of governmental grounded in the office rather than the person of the ruler; (2) limitation of rulers through public control over the offices of state; (3) the guarantee of specific and imprescriptible rights to all persons or citizens; and (4) individualized free consent to rulers and their official deeds.59 Viewed collectively, these prin57. James M. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 202. The term was originally applied to Marsiglio of Padua’s theory of the legislator. 58. Key parts of the text are reproduced in Black, Monarchy and Community, 162–72. 59. A fuller account of this conception of modern constitutionalism, along with evidence to support each of its elements, may be found in Nederman, “Conciliarism and Constitutionalism,” 193 and notes.

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ciples supplement the rule of law so as to compose the core of modern constitutional theory. According to the uniquely modern sense of constitutionalism, government is conducted within the confines of law by officials whose duties are determined in advance and carefully regulated, who hold office at the pleasure of the citizen body at large, and who must treat as sacrosanct certain forms of individual activity. Clearly, the organic conception of the constitutional order of the political community stands at considerable remove from these salient elements of modern constitutionalism. Of course, use of the body as a metaphor to conceptualize political systems and relations continued long after the close of the Latin Middle Ages.60 But to the extent that cosmological and moral assumptions about the nature and place of the body within a divinely ordered universe were eroded and replaced, the significance of the organic model changed profoundly. By the seventeenth century, an important distance had been traversed in the intellectual journey of modernity, one that sets the conciliarist stance at a remove from later constitutionalism. The roots of conciliarist doctrines, shared with opponents and with the medieval world generally, had been poisoned by a host of changes in the way early modern human beings (or educated ones, at any rate) understood the natural and supernatural worlds. It occurs to me that a quite similar case, methodologically and conceptually speaking, holds against other recent attempts on the part of neoFiggisites to identify direct continuities between medieval and modern teachings about rights and law. Take Brian Tierney’s construction of a direct line from twelfth- to seventeenth-century doctrines of so-called subjective natural rights.61 Tierney challenges the conceit of many scholars (including authors as diverse as Leo Strauss, Norberto Bobbio, Alasdair MacIntyre, and C. B. Macpherson) that “rights talk” arose as one of the seventeenthcentury innovations associated with modernity and/or capitalism. Tierney instead proposes that “the idea of natural rights grew up—perhaps could only have grown up in the first place—in a religious culture that supplemented rational argumentation about human nature with a faith in which humans were seen as children of a caring God,”62 that is, the distinctively 60. A recent excellent survey is Gianluca Briguglia, Il corpro vivente dello Stato: Una metafora politica (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2006). 61. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997) and Rights, Law and Infallibility in Medieval Thought (Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum Press, 1997). 62. Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 343.

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Christian, Occidental circumstances of the High and Late Middle Ages.63 Tierney is surely correct that medieval legal and political authors from Gratian forward expressed the inviolable moral dignity of individual human beings in the language of ius naturale. In this sense, natural rights discourse possesses the long and venerable lineage that Tierney maintains. The difficulty, however, is that this claim in itself does nothing to upset fundamentally the conventional view of the modernity of natural rights theory in its political significance. As Quentin Skinner has amply demonstrated, “subjective” rights mattered in early modern political thought insofar as they had direct political consequences for the powers enjoyed by government over individuals.64 The issue was not that persons per se are bearers of rights or can assert moral claims as a result thereof, but that such rights constitute the basis of a system of political rule which must not only recognize them but, perhaps more importantly, must be legitimized entirely in relation to them. The modern appeal to rights conveys the absolute priority of the individual in relation to all other, particularly political, considerations. If, à la Burke, the only rights that properly enjoy political force are socially derived, then possessing a natural right is not relevant to our evaluation of political institutions, although it may be important in other spheres of human life. Tierney’s work fails to demonstrate that medieval natural rights had such political overtones. For the most part, he evinces no recognition that such a connection between natural rights and politics must explicitly be drawn at all. Thus, in his discussion of Marsiglio of Padua65—a deeply political thinker if ever there was one—Tierney makes no effort to construct a relationship between the protracted analysis of rights terminology in Defensor pacis II.12 and the secular or ecclesiological theories proffered in the main body of the text. Either no such relation exists, in which case Tierney’s examination is not especially illuminating, or it is present, in which case he has left an important issue uninterrogated. On the few occasions on which Tierney does engage in an extensive investigation of the political dimensions of medieval natural rights, the results are decidedly mixed. His test case seems to be William of Ockham. On the one hand, Tierney suggests that Ockham’s deployment of natural rights language outside of the 63. Ibid., 346–48. 64. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2: 302–48. 65. Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 103–18.

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context of the Spiritual Franciscan debate was hazy and perhaps wholly polemical.66 On the other hand, he asserts that “one could make a good case for regarding the Breviloquium [de principatu tyrannico by Ockham] as the first essentially rights-based treatise on political theory.”67 But the evidence (even as presented by Tierney) seems to contradict this claim. Ockham’s recurrent references in Breviloquium and elsewhere to “the rights and liberties granted by God and nature” do nothing whatsoever to protect the individual from the unilateral intrusions of the secular ruler (or even, if more rarely, the ecclesiastical lord) into the lives of subjects. Ockham evidently placed no rights-based limits upon the exercise of political power whenever the common good might be endangered. It was left up to the ruler alone to determine what constituted a clear and present danger to the public welfare. Even the notorious absolutist Thomas Hobbes believed that individuals retained certain ineliminable natural rights—to self-preservation and to a measure of discernment—after they alienated the rest to the sovereign. This is not to say that Ockham was consequently an “absolutist,” but rather to reiterate Fasolt’s already noted observation that modern terms such as “absolutism” and “constitutionalism” fail to capture adequately the way in which medieval thinkers conceived their political universe. In sum, only a very skewed and anachronistic reading of Ockham permits one to find within his writings anything resembling a “rights-based political theory,” at least in some meaningful modern sense. Does this mean that no medieval figure was able to develop a full defense of the priority of the individual in relation to the exercise of political power? Not at all. In several late medieval authors whom Tierney either dismisses, such as John of Paris,68 or ignores entirely, such as William of Pagula, we find the rudiments of a political defense of the individual over against the claims of government intrusion. That Tierney evinces little or no interest in these theorists reflects perhaps the fact that they frame their position not through the language of ius naturale but that of dominium, and they draw no direct connection between such “lordship” or “property ownership” and “natural rights.” From the thirteenth century onward, the discourse of dominium (largely unassociated with rights talk) afforded an alternative account of the primacy of the individual in relation to the community—one that was far more explicitly political than may be located in the writings of the canonists and their transmitters, such as Ockham. Tier66. Ibid., 174. 68. Ibid., 148, 167, note 113.

67. Ibid., 185.

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ney apparently rejects or overlooks this approach to grounding the consent of the individual to authority (and even of the right of subjects to revolt in cases where the terms of voluntary agreement are overridden), because of the absence of a linguistic bridge constructed out of the discourse of natural rights. Whether we consider constitutionalism or rights or most other important political ideas, then, modernity in general wrought profound and permanent changes upon the way in which authors thought and wrote about politics. As key assumptions about the world (metaphysical as well as political) shifted, so did the political lexicon, with the result that the same (or similar) words and their attendant conceptual structures took on different meanings and transformations occurred in discursive spheres. In this sense, I remain convinced that the neo-Figgisite mode of interpretation neither explains the intellectual course of European political thought so completely as its proponents imply nor accords sufficient significance to the complex patterns of change as well as persistence typical of the period from 1100 to 1700. What is required, it seems to me, is the recognition that medieval doctrines provide merely one element of a large and multidimensional story that requires sensitive recounting resistant to the simplicity of a single overarching narrative structure. Some of the theoretical baggage was carried forward; some luggage was discarded along the way. The substantive studies contained in the subsequent parts of this volume have been selected in order to illustrate this theme from a variety of perspectives.



4

A Mi d d l e P at h Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves

n t h e p r e c e d in g e x a m inat i o n of some of the major re cent trends in the historiography of medieval and modern European political thought, we have observed a noticeable tendency to promote a “universalistic” system of interpretation. The value of a political text is judged according to a preconceived yardstick, whether of “ascending” doctrine or the state or constitutionalism or natural rights. In the current chapter, I offer an example of a historian of political thought who eschewed such one-dimensional interpretative frameworks in preference for a more nuanced and multifaceted approach to reading and relating political texts: Alexander (or Alessandro) Passerin d’Entrèves. Alas, d’Entrèves, whose career spanned nearly the same era as Walter Ullmann’s (he was born in 1902 and died in 1985) and who compiled a distinguished record of teaching and scholarship both at Oxford and in Italian universities, has not received the attention or been granted the respect that he merits.1 I propose to highlight the uniformity of several key interrelated historical and historiographical themes in the 1. For a précis of d’Entrèves’s life and career, see Cary J. Nederman, “Introduction to the Transaction Edition” of Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1995), vii–xxv. A recent volume, based on a conference celebrating the centenary of d’Entréves’s birth, offers a more thorough appreciation of his contributions: Sergio Noto, ed., Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves pensatore europeo (Bologna: il Mulino, 2004).

49

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scholarship of d’Entrèves, running from his prewar scholarship up to his publications in the 1970s, that touch directly upon the transformation of medieval into modern patterns of political thought. Perhaps the most striking feature of d’Entrèves’s attitude toward the relationship between the medieval and the modern worlds of thought was his refusal to draw any absolute and universally applicable conclusions. He inhabited a scholarly world that still largely clung to the position that the Renaissance and the Reformation constituted complete and unbridgeable ruptures with the intellectual, cultural, and religious past of the Latin Middle Ages. Yet he adamantly refused to embrace this historiographical commonplace, choosing instead to develop the principles enunciated by his Oxford mentor, A. J. Carlyle, who had looked to the Middle Ages for the foundations of political thought in the West. At the same time, d’Entrèves resisted the temptation to highlight continuity more or less exclusively by insisting that the primary lessons of modern political writing resonate with the doctrines of the Middle Ages. The reduction of historically complex patterns of intellectual continuity and change to a simplistic and rigid scheme of interpretation is utterly foreign to the scholarship of d’Entrèves. From his 1939 study of The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought until the second edition of Natural Law in 1970, he consistently and conscientiously foregrounded alteration as well as persistence in the deployment of political ideas. In the introduction to the 1939 volume, he remarks, “The idea of contribution, which is emphasized in the title of these lectures, should by no means be taken as an excuse ‘to arrange the past neatly as a process in which the most significant things are those which are most easily appropriated by the present,’ but rather as an inducement to realize the necessity of considering medieval political thought, not only as a sum of political doctrines and rules, but as a system of values.”2 He goes on to explain that, inasmuch as this system of values is adopted by thinkers whose lives extend chronologically beyond the period conventionally designated “medieval” (he has Hooker in mind), we can and must conclude that “some fundamental principles and leading ideas, which were given definite form and expression by medieval thinkers, far outstretch in their effects and influence the conventional boundaries which usually limit the medieval period.”3 Yet to the extent that modern thought rejected or 2. Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 5. 3. Ibid., 6.

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turned away from the medieval system of values, we can speak of modernity as generating a different and distinct framework of political values. D’Entrèves illustrated this clearly in the case of the idea of natural law: The medieval and the modern conceptions of natural law are two different doctrines; the continuity between them is mainly a question of words....... If the modern doctrine of natural law proved to be so different from the old in its implications and in its far-reaching consequences, the reason is that a new conception of man and the universe turned what had been for centuries a harmless and orthodox doctrine into a potent instrument of progress and revolution, which gave an entirely new turn to history and of which we still feel the effects.4

We should not, in other words, be seduced by superficial similarities of terminology or style into ascribing intellectual continuity. It is necessary to grasp the premises and logic of the ideas in order to judge their place and “contribution” within history. We can see in the full run of d’Entrèves’ scholarship how this guiding insight directed the ways in which he confronted the political, philosophical, and historiographical problems posed by the transition from medieval to modern forms of thought and informed his interpretation of political theory. In the present chapter, I consider three dimensions of this general problematic: first, his account of the concept of the state; second, his understanding of Marsiglio of Padua’s place in Western political thought; and third, his reading of Machiavelli’s writings and doctrines. In doing so, I draw upon d’Entrèves’s English-language scholarly works from across a broad range of his interests and written throughout his career, in the belief that his approach in this regard remained fundamentally the same. I think we shall see how issues posed by the medieval/modern divide led him to adopt unique and powerful interpretations of several of the most important ideas and authors in the history of European political thought. D’Entrèves published The Notion of the State in 1967, choosing to concentrate on a theme that had virtually disappeared from the landscape of scholarship. Consequently, he was behind the times when viewed from his own day, yet forward-looking—even prescient—when viewed retrospectively from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century. Under the influence of positivist and behavioralist social science that dominated the field of political science during the 1950s and 1960s, the “state” had been 4. D’Entrèves, Natural Law, 17.

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written out of English language political inquiry as a term too “metaphysical” and too untestable to have analytical value. The Anglo world has never, in any case, been particularly enamored with the state as a political category, so this rejection of state talk met with relatively little controversy and the word soon became coextensive with the institutions of government, if it was employed at all.5 By the later 1970s and 1980s, however, the state as both an idea and a practice enjoyed a significant comeback among social scientists, political theorists, and philosophers. Sociologists and political scientists such as Theda Skocpol and her collaborators and students returned the state to the forefront of empirical investigation, building—but at a distance—on the work of European Marxists such as Louis Althusser, Ralph Miliband, and Nicos Poulantzas.6 Likewise, as discussed in chapter 2, Quentin Skinner self-consciously organized Foundations of Modern Political Thought around an account of the origins of the state in its modern sense “as the sole source of law and legitimate force within its territory, and as the sole appropriate object of its citizens’ allegiances.”7 Although d’Entrèves’s book on the state garnered attention from neither the social scientific nor the historical approaches that have become prominent,8 his work clearly prefigures both developments. Indeed, I will argue that on the issue of the transition from thirteenth- to sixteenth-century modes of political thought, d’Entrèves’s scheme of interpretation is superior to Skinner and most of those who have followed in his stead. Succinctly stated, d’Entrèves asserts that while the Middle Ages did not—and could not have—produced an idea of the state in the modern meaning, the modern state—both as a theoretical construct and a practical force—could not have emerged without the preexistence of distinctively medieval ideas and institutions. Throughout the course of The Notion of the State, he points to these preconditioning elements and also to their limitations. He identifies such key political factors as consent, representation, and the division of powers in their medieval instances, and 5. Kenneth Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe: A Study of an Idea and Institution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 6. A survey of these developments is provided by Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 7. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1: x. 8. Interestingly, d’Entrèves’s work on the state in not cited in Skinner’s bibliography for The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Is it too fanciful to wonder whether this is yet another consequence of the lingering and always smoldering rivalry between Cambridge and Oxford?

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he demonstrates how the Latin church (and to some extent, cities and kingdoms) functioned as sovereign entities in a modern sense.9 Moreover, d’Entrèves stresses the convergence of nation and state that marked the political transformation of Western European institutions at the end of the Middle Ages.10 All of these developments, he clearly believes, were necessary for the idea of the modern state to emerge. Yet at the same time, he does not mean for us to infer, in the manner of Whig history, that these concepts and practices were somehow inherently “progressive” or otherwise aided in the breakdown of the medieval view of the political world and its replacement by the modern. Rather, the doctrines that might later be integrated or cited as inspiration for the modern state had a substantially different significance when viewed in their original medieval context. In other words, what we encounter when we look at an idea such as “consent” or “sovereignty” in its medieval and in its modern usages respectively is the intellectual equivalent of faux ami in language: two terms that appear identical but possess highly divergent meanings because they assume and/ or refer to distinct conceptual frameworks. Thus, in the case of sovereignty, d’Entrèves points out that “it was not in support of the State, but of the Church, that the concept of sovereignty was first coherently worked out and its logical consequences drawn.” But the claim of sovereignty in the form of papal supremacy nonetheless depended upon an essential theological principle that is anathema to the modern state, namely, “what is usually called the ‘theocratic doctrine,’ the doctrine which claimed for the Roman Pontiff the supreme authority on earth—the plenitudo potestatis.”11 As d’Entrèves emphasizes, the legal logic of the papal plenitude of power parallels that of the sovereign power of the modern state. Still, the framework that renders the medieval legal principle efficacious derives from a conception of the respublica Christiana (albeit recast) that has no place in modern theories and practices of the state. D’Entrèves’s great accomplishment, in my view, is the insistence that one must not confuse resemblance with identity in the realm of ideas. It is a lesson that more recent intellectual historians would be well advised to take on board. At the same time, d’Entrèves’s approach to the state stands at a distance from attempts to equate the presence of state language with the presence 9. Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves, The Notion of the State: An Introduction to Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 89–95, 97–99. 10. Ibid., 171–74. 11. Ibid., 97.

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of the state as an intellectual or institutional reality. One finds the latter position proposed, perhaps most famously, by Skinner in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Like d’Entrèves—although without crediting him for having said so—Skinner proposes that the period from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries yielded the “preconditions” only for the emergence of the modern doctrine of the state.12 The elements that would come together to define the modern state appeared gradually, according to Skinner, shaped out of unrelated intellectual events imbedded in a variety of narrowly conceived controversies. But Skinner asserts that the “conceptual shift,” as he calls it, that occasions the birth of the modern state as a theoretical construct is essentially a linguistic one: “The surest sign that a society has entered into the secure possession of a new concept is that a new vocabulary will be developed, in terms of which the concept can then be publicly articulated and discussed.” Skinner regards it “as a decisive confirmation” of his interpretation of the development of the modern state that by the early sixteenth century “the term ‘State’ began to be used freely for the first time in a recognisably modern sense.”13 Skinner thus seems to hold to the view that the presence or absence of vocabulary determines the presence or absence of an idea or conceptual structure.14 D’Entrèves’s observations on this issue published more than a decade before the appearance of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought seem to me to offer a corrective to such linguistic overdeterminism. As with Skinner, d’Entrèves recognizes perfectly well that the term “state” as deployed in modern political thought is a neologism derived from the Latin word status.15 But d’Entrèves does not infer from the fact that “down to a certain date the word ‘State’ is missing altogether” the impossibility of speaking cogently or coherently about the existence of the state.16 On a conceptual level, the central problems posed by the state are endemic to the Greek polis, the Roman res publica, and the medieval civitas vel regnum.17 Of course, none of these were states in the modern sense—each 12. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2: 351–52. For the methodological reasons underlying Skinner’s approach, see chapter 2 of the present volume. 13. Ibid., 2: 352. 14. See Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 5. 15. Compare d’Entrèves, The Notion of the State, 30–31, with Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2: 352–53. 16. D’Entrèves, The Notion of the State, 29. 17. Ibid., 28–29

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depended upon its own distinctive set of assumptions and principles—yet all can be related, philosophically speaking, to similar sorts of problems that inform the specifically modern notion of the state, such as political obligation, authority, legality, and force.18 On a more historical plane, the importance of which d’Entrèves also acknowledges, the absence of the language of the state during the Late Middle Ages is no token of the presence or absence of a conceptual apparatus. He remarks, “If medieval political writers did not as yet recognize either in name or in substance the ‘State’ in its modern acceptation, it is all the more interesting to see the effort they made to grasp the essence of the new political reality which was beginning to take shape during the last centuries of the Middle Ages.”19 D’Entrèves proceeds to trace many of the departures and transformations that characterized the use of classical and Christian sources to precisely the historical emergence of the elements that would coalesce in the theory and practice of the modern state. Thus, it is of great importance to think about the state as a way of organizing political knowledge and argumentation during the Middle Ages even if the terminology had not arrived on the scene. Moreover, even after the vocabulary of the state came into usage with some frequency during the sixteenth century, its application remained unsystematic and contradictory for a very long time thereafter, standing alongside other political discourses of more established pedigree. After all, Bodin— that supreme theorist of the modern state—continued to prefer république to estat at the end of the century. Arguably, not until the end of the seventeenth century did the terminology of the state settle down into its familiar modern usage.20 D’Entrèves’s general historical insight about the political theory of the modern state in turn also directed his thought about two of his favorite political thinkers, the Italians Marsiglio of Padua and Niccolò Machiavelli. Marsiglio was a major figure in The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought, accounting for around one-third of the book’s 143 total pages of text. While d’Entrèves never wrote a single book or even an extensive chapter devoted solely to Machiavelli, the Florentine thinker received significant attention from him in The Notion of the State and elsewhere. What d’Entrèves’s analyses of these authors share is an insistence upon the need to refine the historical claims commonly made about their “modernity” by paying closer attention both to intellectual context and to textual argumentation. 18. Ibid., 34 20. Ibid., 32–33.

19. Ibid., 29.

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D’Entrèves raises the problem of modernity explicitly at the beginning of his examination of Marsiglio in The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought.21 He points out that Marsiglio’s high estimation among scholars has derived mainly from a reputation “as the forerunner and prophet of modern times.”22 Presumably, this stems from Marsiglio’s departure from the standard medieval conception of the supernatural and moral ends of communal existence as coordinated with yet ultimately superior to earthly and material ones, such as one finds stated in Aquinas (and perhaps Dante). But this is to assume that the medieval “contribution” to political thought—the core of medieval political thinking—is narrow and monolithic, rather than capacious to a certain degree. And this is what d’Entrèves denies: “If we take Thomas Aquinas’s great systemization as the expression of one fundamental aspect of that contribution, it may seem fair and adequate to consider Marsilius’s theory as its exact counterpart, expressing an entirely different answer to those main problems which it is the merit of medieval political speculation to have raised.......”23 To depart from or challenge the Thomist interpretation of the world is by no means necessarily to be a modern, according to d’Entrèves. Marsiglio is an ideal illustration of this precept. In the sort of questions that stimulated his work, and in the frame of reference he invoked for his replies, he revealed the “traditional character” of his thought: “Marsilius was unable to rise to a notion which still remained unknown to the medieval mind: the notion of a deep and far-reaching difference between religious and political obligation. For him, as for the traditional medieval doctrine, the ‘state’ cannot exist without the ‘church,’ nor the ‘church’ without the ‘state.’”24 What makes Marsiglio seem so different is his attempt to reverse the standard ordering of these two coordinate institutions. But this does not erase the primary expectation imposed upon the medieval political theorist to address the connection between the two as an intrinsic “internal relation,” a logical linkage not unlike that of “alienation” and “dealienation” in Marx’s thought.25 D’Entrèves postulates that no discussion of the church could occur without some recognition of its relation to earthly government, and 21. D’Entrèves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought, 44–49; see also d’Entrèves’ review of Alan Gewirth’s Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy in The Philosophical Review 62 (1953): 603–8, where this forms a major theme. 22. D’Entrèves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought, 44. 23. Ibid., 45 24. Ibid., 75. 25. On this logical conception of “internal relations,” see Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

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vice versa—this was a (maybe the) hallmark of the medieval contribution to political thought. Nor is Marsiglio’s immersion in the medieval mind-set the only token of his distance from the contours of modernity. In order to achieve his goal of bringing the church into the ambit of the state, Marsiglio self-consciously rearranged many of the conventional features of medieval thought to draw conclusions that are, while strikingly innovative, still confined by their origins. The Paduan’s reliance on the Christian interpretation of Aristotle’s teachings, his valorization of peace as the leading goal of politics, his concern for the internal organization of the church as well as temporal government—all of these suggest a thinker whose major theories remained wholly planted in the intellectual soil of the Latin Middle Ages. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with the details of d’Entrèves’s interpretation of Marsiglio, he is surely correct to insist that “the significance of Marislius’s doctrine in the contribution of the Middle Ages to political thought can be adequately valued” only once scholarship achieves “a full knowledge” of “the sources of Marsilius’s thought.”26 Likewise, d’Entrèves asserted with perfect accuracy that nowhere in Marsiglio’s thought may be located quintessentially modern doctrines associated with liberal individualism such as personal rights or a conscience-based defense of religious pluralism or diversity.27 In short, a Marsiglio scholar of a later generation can wholeheartedly endorse d’Entrèves’s picture of the Marsiglian forest, even as one might propose to rearrange some of the trees found therein. His articulation of a diverse yet internally coherent “medieval contribution to political thought” does much to restrain the more fanciful and historically implausible claims made about the modernity of Marsiglio. Just as d’Entrèves sought to restrict the ways in which the label “modernity” was appropriately applied to Marsiglio, so he sometimes questioned the championing of Machiavelli as an unambiguous and unalloyed advocate of modern political ideas and values. While subscribing to the conventional view that Machiavelli was a “truly revolutionary” thinker, he also expressed skepticism about just how completely the Florentine broke with the past.28 This is not simply to make the obvious point that Machiavelli’s political theory cannot plausibly be “severed from its close connexion with the conditions of Italy in the sixteenth century,” but to stress that 26. D’Entrèves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought, 85–86. 27. Ibid., 79–84. See also the review of Gewirth, 607. This does not mean, of course, that Marsiglio lacked concepts such as liberty or tolerance altogether; see chapter 5 below. 28. Ibid., 90.

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his alleged rejection of the political ideas and language of the Middle Ages was not complete and consistent.29 For instance, d’Entrèves denies that “Machiavelli can be said to have used [the word ‘state’] in a truly modern sense.”30 Rather, as with his interpretation of Marsiglio, d’Entrèves pursues a careful and nuanced reading of Machiavelli’s historical position in order to challenge the “widely held opinion”—today as in the past31—that he single-handedly introduced “the modern meaning of the term ‘State.’”32 Rather, although Machiavelli sometimes employs lo stato in a manner that suggests the definition of “an organization endowed with the capacity of exerting and controlling the use of force over certain people and within a given territory,” it is also the case that he was equally capable of using the word “indiscriminately, with different meanings that can be traced to preceding linguistic usage.”33 In similar fashion, d’Entrèves casts doubt on commonplace assertions that Machiavelli founded modern political science and that he first articulated modern nationalism. In the former case, Machiavelli is said to emphasize the “art,” rather than the “science,” of politics inasmuch as the general rules he formulates are meant to have prescriptive force. Machiavelli’s concern is to generate a code of conduct for rulers of a certain type—and perhaps also for their subjects—that ought to be put into action if their success is to be ensured. Such a goal stands at considerable remove from the value-freedom postulated by later scientific study of politics.34 Neither can d’Entrèves find evidence to link Machiavelli’s politics to nationhood. The unification of Italy (or a large section thereof ) that is exhorted in the final chapter of the Prince was not a nationalist project because natio, understood as an ethnic, linguistic, or racial grouping, did not form the rationale for political integration. Machiavelli’s politics of state-centered force, one of the features that defines his place on “the new landscape of the modern political world,” at the same time ruled out any conception “of the whole of Italy as a ‘nation,’” and hence belied the claim that he was a “‘nationalist’ in the modern sense of the word.”35 While it may have been the case that the wide dissemination of some of Machiavelli’s writings lead later theorists to identify their own doctrines as 29. Ibid., 3 30. Ibid., 2. 31. For some examples, see Cary J. Nederman, “Amazing Grace: God, Fortune and Free Will in Machiavelli’s Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999): 620, n12. 32. D’Entrèves, The Notion of the State, 30. 33. Ibid., 32, 30. 34. Ibid., 37–42. 35. Ibid., 170.

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an inheritance from him, an examination of his own teachings do not bear out the purely modern character of his ideas. Methodologically speaking, Machiavelli illustrates another aspect of the dilemma posed by the medieval/modern divide in European political thought. Just as Marsiglio remained firmly planted in the Middle Ages despite the fact that some elements of his thought may be judged, retrospectively, to anticipate modern doctrines, so Machiavelli clearly stands on the side of modernity, even though his thought occasional draws on language that retains medieval overtones. In framing historical judgments in this manner, d’Entrèves draws our attention to the priority of ideas over discourse, that is, that concepts imbedded in history are not always perfectly or even adequately aligned with the language in which they are couched. Indeed, it may be the case that ideas outstrip the ability of thinkers to express them: language may occasionally “lag behind” thought. Conversely, terminology that has one connotation in relation to a certain set of ideas, but a different meaning within a different intellectual framework, may lead to confusion on the part of the historically naïve or untutored reader. The effect of d’Entrèves’s observations is to caution scholars not to treat language as transparent or constitutive of ideas: discourse is the necessary means for concretizing ideas, but it is as capable for many reasons of deceiving or deflecting understanding as it is of clarifying or enlightening. It is precisely because ideas proposed and defended by the great political theorists are often more complex and multifaceted than their own language can capture that historians of political thought have a role to play in the examination and explanation of texts and their authors. By way of conclusion, I would like to highlight one further dimension of d’Entrèves’s scholarly endeavors. There is a pronounced tendency among many political theorists today (especially of the analytic philosophical persuasion) to reject completely the value of historical studies or to filter the past entirely through contemporary concerns. Any attempt to introduce considerations of historical plausibility or validity are dismissed as antiquarian and irrelevant. On the other hand, a significant implication of the methods championed by the so-called Cambridge School of historians of political thought is that political ideas are only sensible or intelligible when set in their context, rendering the philosophical comparison and evaluation of concepts eo ipso invalid. A noteworthy virtue of d’Entrèves’s scholarship is his refusal to surrender to either the philosophical or the historical trends. He clearly believed that both ways of studying political ideas were useful and defensible, indeed that philosophy and history were compatible

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and mutually reinforcing angles from which to study concepts. Books such as Natural Law and The Notion of the State are paragons of such a balanced conception of political theory. To take both the historical and philosophical aspects of political theory seriously, of course, renders the task of studying that subject that much more difficult and time-consuming. But even cursory examination of the scholarly corpus of Alexander Passerin d’Entrèves suggests how greatly rewarding is the adoption of a multifaceted approach to the study of political theory.

Pa rt I I

Dissenting Voices and the Limits of Power 





5

T o l e r at i o n an d C o m m u ni t y Functionalist Foundations of Liberty

n h is fa m o u s l i t t l e e ssay entitled “What Is Enlighten ment?” Immanuel Kant presses the case for liberty of conscience in the following terms: A prince who ..... holds it to be his duty to prescribe nothing to men in religious matters but to give them complete freedom while renouncing the haughty name of tolerance, is himself enlightened and deserves to be esteemed by the grateful world and posterity as the first, at least from the side of government, who divested the human race of its tutelage and left each man free to make use of his reason in matters of conscience.1

Kant’s distinction is one familiar to liberal political theorists today, not only in addressing matters of religion but also in connection with more general questions of freedom of thought and expression.2 According to current exponents of a Kantian orientation, tolerance connotes merely a privilege, granted by some superior authority and presumably revocable at its will. Toleration pro1. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 88. 2. For the historical antecents of the distinction, see Gordon J. Schochet, “John Locke and Religious Toleration,” in Lois G. Schoerer, ed., The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 147–64, and R. K. Webb, “From Toleration to Religious Liberty,” in J. R. Jones, ed., Liberty Secured? Britain before and after 1688 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 158–98.

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motes a policy—to express the matter in contemporary usage—of “don’t ask, don’t tell”: one’s beliefs, practices, and rituals are one’s own business so long as they are kept out of sight. By contrast, liberty of conscience is said to be grounded independently of the ability of a power to interfere with its legitimate expression. The basis for the liberty is presumably something like a natural right or an autonomous moral will. Moreover, liberty in matters of conscience permits the public expression of one’s views—Kant’s notion of a realm of public reason—“provided that their manifestation does not trouble public order as established by law,” in the words of Article Ten of the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.”3 The conceptual distinction between tolerance and liberty ordinarily accompanies a historical judgment: the doctrine of liberty of conscience, especially in matters of religion, arose in the context of the Reformation and its aftermath, and is strictly a product of the modern world.4 The assumption, articulated by John Rawls in his introduction to Political Liberalism, is that the medieval Christian world was too “authoritarian” in its religious and social values to permit a workable notion of liberty.5 Liberty of conscience and freedom of thought were historically dependent upon an intractable religious pluralism that owed its development to the successes of Luther, Calvin, and their followers. Although flattering to liberalism and seductive to the untutored, the conceit of the modern liberal discovery of liberty of conscience is both conceptually simplistic and historically misleading. It is conceptually simplistic because it assumes, but does not defend, the view that liberty can only be grounded outside of the public realm, and hence that liberty and toleration are inherently antithetical. This dualism already takes for granted the basic principles of the liberalism that it sets out to defend. It is historically misleading because it fails to consider the very real strides that were made during the Latin Middle Ages to construct theories of political life that embraced liberty of thought and expression as a necessity rather than a privilege or an expediency. The image of medieval life and thought as monolithic is a pernicious myth. If anything, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, the problematic of the Middle Ages was constituted not by the unity of a single form of life but by the sheer multiplicity and diver3. “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” in Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 222. 4. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), xxiv. 5. Ibid., xxiii.

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sity of such forms.6 Consequently, any systematic conception of political and even ecclesiastical life had to contend with what Constantin Fasolt describes as “a plethora of actors jostling side by side to assert their particular ideas of the highest good.”7 In order to appreciate the contribution of the Middle Ages to the development of a theory of liberty of conscience, I shall consider a characteristically medieval mode of political thought which is sometimes termed “organic,”8 but which I have elsewhere more precisely labeled “communal functionalism.”9 The communal functionalist approach, which has received some attention already in chapter 3, conceives of the community as an arrangement of functionally distinct parts, each of which is necessary for the well-being of the whole and of all the others. Consequently, communal functionalism rejects elitist or specialist arguments for political rule, since the common good is the product of the intercommunication of parts, not of the task of any particular segment of the community in isolation. Rather, the common good can only be identified and applied by the joint participation of all the members of society. Any attempt to exclude functional members from public life damages the realization of the common good itself: interdependence entails inclusion. Thus, each segment of society has two roles that are crucial to the common welfare: the specialized performance of one’s functional activity and a more general concern with how that task fits into the overall communal scheme. If certain segments of society are not permitted to play the latter role—to express their views regarding the common good and their contribution to it—then the community will be guided by only a partial set of interests and will be impaired in its functioning. Cooperation among the parts is the key to a healthy civil body. And cooperation entails that all of the members must have a say and be listened to; that is, they must be at liberty to state their interpretation of the common good from their distinct perspective and this expression must be tolerated—indeed, carefully respected and consid6. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1981), 165. 7. Constantin Fasolt, Council and Hierarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 103. Fasolt is writing in the context of the competing claims of kings, popes, bishops, and secular lords in early fourteenth-century provincial France, but his remark applies to most of Europe during the Latin Middle Ages. 8. See Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der organalogischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1978). 9. Cary J. Nederman, “Freedom, Community and Function: Communitarian Lessons of Medieval Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992): 977–86.

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ered—by the other segments of society. In broad outline, this constitutes the communal functionalist case for a doctrine of liberty of conscience, grounded not outside of the public realm but justified by the very continued health and well-being of the community. Although communal functionalism as described is a kind of ideal typology, one can find throughout the Latin Middle Ages political authors who, in their conceptions of ecclesiastical as well as secular government, embraced the essentials of the theory. Thus, John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, employing what we may term a “moral” concept of freedom and his famous organic metaphor, argues that the liberty to speak out about the ills of society and the wrongs of one’s superiors must be tolerated and encouraged by the well-ordered community. Almost two centuries later, Marsiglio of Padua, employing an expanded and more sophisticated political language, asserts that a healthy civic body depends upon the assurance to each of its citizens of the personal freedom to judge and speak openly in matters of public concern. Now, the language of liberty was one of the most widely used modes of political and legal discourse in medieval Europe. It is possible to identify at least three traditions of thought about liberty available to the Middle Ages. The first goes back to the civic values of antiquity, especially the Roman Republic, and was transmitted with classical sources such as Roman law and Cicero. Liberty in this sense pertains to the corporate rights that accrue to a self-governing republic (and its citizens).10 Second, Christianity contributed a doctrine of liberty construed in terms of free choice, namely, the freedom to do God’s will or to refrain from following divine ordinance. This is a purely personal conception of liberty; it is confined to the particular orientation of the individual’s will.11 Finally, the feudal structure of social and economic, as well as political, relations generated a distinctive discourse of liberty defined as a sphere of action and judgment independent of the control and supervision of any superior authority. Out of such “territorial immunity” arises a principle of “inviolability,” an exclusive and unabridgeable right of the lord to exercise power.12 The concept of liberty that I am ascribing to medieval communal functionalism partakes of elements of all of these prevailing conceptions of lib10. Ch. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). 11. Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200 (London: SPCK, 1972). 12. Alan Harding, “Political Liberty in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 55 (1980): 423–43.

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erty, but is not fully assimilable to any of them. The uniqueness of the communal functionalist position is that it integrates respect for personal liberty into a secular, political framework, merging toleration with inalienable freedom. The force of the claims that might be made on behalf of such liberty is evident in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. John defends there a conception of open personal expression that was extensive even by far later standards. He counsels a doctrine of “patience” for the opinions and deeds of others that becomes difficult to distinguish from toleration. The best and wisest man is moderate with the reins of liberty and patiently takes note of whatever is said to him. And he does not oppose himself to the works of liberty, so long as damage to virtue does not occur. For when virtue shines everywhere from its own source, the reputation of patience becomes more evident with glorious renown.13

The patient man respects the liberty of others to state their own honest opinions, and he attempts to improve himself by patiently regarding his fellows. “The practice of liberty ..... displeases only those who live in the manner of slaves.”14 In other words, free men are reciprocally tolerant of the freedom of others, even when they are the objects of criticism. John praises the Romans for “being more patient than others with censure,” since they adhered to the principle that “whoever loathes and evades [criticism] when fairly expressed seems to be ignorant of restraint. For even if it conveys obvious or secret insult, patience with censure is among wise men far more glorious than its punishment.”15 The Policraticus supports this claim in characteristic form with many exempla of wise people who spoke their minds straightforwardly and of wise rulers who permitted such free expression to occur. There is no doubt that John’s praise of liberty of thought and speech reflects his conception of decorum and “civility”: the refined person permits civilized speech in his presence, and such speech may involve personal criticism and admonitions.16 But there is more at stake in John’s argument 13. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7.25, pp. 176–77. This translation is based on the text of the Policraticus edited by C. C. J. Webb, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909). A new edition by K. S. B. KeatsRohan has long been in the works, but thus far only books 1–4 have been published. 14. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 7.25, p. 176. 15. Ibid., 7.25, p. 179. 16. John talks at great length about matters of civility in ibid., 8.9–10. This passage is not translated in my edition of the Policraticus, but may be found in Joseph B. Pike’s selection, Fri-

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than simply good manners. For John posits an intimate relationship between liberty and morality. [Virtue] does not arise in its perfection without liberty, and the loss of liberty demonstrates irrefutably that virtue is not present. And therefore anyone is free according to the virtue of one’s dispositions and to the extent that one is free, the virtues are effective.17

Freedom makes virtue possible, for no one who is unfree (i.e., unable to make decisions for himself ) can ever be counted as capable of moral action. A virtuous (and also presumably a vicious) act is one that an individual has intentionally chosen to do, and thus for which he can be held responsible. But no such intentional choice is possible in the absence of liberty; the slave merely does as he is told, so that it is his master who must bear the blame for his conduct. There are two primary reasons why this liberty must be respected or endured by the rest of the community. First, John recognizes that a consequence of the necessity of personal liberty as a prerequisite for virtue is the possibility of making errors, that is, of misjudging and committing vice. There is no way around this difficulty: if individuals are to choose freely, then they must be free to be mistaken. John recognizes that enforced virtuous actions are not really virtuous at all and do more harm than good to subjects. It is for this reason that he condemns the immoderation (and immorality) of zealous rulers who compel their subjects to perform good deeds and who excessively punish evildoers.18 If John is not quite an advocate of the view that “Every man has the right to go to hell in his own way,”19 then he at least believes that there must be a realm of personal discretion in decision making with which no person can properly interfere. Hence, we must be tolerant of individuals when they go astray because volities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938), 341–54. Thanks are due to Dr. Sally Jenkinson of the University of London for suggesting to me the importance of the dimension of civility. 17. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 7.25, p. 176. 18. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 4.9, pp. 53–54. Coincidentally, he makes the same charge in his letters against Thomas Becket; see Cary J. Nederman, “Aristotelian Ethics and John of Salisbury’s Letters,” Viator 18 (1987): 171–72. 19. A position he rejects explicitly at Policraticus 8.9 when he attacks the Roman tribune who once proclaimed in a speech that there is no value to “liberty if it is not permitted to those who desire to ruin themselves by luxury.” Such “liberty” would have been regarded by John to be instead “license”; see Cary J. Nederman, “The Aristotelian Doctrine of the Mean and John of Salisbury’s Concept of Liberty,” Vivarium 24 (1986): 139.

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their liberty to do so is also the assurance of their ability to live a virtuous life. But there is a second sense in which patient endurance of the liberty of action enjoyed by others must be matched by a liberty of critical speech. John asserts that “it is permitted to censure that which is to be equitably corrected.”20 If we may not properly force people to do good, then we must equally be respected and tolerated when we point out the error of their ways. In other words, if you are free to do wrong, then I must also be free to correct or reprove you. The flip-side of individual liberty of action is liberty of speech. John emphasizes this point: “Liberty ..... is not afraid to censure that which is opposed to sound moral character....... Man is to be free and it is always permitted to a free man to speak to persons about restraining their vices.”21 The Policraticus indeed practices what it preaches. John describes his own encounter with Pope Adrian IV in which he recounted to the pontiff all the evils that are commonly (and with justification) ascribed to the Roman Church and curia.22 Moreover, he did not shy from lamenting at great length the many sins and vices committed by priests, monks, and members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.23 In fact, John claims that his liberty to censure is not merely a privilege: “It is not necessary to obtain confirmed permission for such remarks which serve the public utility.”24 Freedom to speak one’s mind about the ills of society, whether spiritual or temporal, parallels the liberty to “do as one pleases” without prior restraint.25 Given common expectations about medieval thought, it is perhaps striking that John leaves so much to the realm of individual discretion, both in terms of exercise of choice and of criticizing evils. Of course, such toleration of liberty is by no means unlimited. John insists that the “vices” of individuals which we ought to endure, if we are unable to correct them through free speech, must be distinguished from “flagrant crimes,” that is, “acts which one is not permitted to endure or which cannot faithfully be endured.”26 Similarly, he acknowledges that statements made “rashly,” that 20. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 7.25, p. 180. 21. Ibid., 7.25, pp. 175, 180. 22. Ibid., 6.24, pp. 132–35. 23. For a summary of these criticisms, see Cary J. Nederman and Catherine Campbell, “Priests, Kings and Tyrants: Spiritual and Temporal Power in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus,” Speculum 66 (July 1991): 579–80, 584–86. 24. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 7.25, p. 180. 25. Ibid., 1.5 (translated in Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers, p. 28). 26. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 6.26, p. 140.

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is, without respect for the persons to whom they are addressed and with the intent of harming another’s reputation, are deserving of censure and condemnation.27 The intent must be pure for liberty of action and expression to be tolerated; manifestly irreligious or dishonorable conduct and words have no claim on our patience. Still, the individual is afforded a remarkably large sphere of personal freedom not simply in private but as a part of one’s public role and perhaps even responsibility. The political ramifications of John’s doctrine of liberty become especially evident when we turn to his well-known conception of the body politic. The Policraticus articulated a complex and influential version of the organic metaphor for the political community whose full statement occupies two books and over two hundred pages of text.28 John compares the ruler to the head, the counselors to the heart, the various administrators and officials to the several organs and limbs, and the peasants and artisans to the feet.29 (The priesthood is analogized to the “soul,” but is not counted strictly among the “parts” of the body.) At the center of this analogy is an attempt to construct civil order on the principle of the social division of labor while rejecting the strictly hierarchical values of the Platonic polis (with whose outlines John would have been familiar via the opening section of the Timaeus).30 John designed his body politic as a system of harmonious cooperation based on reciprocal interdependence and social and political inclusion. The recognition and toleration of personal liberty is crucial to the successful operation of the political organism. John insists that all the relations between the members of the community ought to be governed according to a principle consistent with reciprocity. Adapting the advice of Terrence in regard to the treatment of the evils of one’s spouse, he proposes that “the vices of princes and subjects ought to be either endured or removed.”31 Now, John points out that “removal” here does not imply coercion or punishment. Rather, according to his interpretation, “‘Removing’ 27. Ibid., 7.25, pp. 176–77, 179. 28. For a full appraisal of John’s version of the organic metaphor, see Tilman Struve, “The Importance of the Organism in the Political Theory of John of Salisbury,” in Michael J. Wilks, ed., The World of John of Salisbury (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 303–17, and Cary J. Nederman, “The Physiological Significance of the Organic Metaphor in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus,” History of Political Thought 8 (Summer 1987): 21–23. 29. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 5.2, p. 66. 30. See Paul Edward Dutton, “Illustre civitatis et populi exemplum: Plato’s Timaeus and the Transmission from Calcidius to the End of the Twelfth Century of a Tripartite Scheme of Society,” Mediaeval Studies 45 (1983): 79–119. 31. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 6.26, p. 140.

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is meant in the sense of correction ....... What cannot be removed is to be endured.”32 John thus argues that we ought to attempt to restore erring members of the body politic to the path of virtue, but that, so long as their vices do not disturb the material or spiritual well-being of the whole, they are to be tolerated when they cannot be convinced of their errors. This principle entails both of the aspects of liberty discussed previously: it involves not only the freedom to speak to people about their vices, but also the liberty to act as one pleases—even contrary to virtue—at least within the limits of public order. Several implications follow from the general principles of liberty and toleration espoused in the Policraticus. First, the ruler must carefully respect the liberty of his subjects. Indeed, John’s famous distinction between the true prince (or king) and the tyrant turns on his doctrine of liberty. By definition, “the prince fights for the laws and the liberty of the people; the tyrant supposes that nothing is done unless the laws are cancelled and the people are brought into servitude.”33 The good ruler will necessarily govern so as to promote the liberty of subjects: liberty “has spurred on all outstanding princes; and none has ever trampled on liberty except for the manifest enemies of virtue.”34 It is perhaps for this reason that John places the prince under the strict dictates of law,35 since “laws were introduced in support of liberty.”36 That is, law assures to men that they will not be subject to the arbitrary will of a ruler and thus that they will be free to act within the fixed and equitable restraints imposed by legal standards. One consequence of this legally (as well as morally) assured liberty is that a measure of public criticism of superiors, even of rulers and priests, must be permitted. John takes great pains to distinguish between “high treason” (crimen majestas) and proper free expression. “High treason” has the express purpose of separating the head from its members, and thus of violating the reciprocity that is vital to the life of the body politic. Such an attack on the head is a violation of the whole.37 John enumerates all of the deeds that count as cases of high treason, citing copious legal texts in support of his definition.38 But it is noteworthy that liberty of conscience, construed as public criticism of the ruler, is excluded as an example of traitorous activity. For this reason, John insists that he is exempt from the charges that he himself is committing high treason by criticizing the bad 32. Ibid., 6.26, p. 140. 34. Ibid., 7.25, p. 176. 36. Ibid., 7.25, p. 176. 38. Ibid., 6.25, pp. 138–39.

33. Ibid., 8.17, p. 191. 35. Ibid., 4.2, pp. 30–31. 37. Ibid., 6.25, p. 137.

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morals and frivolities of princes and courtiers: “I myself will not be accused unfairly by anyone of having presumed against the authority of the prince.”39 Of course, just as princes (and indeed all people) must endure those vices that cannot be corrected in their fellow human beings, so subjects must tolerate the vices of their superiors. Even if the ruler is too loose in the virtues of his office, still he has to be honored; and ..... subjects, whom we have said to be the feet and members, should exhibit subservience to him in every way, so long as his vices are not pernicious. For, even if he is afflicted with vices, he is to be endured as one with whom rests the hopes of the provincials for their security.40

But note that such “subservience” is not slavery. The liberty to speak openly to superiors about their vices in hopes of achieving correction cannot be suppressed by a ruler without the enslavement of his subjects, at which point he ceases to be merely vicious and commits a flagrant crime against the body politic. The liberty of the individual members is the life-blood of the political organism, and is violated only by the tyrant. The proper response of the good ruler is illustrated by the Policraticus’s account of the reply of Pope Adrian IV to John’s own honest and stinging criticisms of the papal curia: “The pontiff laughed and congratulated such great candor, commanding that whenever anything unfavorable about him made a sound in my ears, he was to be informed of this without delay.”41 Free speech, even of a highly critical nature, is always welcomed at the court of the good ruler. But what of the case of the ruler whose vices are “pernicious,” that is, who reveals himself to be a tyrant, and who thereby endangers the spiritual, moral, and material well-being of the body politic? Here personal liberty of judgment and action takes on a different complexion. When the community is threatened by an incorrigible tyrant, members of the political organism are regarded by John to be bound to deflect injury to the public welfare. This duty to resist a flagrantly criminous ruler may even include a responsibility to kill the tyrant when no other mode of opposition (such as patient correction and prayer) succeeds.42 To say this is merely to invoke the earlier distinction between “vice” and “flagrant crime”: “What is understood by ‘vice’ is what honor and religion can securely endure. For 39. Ibid., 6.26, pp. 139–40. 40. Ibid., 6.24, p. 132. 41. Ibid., 6.24, p. 135. 42. See Cary J. Nederman, “A Duty to Kill: John of Salisbury’s Theory of Tyrannicide,” The Review of Politics 51 (Summer 1988): 365–89.

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vices are more insignificant than flagrant crimes; and there are a number of acts which one is not permitted to endure or which cannot faithfully be endured.”43 The same formula of justice that John ascribes to the ruler— that he should not be “excessively inclined toward punishing the faults of subjects”44—is also expected of the other parts of the body politic. The sphere of liberty ascribed to the ruler is in effect identical to that permitted to his subjects (recall that they both obey the same law). And it pertains to the individual discretion of the members of the political organism to decide when the ruler, having overstepped the bounds into tyranny, ought to be opposed. Hence, John praises the biblical Judith for taking matters into her own hands by performing God’s will in slaying the tyrant Holofernes.45 This response to tyranny may seem to us an “unreliable” procedure for restoring public order. But John is confident that the fear of eternal punishment for committing murder (an act of private will) would be such that the prospective tyrant slayer will be sure in herself that her intentions are pure. In any case, John is prepared to countenance such displays of liberty of conscience for the public good, at least in exceptional circumstances. It would be difficult to imagine a more confident expression of support for the individual capacity to judge and act freely. Marsiglio of Padua may seem on the face of it to advocate a diametrically different conception of liberty than that to be found in John of Salisbury’s thought. Given his personal background, not to mention some of his remarks in the Defensor pacis,46 Marsiglio has come to be regarded by many scholars as an early proponent of the kind of communal republican liberty so beloved of later Italian Renaissance figures such as Machiavelli. In the view of Quentin Skinner, it is central to Marsiglio’s theory to explain why the liberty of the Italian City Republics is everywhere being threatened and lost ....... What we in fact find ..... in Marsiglio is not merely a conventional diagnosis of faction as the main threat to the liberties of the City Republics; we also find a new and radical answer to how these liberties might best be secured.47

According to this interpretation, Marsiglio’s central preoccupation with peace is directly reflective of his overarching value of civic liberty. When 43. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 6.26, p. 140. 44. Ibid., 4.9, p. 45. 45. Ibid., 8.20, p. 207. 46. The best treatment of Marsiglio’s personal and intellectual biography remains Carlo Pincin, Marsilio (Turin: Edizioni Giappichelli, 1967). 47. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1: 57, 61.

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peace is threatened, the ability of the cities to govern themselves is endangered and they become subject to the sway of tyrants. Although this understanding in many ways involves too narrow a reading of the Defensor pacis,48 it is clear that one of Marsiglio’s concerns was indeed to protect the communal liberty of the cities of Italy against the incursions of “external” forces, especially the Roman church. But concentration on the communal sense of liberty—a value which is alluded to but never overtly defended or analyzed in the Defensor pacis—obscures another and theoretically more potent notion of freedom proposed and examined in great detail by Marsiglio. This notion arises from his doctrine of consent. It is well known that Marsiglio regarded consent to be the touchstone of good government and public order. In discussing the distinction between “healthy” and “diseased” regimes, he equates the genus of the first with rule over “voluntary subjects,” while the genus of the second is rule over “involuntary subjects.”49 He quotes Aristotle’s Politics 1295a15 in support of this view, but he then goes on in non-Aristotelian fashion to explain that the token of the voluntariness of subjects is their consent to government: “Absolutely or in greater measure it is the consent of subjects which is the distinguishing criterion” of a healthy or diseased government.50 In the case of constitutional structure, Marsiglio construes consent as the election of the ruler by the citizens of the kingdom or city.51 He indeed devotes an entire chapter of the first discourse of the Defensor pacis to the superiority of elected over nonelected government.52 Why is it preferable (indeed, even necessary) for citizens to be “voluntary,” that is, to consent to the terms of their rule? Marsiglio frames his answer in the course of his account of the process of enacting law (which follows the same procedures, he says, as “anything else established through election”).53 His main concern in regard to legislation—and indeed, all other matters of government—is that it truly embody the common interest rather than some partial set of interests. He thus formulates his scheme 48. I try to offer a corrective to this reading of the Defensor Pacis in Community and Consent: The Secular Political Theory of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995). 49. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor pacis, ed. Richard Scholz (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1933), 1.9.5. I will also cite the page number of the English translation by Alan Gewirth, Defender of the Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), although I have often revised Gewirth’s renderings. 50. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor pacis, 1.9.6, p. 32. 51. Ibid., 1.9.6–7, pp. 32–33. 52. Ibid., 1.16. 53. Ibid., 1.12.3, p. 45.

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of legislative enactment in order to exclude any statute that reflects partial or sectarian interests. Marsiglio objects to the claim that some segment of the community is especially competent or well qualified to impose law upon the remainder of the citizens.54 Rather, whenever one or a few individuals legislate, there is the threat that partiality may intrude: One man could make a bad law, looking more to his own private benefit than to that of the community, so the law would be tyrannical. For the same reason, the authority to make laws cannot belong to a few, for they could, as above, also sin in making the law for the benefit of a few and not for the common benefit.55

Fear of creating statutes and institutions that are not really for the common benefit—which are not, as Marsiglio remarks elsewhere, “politic” (politicis) in the truest sense56—stands behind the Defensor’s conception of how laws (as well as governments) should be authorized. It may not be immediately clear why this fear is warranted. That is, why is it not possible to trust a few men—say, the wisest, more prudent citizens—to act on behalf of the citizenry as a whole? To understand the ineliminable threat posed by partiality, we must realize that Marsiglio conceives of the origins and structure of the community in characteristically communal functionalist fashion. The Defensor gages the level of the “development” or “perfection” of a civil body according to the extent of the differentiation of its parts, where such parts constitute the specialized functional divisions within society. The community emerges out of a process through which human beings gradually discover all of the tasks necessary for a satisfactory existence. The variegation of functions typifies what Marsiglio terms “the perfect community,” namely, the kingdom or city.57 Consequently, the mature Marsiglian community has a reciprocal organization, characterized by the intercommunication of functions (in effect, the exchange of goods and services) necessary for a “sufficient life.”58 This generates a kind of ambiguous situation. On the one hand, the various parts functionally necessary to the community “are properly called offices, as though services, since, considering that they are established in the civic body, they are ordered towards human service.”59 In this sense, the final cause of each member is the well-being of the whole. But it is also true that these functions originate in a cause outside of the community, 54. Ibid., 1.13.3–4, pp. 51–53. 56. Ibid., 1.9.6, p. 32. 58. Ibid., 1.4.5, p. 14.

55. Ibid., 1.12.8, p. 48. 57. See ibid., 1.5.5, pp. 11–12. 59. Ibid., 1.7.1, p. 26.

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namely, in dispositions (habitudinem) of the soul endowed by nature.60 Hence, each of the functions additionally has its own special and definite end apart from serving the common welfare of the civil body.61 The functionally distinct parts within the community also and simultaneously aim at diverse particular and partial interests.62 Thus, the dilemma posed by Marsiglio’s communal functionalism is how to ensure that the specific interests of one or a few of the parts, rather than the general interest of the whole, do not become the basis for law and government. Marsiglio cannot embrace either of two obvious solutions to the problem. He cannot recommend the suppression of the particular interests of the various parts of the community. This would entail a devolution from that differentiation of functions that constitutes for him the “perfection” of civil life. Nor could he plausibly countenance a kind of protopluralism according to which the parts all seek to further their own narrow interests apart from and in competition with the other segments of society. Such a proposal would certainly lead (at least in Marsiglio’s mind) to conflict and dispute and ultimately to the disintegration of the public order. Rather, the path laid out in the Defensor pacis to cope with the intractable character of partiality follows from a theory of consent. Consent operates in Marsiglio’s thought as a bridge between the particular and the general. This becomes clear in the procedures sketched by him for the authorization of law. Whatever the corporation of citizens seeks by mind and feeling is more certainly judged as to its truth and more diligently noted as to its common utility....... The common utility of a law is better noted by the entire multitude, because no one knowingly harms himself. Anyone can look to seek whether a proposed law leans to the benefit of one or a few persons more than that of others in the community and can object to it.63

The argument proposed by Marsiglio to defend the priority of consent rests on the principle that people can judge what is contrary to their own interests. In a claim that captures some of the spirit of modern rational choice theory, Marsiglio maintains that no one would act in a manner detrimental to himself, in the sense of approving a law that favored the inter60. Ibid., 1.7.1, p. 25. 61. Ibid., 1.6.10, p. 24. 62. For a more thorough dissection of Marsiglio’s argument, see Cary J. Nederman, “Character and Community in the Defensor Pacis: Marsiglio of Padua’s Adaptation of Aristotelian Moral Psychology,” History of Political Thought 13 (Autumn 1992): 377–90. 63. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor pacis, 1.12.5, p. 46.

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ests of some at the expense of one’s own welfare.64 Hence, if each segment (or office) in the community has the opportunity to approve a legislative proposal and none can see that it will cause injury, then that law will carry the weight of the common utility behind it. Consent is given based upon the citizen’s individual judgments about and calculations of self-interest. Since no one can represent another’s interests,65 each citizen must be accorded a say in all decisions regarding matters of public concern. How does this involve the doctrine of liberty of conscience? There are two ways in which personal liberty and respect for it are integrated into Marsiglio’s theory: one public, the other private.66 In its public aspect, liberty is necessary in order to form judgments regarding the common good that are critical to the effective use of consent. Marsiglio describes legislation as a process of public debate and discussion about a proposed statute: If any citizen thinks that something should be added, subtracted, adjusted or completely rejected, he can say so....... In the general assembly of citizens, those citizens will have been heard who have wished to make some reasonable statements in the regard to them [the proposed laws].67

Consent does not simply entail a dull vote of “yea” or “nay.” Rather, every citizen must be afforded the opportunity to discuss and examine legislative proposals and to recommend adjustments or revisions. The authorization of law is the result of broadly based public discussion directed toward the achievement of consensus.68 Underlying the effective use of consent is a liberty of thought and expression grounded in the very nature of the healthy civic body. If all citizens are not free—and equally free—to speak their minds, then partiality will doubtless creep into the political process and the disintegration of the community will eventuate. 64. As demonstrated by Cary J. Nederman, “Community and Self-Interest: Marsiglio of Padua on Civil Life and Private Advantage,” Review of Politics 65 (Fall 2003): 395–416. 65. Marsiglio is a vehement critic of political representation; see Cary J. Nederman, “Knowledge, Consent and the Critique of Political Representation in Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis,” Political Studies 39 (1991): 19–35, summarized in chapter 7 of the present volume. 66. This is consistent with Marsiglio’s strong attachment to the public/private distinction, the significance of which I have examined in “Private Will, Public Justice: Household, Community and Consent in Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis,” Western Political Quarterly 43 (1990): 699–717. 67. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor pacis, 1.13.8, p. 55. 68. Marsiglio adopts this view explicitly in the Defensor minor in connection with the General Council of the Church. See Marsiglio of Padua, Writings on the Empire: Defensor Minor and De translatione Imperii, ed. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14.5, p. 42.

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Nor is Marsiglio shy about declaring the necessity of such liberty. “Every citizen must be free,” he proclaims, “not subject to the despotism of another, that is, servile lordship.”69 Such liberty to speak and act in the public realm, without fear of punishment or retribution, is the absolute precondition of stable self-government. Freely given consent ensures that members of the community will regard themselves to be the source of their own rule, with the consequence that “a law would be better observed by citizens anywhere when each is seen to impose it on himself.”70 Marsiglio’s concern here arises not merely from pragmatic considerations of obedience. It is the identification of the citizen with his community, and thus the congruence of his good with that of the whole, which is at stake. Indeed, he insists that even if a law were “less useful” by virtue of having been “made by the hearing and consent of the whole multitude,” still such a statute is better because it is more consistent with the voluntary character of citizenship, that is, “because each would be seen to set the law upon himself and thus has no protest against it, but tolerates it with equanimity.”71 The peace and order of the community—the undisturbed tranquility that facilitates the sufficiency of life that Marsiglio regards to be the purpose of communal association—can only be assured when the liberty of each citizen to contribute to the political process is guaranteed. Otherwise, partiality will induce a level of conflict that ultimately undermines the ability of the parts to cooperate and coordinate their functions. The other dimension of Marsiglio’s concept of personal liberty pertains to the private realm. In his Defensor minor, which purports to be a summary and restatement of the Defensor pacis, he argues that those forms of action and belief that do not impinge upon the intercommunication of functions among the parts of the community, and hence do not disturb the public peace, are to be tolerated.72 Regardless of the practices in which they engage or the views they hold, individuals ought to be at liberty to continue to perform the tasks necessary for the maintenance of the common good. Marsiglio defends this position explicitly in connection with diversity of religious belief. Rejecting the temporal consequences of excommunication, he asserts that the separation of believer from heretic 69. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor pacis, 1.12.6, p. 47. 70. Ibid., 1.12.6, p. 47; similarly, 13.8, p. 55. 71. Ibid., 1.12.6, p. 47 72. I examine the background to this position in much greater detail in “Tolerance and Community: A Medieval Communal Functionalist Argument for Toleration,” Journal of Politics 56 (November 1994): 901–18.

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should occur in connection with spiritual matters only. Excommunication is to be applied solely “in regard to belief and the observance of the rituals of the faith, rather than in regard to other domestic or civil intercourse.”73 The anathematization of heterodox belief is, Marsiglio contends, really “a sort of shame and disgrace” rather than a form of coercive punishment.74 While the Church retains the authority to fix its truths and to exclude from worship those who reject fundamental doctrinal principles, there is neither a scriptural nor a rational basis for extending this prohibition to the temporal domain of communal life. Marsiglio’s defense of this claim derives from his functionalist conception of society. He points out that the final cause of human law and its coercive force “is the tranquility and finite happiness of this world,” with the result that such precepts shape “human beings insofar as they are disposed and affected towards tranquility and power and many other [earthly] things.”75 If excommunication were to encompass temporal as well as spiritual affairs, then the legitimate concerns of public order and welfare would be disturbed. Indeed, the very purpose of excommunication, the well-being of the faithful, would be undermined. By denying intercommunication of a purely secular nature between the orthodox and nonbelievers of all sorts, it is the faithful themselves who will be harmed: they will not be able to take advantage of those material benefits accorded by communal life. No one (let alone orthodox Christians) should be deprived of civil comforts and associations, such as by purchasing bread, wine, meat, fish, pots or clothes from them [persons guilty of heresy], if they abound in such items and others of the faithful lack them. This is likewise also true of the rest of the functions and comforts to which they might possibly be judged susceptible in connection with their positions or civil duties and services. For otherwise this punishment would redound in like fashion or for the most part to innocent believers.76

The extension of excommunication to civil association constitutes for Marsiglio an attack on the most basic principle of community rooted in the interchange of functions. Inevitably, the functional breakdown of the community, and the intranquility that Marsiglio so feared, would ensue. The assurance of a private liberty of thought and practice is the only way to avoid this consequence. 73. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor minor, 10.5, p. 34. 74. Ibid., 10.6, p. 35. 75. Ibid., 15.5, p. 56. 76. Ibid., 15.6, p. 57.

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The liberty of conscience endorsed as a result of the communal functionalist framework adopted by John of Salisbury and Marsiglio of Padua, then, is by no means absolute or unlimited. In general, the limitations of such liberty are fixed by the concrete requirements of public order. Those who find this an unacceptable curtailment of the proper realm of personal freedom are reminded that the positions held by John and Marsiglio are closely paralleled by the distinction Kant himself makes between the public and the private uses of reason. It is to the public realm, Kant says, that liberty of conscience pertains. In their “private” functions and activities, individuals must still conform to the legal, moral, intellectual, and religious standards of the land. In terms that echo the medieval communal functionalists, Kant says, “Many affairs which are conducted in the interest of the community require a certain mechanism through which some members of the community must passively conduct themselves with an artificial unanimity, so that the government may direct them to public ends, or at least prevent them from destroying those ends.”77 Liberty of conscience does not for Kant apply in many aspects of social life. Of course, one may deny that Kant represents the pinnacle of liberal thinking about personal liberty. But any version of liberalism is compelled to set limits and to offer some justification for those limits. Locke and Mill, two other important liberal proponents of liberty of thought and expression in religious matters, were similarly careful to stipulate a bright line between liberty and license. The crucial question concerns the demarcation of the proper sphere of liberty. The principle that diverse modes of free thought and action must be tolerated for the sake of the perpetuation of the public good—the solution proposed by medieval communal functionalism—has several merits. Most obviously, because it is grounded in social reciprocity, it appeals to a logic of self-interest that can be broadly appreciated. The good of each depends upon the ability of each to contribute freely to the whole. Hence, respect for difference is a precondition of an adequate communal life, that is, a life of peace and mutual advantage. This means that toleration is not a privilege to be granted or denied at the whim of some superior (as liberals object) but a necessity strictly entailed by and built into the very terms of social and political interaction. Liberty retains its importance, but now within a network of public identity and diversity. Liberty of conscience ceases to be a justification for escaping community and takes on instead a central role in the maintenance and enhancement of a vital public life. 77. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” 85.



6

T h e R o y a l Wi l l an d t h e B a r o nia l B r i d l e The Bractonian Contribution

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o r m an y c e n t u r i e s , the medieval English jurist Henry de Bracton has enjoyed a prominent reputation among legal practitioners and political theorists alike, largely as the result of his ascribed authorship of the seminal lawbook De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae.1 For instance, during the 1571 trial of the Duke of Norfolk, an admissibility ruling by Chief Justice Catline contained the remark that “Bracton is indeed an old writer of our law.”2 Throughout the partisan disputes of the seventeenth century, Bracton’s name and the text of the De legibus were invoked on all sides—by royalists as well as antiroyalists—and found a home among thinkers ranging from Hobbes and Filmer to Algernon Sidney and Locke.3 John Milton, to cite but one case, relied heavily upon “our ancient and famous lawyer, Bracton” in his Defence of the People of England.4 The eighteenth-century legal scholar William

1. For a brief survey of this influence, see D. E. C. Yale, “‘Of No Mean Authority’: Some Later Uses of Bracton,” in M. S. Arnold, T. A. Green, S. A. Scolly, and S. D. White, eds., On the Laws and Customs of England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 383–96. 2. In Thomas B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings ......, 34 vols. (London: Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1809–1826), 1: 957. 3. The varying applications of Bracton’s political thought during the seventeenth century are surveyed in chapter 19 below. 4. John Milton, “A Defense of the People of England,” in D. M. Wolfe, ed.

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Jones referred to De legibus as “certainly the best of our juridical classics,”5 while a nineteenth-century jurist still considered Bracton to be “a man of no mean authority.”6 The twentieth century confirmed Bracton’s pivotal role in the formation of the English legal and political tradition by devoting massive quantities of scholarship to the study of his career and thought.7 As author of De legibus, Bracton richly deserves his preeminent status. Unfortunately, it now appears likely that Bracton was not the original (or even the primary) author of De legibus. It is no small irony that the intensive recent study of the Bractonian text, initiated to enhance the reputation of Bracton, has yielded the conclusion that De legibus was the work of several hands. This thesis first arose out of brilliant textual criticism by Samuel E. Thorne, contained in the introduction to the third volume of his reedition of Woodbine’s text of De legibus.8 Thorne established the 1220s as the most plausible dating for the initial composition of the text, with additions made early in the following decade. Only after about the middle of the 1230s does De legibus seem to have passed into Bracton’s hands, by which time it was already largely complete, judging from the relatively small number of later cases to which it refers.9 Bracton was simply the inheritor (albeit a prominent one) of a manuscript to which one or possibly more clerks had already contributed.10 In the past, while scholars have devoted considerable attention to the vast inconsistencies in the text of De legibus, they had always begun with the assumption that Bracton was the first and major author of the treatise.11 The genius of Thorne’s interpretation of the history of De legibus’s composition is that it accounts at a single stroke for the many textual discrepancies that have disturbed scholars throughout the twentieth century. Compared to previous invoThe Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), 4.1.492–93. 5. William Jones, Essay on the Law of Bailments (London: printed by A. Strahan for Charles Dilly, 1781), 75. 6. Quoted by Yale, “Of No Mean Authority,” 383. 7. For a bibliography of the main body of twentieth-century scholarship on Bracton, see Cary J. Nederman, “Bracton on Kingship Revisited,” History of Political Thought 5 (Spring 1984): 61, nts. 1–3. 8. Bracton, De legibus et consuetudinibus angliae, ed. G. E. Woodbine, rev. S. E. Thorne, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968–1977), 3: xiii–lii. 9. Ibid., 3: xxx–xxxix. 10. For a dissenting view, however, see John L. Barton, “The Mystery of Bracton,” Journal of Legal History 14 (1993): 1–142. 11. See the review of this controversy in H. G. Richardson, Bracton: The Problem of His Text (London: Selden Society, 1965), 37–44.

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cations of an anonymous redactor or changes in Bracton’s own opinions, Thorne’s postulation of multiple authorship is elegant in its simplicity as well as convincing in its explanatory power. Where incongruities were earlier treated as corruptions, to be disentangled from the “genuine” kernel of Bracton’s thought, we are henceforth encouraged to view them as aspects of the progressive formation of a document that was fashioned over the course of perhaps fifty years. One of the discrepancies that has commonly been cited (from the time of F. W. Maitland onward)12 as a primary example of the unresolved tensions within the text of De legibus arises out of the doctrine enunciated by the so-called addicio de cartis. The name attached to this passage stems from the view of earlier scholars that it was not an “original” part of the text, but instead was added as an afterthought at a later date (either by Bracton himself or by an editor) to the work’s discussion of charters. The conflicting character of the addicio de cartis results from its apparent defense of the occasional legitimacy of the restraint of kings by their inferiors, in direct contrast to assertions elsewhere in De legibus that the ruler is subject to God and law, but not to man. Thorne accepts the conclusion that the addicio de cartis was certainly not a part of the text in its earliest form. Yet without explicitly imputing authorship, he argues that “this addicio is as Bractionian as any other and was certainly in his manuscript. It was in the margin, a gloss. . . .”13 According to Thorne, then, the addicio de cartis is one more instance of the internal contradictions engendered by a multiplicity of authors contributing to the same treatise. Indeed, he claims the addicio as a major piece of evidence favoring his interpretation: If two or more clerks had a hand in the De legibus and if, several times copied, it had a longer gestation period than generally allotted it, an explanation appears for what seems to be Bracton’s self-contradictions and abrupt changes of mind, his afterthoughts which do not harmonize with their context, and the sudden doubts which assail him sometimes within the space of a few folios, causing the abandonment of one explanation and the adoption of another. There are many such opposite and conflicting views, the best known being the several assertions that the king has no superior and the contrary statement in the addicio de cartis.14

For Thorne, almost uniquely among recent students of the text of De legibus, the presence of the addicio de cartis is not a cause for consternation. It is 12. F.W. Maitland, ed., Bracton’s Note Book, 3 vols. (London: C.J. Clay, 1887), 1: 29–33. 13. Bracton, De legibus, 3: xlvi, n. 9. 14. Ibid., 3: ii.

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to be treated simply as another consequence of the participation of several hands in the composition of De legibus as it was ultimately transmitted. At the same time, however, Thorne perhaps does not appreciate that the ostensive inconsistency between the addicio de cartis and the rest of De legibus is of a different order than many other incongruities within the treatise. In particular, where the remainder of the discrepancies identified by Thorne are of a purely technical, juristic sort—conflicts in legal judgment15—the claim that the addicio de cartis is incompatible with the political thought in the main body of De legibus is a conclusion that can only be drawn on theoretical or philosophical grounds. In other words, to assert the contradictory character of the addicio de cartis is to make not merely a statement of observable fact, but instead to engage in a process of rational deduction. Certainly, legal authors in the generation immediately following Bracton did not see any incongruity. Fleta, for instance, arranges the text of the addicio de cartis just after a passage adapted from De legibus that asserts that the king has no human superior.16 And, as we shall see, many modern scholars have also failed to be convinced that the doctrine of the addicio necessarily contradicts other passages of De legibus. Thus, even if we accept Thorne’s thesis of multiple authorship (as present evidence indicates we ought), we need not thereby maintain that the addicio de cartis is conceptually inconsistent with the remainder of De legibus. The question remains an open one, to be settled by theoretical discussion rather than by textual criticism or historical investigation. In spite of Thorne’s account of the composition of De legibus, we are by no means necessarily closer to a final understanding of the relationship between the addicio de cartis and the political ideas contained elsewhere in the text. As a consequence, there may still be considerable value in reviving an issue addressed by an earlier generation of scholars.17 What is the place of the addicio de cartis in the political thought of De legibus as a whole? It is possible to generate a conceptually consistent yet historically plausible reading of the allegedly incompatible passages within De legibus? 15. Ibid., 3: li–lii. 16. Fleta Bks. I and II, ed. H. G. Richardson and J. O. Sayles, 2 vols. (London: Selden Society, 1966), 2: 36. Also see John de Longueville’s gloss, reproduced by Bertie Wilkinson, Constitutional History of Medieval England 1216–1399, 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1948), 3: 104. 17. Traditional discussions of the addicio de cartis may be found in Hermann Kantorowicz, Bractonian Problems (Glasgow: Jackson, Son & Company, 1941), 49–52; Gailliard Lapsley, “Bracton and the Authorship of the ‘Addicio de cartis,’” English Historical Review 62 (1947): 1–19; Charles M. Radding, “The Origins of Bracton’s Addicio de cartis,” Speculum 44 (1969): 239–46; and Richardson, Bracton, 30–36.

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To construct a response to such queries, we must begin with a detailed survey of the source of the controversy itself. It is appropriate to quote the entirety of the section on charters in order to appreciate not only the substance, but also the immediate context, of the addicio: Royal charters and acts of kings should be disputed by neither judges nor private persons; not even if doubts arise in them can they interpret them. Even with doubtful and obscure passages, or if a phrase is open to two meanings, the interpretation and will [voluntas] of the lord king should be awaited, since it is for him who establishes to interpret. And even if all is completely false because of erasure, or because the affixed seal is forged, it is better and safer that the case should proceed in the court of the king himself [corum ipso rege]. [No one can judge the king’s act or charter as so overrule the king’s act. But one can say that the king might have done justice and good, and if, by the same reasoning, he did what is bad, one can impose upon him the amendment of the injury (iniurium) so that the king and his judges do not fall into the judgment of the living God because of the injury. The king has a superior, namely, God: and also the law by which he is made king; and also his curia, that is, the counts and barons, because counts are called so to speak, partners of the king (socii regis), and he who has a partner has a master. And if the king is without bridle, that is, without law, they should put the bridle upon him, unless they themselves like the king are without a bridle. Then the subjects will clamour and say, “Lord Jesus, bind fast their jaws in rein and bridle.” To them the Lord will respond, “I shall call upon them a people fierce and distant and unknown, whose language is unknown, who shall destroy them and remove their roots from the earth, and by such they will be judged, because they will not judge their subjects justly.” And in the end, tied hand and foot, they will be sent into the burning pit and outer darkness, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.]18 18. De legibus, 2: 109–10. It may be useful to reproduce here the entirety of the addicio in the original Latin: “De cartis vero regiis et factis regum, non debent nec possunt iustitiarii nec privatae personae disputare, nec etiam si in illis dubitatio oriatur possunt eam interpretari. Etiam in dubiis et obscuris, vel si aliqua dictio duos contineat intellectus, domini regis erit expectanda interpretatia et voluntas, cum eius sit interpretari cuius est condere. Et etiam si omnino sit falsa propter rasuram, vel quia forte sigrum appositum est adulterinum, melius et tutius est quod coram ipso rege precedat iudicium. [Item factum regis nec cartam potest quis iudicare, ita quad factum regis irritetur. Sed dicere poterit quis quod rex iustitiam facerit, et bene, et si hoc eadem ratione quod male, et ita imponere ei quod iniuriam emendet, ne incidat rex et iustitiarii in iudicium viventis dei propter iniuriam. Rex habet superiorem, deum scilicet. Item legem per quam factus est rex. Item curiam suam, videlicet comites et barones, quia comites dicuntur quasi socii regis, et qui socium habet, habet magistrum. Et ideo si rex fuenit sine fraeno, id est sine lege, debent ei fraenum apponere nisi ipisimet fuerint cum rege sine fraeno. Et tunc clamabunt subditi et dicent, Domine Iheus in chamo et fraeno maxillas eorum constringe. Ad

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This passage contains three distinct components. In the first section, which arguably predates the rest of the passage, we are told that ambiguities in royal documents ought not be explained or judged except by the king himself. This echoes the claim we encounter throughout De legibus that preeminence is to be accorded to the king’s will.19 Second, the opening part of the addicio asserts that the curia of the ruler ought to bridle him when he commits an injustice. The magnates may so “bridle” him because they are his “partners” in governing the realm, and partnership implies mastery.20 Finally, the latter half of the addicio invokes the principle—again employed in other sections of De legibus—that those who misuse their authority so as to commit an injury will be consigned to flames of woe by God the Avenger.21 It is, then, the initial section of the addicio that creates an interpretive dilemma when compared narrowly with the observations about the judgment of charters and more broadly with the political theory that emerges from the rest of De legibus. The text would appear to contradict the doctrine, espoused recurrently in De legibus, that the royal will answers only to God and the law. According to the addicio, the superiority elsewhere reserved for God and law also pertains to the great men of the realm. Short of multiple authorship,22 does any other coherent way of accounting for this apparent inconsistency suggest itself? Among those scholars who had assumed De legibus to be the work of a single hand, one of two strategies quos dominus, Vocabo super eos gentem robustam et longinquam et ignotam, cuius linguam ignorabunt, quae destruet eos et evellet radices eorum de terra, at a talibus iudicabuntaur, quia subditos noluerunt iuste iudicare. Et in fine ligatis pedibus eorum et manibus, mittet eos in caminum ignis at tenebras exteniores, ubi erit fletus et stridor dentium.]” All translations from De legibus are mine. 19. For a summary and analysis of the main body of political theory within De legibus, see Cary J. Nederman, “Bracton, Henry de,” in David Miller, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 47–48. 20. The sources of this troublesome argument have been traced by Radding, in “The Origins of Bracton’s Addicio de Cartis,” 241–43. Fritz Schultz, in “Bracton on Kingship,” English Historical Review 60 (1945): 174, characterized the claim that “he who has a partner has a master” as “not intelligible.” But Radding explains that “according to the Civil Law the partner— and the word for partner was socius— ..... could make commitments of common property only with the consent of his partner. The socius ..... was a master in the sense that his partner’s freedom was limited by his consent....... The actions of a socius were subject to the scrutiny of his partners. If there was any evidence of fraud, or even of negligence, he was liable to the action pro socia which could force him to make restitution” (242). 21. On Bracton’s conception of an avenging God, see W. C. Jordan, “On Bracton and Deus Ultor,” Law Quarterly Review 87 (1972): 25–29, and Gaines Post, “Bracton on Kingship,” Tulane Law Review 42 (1968): 525–35. 22. As suggested, for instance, by Schultz, “Bracton on Kingship,” 174–75, and C. W. MacIlwain, Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1958), 69.

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was commonly adopted in order to explain the significance of the addicio de cartis in relation to other sections of the text. First, it was argued that the addicio is in fact consistent with the theory presented in the main body of De legibus. Evidence for this claim depends upon a somewhat altered reading of the addicio itself. For instance, H. G. Richardson understood the passage to refer merely to the fact that the magnates possess a moral superiority over the king, that they can “bridle” him by means of moral pressure and persuasion which does not involve the actual exercise of sanctions against the Crown.23 Similarly, Brian Tierney insisted that the position defended by the addicio “did not necessarily contradict the view that the king had no superior judge set over him.”24 According to Tierney, Bracton can be rendered “entirely and literally consistent” if we interpret the addicio to mean that “the magnates could oppose the king’s judgments in his curia and they had a duty to do so when his judgments were unjust, but if the king persisted in upholding a royal act that was unjust his judgment had legal validity.”25 Tierney arrived at this interpretation by way of an ecclesiological analogy; the author of the addicio is said to have borrowed the canonistic doctrine that “the judgment of the bishops in council outweighed that of the pope.”26 But Tierney’s reading founders on two objections. First, there is no evidence (of either an internal or external variety) that whoever wrote the addicio was aware of the canonistic sources Tierney cites. The supposition that the addicio’s creator possessed the specific familiarity with canon law required of him by Tierney is purely conjectural. Second, Tierney’s explanation does not in fact accord so readily with the rest of De legibus as he seems to believe. Tierney’s view is that the king retains legal superiority over his realm even when moral superiority devolves to his barons. But this entails an anachronistic distinction between moral right and legal right that De legibus expressly rejects.27 Instead, the king’s legal stature as a ruler arises from the characteristics of his moral will; the king is to be obeyed because he is the fount of justice, not merely because he is a lawful superior.28 Thus, the magnates could never be morally superior in Bractonian terms without also thereby achieving the legal superiority that Tierney denies is implied by the addicio. 23. Richardson, Bracton, 33–34. 24. Brian Tierney, “Bracton on Government,” Speculum 38 (1963): 315. 25. Ibid., 316. 26. Ibid., 315. 27. On the intimate relationship between law and justice in Bracton, see Nederman, “Bracton on Kingship Revisited,” 73–74 and nts. 71–75. 28. An overview of the moral aspects of the Bractonian conception of kingship may be found in ibid., 65–68.

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A second strategy designed to justify the inclusion of the addicio de cartis as a coherent element of the political teaching of De legibus is offered by Donald W. Hanson. In Hanson’s view, Bracton is an advocate of a conception of “double majesty,” that is, the thesis that “the king is the ruler and vicar of God and therefore responsible for the protection of his subjects through the administration of justice, but that affairs of the kingdom ought to be conducted in conjunction with the magnates of the realm.”29 Accordingly, the apparent contradiction of the addicio is really no more than an expression of the dualism present in medieval English thought between the independent powers of the king and of his magnates.30 Seen from the royal side, the monarch’s power is absolute and insusceptible to correction; the baronial component, however, requires that the king can rightly do nothing except what is done with the approval of the great men of the realm. Because the idea of “double majesty” was so widely accepted by the thirteenth century, Hanson believes, imitators of De legibus could in good conscience set the addicio side-by-side with statements of royal primacy and superiority.31 Of course, there is an implied tension between the two aspects of the “double majesty” doctrine, but Hanson insists that this was an historical conflict that manifested itself in the recurrent disputes between Crown and baronage that afflicted thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury England. It is true that the introductory comments in De legibus grant to the magnates a pivotal role in the legislative process. But the text never explicitly extends to the barony a similar function in the judgment and execution of just law—the subject of the addicio. Moreover, Hanson neglects to mention that the magnates are conceived by De legibus to be wholly the creation of royal authority, their powers devolving entirely from the concession and pleasure of the Crown.32 Thus, no Bractonian baron could possibly claim to be “independent” of the king in the sense demanded by the idea of “double majesty.” It seems likely that the notion of “double majesty” is more a product of Hanson’s historiographical creativity than a principle actually operative during the Middle Ages. In fact, as historians have repeatedly emphasized, English government and society was characterized by deeply felt and continuous cooperation and collaboration between the king and his noble subjects, reflecting a singular community 29. Donald W. Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 121–122. 30. Ibid., 126. 31. Ibid., 122. 32. De legibus, 2: 167.

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of interest uniting them and motivating magnates to associate themselves ever more closely with the royal administration.33 Thus, Hanson’s dualistic account of the addicio’s compatibility with the main body of De legibus cannot be accorded any greater credence than Tierney’s effort to construct a strictly consistent interpretation. The limitations of these previous efforts to reconcile the addicio de cartis with the remaining features of De legibus need not, however, suggest the futility of such a project. On the contrary, by paying careful attention to the arguments themselves, it is possible to ascribe to De legibus the coherent (if apparently paradoxical) claim that the king who has no superior on earth in some respects nevertheless must answer to a temporal superior. To make sense of this statement requires, first of all, that we review several elements of the political theory contained within the main body of De legibus. In particular, we should note that De legibus ordinarily describes the king’s superiority specifically as a function of his performance of just deeds. For example, the principle that the ruler can have no equal, let alone superior, among his subjects is justified on the grounds that “there ought to be no one in his kingdom who surpasses him in doing justice [iuris].”34 It is because the king’s will must be thoroughly disposed toward justice that he voluntarily places himself under the law, which is itself presumed to be just. The connection between justice and royal supremacy is reaffirmed throughout De legibus. “A king is created and elected to the end of doing justice to everyone,” declares the text, and thus “he must surpass in power all those subject to him. He ought to have no peer, much less a superior, in particular in the performance of justice [iustitia].”35 De legibus cites a number of maxims, derived from legal and theological sources, to prove that the king’s office and duties oblige him to put the bridle of justice on himself, to judge justly, and to uphold the law.36 Yet De legibus is equally 33. Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and State in England 1272–1377 (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), 146; Thomas K. Keefe, Feudal Assessments and the Political Community under Henry II and His Sons (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 2–6; David C. Douglas, The Norman Achievement 1050–1100 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 86, 113–14; Helen Maud Cam, Liberties and Communities in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 240; George Holmes, The Later Middle Ages, 1272–1485 (New York: Norton, 1962), 68, 82; Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 371; M. H. Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1973), 12–13; and Bertie Wilkinson, “The ‘Political Revolution’ of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries in England,” Speculum 24 (1949): 502–3. 34. De legibus, 2: 33. 35. Ibid., 2: 305. 36. Ibid., 2: 305–6.

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unequivocal on the point that no one can force the king to do or give justice; he alone is responsible (before God) for conforming his own will to the dictates of ius.37 It is in precisely this sense that the Bractonian king is without human superior—non sub homines sed sub deo et sub leges (“not under man but under God and under law”). Still, it is one matter to say that no man can compel the king to do justice, quite another to assert that none can restrain the king if he has committed a positive injustice. In other words, to dispute those determinations of the monarch that have a basis in law and the precepts of justice and equity is to presume against the Crown’s superiority. The competence of various kings in their role as judge is bound to be unevenly distributed; some rulers will certainly be more accomplished, wise, merciful, and fair in their decisions. Yet such variations do not imply that the king has wished or sought to bring about any harm to those over whom he reigns. It is for this reason that if the monarch refuses to “correct or amend his act” when so petitioned, his will cannot properly be doubted or contravened.38 God will judge the maleficent intent of an incompetent ruler;39 private persons, whose knowledge of their master’s heart is fallible, are not appropriately positioned to form the proper conclusions.40 In the present regard, the concern of De legibus seems to be with those men who, having received due process and royal judgment, still feel ill-done by the outcome. There were many individuals of this description in the Middle Ages (as today) and the message of De legibus to them is: Do not quarrel with what has been determined as just by your superior; it is his duty, not yours, to apply the principles of justice and law to particular cases, and you must abide by his determination; if the king was in error in a culpable manner, he will receive a far greater penalty in the hereafter. In no way, however, is this problem assimilable to the doctrine of the addicio de cartis, namely, to show that the commission of a clear and flagrant injury on the part of the king requires human response and restraint. We find a similar issue addressed by De legibus in the assessment of the culpability of inferior judges whose determinations are unjust or ill-founded. 37. Ibid., 2: 26–27. 38. Ibid., 2: 33. 39. On the role of intent (affectio) in Bracton’s analysis of justice, see ibid., 2: 23. 40. Thus, even so strong a medieval opponent of tyranny as John of Salisbury ultimately refused to sanction individual initiative in the correction of an evil ruler; John instead regarded action against a tyrant as the work of God Himself. See Cary J. Nederman, “A Duty to Kill: John of Salisbury’s Theory of Tyrannicide,” Review of Politics 50 (Summer 1988): 365–89.

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In the instance of a judge who “willingly decides incorrectly, he makes the case his own, and will be bound to restore damages.”41 In short, judgment given with malicious intent results in the judge himself becoming responsible for rectifying the consequent injury. On the other hand, if incompetence or mere inexperience yields a fault, the judge may not be blamed or made to pay for the injury, even if reversal and correction is ordered by a superior court. De legibus observes that the eventual disposition of judicial misconduct depends upon whether the judge or justice does this with certain knowledge, in which case he will be bound by reason of maleficence for deciding badly and knowingly perverting just judgment . . . . If, however, he acts out of ignorance or inexperience, he will be bound only partially by reason of maleficence, so that punishment will be mitigated by reason of his inexperience.42

Thirteenth-century lawyers were very well able to distinguish between a judgment aimed at the commission of an iniuria and one that produced an unintentional injustice. De legibus explains that “iniuria can be said to encompass all those things that are not done rightly,” with the result that maleficent and nonmaleficent acts “are distinguished by the intention or will with which they are done.”43 An erroneous judgment rendered without ill-will—without intending iniuria—merits vastly different treatment than one in which the evil was sought or planned. By logical extension, this principle may equally be applied to judicial decisions arising from a royal source. Should a royal deed be maliciously injurious, and performed with unambiguous intent, it must be corrected. In this regard, the doctrine of the addicio de cartis coincides with legal precepts found elsewhere in De legibus. According to the addicio, if a king willfully invalidates or misinterprets a charter in order to harm its possessor, the magnates of the kingdom would be duty-bound to rectify the injury (or to compel the king to do so). And should the peers, whether because of fear or self-interest, allow the injustice to stand, then the community of the realm may appeal to God for the remedy of divine judgment. Since the addicio de cartis itself very strictly limits the functions of the barons to “the amendment of iniuria,” an interpretation of the addicio can be made to harmonize with the rest of De legibus. 44 41. De legibus, 1: 280. 42. Ibid., 3: 338. 43. Ibid., 2: 289. For parallel remarks, see ibid., 2: 283. 44. Another passage of De legibus would seem to confirm this reading of the addicio. In

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The ability of the magnates to restrain their ruler when he commits an iniuria, while still not violating the principle of royal superiority, in turn depends crucially upon a precise understanding of the royal will (voluntas). The king’s will, properly speaking, is conceived to be a careful imitation of the will of God. And the essential characteristic of the divine voluntas, De legibus insists, is its absolute and unwavering orientation to do justice: God “is neither variable nor inconstant in his dispositions and wills [voluntatibus] but His voluntas is constant and perpetual.”45 Likewise, to speak of the royal will—the will of God’s vicar and minister on earth—must be to speak of a will inclined invariantly toward the performance of virtuous and just deeds, albeit imperfectly so. The justice of the king stems from a good will insofar as “the just man has the will to give each his right, and thus that voluntas is called just” which is constant and unfailing.46 This sense of the royal voluntas as distinctively just seems to be conveyed in the declaration of De cartis that the will of the king must be awaited.47 But what if the monarch’s good voluntas is not forthcoming, so that malicious injury rather than justice occurs? This is the kernel of the problem addressed by the addicio de cartis. In Bractonian terms, what the king does injuriously is not done by the king’s good will at all, but by an arbitrary will that cannot be construed as the royal voluntas, because it has no characteristic orientation toward justice.48 That is to say, the royal will is of a special character, being the fount of justice in the realm, which is why the discussion of the assize of royal disseisin, De legibus examines the recourse available to an individual who has been dispossessed and ejected from a holding unjustly by the act of a king. One may petition the ruler to rectify his iniuria in the hope that he will conform his voluntas to the law. Should he fail to make good the wrongful confiscation, however, “sufficiat ei pro poena quod deum expectat ultorum, quo dicit, Mihi vindictam et ego retribuam, nisi sit qui dicat quod universitas regni et baronagium suum hoc facere possit et debeat in curia ipsius regis” (ibid, 3: 43). This passage shares an important feature with the addicio de cartis, namely, that in both texts the barons are not viewed as challenging or coopting the king’s unique power to render just judgment. Rather, their role is limited to the restoration of what was unjustly determined, by constraining the king to amend his flagrant iniuria. 45. De legibus, 2: 23. 46. Ibid., 2: 23. 47. An interpretation that has already been suggested by Gaines Post, “Bracton as Jurist and Theologian on Kingship,” in Stephan Kuttner, ed., Proceedings of the Third International Congress of Medieval Canon Law (The Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1971), 121, nt. 33, although Post then immediately proceeds to describe the addicio itself as “a glaring contradiction of what Bracton has just said.” 48. For a more thorough treatment of the distinction between an “arbitrary” and a “good” will, see Post, “Bracton on Kingship,” 538, 553, and Post, “Bracton as Jurist and Theologian on Kingship,” 118.

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the king is not under man, but solely under God and law. Gaines Post observed that the Bractonian royal (good) will enjoys many of the properties of recta ratio (right reason).49 This suggests that the king truly uses his voluntas only when he employs it in accordance with right and justice.50 Should a ruler instead will what is injurious, then he has not willed it as would a king. He thereby renders himself subject to the same correction to which the unjust determinations of any other person are susceptible. To use terms intimately familiar to medieval authors, the exercise of the royal voluntas is coextensive with the king’s iurisdictio. Where the ruler’s iurisdictio does not extend—such as to the prescription of the legitimate rights of subjects, including their dominium51—a genuine royal will must be impotent. In short, the king forfeits his superiority by relinquishing his royal (good) will in favor of an arbitrary will when he does what is malicious and detrimental to his subjects. And it is in this sense that the addicio de cartis stipulates that the king may be forced by his magnates to correct his injustices. This account of voluntas ought to be sufficient to erase completely the alleged inconsistency between the addicio de cartis and the main doctrine of De legibus. For the claim that the magnates should “bridle” the king who commits a flagrant injury means merely that they are obliged to correct and restore that which was never done by the truly royal will in the first place. Since the king’s superiority is premised on his doing justice, and since he can truly will only what is righteous, the forceable imposition upon the king to rectify an iniuria does not contradict the principle that no external human authority may compel him to judge justly. The king whose will conforms to justice, or at least refrains from doing harm,52 will 49. Ibid., 118–20. 50. That the king himself recognizes the essentially good nature of his will is demonstrated in De legibus by the public oath that he is required to take at his coronation; the king-elect promises “ut in omnibus iudiciis aequitatem praecipiat et misericordiam ..... ut per iustitiam suam firma pace guadeant universi” (De legibus, 2: 304). On the background to the Bractonian use of the coronation oath, see Post, “Bracton on Kingship,” 535–44. 51. On the relationship between iurisdictio and dominium in medieval political thought generally, see Janet Coleman, “Medieval Discussions of Property: Ratio and Dominium According to John of Paris and Marsiglio of Padua,” History of Political Thought 4 (Summer 1983): 209–28, and Coleman, “Dominium in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Political Thought and Its Seventeenth-Century Heirs: John of Paris and Locke,” Political Studies 33 (March 1985): 73–100. 52. We ought not to forget that medieval authors could distinguish perfectly well between the acts of rulers that were of an intentionally malicious character, on the one hand, and benign neglect, on the other. Indeed, in the twelfth century already, John of Salisbury was quite

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be a superior whom none may challenge. Should an injury be committed, however, the justice that demarcates and defines the royal voluntas is nowhere present, and the king must be made to undo the unjust results of his arbitrary act or decision. In short, no inconsistency is posed by the addicio de cartis so long as we understand that whenever De legibus says the king is not sub homines, the reference is to his capacity to do good, whereas the addicio relates to the consequences of a ruler’s determination to behave maliciously. This conclusion does not quite put an end to the theoretical puzzle posed by the addicio de cartis. We may still want to know why the passage specifies that the magnates uniquely become responsible for reforming the flagrant injuries of the king, that is, that the “peers” of the realm are afforded a position of superiority under the circumstances. In the addicio itself, we are merely confronted with a play on words to the effect that the curia is in partnership with the king, and that whoever has a partner has a master. Charles M. Radding has shown that the source of the latter proverb may be traced to Romanist texts on the law of partnership.53 But more significantly, the principle that the king is in partnership with his magnates certainly accords with remarks elsewhere in De legibus. “Diverse powers are constituted under the king,” the text observes, for example, earls [comites] who take their name from companion [comitatu] or partnership [sociatate], who can also be called consuls from counselling [consulendo]. Kings associate such to themselves for ruling God’s people, ordaining them with great honor and power and name when equipping them with . . . the sword signifying defense of the realm and the country.54

In other words, De legibus allows the magnates the role of partners in governing the kingdom and in protecting the interests of the populace. The “association” between ruler and baronage would seem to correspond to the privileges under royal jurisdiction which the king may transfer outside of his ordinary control. The possession of a privilege, while hardly irrevocable, cannot generally be disturbed. What the king “once able to praise the prince who, while doing no great good, at least did no great evil: “For indeed princes are reputed for justice even when they refrain from injury; and their faculty for harm is the very substance of their merit. To refuse evil is a great thing in them, even if they do no great goodness, provided that they do not permit their subjects to indulge in evil” (Policraticus, ed. Cary J. Nederman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 55). 53. See note 20 above. 54. De legibus, 2: 32.

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consigns he cannot resume nor give to others, without injuring right,” except by request of the possessor or due to negligence.55 If, on the one hand, the magnate to whom privileges are granted acquires a set of private powers with which no other may ordinarily interfere, then at the same time he also takes on a set of obligations toward the kingdom. Ordinarily, the barons have a duty to “fight with the king” in order to “defend the country and the people of God,”56 to take counsel with the king in matters of legislation,57 and to participate in judgments of the royal curia in difficult and unclear cases when “new and unusual matters arise which have not before been seen in the realm.”58 In sum, the magnate truly does become a royal partner in numerous instances concerned with the governance of the realm; he is, as Walter Burley would say in the fourteenth century, a comprincipatur, a coruler, along with the king.59 Thus, it is not solely in the addicio de cartis, but throughout De legibus, that the baronage is accorded obligations that encompass the realm as a whole. More exceptionally, De legibus allows that the magnates as a group may be duty-bound to supplant the king as judge in his own court. This becomes apparent, for example, in the lengthy treatment of the adjudication of lese-majesty, which is considered to be “a crime exceeding all others.”60 Lese-majesty creates an unusual problem. Where normally the Crown retains jurisdiction in the case of heinous capital crimes, when lese-majesty is charged the king himself becomes plaintiff in the action. Because one ought not to be both plaintiff and judge in the same trial, De legibus insists that the monarch must be excluded from personal jurisdiction over lesemajesty proceedings. Nor may the royal justices alone replace their master under these circumstances—unless perhaps the trespass against the king is slight—since, as we are reminded, an official of the court “represents the person of the king whose deputy he is.”61 De legibus resolves the dilemma of who may judge in cases of lese-majesty by placing the burden of determination upon the baronage:

55. Ibid., 2: 169. 56. Ibid., 2: 32–33. 57. Ibid., 2: 19, 305. 58. Ibid., 2: 21. 59. On Walter Burley’s theory of corulership, see Cary J. Nederman, “Kings, Peers and Parliament: Virtue and Corulership in Walter Burley’s Commentarius in VIII Libros Politicorum Aristotelis,” Albion 24 (Fall 1992): 391–407. 60. De legibus, 2:.334. 61. Ibid., 2: 337; cf. ibid., 2: 307.

96  Diss e n t & t h e Li m i t s o f P o w e r The curia and peers should judge, so that malfeasance does not remain unpunished, in particular where life and members or disinheritance is involved, when the king himself must be an actor in court. . . . The peers ought to be associated with the justices so that the king either by himself or through his justices without his peers is not actor and judge.62

In other words, while the expertise of judicial magistrates should be included in any deliberations regarding lese-majesty, the judgment of the magnates is absolutely necessary to the resolution of the case. Only a court that contains the peers is fully competent to reach a decision, presumably because they have acquired a preeminent obligation to serve and protect the realm. Thus, it is admitted that there are special situations in which the baronage must be raised to a position of judgment over the king, albeit when the injury is allegedly committed against the Crown rather than by it. The description of the lese-majesty proceeding we find in De legibus is thereby indicative of the extent to which it might be possible to impute to the magnates authority for playing a judicial function in the realm when the king is incapable of doing so. It perhaps needs to be emphasized that the public responsibility for the correction of royal misdeeds and injuries must be strictly limited to the class of magnates. This is indicated in the addicio’s insistence that should the curia refuse its duty and allow the king’s injury to stand unrectified, the populace at large has recourse to God only. The addicio consequently excludes any effort of nonnoble subjects to bridle the king on their own. The explanation for the addicio’s proviso is once again found in the main text of De legibus. There is a clear distinction to be drawn between the peers of the realm—who are charged with aiding the king in governing his people—and the population at large, which is merely “subject to his power” and enjoys no further rights.63 In other words, just as the addicio shows no sympathy for the expression of truly popular grievances in a political forum, so it relegates the king’s lesser subjects to the role of obedience only. By no means was this an exceptional view during the Middle Ages, but it underscores the singular character of the privileges ascribed to the baronage by both De legibus and the addicio. Magnates were endowed with a measure of responsibility for political involvement to which no other men could possibly aspire. The uniqueness of the peer’s place is suggested by the 62. Ibid., 2: 337. 63. Ibid., 2: 34.

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remark that to bring “the rights of earldoms and baronies . . . to naught” would be simultaneously to precipitate “the destruction of the realm, since it is of earldoms and baronies that it is said to be constituted.”64 For this reason, the addicio concedes to magnates a special authority for the amendment of injuries that no other social group could possibly be afforded. The baronage is conceived to have a vested interest in the good and just government of the kingdom which lesser men could never share. Although the doctrine of the addicio de cartis may intelligibly and plausibly be rendered consistent with the political theory of De legibus as a whole, no conclusions ought to be drawn about the motives behind the authorship of the addicio. It may be, as recent scholars have maintained, that the inclusion of the addicio was the result of historical concerns stemming from the Monfort Rebellion against King Henry III and its aftermath.65 All the present chapter has sought to demonstrate is that whoever wrote the addicio and for whatever reasons, the author framed his contribution in such a way as to be strictly congruent with the political and legal ideas found elsewhere in De legibus. For this reason, rather than because of extrinsic historical considerations, the later medieval imitators of De legibus repeated the words of the addicio without alteration or comment. English lawyers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries understood perfectly well that the king who committed harmful and injurious acts was not comparable to the monarch whose will was good and whose intent was pure. What is not so clear is whether the legal minds of Bracton’s age took the teaching of the addicio to be some sort of legitimation of revolutionary baronial action against the king. One venerable line of interpretation from the seventeenth century until the present day places De legibus at the origin of a distinctively English tradition of resistance to illegitimate authority.66 But there seems better evidence to suggest that the addicio presumes the same sort of structure proposed by the English pseudo-lawbook Speculum justiciariorum, probably written early in the fourteenth century. The Speculum observed that: 64. Ibid., 2: 222. 65. Radding, “The Origins of Bracton’s Addicio de Cartis,” 243–46; and Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth, 126–33. 66. Locke invokes the name of Bracton, for instance, as an authority for his own justification of revolution in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 475. For a modern reading of the addicio as an incitement to rebellion, see Lapsley, “Bracton and the Authorship of the Addicio de Cartis.”

98  Diss e n t & t h e Li m i t s o f P o w e r while the king should have no peer in his land, in order nevertheless that if the king by his wrong sins against any of his people, none of his commissioners should be judge and party [to the action], it was arranged as law that the king has companions in order to hear and determine in the parliaments all briefs and plaints of wrongs of the king, the queen and their children, and their kind, for whose wrongs one could not otherwise have common justice. These companions are now named earls [contes], after the Latin comites.67

The procedure advocated by the Speculum is foreshadowed by De legibus’s account of lese-majesty hearings. As the similarities suggest, we are hardly justified in describing the addicio de cartis as the work of an ardent revolutionist, any more than as a coherent statement of constitutionalist or any other political doctrine.68 Rather, the addicio de cartis represents the same sort of theoretical stance that we find throughout De legibus: the attempt to identify judicial and legal remedies to the problems posed by personal monarchic government. 67. Speculum justiciariorum, ed. W.J. Whittaker (London: Selden Society, 1895), 7. Similar sentiments were behind the Ordinances of 1311, the Statue of York, and analogous fourteenthcentury attempts to specify the king’s obligations to his realm and subjects. 68. The desire to place the political theory of De legibus into a consistent and clearly modern framework has been intensely pursued by some scholars; see, for instance, R. F. Treharne, “The Constitutional Problem in Thirteenth-Century England,” in T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke, eds., Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 49–60. The origins of such efforts to coopt Bractonian thought for purposes of authorizing more purely modern political doctrines are discussed in chapter 19.



7

P o l i t ica l R e p r e s e n t at i o n Modern Theory and Medieval Practices

m o n g t h e various contributions identified by histori cally minded scholars as medieval bequests to modern thought, few have been as widely proposed as political representation.1 For some authors, this phenomenon can be traced to the widespread use of “representation” in the construction of ecclesiological, especially conciliar, doctrines. Brian Tierney claims that representation has an important genealogy in canonistic writings that crystallized as a political theory in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries among conciliarsts. Although ultimately failing to plant firm roots in the soil of ecclesiology, Tierney observes, “the ideas of the great medieval Churchmen on representative government had more influence in the secular sphere.......”2 By contrast, other scholars have located in the emergence of parliamentary institutions and practices in the territorial kingdoms of Europe the locus of representative thought. As Antony Black has remarked, “There was considerable continuity between medieval parliamentary traditions and the emergence of modern represen1. Overviews of the topic may be found in Hasso Hofmann, Reprästentation: Studien zur Wort- und Begriffsgechte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974), esp. 38–285. Also useful is Adalbert Podlech, “Repräsentation,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 5 (Berlin: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 509–47. 2. Brian Tierney, “The Idea of Representation in the Medieval Councils of the West,” Concilium 187 (1983): 29.

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tative government.”3 Regardless of whether they look to spiritual or to secular institutions and ideas, medievalists seem generally satisfied that political representation clearly originates during the Latin Middle Ages.4 Interestingly, however, the leading interpretations of the medieval sources of modern political representation have not exercised much impact upon recent political theorists who have analyzed the concept.5 In her classic book on the topic, Hanna Pitkin only managed a few scattered lines about representation during the Middle Ages,6 while a few years later A. H. Birch wrote eight pages on “medieval concepts and practices” that contains no theoretical discussion and barely manages to move beyond the shores of England.7 More recently, Bernard Manin groups medieval ideas and practices mainly with the classical, prerepresentative traditions of Greece and Rome,8 and F. R. Ankersmit, despite his self-proclaimed historical (and historicist) orientation, is entirely silent about the Middle Ages.9 In gener3. Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 162. 4. See Arthur P. Monahan, Consent, Coercion and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), esp. 111–33; Jeannine Quillet, “Community, Counsel and Representation,” in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 554–72; and Kenneth Pennington, “Representation in Medieval Canon Law,” in Massimo Faggioli and Alberto Melloni, eds., Repreasentatio: Mapping a Keyword for Churches and Governance (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2006), 21–40. A rare dissenting note is sounded by Bernard Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, trans. Juliet Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 171–87, who held that a break occurs between late medieval practices of representation and the subsequent rise of modern representative government. 5. For a representative selection of the scholarship, see J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds., Representation, Nomos 10 (New York: Atherton Press, 1968); of the nineteen chapters, only two have any significant historical orientation. Most recently, see Andrew Rehfeld, The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy, and Institutional Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), in which Montesquieu is the earliest figure examined; and Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), which insists upon the modern invention of representative regimes. 6. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 3, 241–42. 7. A. H. Birch, Representation (London: Macmillan, 1972), 22–29. 8. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 51–67, 87–90. 9. F. R. Ankersmit, Political Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); see 15–32 for his “historicism,” and 91–132 for his reconstruction of the development of political representation. A useful critique of Ankersmit’s general line of interpretation is provided by H. S. Jones, “Political Uses of the Conception of ‘Representation,’” Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 4 (2000): 15–36 (with a reply by Ankersmit on 37–41).

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al, the historiography of representation, at least among political theorists, does not seem to have moved significantly beyond Rousseau’s declaration nearly 250 years ago that “the idea of Representatives is modern ..... modern peoples which believe themselves free have representatives....... [But] the instant a people gives itself Representatives, it ceases to be free; it ceases to be.”10 Even those who dispute Rousseau’s conclusion about the enslaving characteristics of representative government apparently endorse his chronology. The standard narrative of modern representation starts with Thomas Hobbes and makes important stops at John Locke, the American Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, and John Stuart Mill before arriving at the contemporary conditions of liberal democracies. While Rousseau also averred that the notion of representative government “comes to us from feudal Government,” he clearly believed that this paternity is not especially germane, since modern representation claims to embody the freedom of the population whereas feudal representation had been grounded in the “degradation” and “dishonor” of the human race.11 One may thus pose the question of whether, as a matter of historical record, Rousseau and his latter-day adherents are wrong concerning the modernity of representation. On the face of it, the evidence seems to support the judgment that they have made a significant error. The language of representation was rife in Europe during the Middle Ages—an inescapable presence in legal, political, theological, and ecclesiological writings. Many scholars have rigorously documented the use of the terminology associated with representation in a wide array of texts.12 Yet the answer about Rousseau’s accuracy ultimately depends upon which concept of representation one has in mind. While there are several senses in which Rousseau is clearly in error, in one important way he was perfectly correct. Specifically, the theory of political representation—precisely the principle that has probably received the most attention since the seventeenth century—lacks a clear medieval ancestry. By a theory of political representation, I refer most generally to a philosophical or conceptual basis for the relationship be10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114, 115 (3.15.6, 11) 11. Ibid., 114 (3.15.6). 12. See, in particular, Antonio Marongiu, Medieval Parliaments: A Comparative Study, trans. S. J. Woolf (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968), esp. 19–41 and 223–47; Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 1100–1322 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 61–238; and Black, Political Thought in Europe, 162–185.

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tween a principal and an agent such that the agent is able to act in a binding fashion on behalf of yet independent from the principal.13 In general, the nature of the relation between principal and agent may be construed variously as symbolic, according to which the representative embodies or personifies a community or group of individuals, or as delegated, on the basis of which the representative is deemed to act solely upon the mandate or direct orders of his constituents. Political representation characteristically involves elements of both symbolic and delegated authority at once. Political representation thus posits that in at least some measure the representative must simultaneously concern herself/himself with the interests of constituents (regardless of their wishes) and the wishes of constituents (regardless of their interests). There may be significant room for shading in one direction or another, but both aspects need to be present. In turn, theories of representative government rest upon the inescapable assumption that a division exists between what people want and what is in their broader interests, such that wishes and interests are seldom, if ever, identical. As a consequence, people need representatives to balance out and mediate between the dual factors of interests and wishes. The consent of the governed constitutes one, but not the sole, salient feature of political representation. I contend that political representation as a theoretical precept was not present in the writings of medieval authors, regardless of whether they were addressing the Church or the secular polity, at least through the late fifteenth century. When the discourse of representation was deployed during the Middle Ages, as frequently happened, its occurrence failed to convey the unique characteristics of the theory of political representation enumerated above. Rather, medieval approaches to representation clustered around one of two alternatives: “spiritual” representation and “practical” representation, which I shall explain momentarily. In the present chapter, I also examine one hard case that has been widely held to embody a full-blooded theory of political representation: Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor pacis. Finally, I shall propose a possible solution to the question of why medieval Europe does not seem to have embraced a theory of political representation, illustrating my answer with reference to the writings of Sir John Fortescue. I have already alluded to one important line of historical research, according to which the major sources of representation derive from concil13. For this definition, see Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 209–40.

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iarism, that is, the medieval doctrine that primary authority within the Church rests with the General Council.14 Although it had antecedents among earlier legal and political authors, conciliarism emerged in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as a means of resolving the Great Schism, when multiple claimants asserted competing claims to be the recognized pope. The General Council, composed of delegates from throughout Christendom, was regarded by its proponents as the only valid source of genuine Christian doctrine. Hence, it pertained to the Council to appoint and remove ecclesiastical officials, proclaim and interpret canon law, and give final authority to every action undertaken by the temporal institutions of the Church. Is this Council representative? The ultimate purpose of the Council is the canonical interpretation of Holy Scripture. Such interpretation is not a subjective affair, a matter pertaining to the wills of individual persons or even of the historical Church as a whole, because the truths of Scripture are fixed for all time. It is up to the Council to discover and articulate these eternal truths when issues of doubtful understanding arise. The representative quality of the Council stems from the fact that it ultimately represents the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as manifested through successive generations of members of the body of the faithful.15 The Council is “representative” not because that it acts at the behest of some party, but rather in the sense that it codifies the truth of Scripture that is known to all believers— past, present, and future. Thus, there is no difference between the real interests of the faithful and their actual wishes. In this sense, the General Council of the Church does not strictly speaking perform the duties of a politically representative body because it does not have to balance between wishes and interests. We see this general conception of spiritual representation at work, for instance, in the thought of the fifteenth-century Parisian theologian Jean Gerson.16 For Gerson, the acts of the General Council are without moral defect and may therefore always be expected to reach the correct determi14. For the most recent statement of this view, see Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 15. This is evident, for example, in the conciliar writings of the young Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, who repeatedly insists that the Council “represents” the universal Church in just this sense. See the collection of his correspondence, Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius: Selected Letters of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), 1405–1464, ed. Thomas M. Izbicki, Philip Krey, and Gerald Christianson (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006). 16. For more detailed examination of Gerson’s ideas, see chapter 12 below.

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nation in all matters pertaining to the faith. On the face of it, the “perfection” of the General Council is problematic. But Gerson reasons that the General Council is thoroughly and invariably representative of the entire Church.17 The Council may thus be conceived as the sole and incontrovertible voice of the corporate mystical body of the Church. When the Council speaks, its proclamations do not reflect the private concerns of its membership but the true needs and purposes of the total ecclesiastical corporation. The General Council does not have a will of its own; rather it expresses the genuine and singular will of the Church community. As a mystical body, the Church has only one will and only one set of interests; its common utility is to be found in the defense and dissemination of the orthodox faith and correct morals, a universal and self-consistent doctrine. The Church, in sum, is the bearer of “indeviable wisdom”18 with regard to its own goals and ends. In view of its organization, furthermore, the welfare of the corporate Church is characteristically distinct from and superior to the private benefit of any of its particular members. Within the ecclesiastical setting, the communal Church is the final arbiter of all matters touching upon the beliefs and conduct of the faithful. By extension, the General Council derives its infallible status from the special and privileged access that the whole ecclesiastical community enjoys to the absolute knowledge of its own common good.19 As representative of the Church, the Council is simultaneously representative of that welfare of which the mystical body alone on earth is the ultimate judge. An individual will can never represent this common utility infallibly and without fail, for it is too easy a matter for a single person (or even a small group) to be tempted by passion and led astray into sin. But the corporate structure of the General Council, insofar as it resembles the structure of the entire Church, is not believed to be capable of entering into a similar path of immorality.20 The perfect wisdom with which the Church is endowed is explicitly transferred to the decrees of a General Council. And such perfection renders the Council functionally supreme in the determination of faith and morals, including the conduct of a pope who abuses the powers pertaining to his office. In a sense, then, the pope does rule with the consent of the Church 17. See Jean Gerson, In recessu regis Romanorum, in Palemon Glorieux, ed., Oeuvres Complètes, 10 vols. (Paris: Desclée, 1960–1973), 5: 479. 18. Jean Gerson, De potestate ecclesiastica, in Glorieux, ed., Oeuvres Complètes, 6: 233. 19. See Brian Tierney, The Origins of Papal Infallability (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 46–49. 20. Gerson, De potestate ecclesiastica, 240.

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manifested through its unique representative, the General Council.21 But such consent is characteristically corporate, a function of a “higher” ethical and religious consensus. Neither Gerson nor (so far as can be ascertained) any other proponent of conciliar supremacy stipulated that the General Council ought to canvas and reflect the actual, empirical wills of individual Church members. The Council is not beholden to particular interests within the Church in the manner of an elected representative in a modern republic who is bound to be responsible and responsive to his constituency. For the Council is under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, and the Church itself has only one genuine interest to be served: the perpetuation of a unified orthodoxy, about which there could be no legitimate difference of opinion. Therefore, the General Council concerns itself solely with matters arising from the identification and enforcement of catholic doctrine, that is, with the truer and higher purpose necessarily shared by all Christians.22 In this, the faithful at large were effectively treated as mere subjects rather than as full citizens; their actual participation as individual members of the Church was not essential or important. We must never confuse the mystical body of the Church with an aggregate of its particular members. In view of the inescapable demand for a single canon of beliefs, the General Council cannot be representative of nor even seek consultation with the diversity of real opinions and interests among individuals within the mundane Church. The other major attempt to find a medieval foundation for representation, as I have suggested, looks to one of the features of the practice of European noble culture (often termed the “feudal contract”), namely, the requirement that a political superior (up to and including the king) seek auxilium et concilium (“aid and counsel”) from those bound to him by oath when undertaking any enterprise that requires their cooperation.23 In effect, consent had to be given by inferiors to the plans of superiors. The question naturally was posed: Is such consent purely personal or does the approval of those present to render it obligate those who are absent (whether by choice or necessity)? This simple question sparked the begin21. Gerson, In recessu regis Romanorum, 479. 22. Ibid., 478–79. 23. For what follows, see Marongiu, Medieval Parliaments; Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought, 91–126; and P. S. Barnwell and Marco Mostert, eds., Political Assemblies in the Earlier Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). The use of the term “feudalism” as a description of this system of legal and political has come under serious attack from Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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ning of debate about representation. If those who did not expressly consent (say, to a military levy or a change in customary law) could be bound by those who did, then a representative relationship might be said to exist between the present and the absent. The issue received no definitive solution, but its very expression opened up a new political problem that had not been raised in either the city-empires of the ancient world nor in previous systems of monarchic rule. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the royal and provincial councils (composed of nobles both secular and clerical) in which the representation question had first been posed enlarged their membership to include delegates from main urban centers and also sometimes from the lesser nobility. Since it was impractical for all urban denizens and rural knights to participate directly, these assemblies (such as the Parliament in England, the Estates General in France, and the Cortes in Spain) were manned by delegates elected or appointed by their localities. Were these deputies “representatives” in the modern sense? It depends upon the authority that they were given. In many cases, and often in spite of the demands made in the summons to attend, the delegates lacked plena potestas, that is, the full power to answer and consent for their constituencies without consultation. Only when the constituents expressly granted plena potestas could a deputy consent in the manner of a representative. The struggle between prince and locality over the granting of full powers persisted for several centuries, such that it is anachronistic to call all medieval assemblies representative institutions in the political sense. More significantly, medieval practices of representation did not translate into a theory; representation language is completely absent in treatises that discussed early parliamentary institutions. Even in England, where the practice of representative government was perhaps most advanced and extensive during the later Middle Ages, writings that mention Parliament are noticeably silent about the status of those who attended the assemblies. Rather, these works treat Parliament as an extension of the king’s customary responsibility to obtain the concilium et auxilium of the members of the feudal nobility who owe his allegiance. Thus, the anonymous early fourteenth-century Speculum justiciariorum imagined a past golden age in which the king determined “to assemble his earls and ordained for perpetual usage that twice each year, or more often if necessary in times of peace, they assemble themselves in London in order to hold parliament about the guidance of God’s people, how men should protect themselves from sin, should live quietly, and should receive justice by regular practic-

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es and sacred judgments.......”24 Several decades later, the anonymous Modus tenendi parliamentum, again imagining a practice said to originate with William the Conqueror, insisted that participation in Parliament, whether of laymen or clergy, derives from tenure alone, “unless their presence is for other causes useful and necessary to Parliament.” The Modus does call for election of delegates from the Cinque Ports, the knights of the shire, the cities, and the boroughs, with the understanding that those elected are authorized “to answer, undertake, state, and do” on behalf of their constituencies “as if everyone ..... were himself personally present.”25 In other words, plena potestas is imputed to delegates, but only by assertion; there is no attempt to reflect on the nature of the powers of those elected or to justify them in terms of an elaborated theory of representation. More importantly, Parliament is nothing and can do nothing without the king: its ordinances are binding only once approved by the king, who can amend them at his will;26 and the king’s presence alone is essential to the conduct of parliamentary business, since “if any of the said grades below the King be absent, provided they have all been forewarned by due and correct summons of parliament, nonetheless it shall be considered to be complete.”27 For the author of the Modus, Parliament remains the king’s creature, as it does for Walter Burley, who in his 1340 commentary on Aristotle’s Politics remarks that “the king convokes parliament”—comprising “the king and the nobles and wise of the kingdom”—“for considering arduous business.” This has the effect of strengthening the “concord” and “friendship” between king and kingdom and of rendering each inhabitant “content with his grade under the king.”28 Representation and attendant concepts play no role in the assembly of Parliament for Burley, since that institution emanates essentially and primarily from the office of the king, not as a reflection of a popular will or as a means of holding accountable the king’s use of executive power. The absence of the language of representation in these documents, then, mirrors a lack of theoretical appreciation of practices that we have come to think of in modern times as tokens of representative government. Parliamentary bodies were conceived instead as extensions of 24. Speculum justiciariorum, ed. W. J. Whittaker (London: Selden Society, 1895), 8. 25. Modus tenendi parliamentum, in Nicholas Pronay and John Taylor, eds., Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 61 (Latin text), 81 (English translation). 26. Ibid., 75, 88. 27. Ibid., 79, 91. 28. Walter Burley, Commentarius in VIII Libros Politicorum Aristotelis, MS Balliol 95, f. 182r, 184r.

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traditional feudal practices that continued to acknowledge the king as the central and final source of power over the territory subject to him. The medieval figure whose name has perhaps been most widely associated with the theory of political representation is the early fourteenthcentury author Marsiglio of Padua.29 But Marsiglio proves to be a difficult case. Most of his discussion of representation is contained in Dictio II of his Defensor pacis, which concerns ecclesiology and which addresses the representative nature of the General Council in a way that is wholly conventional and consonant with “spiritual representation.”30 In the first discourse of the Defensor pacis, where secular government is analyzed, there are only two instances of the discourse of representation. The first occurs in Marsiglio’s treatment of the legislative process within the temporal community. The Defensor pacis is famed for its contention that the sole authority for the creation (as well as alteration and revision) of law is the legislator humanus, the “human legislator” composed of “the people or the whole body of citizens.”31 Intriguingly, Marsiglio continually qualifies this apparent statement of popular control over legislation with the inclusion of the clause “or its weightier part [valentior pars]” after references to the legislator humanus. The valentior pars signifies, according to Marsiglio, the qualitatively and quantitatively superior segment of the community.32 Scholars have long debated about what Marsiglio intended to convey by the phrase valentior pars.33 For our purposes, what matters is his claim that the valentior pars “represents the whole community [totam universitatem representat].”34 In this single, and by no means unambiguous, clause has been found the seeds of a theory of political representation. In spite of the fact that Marsiglio does not elaborate on his remark—or perhaps because of it—commentators have engaged in prolonged debate about the sort of representative relationship he must have envisaged. Thus, Jeannine Quillet 29. Quillet, “Community, Counsel and Representation,” 558, insists that “it was only with the work of Marsilius of Padua … that the idea of representation came to occupy a prominent place in political thought.” See most recently Maurizio Merlo, Marsilio da Padova: Il pensiero della politica come grammatica del mutamento (Milan: Franco Angelia, 2003), 130–39 and passim. 30. See Cary J. Nederman, Community and Consent: The Secular Political Theory of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 84–85. 31. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor pacis, ed. Richard Scholz (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1932), 1.12.3. 32. Ibid., 1.12.3. 33. For the range of opinion, see Nederman, Community and Consent, 86. 34. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor pacis, 1.12.5.

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perceives the representative nature of the valentior pars to be institutional: it denotes in effect the body of those men whom the community at large assigns with the responsibility of legislating on its behalf. The valentior pars thereby comes to be seen as a legislative assembly in its own right.35 For J. H. Burns, by contrast, Marsiglio has articulated the salient representative doctrine that majorities bind minorities and thus effectively “represent” the whole.36 Less commonly noted is Marsiglio’s own explication, in the text immediately following, of the nature of the representative relationship between the valentior pars and the totius universitatem. ..... since it is not easy or not possible for all persons to agree upon a single judgment, because the malice or singular ignorance of some, being naturally deprived [naturam orbatam], leads them to dissent from the common judgment; the common concerns should not be impeded or disregarded on account of protest or objection from some irrational people. The authority to make or establish laws, therefore, belongs only to the whole body of citizens or its weighter part.37

By no stretch of the imagination does this amount to a theory of political representation. Marsiglio simply makes the empirical observation that some citizens (and presumably a few well-known ones), by virtue of temperment or lack of mental faculities, are notably contentious and never accede to the decisions of their fellows. The failure of such individuals to assent should not form a barrier to the process of public decision making; it would be impractical to grant them a veto power over the rest of the community. The “representation” entailed is of a virtual, and wholly trivial, sort. This passage simply does not support the view that the Defensor pacis offers a cogent and clearly delineated theory of representation by the valentior pars of the legislator humanus. The one other use of representation language in the first discourse is less ambiguous. The Defensor pacis erects a complex procedure in order to ensure that laws conform to the common benefit of all citizens. This involves the selection of a group of wise and leisured men (whom Marsiglio calls prudentes) whose task it is to formulate and propose a legislative program. (Marsiglio never refers to this assembly of law framers as representa35. Quillet, La Philosophie Politique de Marsile de Padoue (Paris: J. Vrin, 1970), 93–99. 36. J. H. Burns, “Majorities: An Exploration,” History of Political Thought 24 (Spring 2003): 67–68, 71. 37. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor pacis, 1.12.5.

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tives, nor does he suggest that in performing their function the particular interests of constituents receive representation.)38 Once these men have devised a set of recommendations for enactment, they must seek the explicit authorization of the community of citizens. Every citizen enjoys the freedom to amend, revise, or object entirely to any legislative proposal on the grounds that it inclines to the benefit of a few individuals within the polity rather than to the welfare of all the people. Only if the draft statutes (in either original or revised form) prove acceptable to the citizen body may they be accorded the force of law in its full and true sense of coercive command.39 In order to facilitate the ratification of these precepts, Marsiglio says, the corporate community may choose to select another (or may confirm the same) group of men who, “representing the position and authority of the whole body of citizens, will approve or disapprove in whole or in part the afore-mentioned standards which had been investigated and proposed, or else, if it so wishes, the whole body of citizens or the weightier part thereof will do this same thing by itself.”40 Here the notion of representation is unequivocal: the term denotes a delegated power to act in strict accordance with the instructions of constituents, to assent or to refuse precisely as ordered by the electorate. The representative does what those who are represented could have done just as well for themselves. Yet, as Hannna Pitkin has argued, the conception of the delegated representative as merely a “tool” of an electorate that has already decided about a given issue may not fall within the bounds of political representation at all, and it certainly does not count as a very interesting case of representative rule.41 At best, Marsiglio treats representation in this context as a simple convenience in which the assembled representatives lack any discretion whatsoever to authorize anything that has not already been willed by the constituents who deputized them. Such a perspective, constituting the only unambiguous use of the idea of nonspiritual representation in the entire Defensor pacis, is hardly satisfying, especially from a theorist who is said to have afforded “prominence” to the principle of representation. In spite of its occasional reliance upon the vocabulary of representation, we will be sorely disappointed if we look to the Defensor pacis for a devel38. Pace Alan Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 188–89, and Quillet, “Universitas populi et représentation au XIV siècle,” Miscellanea Medievalia 8 (1971): 186–201. 39. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor pacis, 1.10.5. 40. Ibid., 1.13.8. 41. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 151–52, 166.

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oped theory of representative government or even a consistent use of some coherent principle of representation. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the Defensor pacis takes direct issue with fundamental premises of political representation. For Marsiglio, the community is not divided between its overall interests, on the one hand, and the particular desires of its constitutive citizen members, on the other. Rather, in any properly ordered civic body, the wishes of the citizens and their communal interests can be reasonably expected to merge. I have shown that Marsiglio articulates a clear principle to support this view: each citizen knows best what constitutes his own advantage or disadvantage (commodum vel incommodum) and hence is alone competent to judge when a proposed law is injurious to him.42 Hence, Marsiglio asserts that only when the community of citizens achieves a consensus about the laws by which it lives are those standards binding and obligatory. The common good can be nothing other than that to which the entire body of citizens extends its consent. Representation is thereby rendered superfluous at best. At worst, representative government threatens to impede and harm the realization and codification of the genuine interests of the community, since the relative independence of the deputy grants to him the potential to bind citizens in a manner contrary to their special knowledge of their own benefits. In sum, Marsiglio’s theory of legislation demonstrates that the assumption underpinning political representation—the presumption that the circumstances of political community require representatives to weigh communal interests in relation to individual desires—constitutes neither a necessary nor a desirable feature of political experience. So where is the divide between medieval and modern ideas of political representation to be located? In one of the rare recent attempts to distinguish between medieval and modern understandings of the concept, Harvey Mansfield concludes that the two “are different ways of life, not merely different kinds of representative machinery, and that the difference is most visible in the secularism of modern representation.”43 Mansfield grounds this claim on the divergent characters of political obligation in the medieval and modern worlds. In the Middle Ages, one was duty-bound to obey government ultimately because it was created and authorized by God; dis42. Cary J. Nederman, “Community and Self-Interest: Marsiglio of Padua on Civil Life and Private Advantage,” Review of Politics 65 (Fall 2003): 395–416. 43. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., “Modern and Medieval Representation,” in Pennock and Chapman, eds., Representation, 82.

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obedience was sinful because it undermined the divinely ordained order. By contrast, in the modern world, where government is conceived to be a creation purely of human invention and will, obligation must be founded on some principle apart from a supernatural or cosmological one; hence, obligation forms a problem for modern political thought that would have been untroubling to the medieval mind.44 Mansfield’s appeal to the secularity of modern political life may capture one element of the chasm between medieval and modern approaches to representation. I wish to suggest another dimension that I take to be salient: namely, the coordination between the idea of political representation and the political status of the person or population represented. My thoughts on this issue are, admittedly, somewhat speculative, but arise from some identifiable transmutations in political discourse between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries. It is a commonplace to construct a dichotomy between two widely divergent models of civic life and political identity in the Western tradition. For Peter Riesenberg, the salient distinction is between the self-governing “citizen” of the ancient and medieval city and the inert “subject” of the modern territorial nation-state.45 On John Pocock’s account, the paradigmatic Aristotelian vision of citizenship as reciprocal ruling may be juxtaposed with the Roman Law precept formulated by Gaius that the citizen is legalis homo.46 Speaking more philosophically, Richard Flathman has posited a division between “high” and “low” conceptions of citizenship,47 while Benjamin Barber distinguishes “thick” from “thin” ideas of the citizen.48 In all such dichotomous taxonomies, one conception of political status involves an active, self-transforming idea of the vita activa civile; the other describes the passive individual subject to the authority of the state and its laws. The first conception entails engagement in the vital moral/intellectual transformation of personhood, the second simply reminds citizens of their legal rights and obligations. It is my contention that just such a dichotomous understanding of public life did in fact inform European political thought during the Lat44. Ibid., 81. 45. Peter Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition: Plato to Rousseau (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 203–6. 46. J. G. A. Pocock, “The Idea of Citizenship since Classical Times,” in Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 29–52. 47. Richard E. Flathman, “Citizenship and Authority: A Chastened View of Citizenship,” in ibid., 105–51. 48. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

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in Middle Ages. Toward the end of the medieval period, however, it is possible to observe a theoretical challenge to the strict division between “citizens” (mainly discussed in urban-oriented theory) and “subjects.” The terms of the challenge derive directly from an attempt (couched in constructions that seem sometimes recognizably “modern”) to combine, refine, and synthesize elements of the two poles of the tension. The typical medieval approach to the conceptualization of political life (either citizen or subject) ran its course at the dawn of modernity and was itself transmuted in order to fit new political realities and demands. Substantively, I argue that the dichotomy between forms of public identity described by current historians and philosophers can effectively be observed by reference to the widely invoked medieval categories of dominium politicum (political rule) and dominium regale (royal rule).49 As the nature of and relationship between these two ideas altered from their origins in the Latinized Aristotle to their medieval disseminators to their eventual restatement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the very understanding of what it was to possess a political identity and function (“citizenship” in its most neutral sense) was profoundly transfigured: the citizen-subject, an amalgam of active and passive principles, flowered as a distinct species of political animal.50 And this distinctively modern idea of political status—partly classical citizen, partly imperial/feudal subject—required a form of government that was both responsible to and shielded from the population, able to weigh wishes against interests—in short, representative government. One early step in this direction was taken by the late fifteenth-century English jurist and legal theorist, Sir John Fortescue. In a series of writings about the political system of England, Fortescue appropriated and reconfigured many characteristically medieval concepts and terms, perhaps most notably the vocabulary of dominium regale and dominium politicum. Specifically, he proposed to synthesize these two categories of rule into a single, superior, and all-embracing form of government, namely, dominium regale et politicum. This type of hybrid regime, in Fortescue’s view, was no mere theoretical construct; rather, it is embodied by the rule of the English monarchy. And corresponding to the particular characteristics of this sys49. J. H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy 1400–1525 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 16. 50. For a more extensive discussion of this process, see Cary J. Nederman, “From Moral Virtue to Material Benefit: Dominium and Citizenship in Late Medieval Europe,” in Dwight D. Allman and Michael D. Beaty, eds., Cultivating Citizens (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002), 43–60.

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tem is an idea of political status quite distant from that conceived by his medieval predecessors. Fortescue’s earliest attempt to articulate the notion of a third category that transcends the distinction between political and royal governments comes in his treatise De natura legis naturae (c. 1461). Having described both dominium regale and dominium politicum, he continues, “But that there is a third kind of dominium, not inferior to these in dignity and honor, which is called the political and royal, we are not only taught by experience and ancient history, but we know has been taught in the doctrine of St. Thomas.”51 While the later reference has induced a raging debate about whether Fortescue actually had any particular source (whether from Aquinas or elsewhere) in mind,52 this should not deflect our attention from the significance of his theoretical point. For he proposes that the strict medieval classification of regimes as either “political” (civic) or “royal” (feudal/imperial) need not be respected. Instead, pointing to England, where “kings make not laws, nor impose subsidies on their subjects, without the consent of the Three Estates of the realm,” Fortescue asks: “May not, then, this dominium be called political, that is to say, regulated by the administration of many, and may it not also be named dominium regale, seeing that the subjects themselves cannot make laws without the authority of the king, and the kingdom, being subject to the king’s dignity, is possessed by kings and their heirs successively by hereditary right, in such manner as no lordships are possessed which are only politically regulated?”53 Fortescue then invokes the examples of Rome during the early Principate and scriptually depicted Israel under the Judges as additional illustrations of mixed regimes. Although Fortescue initially concentrates on the governmental aspects of dominium regale et politicum, the system equally involves for him a “mixed” character on the part of the governed: they play an active role in authorizing law; but once legislation has been approved, they are rendered passive in the face of its enforcement by the king and his officials. As he observes later in De natura legis naturae, “It is good for a people to be ruled by laws to which it consents.”54 This principle, for Fortescue, defines the essence of the mixed royal and political regime, conferring upon those who are governed 51. Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 128. I have occasionally adjusted Lockwood’s translations from Latin when it seemed appropriate. 52. For more detail on this debate, see chapter 17 below. 53. Ibid., 128–29. 54. Ibid., 135.

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under it the quality of citizen-subjects. Under the rule of dominium regale et politicum, one is both a citizen and a subject, or perhaps more properly, one alternates between these two identities according to circumstance. Thus, depending upon whether one judges from the perspective of a royal or a political system of government, the effect of Fortescue’s mixed regime is either to diminish or to enhance the status of citizenship. But why should dominium regale et politicum be judged superior to either dominium regale or dominium politicum? This is a question that Fortescue takes up in two of his later works, De laudibus legum Anglie (1468– 1471) and The Governance of England (1471). Already in De natura legis naturae, Fortescue had proposed that the conjunction of political with royal rule should not be construed as an infringement on the king’s authority or prerogative. The fact that the monarch ruling politically as well as royally is limited by the laws that his subjects approve means only that he lacks license to decree and enforce unjust statutes. Such license is in no way appropriate to a king’s true liberty; it does not fall within the legitimate power of the king to commit evil acts.55 This theme is carried forward into De laudibus legum Anglie, which purports to be a dialogue between the chancellor of England (a stand-in for Fortescue himself ) and Edward, the young Prince of Wales, regarding the study of law. The chancellor explains to Edward why English government, organized politically and royally, generates a legal structure superior to those systems found in continental Europe. For while kings elsewhere possess a wide latitude to do evil, if they are so inclined, the English ruler is prevented, as a result of the constraint imposed by the political quality of his regime, from acting contrary to just law. The political component of the king of England’s governance is a check on tyranny, the will to act improperly, not on his capacity to behave rightly. “With the king ruling his people politically, ..... he himself is not able to change the laws without the assent of his subjects nor to burden an unwilling people with strange impositions.......”56 Not only does this not interfere with the king’s valid authority, it also yields a positive benefit: it ensures the stability of the realm and of the Crown. “Rejoice, therefore, good Prince,” Fortescue proclaims, “that such is the law of the kingdom to which you are to succeed, because it will provide no small security and comfort for you and for the people.”57 Fortescue points out the error that previous English kings made by scheming to rule the realm according to 55. Ibid., 133–36. 57. Ibid., 18.

56. Ibid., 17.

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dominium regale alone: they undermined their own authority, the chancellor tells the prince, in order to satisfy “ambition, lust, [and] license, which your said ancestors preferred to the good of the realm.”58 Yet the condemnation of such rulers is notably consequentialist and temporal, rather than moral or religious, in bearing: Hence, Prince, it is evident to you, from the practical effects, that your ancestors, who sought to cast aside political government, not only could not have obtained, as they wished, a greater power than they had, but would have exposed their own welfare, and the welfare of their realm, to greater risk and danger....... The power of the king ruling royally is more difficult to exercise, and less secure for himself and his people, so that it would be undesirable for a prudent king to exchange a political government for a solely royal one.59

Fortescue’s criteria for judging between different kinds of regimes, and for preferring dominium regale et politicum, are highly pragmatic: such a system of government evinces greater strength and longevity than royal rulership, and thus benefits the king directly and materially. Less germane are considerations of the personal wisdom and virtue of the monarch, not to mention responsibility for promoting the moral goodness or salvation of the populace.60 A regime in which the king rules royally and politically in turn requires a conception of denizens who possess the character of the citizen-subject. This is evident both in Fortescue’s account of the origination of regimes and in his calculation of the benefits that dominium regale et politicum confers upon those who live under it. Fortescue observes in De laudibus legum Anglie that the reason why “their authority over their subjects” differs between a king ruling royally and one ruling royally and politically stems from the manner in which each regime is instituted.61 The former is imposed initially upon inhabitants against their will (as by conquest); and only once they are assured of their own basic protection do they agree to submit themselves to the king.62 Consequently, the subjects of a royal regime are wholly passive: “With a kingdom which is incorporated solely by the authority 58. Ibid., 53. 59. Ibid., 54; also 49. 60. Also noteworthy is the fact that Fortescue never anywhere mentions dominium politicum as a viable form of government, bowing perhaps to the historical realities of Northern Europe, which by the late fifteenth century had taken a decisive turn toward territorial monarchies organized along national lines. 61. Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, 18–19. 62. Ibid., 19; cf. 85–86.

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and power of the king, ..... such a people is subjected by him by no sort of an agreement other than to obey and be ruled by his laws.”63 By contrast, Fortescue describes the formation of a kingdom ruled by a “mixed” government as a wholly voluntary process. Although employing the traditional medieval metaphor of the body politic—according to which the head and members of the political organism cohere in a mutually beneficial reciprocal relationship64—he imputes to it a clearly nonhierarchical significance according to which the authority flows from the organs and limbs upward to the head. The royal head is thus firmly “bound” by the legal sinews of the body: “For a king of this sort is set up for the protection of the laws, the subjects, and their bodies and goods, and he has power to this end from the people.”65 Fortescue’s Prince Edward summarizes the relation between the royal and the political king and his realm thus: “I now very clearly perceive that no people ever incorporated themselves into a kingdom by their own agreement and will, unless in order to possess safer than before both themselves and their own, which they feared to lose—a design which would be thwarted if a king were able to deprive them of their means, which was not permitted before to anyone among men.”66 If not quite a complete theory of a social compact, then the explanation of the origin of dominium regale et politicum offered in De laudibus legum Anglie—and reiterated in all essentials in The Governance of England 67—clearly articulates the theory that the people are the founding force and continuing source of public authority in such a regime. And, in turn, the king ruling royally and politically is responsible for guaranteeing the physical safety and well-being of the population of the realm. Fortescue’s subjects are, therefore, weakly or minimally civic actors in the sense that it is their collective will that approves the system of government and the laws by which they are governed; this is precisely the “political” aspect of the regime. But the practical impact of citizenship remains generally indirect and fleeting; for the most part, the inhabitants of a territory governed royally and politically are every bit as much passive subjects as those living under a simple royal regime. 63. Ibid., 23. 64. The basic survey of the medieval use of the organic metaphor is Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffasung im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1978). For an extension of the range of sources, see Cary J. Nederman, “Body Politics: The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in the Later Middle Ages,” Pensiero Politico Medievale 2 (2004): 59–87. 65. Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, 21–22. 66. Ibid., 23. 67. Ibid., 86.

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Like the English political writers of the fourteenth century surveyed above, Fortescue does not expressly employ the language of representation. But his conception of Parliament, in contrast with those of his predecessors, rests on the logic of representative government. The people have material desires the pursuit of which receives expression in the decisions about statutes and especially the taxation policies made in Parliament: the English king cannot, “by himself or by his ministers, impose tallages, subsidies, or any other burdens whatever on his subjects, nor change their laws, nor make new ones, without the concession and assent of his whole realm expressed in its parliament.”68 In this sense, the government is constrained and accountable in a way that was unthinkable for medieval authors. Because the government is “royal” as well as “political,” however, the king still enjoys the flexibility to seek what he identifies to be the interests of his realm and its inhabitants, at least within the confines of authorized lawful conduct. Hence, royal approval, too, is required to legitimate laws and policies: coordination between the king and his ministers, on the one hand, and the members of Parliament, on the other, ensures the ends of balancing wishes and interests that characterize a system of political representation. As Fortescue remarks, “ ..... the statutes of England ..... are made not only by the prince’s will, but also by the assent of the whole realm, so they cannot be injurious to the people nor fail to secure their advantage.”69 The population’s activity in authorizing the main laws and policies of the realm, and passivity in permitting itself to be governed by the royal administration, open the path toward modern conceptions of representative government. There is but a small step to be taken to Sir Thomas Smith’s declaration in the sixteenth century that the parliament of Englande ..... representeth and hath the power of the whole realme both the head and the bodie. For everie Englishman is intended to bee there present, either in person or by procuration and attornies, of what preheminence, state, dignitie, or qualities soever he be, from the Prince (be he King or Queene) to the lowest person of Englande. And the consent of the Parliament is taken to be everie mans consent.70

With these words, the theory of political representation reaches its maturity. 68. Ibid., 52. 69. Ibid., 27. 70. Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 79.

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It is thus a pity that among those political theorists who are usually credited with responsibility for the undoing of the classical and medieval traditions of civic life—Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, for instance— the name of John Fortescue seldom appears. Part of the reason for this may be that so much of Fortescue’s writing was couched in the political and legal vocabulary of his antecedents. Thus, Alan Cromartie has recently been led to conclude that Fortescue resisted a “constitutionalist” politics of the sort that emerged in the sixteenth century, since his “true affinity was ..... with earlier Aristotelians like Giles [of Rome], for whom the limitations on the monarch were as it were internal to their view of monarchy.”71 By contrast, I would maintain that while Fortescue is surely a transitional figure between the Middle Ages and modernity, his cloaking of many of his doctrines in medieval garb should not deter us from recognizing the actual nature and force of his arguments. I will return to this theme in chapter 17 of the present book. What theoretical lessons, then, might we draw from the discovery that the theory of political representation appears only at the threshold of modernity? Throughout most of the last century at least, the tendency of political philosophers has been to concentrate on the meaning of political representation rather than its justification. This has produced a variety of efforts to discern and distinguish the range of senses in which the term “representation” may be used, as well as to determine whether there is an “essential” or “real” definition of the word which all of its senses share. What these discussions have lacked, however, is an attempt to pose questions about the philosophical foundations of political representation, that is, to defend or attack the conceptual underpinnings of the idea of representative government. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, the situation has changed noticeably. Among contemporary democratic theorists, a debate has simmered regarding the relationship between the maintenance of democratic institutions and relations, on the one hand, and the persistence of representative forms of government, on the other. For some, representation constitutes a serious challenge to the possibility of realizing a meaningfully democratic society. For others, the problems posed by representative politics, such as its apparent tendency to erode levels of political participation and to undermine the idea of citizenship, can be addressed within a coherent theory of representation itself. But beyond 71. Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31.

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its implications for democratic practices, this debate has also revitalized normative discussion about the nature and viability of political representation as a form of government and a means for public decision making.72 In particular, the idea of representation as a form of advocacy, and the attendant problem of who may rightfully speak for an identifiable group, have been thoroughly and rigorously examined.73 Recent efforts to evaluate political representation have remained largely ahistorical in bearing, however. The foregoing chapter reminds political theorists that the development of representation as a general notion involved considerable complexity and even confusion. Attempts to equate the principles of “spiritual” representation with either the practice or the theory of representative government lead to certain fundamental misunderstandings.74 The failure to realize that a theory of political representation involves a set of other social and cultural assumptions such as those discussed in this chapter—secularity, the citizen-subject, a legitimate division between common interests and personal wishes—lends a certain unfortunate universalizing quality to contemporary theoretical reflections. It does not seem too implausible to look to history to identify the conditions under which political representation—both in practice and, especially, in theory—took root in order to understand how and whether it may have purchase in present times. After all, the long-standing American crusade to bring “democracy” to the world (however one evaluates it) is really an attempt to spread the institutions and ideas of “representative government.” So, it is less the nature and culture of democracy per se that must perhaps be comprehended than the salient characteristics and context of political representation. Indeed, if we take seriously Mansfield’s observation that “it does not follow that modern representation is democratic,”75 those who 72. See George Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 36–56; David Plotke, “Representation Is Democracy,” Constellations 4 (1997): 19–34; and Iris Marion Young, “Deferring Group Representation,” in Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka, eds., Ethnicity and Group Rights, Nomos 39 (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 349–376. 73. For example, Nadia Urbinati, “Representation as Advocacy: A Study of Democratic Deliberation,” Political Theory 28 (2000): 758–86; Suzanne Dovi, “Preferable Descriptive Representatives: Will Just Any Woman, Black, or Latino Do?” American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 729–43; and Andrew Rehfeld, “Toward a General Theory of Political Representation,” Journal of Politics 68 (2006): 1–21. 74. Such a confusion, for example, infects the argument of Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 23–25. 75. Mansfield, “Modern and Medieval Representation,” 81.

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wish to export what is in effect representative government worldwide may do themselves a disservice by pursuing the creation of democratic social institutions at the expense of belief systems more conducive to political representation. This chapter thus strives to bring the dimension of historical perspective to bear on broader political debates about why, how, and where political representation plays a proper and fruitful role in public life both in Western societies and around the globe.



8

F o r L o v e an d M o n e y Theorizing Revolt in Fourteenth-Century Europe

o nv e n t i o na l ly, medieval political theorists expressed the relationship that inhered between a ruler and his subjects through the language of amor and caritas, that is, “love” and “charity” (the two are virtual cognates). St. Augustine had emphasized “love” as the basis for all human associations, although the only “true” love was love of God, which did not partake of or inhere in mundane concerns such as government.1 Medieval authors deployed the language of “love” in a more positive sense to describe the arrangement of temporal politics and polities. In particular, the virtuous prince loves his people and he is loved by them in turn. John of Salisbury in the mid-twelfth century offered a quintessential account of how the love that obtains between the king and his subjects has the effect of creating a singularity of mind, “one perfect and great harmony out of pursuits that appear discordant....... Above all, the favor and love of subjects, which is produced by divine favor, is the best instrument of all governance. And yet love without respect is not advantageous because the people will retreat into illegalities once the stimulus of justice ceases.”2 Likewise, Dante’s De monarchia claims that 1. St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, 2 vols., ed. Berhard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955), 19.24. 2. John of Salisbury, Policraticus I–IV, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993), 4.8.

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“in him in whom rightly ordered love can be found to the greatest degree can justice be found at its most powerful; such a one is the monarch....... Charity ..... seeks God and man and, in consequence, seeks man’s good.”3 According to the standard trope, then, the “love” that obtains in political order stands in relation to God and betokens, in particular, just rule; it correlates to religious and moral rectitude. Yet some later medieval theorists transformed their understanding of the bond of love in accordance with the more earthly purposes they ascribed to government. Love became shorthand for a balanced equilibrium between Crown and community, according to which the king assured and protected the wealth held by the people and provided conditions for its enhancement whenever possible, while his subjects in turn obeyed the ruler and supported his policies. Of course, the regulative ideal of mutual love was not always—indeed, was not often—attained, with the result that discord and discontent occurred. In particular, given the elevation of the promotion of material well-being to a central goal of government, kings who overstepped their fiscal boundaries by imposing taxes or other forms of revenue generation that exceeded custom or law risked incurring the loss of their subjects’ love. The reasons and remedies for such loss of love became a major theme of later medieval writings about the nature and function of royal government, in line with the more general growing interest in economic affairs, which will be discussed in Part IV below. In broad outline, rulers were counseled that prosperity occasioned love and cushioned them from the displeasure and disobedience of their people. Consequently, economic stewardship and prudent management formed the cornerstones of loving concord between kings and subjects: the king who manages his own affairs so as to restrain his hand from the goods of his subjects deserves love. The king who fails to defend (indeed, undermines) the economic rights of those under his dominion renounces his claim on their affection. Indeed, the latter sort of ruler can reasonably expect opposition to his regime. Before I develop and defend these claims in greater detail, let me emphasize why I take them to be historically plausible. The fourteenth century, on which I shall concentrate, witnessed tremendous political upheaval. In particular, European kings and their minions (to whom so much 3. Dante, De Monarchia, ed. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1.11.13–14. The translation is that of Anthony K. Cassell, ed., The Monarchia Controversy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 121.

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political advice writing was directed) were the direct targets of civil resistance and political rebellion—and not just by ambitious members of rival noble dynasties.4 Untitled and untutored urban dwellers and rural rustics organized to express their dissent toward royal policies (and often toward the clerical hierarchy that supported the Crown as well). The Jacquerie in France (1356) and John Ball’s Rebellion (1381) in England afford but the best known instances of widespread popular unrest that threatened the peace and stability of the Western European monarchies.5 Accountability was determined at the public point of a pitchfork rather than in the privacy of the ballot box. And kings indeed felt the pressure that such uprisings were capable of exerting. In turn, the unsettled times made for especially trenchant political commentary. Why were peasants and burghers revolting? What might be done to deter discontent? The iconic view of medieval society as rigidly organized according to “the three orders” (those who fight, those who pray, those who work) or hierarchically arranged along the lines of human anatomy (the lower limbs and organs submitting to the rule of head or heart) had long since been undermined or replaced— if indeed it ever described a reality rather than depicting an unattainable aspiration.6 The so-called commercial revolution that swept through Europe after 1100 radically altered social values as well as economic practices among all strata of society.7 As early as the twelfth century, political thinkers began to examine seriously the role of government—especially the king and his officials—as the primary economic steward of the country, alongside military, judicial, and sacral functions. By around 1300, Giles of Rome, the author of the “best-selling” medieval advice book (or “mirror”) for rulers, De regimine principum, could insist uncontroversially upon the maintenance and enhancement of prosperity as one of the central responsibilities of the king. Indeed, for Giles, the other duties of the mon4. Here I part company with Claire Valente, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), who concentrates almost entirely on aristocratically fomented rebellions and the justifications given thereof. For an alternative view, see Lillian M. Bisson, “The Cry of the Poor: Unrest and Rebellion among the Peasants,” which constitutes chapter 7 of her Chaucer and the Late Medieval World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 143–63. 5. An excellent recent treatment of the topic may be found in Samuel K. Cohn Jr., Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). 6. See Cary J. Nederman, “Body Politics: The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in the Later Middle Ages,” Pensiero Politico Medievale 2 (2004): 59–87. 7. This topic will be addressed at greater length in chapter 13 of the present book.

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arch—to uphold law and virtue—are only possible once preservation of wealth is assured.8 To describe the European Middle Ages as an era of economic nationalism—in theory as well as in practice—does not seem at all implausible.9 Later medieval authors took cognizance of these changing circumstances.10 In the present chapter, I illustrate this claim by examining two treatises that, on the one hand, employ the standard view that communal love emanates from princely virtue but that also import economically oriented conceptions of governance that license public resistance. First, I investigate a theory formulated in England of how the absence of certain royal virtues sets the limits of the love of a people toward its ruler and permits public opposition to his reign. This is found in the two versions of the Speculum regis Edwardi III, dated to 1331 and 1332 respectively, and written in Latin by William of Pagula.11 Second, I consider an anonymous French vernacular treatise composed in 1347, L’estat et le gouvernement comme les princes et seigneurs se doivent gouverner (hereafter L’estat et le gouvernement), which was translated into English during the following century with the title The III Consideracions Right Necesserye to the Good Governaunce of a Prince.12 This tract presents a quite straightforward economic theory of popular political behavior: the people love the king and embrace his laws when his virtues shine forth by managing his own holdings and the realm 8. John F. McGovern, “The Rise of New Economic Attitudes—Economic Humanism, Economic Nationalism—during the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance, A.D. 1200–1500,” Traditio 26 (1970): 231. 9. See Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 117–25; also chapter 17 below. 10. Sverre Bagge, “Kirken, bøndene og motstandsretten i Norge I middelalderen,” Historisk tidsskrift 84 (2005): 385–410, has detected a similar interest in the material conditions of the poor in Scandanavia at about the same time. 11. I have translated both versions in Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-Century England: Treatises by Walter of Milemete, William of Pagula, and William of Ockham (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), based on the Latin text, mistakenly attributed to Simon Islip, published by Joseph Moisant, De speculo regis Edwardi III (Paris: Picard, 1891); for full information about the authorship of the treatise, see Political Thought in Early Fourteenth Century England, 65–68. 12. The French original remains in manuscript. The Middle English translation has been edited by Jean-Philippe Genet in Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 174–219; Genet consulted not only the English manuscripts but also the two extant French manuscripts (one partial). When the English version departs from its French exemplar, Genet gives the French in his notes. My modern English translation in the present chapter is based on the Genet edition of the English along with the French departures.

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in general with fiscal good sense. For the ruler to behave otherwise is to risk rebellion. Perhaps the most extensive later medieval analysis of the dangers confronted by the ruler who ignores the economic condition of his realm may be found in two seldom examined treatises, whose authorship was once uncertain but is now safely ascribed to the Oxford-schooled theologian, canonist, and parish priest William of Pagula. Although, for purposes of simplicity, I will treat the two texts as a single unit, it should be noted that the second recension is not simply a revision of the first. Rather, the former constitutes an entirely new treatise that restates essentially the same grievances as its predecessor, but develops its case in the larger context of royal administrative and fiscal practices. Yet in both versions the argument is entirely directed to the hardships endured by the peasant population of the realm, that vast majority who lacked a literate political voice loud enough to be heard among magnates and royal officials. Because he centered his career on parish service, William was especially well qualified to recount the complaints of the humblest segments of English society and to record the level of displeasure with and resistance to the Crown.13 And there is no question that William’s sympathy lay with the grievances that he observes and reports. In his treatises, William affects the style of a “mirror of princes” tract. Thus, he couches his warning about the economic depredations of the English peasantry caused by royal policy in language that seems wholly conventional on first glance. The first recension (A) commences with a plea for Edward III to act justly in order “to serve the honor of God and the utility of the kingdom, and also in order to acquire the love of the people.”14 In William’s view, love and justice are of a single piece: the just king imitates divine justice and hence is “loved by God,” as a consequence of which “all men who follow you will call you a just man; they will venerate and love you.”15 The second recension (B) opens with a more urgent overtone: as a mortal being, the king (like any human) must be mindful that the moment of his death impends and that the failure to redress 13. For William’s biography, see Leonard E. Boyle, “The Oculus Sacerdotis and Some Other Works of William of Pagula,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 5 (1955): 81–110. 14. De speculo regis Edwardi III, A 1. The translation may be found in Nederman, ed., Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-Century England, 73. References to the Latin text below will refer to the Recension (A or B) and section number, followed by the page in the English version. 15. De speculo regis Edwardi III, A 1, 73–74.

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evils in his kingdom immediately may impact the state of his soul. At the same time, Edward III is reminded that the English populace welcomed his presence “humbly ..... graciously ..... devoutly ..... joyously” and “stood by you and aided you in everything you did against your rebels.”16 By implication, he owes his present position to the love of his people and his future status to the judgment of God. These are themes familiar to any knowledgeable reader of princely advice books: the king is simultaneously beholden both to God and to his people, and his virtue ensures his fidelity to both of his constituencies. Unlike most medieval mirrors, however, William’s treatise specifies a concrete and clear action on the part of the king that casts in doubt his place in the nexus of love. The target of William’s wrath in the Speculum regis Edwardi III is the practice of royal purveyance, the alleged prerogative of the king to provide for his household and troops when touring the realm by confiscating local goods or purchasing them at a fixed, nonnegotiable price. Beginning around 1300, purveyance gradually came to be employed by the English Crown as a form of arbitrary indirect taxation.17 In order to meet the growing costs of royal military activity costs, the king’s array was sent into the countryside, where it could lay claim to provisions at a cheap rate or even for free. The consequences of purveyance were unequally distributed. It was often the moveable goods, and occasionally the labor power, of the peasantry that were appropriated by royal agents in their forays into rural villages. Purveyance struck mainly at the poorest of the Crown’s subjects. Both recensions of the Speculum regis Edwardi III argue that the king should dispense with purveyance and other exactions by which he maintains himself and his household at the expense of the poor. William states his case through moral and religious language that would have been unexceptional; the king is warned that the commission of evil endangers his salvation; and theft, which is coextensive with purveyance, is precisely the sort of evil about which the king ought to worry.18 Indeed, what makes purveyance especially dangerous to the health of the king’s soul is that it involves stealing from the poor—whom the ruler should be especially concerned to protect19—in order to extend his own holdings, which God has 16. Ibid., B 1, 106. 17. For the historical background, see Nederman, ed., Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-Century England, 64–65. 18. De speculo regis Edwardi III, A 6–7, 79–81. 19. Ibid., B 31, 126–27.

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already multiplied many-fold. The king therefore proves himself ungrateful to God and unworthy of salvation.20 William recurrently invokes the frailty of all human life, including the king’s; since no one can predict with certainty when death will occur, every person should remain in a constant state of repentance.21 Otherwise, should death transpire unexpectedly, damnation and eternal punishment are the prospects for the ruler who has not corrected his evils toward his poverty-stricken subjects. The message is clear enough: “You should wish to be loved by God and by the people, and also to be honored,” conditions requiring that “those serving you take nothing against the will of the sellers.”22 A ruler whose actions stand opposed to a loving bond endangers the state of his soul for mere passing material comfort. In turn, moral and theological strictures in the Speculum regis Edwardi III are supplemented by recognition of the impact of the king’s economic management upon the economic well-being of subjects. William thus highlights the interdependence of moral categories (justice and piety) and government fiscal policy. It is materially self-destructive, as well as spiritually dangerous, for Edward III to continue to follow policies that seriously impoverish his subjects. The welfare of the head of the realm stands in an inextricable reciprocal relation to the temporal good of the rest of the communal body. One major consequence of the prises is interference with the laborers’ cultivation of their own lands. This occurs in two ways. First, the confiscation of victuals cuts into supplies required for planting future harvests. As William explains, the king’s agents “seize bread, beer, fowls, cocks, beans, oats, and many other things, for which practically nothing is paid; and because of extortions of this kind, many poor people will not have what they need to sow their fields.”23 As a result, arable land goes fallow. Second, enforced labor contracts—for little or no payment—prevent peasants from working their own lands. Recounting his own experiences in the Windsor Forest region, William tells of officials who ordered into service the goods and labor of the neighborhood farmers, promising (but failing) to compensate them for their work: “On account of this diabolical deed, the lands of the poor were not cultivated, not planted, and the poor did not have any [surplus] goods by which they were able to sustain burdens of this sort.”24 In William’s view, therefore, purveyance strains rural 20. Ibid., B 30, 126. 22. Ibid., A 2, 75. 24. Ibid., A 15, 87.

21. Ibid., B 1–3, 103–8. 23. Ibid., A 9, 82.

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resources to the point at which agricultural production begins to decline. The Speculum regis Edwardi III also narrates how these royal exactions have sometimes forced subjects to the brink of penury: A poor man comes to the market with one ox at a price of one mark, since he has to pay one mark on a certain day or lose his land. His ox is seized by your ministers and nothing is paid to him, on account of which he loses his land, because he did not pay his debt on the day appointed. Some men, then, whose sheep and oxen are taken do not pay their debts to their creditors on the appointed day, as a result of which they incur perjury and excommunication and are reputed to be dishonest, and many evils happen on account of these seizures.25

Time and again, William observes, purveyance is directly to blame for the impoverishment and eventual starvation of subjects.26 By indifference to the consequences of his servants’ actions, Edward III is implicated in the “murder” of his people: “You, through your ministers, through all sorts of deeds done by them, take away from your subjects bread, beer, wheat, oats, and other innumerable things, on account of which many die.”27 Little wonder that William elsewhere describes the king’s conduct as, in effect, “making war” on the inhabitants of his own realm.28 It remains entirely conjectural whether or not this is simply hyperbole. By acting in such an uncharitable manner toward his subjects, the ruler demonstrates the absence of his virtue and the breakdown of the bonds that tie him to God and his kingdom. By contrast, William offers the suggestion that a loving king will be rewarded materially by adoring subjects. There is, William says, historical precedent for such spontaneous popular generosity: “In the time of the last King Henry [III], all sorts of food, wheat, oats, and all necessities were carried to his gate, since he himself seized nothing against the will of the sellers, since he bought and paid as one of the people.”29 While the author’s recounting of Henry III’s reign as peaceful and amicable is surely a distortion, historical accuracy is entirely irrelevant to the moral point of the example. The Speculum regis Edwardi III strives to convey the lesson that the king who does right by his people also does well for himself. The principle of political reciprocity, expressed in terms of mutual love between king and people, is not only a bridle on royal abuse of power but also a spur to fis25. Ibid., A 14, 86. 27. Ibid., A 16, 87–88. 29. Ibid., A 39, 98. See also B 6, 110.

26. Ibid., A 3, 75–77; A 37, 97; B 43, 131. 28. Ibid., B 37, 128.

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cal self-restraint. Ultimately, the ruler who demands less of the fruits of his subjects’ labor will be wealthier and safer than one who is constantly grasping at their goods. To demand goods and services with little or no payment from already impoverished subjects is, to William’s mind, wholly self-defeating for the ruler. The Speculum regis Edwardi III advises its addressee that, should he persist in his oppressive policies, “you will not be king in your land, nor will you find food and drink and other things necessary for you.”30 William warns of a twofold threat to the king: he will encounter political resistance as well as circumvention of his economic demands. Rural denizens achieve the latter mainly by stealth. When villagers hear of the approach of the royal entourage, “at once on account of fear they hide fowls, roosters and other goods, or they get rid of them, or they consume them by eating and drinking, lest they lose them upon your arrival.”31 Thus, the royal household does not succeed in supplying its needs in any case and its mission fails. The threat of rural social unrest and insurrection is, according to William, even more dangerous to the continued authority of the ruler. As the Speculum regis Edwardi III says to the king, Carefully consider the honor paid to you by the men of this land ....... Do not forget how the English people made you king. Therefore, be like one of them ....... I advise that you should procure food and drink and other things necessary to you just like one of the people [sicut unus de populo].32

By the last phrase, presumably, William means paying full value for victuals and buying them consensually. To behave in this way is to build a reciprocal bond of love between ruler and people, one that ensures the political stability and tranquility of the realm and the throne. If, therefore, you wish to save your kingdom for yourself and your son, it ought to be that you make yourself loved by the people, but you will never be loved by the people as long as you wish to seize the things of others at a price lower than the seller wishes to receive for them.33

William warns Edward that, if he continues to employ purveyance, “many evils may happen to you and your kingdom,” as a result of which the king and his officials “will perish.”34 The Speculum regis Edwardi III likens the 30. Ibid., B 9, 111. 32. Ibid., B 16, 118; cf. B 1, 106. 34. Ibid., A 10, 83.

31. Ibid., B 6, 109. 33. Ibid., A 34, 95.

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position of the unloved king within the kingdom to that of a head that cannot lead its own body: “Your people ..... are not of one mind with you, although they seem to be of one body with you; and indeed, if they had a leader, they would rise up against you, just as they did against your father. Then in truth you would not have a multitude of people with you.”35 Kings who “have extended their hand towards the goods and income of others” find that “the people rise up against them and they are almost wiped from the earth. And therefore be warned, and heed, lest you forget what happened to your father.”36 The persistent references to the unfortunate Edward II are painful reminders that recent precedent exists for the popular discontent foreseen by William. This need not be interpreted as a threat. Rather, William seems to intend such remarks as a kind of empirical generalization: rulers who willfully break the bond of love with their people by pursuing policies that are economically detrimental and manifestly unjust find themselves confronted with rebellious subjects. Kings who govern their realm in a manner consonant with the earthly well-being of their subjects are obeyed and loved in turn. William of Pagula, then, employed the language of love in order to achieve an overt and pressing goal: the prevention of the impoverishment of rural denizens and the depopulation of the English countryside. The unapologetically polemical intent of his treatise may leave readers with the impression of a certain lack of systematic and reflective use of the language of princely virtue that had been refined in the past. The author of the French tract L’estat et le gouvernement, by contrast, seems to be more conventional in the use of moral discourse. This is unsurprising, given that the book’s introductory poem explains that its composition was commanded in 1347 by “un prince de royal noblesse” in order to gather together knowledge and wisdom concerning “l’estat et le gouvernement de seigneurie temporelle.”37 The work thus has a courtly origin that surely demanded greater discretion in the use of invective and moral condemnation than William employed. Yet the circumspection found in L’estat et le gouvernement does not mean the absence of a critical edge similar to the Speculum regis Edwardi III. The French author refers mainly to points of princely fiscal management and administration rather than to moral or religious generalizations. Yet the tract also grounds the political virtues explicitly on the 35. Ibid., A 11, 83–84. 36. Ibid., B 38, 129. 37. L’estat et le gouvernement, in Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages, 210. For some speculation about the authorship of this treatise, see ibid., 177–78.

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bonds of charity and love that unite a ruler with both God and his people. In sum, there are noticeable and significant thematic similarities between two writings conceived and disseminated in otherwise different contexts—a fact that suggests to me how commonplace it had become by the middle of the fourteenth century to filter grievances about the economic well-being of a kingdom though customary categories of moral and religious discourse. The structure of L’estat et le gouvernement bears a general resemblance to the famous mirror by Giles of Rome; it is organized into three parts (hence, the title The III Consideracions Right Necesserye to the Good Governaunce of a Prince given to the fifteenth-century English translation), around the themes of self-governance, household stewardship, and political dominion. But where Giles organized his De regimine principum around a Christianized Aristotelian conception of “felicity,” the French author cautions his noble reader to recollect that in his life as in his death, there is no fundamental difference between the powerful and the weak: “..... the princes and other great lords have no greater assurance of health and long life than have poor subjects,” which ought to act as a call to that humility without which “no man may attain to salvation nor be loved by God.”38 Just as William of Pagula warns King Edward to take care lest in his pride he pretends to an immortality that he does not possess, so the French treatise counsels that a humble outlook leads the powerful to “charity, which is the sovereign of all virtues. For charity is the true love of God and likewise of His creatures .......” Love of God and love of subjects are so conjoined in good governance that the pious and virtuous prince cannot help but rule well.39 The treatise later emphasizes this point even more unmistakably, referring to “two wells or two fountains” from which spring all the benefits of virtuous rule: The first fountain is the love of God, the other is love of the people subject to him [the prince]. And if he keeps to the two fountains, which would be right, fair and good, he shall have peace and good governance in his land. And these two fountains are permanently associated, for he who loves God loves his people. And he who loves the people of God loves God and God loves him. So the prince ought especially and singularly to take heed that he does nothing against the commandment of God, nor anything against reason, to the grief and prejudice of his people so as to give them cause to hate him and curse him.40 38. Ibid., 181. 40. Ibid., 199.

39. Ibid., 181–82.

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Love constitutes both a check on and a spur to the ruler. On the one hand, the prince (a term that the treatise employs generically to include not just kings but all manner of powerful lords) who acts within the bounds of love is rewarded with popular submission and support. On the other hand, breaking the bond of love leads directly to public disapprobation. The meaning of “love” in this passage might seem sufficiently vague that one could understand it to designate a purely spiritual phenomenon, leaving the consequences of misrule to be dealt with entirely in the afterlife by the judgment of God upon a prince’s soul. While this reading comports with the more traditional conception of princely virtue as primarily moral and theological in bearing, the author of L’estat et le gouvernement in fact focuses almost entirely on the earthly consequences of a loving relationship between God, ruler, and people. The temporal orientation of the treatise may be deduced, first of all, from the relative weight placed on the three factors necessary for good government. The discussion of the prince’s own condition, built upon a reminder of his humility and mortality, is by far the briefest in the work. The ruler who “knows himself ” realizes the precious and precarious predicament of human life, and submits to his fate accordingly by conducting himself mildly; personal virtues are otherwise not addressed.41 The second and third sections of the book, by contrast, are longer and more detailed, offering advice primarily concerning the management of the prince’s realm so as to assure his subjects of their physical well-being. Indeed, awareness of the likely complaints that a populace might make against their leader and planning in advance how to appease them seem to constitute the main touchstones of a properly administered territory. The second part of L’estat et le gouvernement addresses the ruler’s stewardship over his own properties and revenues. The author asserts that there are, in turn, three aspects (“ordinances”) of manorial management as the subject pertains to public administration: the first is the maintenance of the ruler and his family, the second is charitable donation, and the third is saving for unforeseen future needs. In each case, the proper use to be made of the prince’s own goods is clearly circumscribed, according to the treatise, by the material welfare of the subjects consistent with his love of them. Thus, when providing for the needs of his immediate household, the greatest danger is the application of superior authority to treat subjects inequitably and to take income in excess of what is owed. For this reason, 41. Ibid., 182–83.

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“among lords, above all other things, it should be seen and well considered that officers take nothing of the goods of subjects other than at a just and mutually agreed price and without long withholding or delay of payment, for it is an entirely good and great honor to every lord when he pays truly and well what he spends and when he does not nourish himself at the expense of others.”42 Likewise, “great blame, hatred of God, great sin, and the malediction of the people” attaches itself to lords “who commit injury against others.”43 Concentration on the impact of domain management upon the well-being of subjects takes up almost the entire discussion of the management of the prince’s household; divine commands, along with natural and civil law, are invoked to protect subjects against their lords. The prince who cannot administer his estates so as to conserve the rightful income of their residents is ill-equipped to govern the political community. In a similar fashion, the ruler is advised to use a portion of his incomes on “deeds of charity.” Typically, of course, this counsel encompassed almsgiving, an act “which purchases the grace of God and the love of the people.”44 Moreover, the prince should be liberal in the conferral of gifts upon the deserving among his servants and subjects, though taking care not to be profligate in his liberality lest he spend beyond his means. The magnification of public repute is the goal toward which the prince should strive: ..... it is entirely necessary that the prince clearly consider himself and his deeds, by which he is held wise and sagacious, respected and honored, praised and loved by his subjects, and feared by his enemies and those envious of him, who are both ready and happy to lay in wait and plot against the prince if they can take any occasion or can find the time at which the prince neither holds nor is beheld reputable for wisdom and sagacity....... 45

This remarkable statement suggests the tenuous grasp that a ruler has on his office and hints darkly at the need for constant preparation against courtly intrigues—a concern that we might associate with Machiavelli, but which was in fact already widely disseminated by advice-books following in the wake of the popular Secreta secretorum, which circulated as a genuine work by Aristotle during the later Middle Ages.46 The prince’s “good works” do 42. Ibid., 184. 43. Ibid., 184–85. 44. Ibid., 185. 45. Ibid., 186. 46. On the Secreta secretorum and its medieval dissemination, see Steven J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

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not purely and simply serve the goal of his salvation. Instead, they ensure a sufficient measure of public support (love) that the ruler can maintain his grip upon his position. The unmistakable lesson is that he who does good for his people does well for himself—precisely the reciprocal and interdependent nature of the loving bond between ruler and ruled. The third and final element of competent household management requires the prince to make provision for future contingencies by safeguarding and building a treasury. The author of L’estat et le gouvernement insists that this should not be confused with avarice. Rather, the king who judiciously saves some of his revenues “for the safeguarding of himself, his lands and his subjects and for other things useful and appropriate” in fact performs a great good for his subjects, since he is able to provision an army against military threats “without taking or encroaching upon the goods of the poor and of his subjects forcibly and against their will.” Indeed, it is predicted that the ruler’s people will voluntarily aid him in his armed exploits for defense of his territory and position if he uses his own resources and refrains from burdening his subjects.47 Again, the intent of the advice is entirely practical: a prince who accumulates a substantial treasury “shall be held to be a good prince and he shall be loved and respected by all his subjects, and feared and dreaded by others. And thus none of his enemies shall suffice in power to move greatly against him.”48 Even if someone were so foolhardy as to oppose the ruler, the love of subjects, accorded to him precisely on account of his concern for their economic welfare, forms an adequate assurance of his victory against his adversaries or enemies. (It is exactly this advice, of course, that Machiavelli would ridicule in Il principe.) The most extensive of the three parts of L’estat et le gouvernement is what might be termed the “political” section, that is, the principles according to which the ruler directly governs “his realm, his land, and his subjects,” to which the initial considerations are in some ways preparatory.49 This is the highest calling of all lords, and its guiding precept is, once more, love—the love of God and the love of the people. And what is the primary token of a prince who demonstrably stands in such a bond of love? The author states, “The lord should in no way burden the people nor forage among his people to make them barren of such things as they must have to live upon, for he is not a good keeper who destroys the thing that 47. L’estat et le gouvernement, 187. 49. Ibid., 188.

48. Ibid., 188.

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he is supposed to guard.......”50 This basic tenet—that the shepherd should not fleece the flock—runs throughout the discussion of lordly duties: the ruled do not exist for the sake of their ruler, but the ruler for the sake of the ruled; and the prince ought, in imitation of the Supreme Lord, to prepare to sacrifice himself to save his people.51 These are well-established teachings, of course, but they are infused with the quite concrete definition that the bond is violated when the lord engages in “taking from them [viz., the people] what they should have to live upon,” the goods upon which their sustenance depends.52 With these general prefatory remarks in mind, the text then turns to the four specific virtues required for good governance by the prince, which are specified as wisdom, providence, justice. and mercy. Each of these receives a brief definition and a quite thorough illustration and application—another indication of the practical mind-set of the author. Wisdom is determined to be a gift from God, deriving from fear of His power that gives rise to love of the divine.53 Wisdom is displayed when the ruler draws to his court wise counselors and when he refrains from frivolous recreations.54 By providence is meant the ability to execute those actions that are determined to be in accordance with wisdom.55 The primary sign of the provident ruler is the careful selection of loyal and virtuous advisors who will speak the truth and disdain flattery.56 Justice is defined in accordance with the Roman legal dictum of a fixed will to give to each what is due as his right.57 Justice receives more complete attention than any other royal virtue in L’estat et le gouvernement, suggesting that for the author it is the quintessential quality of political command. The just prince in particular eschews his own “profit” in preference for his “love especially and principally [of ] the common profit of the people and of subjects.”58 This or similar phrasing is employed repeatedly throughout the discussion of justice: “love” of common profit outweighs all self-regard for the just ruler, whereas the unjust ruler or tyrant places his own will or pleasure before all else. The point is not per se a novel one; it follows the language one usually finds in standard medieval mirrors and political treatises.59 But the 50. Ibid., 190. 51. Ibid., 189, 190. 52. Ibid., 189. 53. Ibid., 191. 54. Ibid., 192–193. 55. Ibid., 193–194. 56. Ibid., 194–195. 57. Ibid., 196. 58. Ibid., 197. 59. See Cary J. Nederman, “Imperfect Regimes in the Christian Political Thought of Medieval Europe: From the Fathers to the Fourteenth Century,” Mélanges de l’Université SaintJoseph 57 (2004): 525–51.

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primary specific example given of the conduct of the tyrant at present is economic oppression: he “intends nothing for the honorable wealth and profit of his land, but instead his singular and delightful pleasure is to be acquainted with strangers and not to love his subjects, to take riches and money, causing extortions and evils to his subjects.”60 The unjust ruler removes the goods of his people, whether into his own coffers or those of his (foreign) friends; the subjects lose those possessions required for their survival. Finally, mercy seems to be regarded as an offshoot of or supplement to justice. Mercy is that virtue which tempers the prince’s desire to restore to each his due, especially in cases where he himself is the person against whom trespass has been made. The merciful ruler is more prepared to bestow forgiveness upon those who do injury to him than those who do harm to his people, and he thus earns the favor of those in his care, who may rest assured that he will seek their benefit before his own.61 One feature consistent across the accounts given of each of the princely virtues is the drawing of a direct connection between the absence of good qualities and the resulting political instability and revolt. The author of L’estat et le gouvernement appears to be conveying a not entirely veiled threat: vicious rulers risk the ruin of their own dominion. Hence, a prince who lacks wisdom (the biblical Roboam is cited) may expect the people to refuse obedience to him and to place themselves in the hands of another governor.62 An improvident ruler trusts foreign counselors likely to be “rebels.”63 The Bible likewise teaches that “for the lack and default of justice, the realm, once it fails, will be transposed and fall into the hands of strange people and to the enemies of any king who will not do justice ..... for this cause a king or a prince who will not do justice shall soon be without lordship.”64 Finally, a ruler whose mercy is misguided “is likely to fall into the peril of rebellion by his subjects or else to suffer a great war among the inhabitants belonging to the parties” in his realm.65 In short, a prince who does not properly and thoroughly love his subjects will find himself abandoned by them and can only reasonably expect to be forced from his office. It may be that this is ultimately God’s judgment, but its immediate and clear cause is popular dissatisfaction. And the major source of such discontent for L’estat et le gouvernement can evidently be traced to economic deprivation as much or more than moral outrage or religious fervor. The author seems to understand very well that men are more inclined to lose 60. L’estat et le gouvernement, 198–99. 62. Ibid., 192. 64. Ibid., 197.

61. Ibid., 200–201. 63. Ibid., 194. 65. Ibid., 201.

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their love and surrender their obedience when their survival is compromised by misadministration and evil government. The connection between the medieval struggle against tyranny and good government and the emergence of full-blown modern economic life has been noted by scholars. 66 The foregoing chapter illustrates that some moral and political thinkers did indeed equate the struggle for the economic rights of the people with forms of opposition to political interference with the possession and accumulation of private wealth. More to the point, the conception of princely virtue, expressed in traditional language, came to be realigned with an ideal of government viewed as the promoter of the economic welfare of the subjects over whom it ruled. Nor were the authors of the Speculum regis Edwardi III and L’estat et le gouvernement simply outlying voices. Rather, their identification of the conventional Christian political value of “love” with royal concern for earthly material benefit of the people echoed a theme that became increasingly commonplace during the later Middle Ages. Better known theorists of the period—from Bruntto Latini and Marsiglio of Padua to Christine of Pizan to John Fortescue—shared similar conceptions of the economic dimensions of political community and the attendant requirements placed on rulers to serve the temporal good of its members, as we shall discover in subsequent chapters of this book. I do not mean to imply, of course, that loftier goals of spiritual and moral reform and improvement were gradually eliminated from late medieval theories of government. Rather, virtues such as justice were expanded to embrace more overtly earthly considerations without any contraction in the duty of a prince to enforce customary Christian values—hence, the inclusion of God’s role in the bond of love that united ruler and people. The tendency to treat the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment and of bodily security as mutually exclusive and perhaps antithetical activities—which one finds both in the Augustinian doctrine of the “two cities” and in modern dichotomies between “secular” and “religious” ends—does not seem to have occurred to (or at any rate, disturbed) many medieval authors. Instead, one could be a good Christian ruler while governing one’s subjects simultaneously for the welfare of their bodies and their souls. 66. Lately, see Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005), 71–99.

Pa rt I I I

Republican Self-Governance and Universal Empire 





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B r u n e t t o Lat ini ’s C o m m e r cia l R e p u b l icanis m

h e e n t h u sias m for republicanism that has gripped po litical theorists and historians during the last fifty years or so has reaped unintended rewards for a host of authors who had been long forgotten or little appreciated. Perhaps no thinker benefited more from this revival in the restoration of his reputation than Brunetto Latini, the thirteenth-century Florentine rhetorician and civil servant. In his own era, Latini was eulogized by a younger contemporary, Giovanni Villani, as a “great philosopher” who tutored the Florentines “in the arts of speaking well and guiding and ruling our republic.” Latini may have been a teacher of Dante, who, while repaying his master by memoralizing him in the Inferno as an occupant of the nether reaches of Hell, also demonstrates the utmost deference and respect for his political judgment. Indeed, Dante’s son, Peter, in his commentary on the Inferno, claims that his father held Latini in high esteem as a “teacher of virtue and knowledge.”1 Regard for Latini’s skills as a philosopher and politician largely lapsed with the centuries, however. Only during the last several decades has Latini’s stock once 1. References to Villani’s Chronica and Peter Alighieri’s commentary on Inferno 15 are given by Charles T. Davis, “Brunetto Latini and Dante,” in Dante’s Italy and Other Essays (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 168, 186–87. Further discussion of Latini’s contemporary reputation may be found in Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri (New York: Peter Lang, 1993) and Iolanda Ventura, “L’iconografia letteraria di Brunetto Latini,” Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 38 (1997): 499–528.

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again risen as a creative political thinker, who, in his encyclopedic treatise called Li Livres dou Tresor, proposed a vigorous republican account of the art of government and the nature of community. Quentin Skinner contends that Latini, foremost among his medieval contemporaries, embraces the fundamentals of republican ideals: “The most unequivocal expression of a preference for Republican liberty over any other form of government is pronounced by Latini in his Books of Treasure.”2 In a similar vein, Maurizio Viroli, recounting the transformation of republican political language between 1250 and 1600, remarks, “Bruntto Latini ..... emerges as a central character in the story, as a writer who condensed in a general definition the notion of politics that had emerged from the tradition of political virtues and the Roman ‘civil wisdom.’”3 Latini now enjoys quite widespread renown as a leading humanistic proponent of republican values and ideals.4 In particular, the valorization of Latini’s republicanism has been heavily based on its literary sensibilities, its attachment to rhetoric, and its praise for classical civic virtues. But there is another important, yet hitherto unexplored, way in which Latini deserves to be classified as a republican in the mold of his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century successors: his foundation of social and political order upon commercial principles—the production and exchange of material goods for profit—and consequent economic defense of republican government. Hans Baron famously argued that an important divide between medieval republicanism and the republican thought of the Renaissance civic humanists might be found in their 2. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1: 41. Skinner develops this point in greater detail in “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher,” Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 1–56 and “Machiavelli’s Discorsi and the Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas,” in Gisela Bok, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 121–41. 3. Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 8 (cf. 2–4, 26–30). 4. For other examples of this propensity to enshrine Latini at the origins of European republicanism, see Ncholai Rubinstein, “Marsilius of Padua and Italian Political Thought of His Time,” in J. R. Hale, J. R. L. Highfield, and Beryl Smalley, eds., Europe in the Late Middle Ages (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), 51, 62; Joseph Canning, “Introduction: Politics, Institutions and Ideas,” in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350– c.1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 366; Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 132; Cary J. Nederman, “The Union of Wisdom and Eloquence before the Renaissance: The Ciceronian Orator in Medieval Thought,” Journal of Medieval History 18 (1992): 86–88; and James M. Blythe, “‘Civic Humanism’ and Medieval Political Thought,” in James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 56.

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respective attitudes toward the creation of earthly wealth. In Baron’s view, the trecento glorification of poverty undermined any positive valuation of the pursuit of material enrichment, either for the individual or the community.5 Only when “the fourteenth-century tradition had been significantly weakened,” Baron asserted, “did it become possible for humanists to look at life ..... with the eyes of citizens proudly acknowledging work and self-acquired possessions as the foundation of morality and the greatness of their city.”6 Hence, Baron rejects the idea that economic development played a central role in the thought of a medieval republican such as Latini. Interestingly, Quentin Skinner, who in other respects did so much to reveal the weaknesses of Baron’s “crisis of the Florentine republic” explanation of the origins of civic humanism, somewhat contradictorily seems to share this perspective. Skinner detects in Latini precisely the doctrine that Baron had ascribed to pre-Renaissance republicans: that an important cause of “the loss of civic liberty is the increase of private wealth,” since “the pursuit of private gain is inimical to public virtue.”7 It is certainly true that Latini was no advocate of greed and excessive wealth. But a more comprehensive reading of the Tresor reveals Latini, no less than the republicans of the quattrocento, supported precisely “the idea that increasing wealth may serve as a positive blessing” to the city—a position that Skinner denies to Latini.8 My interpretation, if upheld, draws Latini more directly into the ambit of the “commercial republicanism” that characterized the Renaissance, in Baron’s view. Hence, the example of Latini challenges one of the principal remaining barriers that supposedly separates medieval defenses of republicanism from Renaissance versions. In support of this reading, I contend that Latini’s republican thought embraces the position that self-governing institutions both depend upon and are especially well suited to sustain a society whose conception of the common good includes centrally the creation and exchange of those material necessities required for physical welfare and comfort. In a reversal of the Aristotelian argument, “living” becomes a salient communal concern, rath5. Hans Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1:158–257. On the attitude of Italian civic humanists toward wealth, see Maria Luisa Pesante, “Il commercio nella reppublica,” Quaderni Storici 105 (35: 3) (2000): 655–95. 6. Ibid., 226. For an evaluation of the importance of this view for Baron’s general interpretation of civic humanism, see William Connell, “The Republican Idea,” in Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism, 20–21 and passim. 7. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1: 42; cf. 42–45. 8. Ibid., 43.

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er than merely a matter for individual households; yet for just this reason, material existence and the objects needed to pursue it may not be assimilated to the private self-interest or desire of citizens. Civil life is thus driven by the production and circulation of tangible goods among members of the community. And republican government is more likely to facilitate such economic activities than other regime types. In considering Latini’s Tresor, we may locate three propositions necessary to sustain this general idea of republican institutions as uniquely consonant with a needs-based commercial society: (1) the foundations of civil association necessarily involve the goal of producing and exchanging consumable goods; (2) one of the crucial functions of government is to enhance the physical (economic) security of citizens; and (3) the material goals of society are best realized under a republican form of government. These three views not only form important elements of Latini’s political argument in the Tresor, they also distinguish him from his classical sources, such as Aristotle and Cicero. The appreciation of the commercial themes that suffuse his political theory has perhaps been overshadowed by scholarly emphasis upon other aspects of his republican sensibilities, a situation that I endeavor to rectify in the present chapter. It is understandable that scholars have previously neglected the economic dimensions of Li Livres dou Tresor. The Tresor is, after all, a long and eclectic work, knitted together out of a diverse array of source materials. Its three major sections cover, first, speculative wisdom as well as religion, human history, and the natural world; second, ethics as understood by Aristotle and by the Latin philosophers; and third, rhetoric and the art of government. Since Latini apparently wrote the Tresor in the early 1260s—while in exile from his beloved Florence—he had no direct knowledge of the doctrines of Aristotle’s Politics beyond those teachings present in the Nicomachean Ethics, an abbreviated translation of which comprises the first half of the Tresor’s second book. Latini similarly draws on works as varied as the twelfth-century Moralium Dogma Philosophorum (the second half of book two), Cicero’s De inventione (the first section of book three), and John of Viterbo’s De regimine civitate (the second part of book three). Yet in adapting all of these works, Latini prunes and revises them to serve his own clear intellectual purposes. Recent scholarship has stressed principally the rhetorical features of Latini’s conception of political life.9 This is hardly surprising in light of the 9. In addition to the work of Skinner mentioned in note 2 above, see Ronald G. Witt, “Brunetto Latini and the Italian Traditions of Ars Dictaminis,” Stanford Italian Studies 3 (1983): 5–24; and John M. Najemy, “Brunetto Latini’s ‘Politica,’” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 33–51.

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contours of his own career as a teacher and civil servant, not to mention his claim at the beginning of the third book of the Tresor (on good government) that “the most important science relative to governing the city is rhetoric, that is to say, the science of speaking, for if there were no speech, there would be no city, nor would there be any establishment of justice or of human company.”10 Latini supports the centrality of rhetoric by appealing to a fairly conventional rendition of Cicero’s account of the linguistic foundations of human association derived from De inventione, which was widely known and repeated during the Middle Ages.11 By means of eloquent speech humanity was originally drawn together into organized society and political life; the latter-day orator retains particular responsibility for upholding the good order of the community. The emphasis upon the rhetorical aspect of politics in Latini’s thought conveniently illustrates his continuity with later Italian humanists. Yet this approach conveys a somewhat one-sided picture.12 In the opening section of the Tresor, Latini offers a definition of politics that incorporates rhetoric within a broader conception. In the course of classifying the disparate branches of knowledge, he asserts that “politics ..... without doubt is the highest wisdom and most noble profession that there is among men, for it teaches us to govern others ..... according to reason and justice.”13 He then immediately explains what is encompassed by the “noble profession” of politics: “It teaches us all of the arts and trades [ars et mestiers] necessary to the life of man, and this occurs in two ways, for one is in deed and the other in word.” By “word,” Latini means that politics embraces grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, the latter of which he commends as the pinnacle of the political arts.14 By “deed,” he maintains that politics “consists of the daily trades involving hand and foot, that is, metalsmiths, weavers, and 10. Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1948), 3.1.2. I have consulted the English translation by Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin (New York: Garland, 1993), but have often modified their renderings: I have also made occasional use of the new edition of the French text, also by Barrette and Baldwin (Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2003). 11. Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, 3.1.7. See Cary J. Nederman, “Nature, Sin and the Origins of Society: The Ciceronian Tradition in Medieval Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 3–26, and Nederman, “The Union of Wisdom and Eloquence before the Renaissance.” Latini repeats the Ciceronian account in his Italian-language commentary on De inventione, published as La rettorica, ed. Francesco Maggini (Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1968). 12. As has been emphasized by Najemy, “Brunetto Latini’s ‘Politica,’” 38. 13. Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, 1.4.5. 14. Ibid., 1.4.7–10.

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shoemakers, and the other trades necessary for the life of man, and which are called mechanical.”15 Thus, Latini’s idea of politics comprehends not only the activities of writing and speaking well, but also occupations that were often regarded by ancient and medieval authors to be demeaning and inconsistent with civic life. What might Latini have in mind here? Certainly not that knowledge of politics involves a direct familiarity with all of the intricacies of the mechanical trades.16 Rather, he apparently believed that the goal of politics must be to facilitate the flourishing of the disparate arts and trades that exist within a community. As he says in the introductory section of Book Two of the Tresor, which allegedly reproduces the view of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, The art which teaches how to govern a city is the most important and the sovereign and the mistress of all arts, because it contains many honorable arts, such as rhetoric and military science and governing one’s household; furthermore, it is noble because it gives order and direction to all those arts which are under it and which bring about its fulfillment, and its end is also the end and fulfillment of the others.17

In spite of his claim to be summarizing the Ethics, Latini seems to make a quite different point from Aristotle. For Aristotle, all of the subordinate arts present within the polis had purposes that were less honorable than the aim of political science: they sought only partial goods, whereas political science sought the good of the whole.18 Hence, they were to be relegated to the strict control of the “master science of the good,” politics, in order to ensure that they did not detract from the realization of the common good, which was the promotion of moral virtue among those inhabitants capable of attaining it. Aristotle’s political science thus is wholly unconcerned with the ends of the divers arts and trades for their own sake, but instead concentrates on maintaining them (at arms’s length) because their products formed the material preconditions for a morally valuable life on the part of a small elite.19 By contrast, Latini teases out of the text of the Nicomachean Ethics a 15. Ibid., 1.4.6. 16. An implication specifically denied at ibid., 3.73.2. 17. Ibid., 2.3.1. 18. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a1–1094b12. 19. See Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 209–53.

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suggestion that the nature of politics is both more inclusive and less exalted than Aristotle proposes. Brunetto hints that the reason politics incorporates the mechanical as well as the verbal arts is that the community must be arranged so as to promote the good of all its members. Thus, a crucial duty of government is the protection and enhancement of tasks and functions that contribute to marketplace activities. It is evident throughout the Tresor that Latini has the utmost respect for the capacities of persons engaged in mechanical occupations. “Each artisan judges well and tells the truth about what belongs to his trade, and in this lies the subtly of his sense,” Latini states.20 Elsewhere, he remarks, “Wisdom is the dignity and advantage of a man in his trade [mestier]; for when one says of a man that he is wise in his art, then his value and worth in that art are shown.”21 Commercial and manual enterprises, so far from demeaning those who engage in them, are deemed honorable and worthy by Latini. Such valorization of mechanical occupations surely reflects the general medieval trend, evident in philosophical and theological literature from the twelfth century onward, to accord dignity to labor.22 Latini’s thinking was doubtless also shaped by the guild-based structure of public life in Florence and the other Italian communes of his time.23 But neither factor is adequate to explain one of the most striking features of the concept of politics propounded by the Tresor: its insistence that the diversity of human arts constitutes a crucial foundation for communal life. “All arts and all works are directed to some good, but because of the diversity of things, it follows that good things are diverse; each thing requires its own good which is appropriate to its goal,” Latini remarks.24 Specifically, he enumerates the different ranks and functions of clerics, and then stipulates that “others are laborers, with some making houses and others cultivating the arable land, and others still are smiths or cobblers or practice some other 20. Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, 2.3.2. 21. Ibid., 2.31.3. 22. See Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1990); and George Ovitt Jr., The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 23. For the social and political organization of Italian civic life in Latini’s time, see John M. Najemy, Corporation and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280–1400 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); and Antony Black, Guild and State: European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (New Brusnwick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 2003), 44–75. 24. Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, 2.50.1.

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trade [mestier]. I say that they all work toward the common and peaceful good of cities.”25 In sum, a range of talents and functions is both constitutive of and desirable for civic life. In turn, Latini’s model for the interrelation of the naturally diverse forms of human activity is located in the commercial interchange of goods and services. He observes that human beings help one another, and for this we must follow nature and place the common profit above all else, and preserve the company of men by serving, that is, by giving and taking its profits and its arts and its wealth, and by giving and leaving to the others one’s property in honorable fashion; for giving of one’s belongings is not only courtesy but it can be of great profit.26

Latini here subtly revises the standard Ciceronian conception of our natural duty to care for other human beings,27 introducing a market-oriented principle according to which the common good is realized in a manner compatible with private advantage. The conditions of one’s fellows materially improve when one shares with them the fruits of the special arts that one possesses. By no means is it illicit, however, for a person to profit from the advantage that at the same time accrues to others. As a result, citizenship comes to be defined by Latini in at least partially commercial terms: “It is a natural thing for a man to be a citizen and to live among other men and other artisans, and it would be against nature to live alone in a desert where no people live, because man naturally delights in company.”28 A large measure of such “delight” seems to be comprised of the exchange of goods: “Citizens who live together in a city serve one another, for if a man needs something that another person has, he receives it and gives him his reward and his payment according to the quality of the thing.”29 Indeed, Latini concludes (contra Aristotle) that commerce forms a perfectly appropriate archetype of friendly relations among citizens: “The proper direction of friendship puts in order those areas in friendship which are divergent, as it happens in cities, for the cobbler sells his shoes according to what they are worth, and the others do the same.”30 What permits friendly and unobstructed trading is the shared desire for personal profit: “Among them, there is a common thing that is loved, through which they arrange and conform their business, and that is gold and silver.”31 Seeking 25. Ibid., 2.50.3. 27. See Cicero, De officiis 1.7.20–24. 29. Ibid., 2.29.2. 31. Ibid., 2.44.18.

26. Ibid., 2.108.1–2. 28. Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, 2.5.2. 30. Ibid., 2.44.18.

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one’s self-interest is neither inherently antithetical to citizenship for Latini nor is it necessarily destructive of the public welfare of the community. Indeed, he appears to define the communal advantage at least partially in terms of the expanding personal gain of citizens. Latini is by no means unmindful that the pursuit of private advantage can readily degenerate into conflict between individuals and groups. Like other republicans before and after him, he frets about the potentially corrosive effects of seeking self-interest: If to obtain gain we are willing to despoil and use force against another, it follows that the company of men, which is according to nature, is dissolved. Illustration: if one limb thought it would be worth more by drawing off for itself the health of the next limb, the whole body would necessarily weaken and die. The same is true in human company, for just as nature grants that each person acquire what is necessary for himself more than for someone else, similarly it does not grant that we should increase our wealth by despoiling others.32

The greatest threat to communal order, somewhat ironically, stems from the very diversity within the capacities of the human race that makes civic life necessary and profitable. Since human beings possess divergent interests, and they desire to pursue these interests in ways that may come into conflict, the great benefit that accrues to them when they share and cooperate always remains under threat. For precisely this reason, Latini stresses the need for a principle of justice to mediate between individuals who, left to their own devices, would injure one another. “If one is a knight, another a merchant, and still others laborers, and the desires of one are detrimental to the gain of another,” he declares, “wars and hatreds would arise and bring about the destruction of men if justice did not exist, which protects and defends the communal life.”33 Latini asserts that this is particularly true in the sphere of the marketplace: “For those who sell and buy and borrow and lend for remuneration, and are concerned with commercial enterprises [marchandises], justice is necessary.”34 Without the mediating force of justice in economic exchange, individuals who have so much to profit by mutual service may easily be tempted to cheat, steal, or otherwise take advantage of other people, and thus destroy the bonds of social order. The Tresor identifies two primary sources for the justice that reduces 32. Ibid., 2.122.4. 34. Ibid., 2.91.3.

33. Ibid., 2.91.2.

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the potential for conflict within the community. The first stems from the mechanisms of the market itself. Latini observes that if a man sings in the hope of gaining and you give him a song in exchange, he will not consider that he has been paid, because he was expecting another reward; therefore, there will be no agreement in commerce [marchandise] unless an agreement is deliberately decided on, and this happens when each one receives what he desires in exchange for what he gives.35

While, in some instances, reward is accorded in the medium of honor or another form of status—Brunetto cites philosophy as one example—“in the other mechanical arts, one asks for money.”36 Money constitutes the source of “a just middle ground” between two persons in the act of exchange: “If the smith has something that is worth one, and the cobbler has something that is worth two, and a carpenter something that is worth three, and each needs things from the others, there must be some way to bring about equality.”37 The equalization of inequality forms the basis for the invention of money: “It brought equality to unequal things, ..... because it is a middle ground through which unequal things become equal.”38 Latini adopts the general view of Aristotle’s Ethics, in the sense that justice concerns, at least in part, the identification of a mean in which each person possesses “what is proportionately equal”; and money is treated as the medium through which this mean may be realized.39 Latini chooses, however, to detour around the technical dimensions of the Aristotelian conception of money, which were widely debated among thirteenth-century commentators on the Ethics.40 Instead, he concentrates upon the utility of money for the harmonious and undisturbed operation of market relations. Justice is half-way between gaining and losing, and it cannot exist without giving and taking and exchanging; for the cloth merchant gives cloth in exchange for something else he needs, and the ironworker gives iron for something else, and because in these things there was a great difficulty, a system was devised to make the adjustment, that is, money, so that the work of the housebuilder can be adjusted to the work of the cobbler through money.41 35. Ibid., 2.44.21. 36. Ibid., 2.24.22. 37. Ibid., 2.29.1. 38. Ibid., 2.29.2. 39. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1134a5; cf. 1133a6–b28. 40. A thorough survey of Scholastic views on money and related issues is provided by Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 41. Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, 2.38.6.

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Latini’s market justice, unlike that described by Aristotle, is an approximate justice. Where Aristotle and most of his medieval followers were concerned with establishing how money could express with mathematical precision the relative values of various commodities, Latini seems to focus on how money fulfills the desires of the exchanging parties. Thus, the equality of market justice as understood in the Tresor is somewhat subjective and contingent upon the satisfaction of the participants and the elimination of any potential for conflict. Money is a source of justice for Latini because agreement about its use mediates in advance the grievances that might otherwise arise among individuals in commercial interactions. Money promotes the peace that is a prerequisite of market society. Yet money is only one factor in Latini’s formula for establishing a just communal order. The other factor necessary for attaining justice is a system of law enforced by an efficient executor. Since the existence of money cannot rid the community of all disputes, even those of a strictly commercial nature, justice must be embodied in a person who is charged with judging dissentions among citizens and imposing law upon the citizen body. Invoking an organic metaphor, Latini comments that “because the lord is like the head of the citizens, and all men desire to have a healthy head, because when the head is sick, all the limbs are sick, men must above all things try to have a governor who will lead them to a good end according to law and justice.”42 The origins of government, as of money, stem primarily from the potential for abuse on the part of unencumbered proprietors: Because the pursuit of evil desires and the opportunity for evil deeds which went unpunished was becoming dangerous for the people and destructive to human association, justice took heed of these people and a governor was chosen for the people with several duties....... Thus, it was appropriate, indeed, it was almost a necessity, that nature be subject to justice ..... Nothing can be more profitable to each group of people and to all communes than to have a just lord and a wise governor.43

Government is required in order to ensure the safety and material well-being of individuals who, left to their own devices, might easily be tempted to engage in selfish behavior. Thus, principal among the expectations for a magistrate is that he would “watch over the common good, and would maintain both outsiders and insiders, and would respect the property and persons of all people in such a way that justice would not decrease in our 42. Ibid., 3.75.1.

43. Ibid., 3.77.1.

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city.”44 Latini appears less concerned with the impact a governor might have upon the moral and spiritual condition of citizens than with his ability to stamp out conflict and to promote the physical comfort of the community’s denizens. Latini recognizes, therefore, that the justice of a magistrate’s administration coordinates directly with the prosperity of the civic body. “The judge of equality remains steadfast in maintaining the law,” he observes, “and the citizens increase, and the landholders in the countryside multiply, as do the workers of the land and of the vineyards; and through the evil deeds which take place in the cities the opposite occurs, and finally they become deserts and woods.”45 The second half of Book Three of the Tresor enumerates the various duties of the public official with an eye toward the issues of economic management that are implied by the government’s direct effects upon the productive and commercial condition of the populace. In preceding medieval literature on the rule of the just man, a heavy emphasis was placed on the moral and spiritual consequences of good government for the people. By contrast, Latini—without neglecting earlier conventions—peppers his advice for the governor with comments of a more practical character. Thus, the ruler must supervise the accounts of the city with care that expenditures from the public treasury are not squandered.46 Generally speaking, as chief financial officer, he is charged to keep and maintain the rights of the commune, the taxes, jurisdictions, lordships, castles, cities, houses, courts, officials, public squares, highways, roads, and all the things which belong to the commune, in such a way that the honor and profit of the city are not diminished, but rather they should increase and grow better in time.47

The equation of just government with sound fiscal management runs throughout the Tresor’s advice about the responsibilities of management: intermingled among its survey of the more traditional virtues of the lord are suggestions about the maintenance of communal facilities and infrastructure and policies regarding the taxation of the citizen body.48 The tools of public administration were beginning to emerge within the pages of medieval books advising rulers.49 44. Ibid., 3.77.1. 45. Ibid., 2.29.3. 46. Ibid., 3.93.1–2. 47. Ibid., 3.93.3. 48. See ibid., 3.97–3.99. 49. For example, Rolandino of Bologna’s career in the 1250s commenced with the publication of a substantial collection of documents, known as the Summa totius artes noarie, which

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Although the principles of just government that Latini proposes are, he believes, applicable across a range of political institutions, he is not unmindful of the divergence that exists between regimes in his own day. “Just as the people and dwellings are different and the customs and the rights are different throughout the world, so too do they have different types of rule,” he comments.50 In particular, Latini acknowledges that the systems of dominion are distinguished according to the method by which their governors come to hold and retain office. All lords and officials are either perpetual forever through themselves and their heirs, as are kings and counts and castellans and other similar men, or they are in office for all the days of their lives, as are the pope and the emperor in Rome and the others who are elected for life, or for years, as are mayors and magistrates and aldermen or town and cities, or they function for special tasks, as do legates and delegates and lieutenants and officials whom the great lords charge with doing things, or to whom their legal affairs are entrusted.51

Latini’s primary concern, however, is with “the lordship of those who govern the cities for terms of a year,”52 although even in this specific instance there is an important distinction to be drawn. In France and elsewhere, he observes, such magistrates are appointed by superior lords who sell offices and “are little concerned with their [the incumbents’] goodness or the advantage to the citydwellers.”53 By contrast, in the republics of Italy, “the citizens and the citydwellers and the communities of cities elect as magistrates and lords those they consider to be better and more profitable to the common good of the city and all its subjects.”54 Latini’s remarks about good government are directed most concretely to this form of rule. At times, the text of the Tresor implies that the concentration on republican government in Book Three is strictly for reasons of relevance: it is the system under which he has served and thus with which he is especially familiar. Yet Latini also seems to hold that a republican regime where citizens choose their chief magistrate is preferable to other constitutions in the sense that it is more conducive to the goals of government, namely, the improvement of the advantage (material as well as moral) of each citizen and included models for administration. See Gianfranco Orlandelli, “La Sculoa di notariato,” in Girolamo Arnaldi, ed., Le sedi della cultura nell’Emelia Romanga: L’età communale (Milan: Silvana, 1984), 146–47. 50. Latini, Li Livres dou Tresor, 3.73.3. 51. Ibid., 3.73.4. 52. Ibid., 3.73.4. 53. Ibid., 3.73.5. 54. Ibid., 3.73.6.

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of the civic body collectively. In Book Two, he offers a criterion for distinguishing between good and evil forms of rule: Although many cities do well, there are some in which the government of men is destroyed and where people live in dissolute fashion, for each person works for his own interests. The most noble government we have, and with less pain and grief, is the one we choose in order to maintain ourselves, our household and our friends.55

Bad governments are those that are unable to regulate the self-interest of citizens in such a fashion that the good of each contributes to the good of all. How can one ensure that such “dissolute” communities do not arise? Latini holds that choice by the members of the city forms the best guard against dissolution. Latini’s argument favoring this position is intriguing. In line with his previously discussed conception of politics as a field of study that shares the same goals and principles as other human arts and occupations, he explains that “legislating in general is different from legislating in particulars, as is the case in all trades [mestiers]; in all things it is necessary to know universal and particular matters.”56 The problem is that far too many people imagine that all a competent ruler requires is knowledge of universal principles and, presumably, that what is true of one community is true of all. “But the truth is not this way at all,” Latini declares, “because the master of the law must be similar to his citizens.”57 In other words, the governor must have an appreciation of the specific circumstances in which citizens live and work and must tailor his rule to their needs and conditions. In this sense, the “art” of ruling is no different from the other trades that compose the community, hence the similarity between ruler and ruled. The person who knows particular things through experience as well as the universal ones will be a perfect master of the law....... He must know this art, and the one who knows it will be effective, but otherwise not, and if someone without that knowledge began to make the law, he would not be able to know accurately or to judge the goodness of its nature, nor would he be able to make up for his lack of knowledge.58

In turn, the best way to ensure that only well-qualified persons attain high office is to leave the decision to those whom they will rule, the citizens. Be55. Ibid., 2.49.1–2. 57. Ibid., 2.49.2.

56. Ibid., 2.49.2. 58. Ibid., 2.49.3–4.

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cause the members of the civic body have the capacity to judge wisely in matters of “art,” they will be able to recognize whether a proposed ruler resembles them in his mastery of his field. The city will not dissolve both because it will be governed by someone of whom the populace approves and because his knowledge will effectively serve the requirements of their particular as well as common interests. Latini’s preference for public approval of the civic head, and thus his recommendation of a republican regime over the other sorts of dominion he enumerates, apparently undergirds his remarks about the cornerstones of signorie (lordship). The government of cities, he says, ought to be founded on the three pillars of justice, reverence, and love. All three were commonly cited by medieval political authors as necessary for a wellordered regime; and Latini offers fairly conventional explanations of the first two.59 But his account of the bond of love between rulers and citizens contains a somewhat more idiosyncratic idea of government that pretty evidently reflects his republican sympathies. Love must exist in both lord [seigneur] and subject, for the lord must love his subjects with all his heart and with a clear faith, and he should be concerned day and night with the common profit of the city and of all men. In the same way, the people must love their lords with a just heart and with a true intention of giving counsel and aid for the maintenance of his office, for because he is one single person among them, he could not do anything without them.60

The inference here is that the governor, in the exercise of his art, remains ultimately at the mercy of his citizenry. If they have the opportunity to consult with him and if he demonstrates his concern for their welfare, then he may reasonably expect their support (the effectual equivalent of “love”) in those endeavors that he determines to be for the common good. Otherwise, the seigneur ought not to assume that the citizens over whom he exercises power will stand behind him. The general principle of “love” is directly realized in the consensual process by which the governor enters office and makes his decisions. Latini cautions that citizens need to take care about the selection of an annual chief magistrate: “They must not elect him by drawing lots or leaving it up to chance, but rather they should do it with great deliberation and wise counsel.”61 Brunetto stipulates a dozen salient criteria that citi59. Ibid., 3.74.1–3. 61. Ibid., 3.75.1.

60. Ibid., 3.74.4.

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zens ought to consider when choosing their leader, many of which fall within the standard conception of the good ruler articulated throughout the Middle Ages. Rather than seeking to alter medieval conventions about the qualifications necessary for governing, his point seems to be that election by “the common consent of the city” forms a more certain basis for assuring that the individual selected is “considered to be the best.”62 By examining scrupulously the character of the prospective magistrate prior to election, one has greater reason for confidence that the candidate will not stimulate hatred rather than love on the part of the city. An official who is hated, Latini says, “falls into the scorn and the bad graces of the very ones who elected him, so that to the extent that each person expected to see good things in him, he now sees harm.”63 It is far less likely that such discontent will occur, however, when the signeur is elected than when another method is employed. Consent remains an essential element of the republican regime even after the ruler takes office. The Tresor insists that a competent ruler— “although he is head and guardian of the commune”—should “in great and dangerous undertakings ..... assemble the counsellors of the city, and present and explain the undertaking to them, and ask them to advise on what course seems best for the city, and listen to what they have to say.”64 Having proposed his plan, the magistrate is to encourage a range of comments on and responses to it and is to ensure that these views are duly recorded in writing. While the final decision about how to proceed remains in the hands of the seigneur, he “must greatly honor the members of the council, for they are like his limbs, and what they decree should not be changed, unless it is for the obvious betterment of the commune.”65 Of course, Latini recognizes that it would undesirable for the ruler to seek consent to every minor decision made by him. Yet the Tresor enumerates a fairly large range of cases in which the communal council must be assembled and consulted, including the reception of important foreign emissaries, the appointment of significant delegations, the ratification of alliances, the imposition of new taxes or other financial burdens, and rectification of wrongs unintentionally done by the lord and his aides to citizens.66 In each of these instances, the head of government enhances his ability to command the respect and support of the citizens—without whom he can 62. Ibid., 3.77.2. 64. Ibid., 3.87.1. 66. See ibid., 3.88, 3.89, 3.99, 3.101.1.

63. Ibid., 3.75.15. 65. Ibid., 3.87.7.

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achieve nothing—by seeking their insight and approval. The republican art of ruling truly is, for Latini, the art of serving the needs and interests of citizens directly and concretely. Brunetto Latini’s vision of a commercial republic, in turn, has important ramifications for the historiography of European republicanism generally. In an incisive survey of the fate of the civic humanist thesis among historians and political theorists, William Connell points to the consequences of scholars’ (particularly Pocock’s) failure to note Baron’s insistence upon commercial values as a key ingredient of civic humanist defenses of republicanism. “Where Baron thought that republicanism was properly protective and nurturing of property,” Connell observes, “Pocock asserted that the republic should be ever on guard to combat the corrupting effects of private wealth.”67 As a result, Pocock’s account of the “Atlantic tradition” of republicanism takes on a distinctly communitarian cast that Baron himself had never envisioned: Pocock’s eighteenth-century republicans are but proponents of classical self-sacrificing civic virtue dressed up in modern garb. This deficiency on Pocock’s part has been emphasized by several recent scholars. Paul Rahe’s concentration in Republics Ancient and Modern on a Montesquieu-inspired insistence upon the distinction between the classical republican distaste for commerce and the modern republican embrace of commercial values corrects Pocock with an account that adheres more faithfully to Baron’s scholarly vision.68 Likewise, Mark Jurdjevic argues forcefully that Pocock “misunderstood civic humanism and the role of commerce in Renaissance Republicanism” by associating commercial values with forms of “corruption” about which the Florentines were utterly unconcerned.69 Yet Rahe, Jurdjevic, and others also perhaps take for granted a divide between ancient and modern republicanism in a way that caricatures medieval attitudes toward the values of commercial society. Rahe remarks, “Neither in antiquity nor in the Middle Ages did the learned seek ‘to come to the relief of man’s estate.’ ..... Government was ordained by God not just to provide for the material wants of men; it did not exist solely or even primarily to protect their rights and to promote their well-being on 67. Connell, “The Republican Idea,” 23–24. 68. Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 57–61, 72–79, and passim. 69. Mark Jurdjevic, “Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Debate,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 723.

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earth.”70 Rather, medieval Christians were almost uniformly “concerned first and foremost with achieving salvation in the next world, not progress and material prosperity in this one.”71 Rahe’s imputation of an antimaterialist bias among medieval authors thus heightens the drama of the break he ascribes to modern, post-Machiavellian republicanism, “a species of republican government hitherto unknown to man.”72 The case of Latini’s Tresor suggests, however, that such a historical generalization is overdrawn: the classical emphasis on virtue, integrated into the Christian focus on salvation, by no means entailed the utter incapacity of republicans to defend self-government on grounds of its earthly benefits for all citizens. The main elements identified by Jurdjevic as characteristic of the economic dimension of Renaissance republicanism already appear in Latini’s writings: commerce as the “economic well-spring of the republic” and organization of economic policy so as to promote material wealth.73 In quite properly correcting Pocock, it remains a mistake to retain too great a fidelity to Baron’s view that medieval Christianity’s invariable reaction to wealth was the glorification of poverty. In the republican acceptance of commercial values, as in much else, the breech between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was far less dramatic than scholars often presume. Moreover, the problem with which Latini wrestled in the Tresor—the relationship between the quest for personal material well-being and the desire for harmonious communal association—remains an abiding one for current republicans, many of whom stand quite justly accused of failing to pay serious heed to economic questions. Current republicanism seems too often in thrall to the communitarian failure to accommodate itself to the undeniable realities of a society immersed in commercial values. Yet some appreciation of the economic side of human existence is necessary if contemporary republicans are to offer a compelling political theory. The tension between commerce and virtue has been highlighted in the second half of Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent, which directs our attention precisely to how questions arising from “the political economy of citizenship” have driven the transformation of the American republic over the course of its history.74 Sandel believes that republicanism can overcome 70. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, 98, 354. 71. Ibid., 98. 72. Ibid., 229. 73. Jurdjeic, “Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment,” 741. 74. Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 123–315.

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the charges of nostalgia, exclusion, and coercion that liberals level at it and can capture a “political economy of citizenship” that seeks “to cultivate not only commonality but also the independence and judgment to deliberate well about the common good.”75 He apparently recognizes that both of the theoretical models he offers to achieve this goal—derived from Rousseau and Tocqueville—are fraught with danger, however: the former because of its unitary character, the latter because it encourages a fragmented public space. The general terms of Latini’s vision of civic life, by contrast, might suggest to the modern theorist an approach that negotiates between these twin evils posed by “thick” and “thin” republicanism, formulating a basis for civil virtue in the meeting of common needs while recognizing that civil society is constituted most essentially of a plurality of private and semiprivate interests. Citizens are treated as bearers of legitimate interests at three simultaneous levels: as individuals pursuing personal aims, as members of groups (primarily constructed around vocation), and as possessors of civic rights. Latini sketches a republican system that accords recognition to each of these dimensions of communal life without demanding the suppression or ultimate priority of any one of them. Such vertical pluralism—acknowledging the nonreducible yet ultimately consistent range of loyalties and commitments tugging at human beings—may capture more faithfully the experiences of citizens of large modern democratic republics than either Rousseau’s unitary or Tocqueville’s localized frameworks. Thus, Latini’s version of commercial republicanism properly demands to be reinscribed in the history of republican thought—not as a quaint historical curiosity or mere antecedent to modern ideas, but as a lively and fruitful alternative to the main trends in contemporary republican theory. 75. Ibid., 320.



10

Ma r si g l i o o f P a d u a Between Empire and Republic

T h e na m e o f Ma r si g l i o o f Pa d u a is so closely associ ated with his major work, the Defensor pacis, that scholars sometimes fail to take note of his authorship of several other political treatises as well.1 The most extensive and important of these was the Defensor minor, written about fifteen years after the Defensor pacis. In 1325, Marsiglio had abandoned France, where he had completed the Defensor pacis the year before, for the precarious protection of the German king and imperial claimant Ludwig of Bavaria.2 While at Ludwig’s court, Marsiglio’s pen seems to have been inactive until the composition of the Defensor minor around 1340. Modern scholarship has been aware of the existence of the Defensor minor for comparatively few years. A single manuscript of it was first identified about a century ago, in a classic case of mul1. For example, in spite of their extensive reliance on Marsiglio, there is no direct reference to his other writings in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); James M. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and even J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 2. The best account of the events of this period, and of Marsiglio’s career generally, is Carlo Pincin, Marsilio (Turin: Giappichelli, 1967). But some redating is in order, as demonstrated recently by Frank Godthardt, “The Philosopher as Political Actor—Marsilius of Padua at the Court of Ludwig of Bavaria,” in Gerson MorenoRiaño, ed., The World of Marsilius of Padua (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 29–46.

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tiple independent discovery, by both James Sullivan and Noël Valois.3 It has generally been assumed that the Defensor minor was composed as a sort of recapitulation of the Defensor pacis.4 But Marsiglio does not state this himself. Lacking a formal preface, the Defensor minor offers no initial clue to its purpose or nature. The incipit reads simply: “The beginning of the book entitled Defensor minor, edited by Master Marsiglio of Padua after the Defensor pacis major.”5 And indeed, the body of the Defensor minor contains copious cross-references to the Defensor pacis. But such references do not in themselves demonstrate the character of the connection between the two works. Marsiglio scholars have consequently disagreed fundamentally about the relationship between the Defensor pacis and the Defensor minor. According to one school of thought, the Defensor minor represents a profound change of doctrine from the Defensor pacis (or at least pivotal sections thereof ). Hence, Nicholai Rubinstein refers to “a shift in Marsilius’ views on government ..... shown by the Defensor minor.”6 By contrast, other commentators treat the later work as mere repetition and confirmation of the teachings of the Defensor pacis. In this vein, Georges de Lagarde remarked, “Le Defensor minor ne fait donc que clamer ce que tout le Defensor pacis suggérait déjà.”7 Ultimately, the central issue separating these two interpretations is the extent of Marsiglio’s commitment to the so-called absolutist principles of imperial rule.8 For the first reading, Marsiglio was a dedicated republican in the Defensor pacis who, whether for reasons of expediency or philosophical reevaluation, became an antirepublican devotee of empire in his later career.9 The second approach, on the other hand, holds Marsiglio to have been an absolutist all along, even in the earliest 3. For a description of the discovery, see C. K. Brampton, The Defensor Minor of Marsilius of Padua (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 1922), v and note 3. 4. For example, Alan Gewirth calls it “a brief resumé of his one great work” (Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy [New York: Columbia University Press, 1951], 22). 5. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor Minor, in Marsile de Padoue, Oeuvres Mineures, ed. Jeannine Quillet and Collette Jeudy (Paris: CNRS, 1979), 172; Writings on the Empire, ed. and trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1. 6. Nicolai Rubinstein, “Marsilius of Padua and Italian Political Thought of His Time,” in J. R. Hale, J. R. L. Highfield, and Beryl Smalley, eds., Europe in the Late Middle Ages (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), 74–75. 7. Georges de Lagarde, Le Defensor Pacis (Louvain: Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1970), 268. 8. For an overview of this debate, see Marino Damiata, Plenitudo Potestatis e Universitas Civium in Marsilio da Padova (Florence: Edizioni “Studi Franciscani,” 1983), 170–75. 9. Rubinstein, “Marsilius of Padua and Italian Political Thought of His Time,” 67–75; Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy, 131 and 248–51; Gewirth, “Republicanism and Absolutism in the Thought of Marsilius of Padua,” Medioevo 5 (1979): 26 and passim; David R. Carr, “Marsilius of Padua and the Role of Law,” Italian Quarterly 28 (Spring 1987): 9.

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chapters of the Defensor pacis, so that the Defensor minor merely renders more explicit the long-standing beliefs of its author.10 It is worth noting that both parties to this dispute, however deep their conflicts, do subscribe to the same fundamental premise about the nature of the Defensor minor itself: they agree that the Defensor minor is a work of imperial political theory, that is, it demonstrates a deep commitment to the Roman Empire and to the continued legitimacy of the rule of the emperor. Alan Gewirth admits that the teachings “in the Defensor minor ..... represent Marsilius’ concession to the imperialist theory as a consequence of his association with Ludwig of Bavaria.”11 For Michael Wilks, likewise, “In the Defensor minor, ..... it is the Roman emperor who figures as the choice of the human legislator, the one to whom this legislator has transferred its powers.”12 And Jeannine Quillet finds in the arguments of the Defensor minor “la fondation marsilienne de la doctrine imperiale.”13 It is precisely this interpretive unanimity about the character of the Defensor minor that I propose to challenge. My contention, by contrast, is that Marsiglio in the Defensor minor adopts the same technique of studied ambiguity that served him so well in the Defensor pacis. Marsiglio’s position in the Defensor minor, as in the Defensor pacis, continues to be that universal empire may be a legitimate form of government. But he hastens to stipulate that imperial rule can never be shown to be necessary and that the authority of both empire and emperor rests strictly upon the more fundamental principle of the consent of the ruled. In this way, Marsiglio can defend the empire (and by extension the powers of the German emperor) without committing himself to an imperial theory of politics. This helps us to understand, I believe, the one passage in the Defensor minor where Marsiglio alludes directly to that work’s relation to the Defensor pacis. He characterizes the relationship in logical terms: “With regard to all of these topics and proofs, many more things in this tract may be called to mind and explicated on the basis of the Defensor pacis major, by means of necessary consequences as well as deductions.”14 The Defensor 10. Jeannine Quillet, La Philosophie Politique de Marsile de Padous (Paris: J. Vrin, 1970), 19, 84–85, 87–88, and passim; de Lagarde, Le Defensor Pacis, 267–69, 153–55; Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 110–13, 186, and passim. 11. Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy, 131. 12. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages, 111. 13. Quillet, La Philosophie Politique de Marsile de Padoue, 265. 14. Marsilgio of Padua, Defensor minor, 16.4, in Quillet and Jeudy, eds., Oeuvres Mineures; Writings on the Empire, 63

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minor is an application of the basic precepts of the Defensor pacis, and it is intended to be logically consistent with and derived from its predecessor. This does not mean that the Defensor minor lacks novelty or that it fails to stand on its own.15 Rather, by referring his teachings in the Defensor minor back to the Defensor pacis, Marsiglio demonstrates how it is possible to apply the principles of the earlier work in a specific context. We might say that the Defensor pacis contains a higher order theory that receives concrete expression in the Defensor minor. The Defensor minor reveals how the theoretical framework of the Defensor pacis “cashes out” in the particular case of the empire. In order to appreciate the subtlety of Marsiglio’s attitude toward the empire in the Defensor minor, then, we need first to acquaint ourselves with the general theoretical framework of the Defensor pacis. The Defensor pacis is composed of three parts or discourses. Dictio I discusses the origins and nature of political authority; the second discourse, nearly four times the length of the first, critically surveys and refutes a variety of claims made on behalf of the Church and, particularly, the pope; the brief third discourse summarizes conclusions derived from the preceding discussions that Marsiglio regards to be especially useful or worthy of emphasis. The division between the two main discourses should not, however, be taken to mean that the Defensor pacis is formed of two separate, independent, and internally coherent treatises. A single central theme binds together the tract as a whole: the danger posed to human happiness (as experienced in the peaceful and self-sufficient political community) by the interference of papal government in secular life. The force of the argument in the Defensor pacis is directed toward demonstrating the disruptive effects of the papacy’s attempts to insinuate itself into temporal affairs. Approached from this perspective, Dictio I stipulates the arrangements necessary to bolster the stability and unity of secular communities so as to repulse papal interference, while Dictio II proposes the replacement of papal monarchy with an ecclesiology in which the General Council reigns supreme over the pope and the priesthood generally. One of the most distinctive features of the Defensor pacis is the way in which it addresses the circumstances of medieval Italy in relation to the 15. For example, see Cary J. Nederman, “Introduction” to Writings on the Empire, xx–xxiii, and “Tolerance and Community: A Medieval Communal Functionalist Argument for Religious Toleration,” Journal of Politics 56 (November 1994): 901–18; and Carlo Dolcini, “Osservazioni sul Defensor Minor di Marsilio da Padova,” Atti della accademia delle scienze dell’Istituto di Bologna 64 (1975/1976): 87–102.

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rest of European society.16 Marsiglio contends that the machinations of the papacy are presently most overt and destructive within Italy, yet he believes that a similar program of encroachment stands behind papal policies toward all temporal governments.17 Hence, the Marsiglian plan of opposition is meant to have general appeal. Marsiglio hopes that secular authorities will halt and reverse the spread of the papacy’s earthly powers before a papal plan of global domination is realized. The Defensor pacis represents a direct call for princes and citizens throughout Latin Christendom to restore the pope to his rightful (and extremely limited) role within the governance of the Church. In order to make this appeal as extensive as possible, Marsiglio constructs a secular political theory that may be described as “generic” in character. Unlike his contemporaries, he refrains from expressing a preference for any particular constitutional arrangement. Rather, he professes the irrelevance of the question: “As to which of the temperate governments is best or which of the diseased is worst, and the relative merits of the other species, the discussion of this does not concern us at present.”18 In a similar vein, the Defensor pacis depicts the political community in sweeping, almost vague, terms; it employs terms such as civitas (city or civic body) and regnum (kingdom) interchangeably and nonspecifically.19 Some scholars have gone so far as to regard Marsiglio’s careful ambiguity as an indication that the Defensor pacis rests on no true theoretical principles at all.20 But this is an overstatement. Dictio I of the Defensor pacis in fact advocates a normative conception of the foundations of a healthy or well-ordered temporal community, irrespective of its institutional arrangements. Marsiglio insists that the chief benefit of temporal life, the peaceful enjoyment of the material and moral fruits of earthly existence, is best realized when human beings are joined together into a fully perfected political society.21 To achieve this, however, it is necessary for humans to exercise 16. The following paragraphs summarize a case I defend in greater detail in Community and Consent: The Secular Political Theory of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 9–27. 17. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor pacis, ed. Richard Scholz (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1933), 1.1.2, 1.19.4–12. 18. Ibid., 1.8.4. 19. Ibid., 1.2.2. 20. See the remark of Conal Condren: “The Defensor Pacis is..... not a work of political philosophy” (The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985], 189). In a private conversation, Condren has indicated to me that he now has receded from this extreme claim. 21. Marsiglio, Defensor pacis, 1.3.5, 1.4.3–5.

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their reason and free will in order to consent to the communal arrangements under which they live. What distinguishes citizens from noncitizens for Marsiglio is primarily the ability of the former to give assent to the laws and governors to which they are subject, or to refuse such approval. The Defensor pacis thus declares that the human legislator, or source of supreme authority, within the political community is the whole body of citizens, or its greater part (valentior pars).22 The meaning of the latter phrase has been widely debated, but it ought to be construed neither as an early statement of the principle of majoritarian democracy nor as a version of the aristocratic doctrine that the views of the “better” citizens should be given more weight in public decision making.23 Marsiglio instead lays stress upon consensus; he permits each and every citizen the opportunity to consent to, amend, or even disapprove of legislation and other common affairs. Yet he expects that most citizens, who share the same powers of reason, will be in agreement about matters pertaining to the public welfare.24 Only a contentious few, whom he describes as possessing “deprived natures” (naturam orbatam), will refuse to join in accepting the determinations of the civic body.25 The term valentior pars seems to denote all but the minuscule number of such demented souls, as we saw in chapter 7 above. Marsiglio’s normative theory has immediate implications for his critique of papal pretensions. The establishment and perpetuation of the political community derives from the exercise of the natural human faculties of reason and volition, rather than from any form of direct divine concession. Hence, the pope, or indeed any priest, enjoys at best the same status as the other parts of the civic body. Should some member of the clergy interfere with the orderly operation of temporal government or legislation on noncivil grounds—for example, because he claims to have special power as God’s ordained servant—he denies to the rest of the citizens their place within the communal association and, in effect, enslaves them by reducing their wills to his own. Consequently, all citizens are under a duty to the just organization and peace of their own communities that requires them to repel the incursions of popes and clerics into the temporal sphere.26 22. Ibid., 1.12.3. 23. See de Lagarde, Le Defensor Pacis, 141–45 and notes for a thorough analysis of how the term has been understood and translated by earlier scholars. An analysis of valentior pars that views the idea as inherently shifting and unstable has been proposed by Conal Condren, “Democracy and the Defensor Pacis: On the English Language Tradition of Marsilian Intepretation,” Il Pensiero Politico 13 (1980): 305–9. 24. Marsiglio, Defensor pacis, 1.13.5–8. 25. Ibid., 1.13.5. 26. Ibid., 1.19.13.

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The “generic” quality of Marsiglio’s theoretical framework in the Defensor pacis extends to his discussion of the imperial system of rule. It is true that he dedicated the Defensor pacis to Ludwig of Bavaria,27 and that he was a partisan of Ludwig’s cause (through his connections with the della Scala and Visconti families) even before he fled to the protection of Ludwig’s court. But Marsiglio cannot bring himself to support world dominion in the Defensor pacis any more than he can endorse other specific forms of government. The question of whether it is advantageous to have one supreme government in number for all those throughout the world who exist in a civil life, or on the contrary whether at certain times it is advantageous to have different such governments in different regions of the world which are almost inevitably separate in location from one another, particularly in the case of human beings who speak different tongues and differ widely in character and customs, is a question that merits reasoned study, but it is distinct from our present concern.28

Given its context, Marsiglio’s refusal to take a stand on the issue of universal imperial rule is intriguing. His indifference to the claims of empire in Dictio I suggests that he views Ludwig’s cause as a means to the more laudable end of opposing papal pretensions to earthly jurisdiction. Marsiglio views Ludwig and the empire not as the embodiment of some grand imperial ideal but as a useful ally in the struggle to rein in the papacy, indeed as the only major European leader of the 1320s prepared to stand up to Avignon.29 What does Marsiglio think of universal imperial government as a matter of principle? Inasmuch as he subscribed to a Ciceronian doctrine of natural law which entailed broad duties on the basis of reason,30 Marsiglio might have defended empire as the form of government most consistent with human nature.31 But his remarks on the matter are ambivalent and inconclusive. On the one hand, he suspects that the multiplicity of governments reflects a kind of divinely inspired Malthusian mechanism: 27. Ibid., 1.1.6. 28. Ibid., 1.17.10. 29. Marsiglio indeed says as much in his dedication to Ludwig: “I have written down the sentences which follow, after a period of diligent and intense study, thinking them to be of some aid to your majesty” (ibid., 1.1.6). 30. See Cary J. Nederman, “Nature, Justice and Duty in the Defensor Pacis: Marsiglio of Padua’s Ciceronian Impulse,” Political Theory 18 (November 1990): 615–37. 31. This is precisely the claim proposed by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini in his De ortu et

  m a r si g l i o o f pa d u a   167 The heavenly cause perhaps inclines toward [diverse regimes], so that the procreation of mankind may not become excessive. For one might perhaps think that nature, by means of warfare and epidemic, has moderated the procreation of human beings and other animals, so that the earth might suffice for their nurture; in such a case, those who argue for eternal generation would be upheld very strongly.32

The latter evidently refers to the beliefs of certain Parisian Averroists, whose views Marsiglio knew and sometimes adapted.33 Less often noted is that Marsiglio detects a supernatural hand in this process: in order to provide for His children, God in His wisdom ordains the political and social diversity from which arises conflict and the control of population. Yet it should be emphasized that Marsiglio by no means embraces this position himself. He simply offers it as a point of speculation. To endorse the Averroist stance directly would be to commit himself to a definite geographical norm. A similar reluctance to pass final judgement on the appropriate geographical unit for political rule is also apparent when Marsiglio returns to the question of universalism in Dictio II. Here the issue at stake is the universality of Christian religion. Marsiglio points out that some proponents of the papacy defend papal primacy with reference to the unity of Christian faith, by appealing to an analogy between a diocese and the Church as a whole: “Just as in a single temple or diocese there ought to be a single bishop, ..... so too it is even more necessary that there be a single head of the universal Christian Church in order to preserve the unity of the believers.”34 But Marsiglio replies that this analogy is not valid, on the grounds that the argument for spiritual universalism would entail the necessity of temporal universalism, that is, of a coercive power of the same proportions competent to enforce the dictates of the universal faith. Our opponent’s reasoning would conclude that it is equally necessary that there be a numerically single head over the entire world, which is neither expedient nor true. For in order that human beings may live together peacefully, it is sufficient that there be a numerically single government in each province....... But that it is necessary for eternal salvation that there be one coercive judge over all humanity does not yet appear to have been demonstrated, although this seems more necesauctoritate imperii Romani. See Cary J. Nederman, “Humanism and Empire: Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Cicero and the Imperial Ideal,” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 499–515. 32. Marsiglio, Defensor pacis, 1.17.10. 33. See Jeannine Quillet, “L’aristotélisme de Marsile de Padoue et ses rapports avec l’averroïsme,” Medioevo 5 (1979): 81–142. 34. Marsiglio, Defensor pacis, 2.27.4.

168  s e l f - g o v e r n A N C E & e m pi r e sary for believers than the existence of a universal bishop, because a universal ruler can better preserve the unity of believers than a universal bishop.35

This passage hardly contains the unbridled endorsement of universal empire that Michael Wilks once found in it.36 Marsiglio simply admits that a more compelling practical case can be made for a single worldly government than for one head of the universal Church. But as in Dictio I, his argument turns on necessity. No necessary grounds—whether spiritual or temporal—can be adduced for universal empire any more than for regional or territorial government. The reason for Marsiglio’s consistent failure to support any given geographical arrangement for government, I take it, pertains both to his polemical purposes and his political principles. To indicate a preference for an urban regime, a territorial monarchy, or a universal empire would be to exclude and thus to alienate some potential supporters of Marsiglio’s primary enterprise: the reformation of ecclesiastical government. Marsiglio’s very intention in writing the Defensor pacis demanded that he address an audience whom Conal Condren has termed “the Duke of Omnium,” namely, the leader of “any regnum, provincia or patria of Christendom, from Padua to Paris, from Flanders to Florence.”37 So his reluctance to state a definite preference is hardly surprising. But pragmatic considerations also coincided with an important Marsiglian principle: that the consent of the community—an express act of reason and will—was the only legitimate and binding source of political authority. Hence, all prospective legislation had to be set before the citizens at large and approved by them after open public discussion; likewise, all prospective rulers had to be examined and elected by the same civic body. To insist upon the necessity of any constitutional or geographical arrangement in advance would have detracted from the unique competence of the community to determine its political identity for itself. This recognition of the contingency of public decision making and of the political process generally lies at the heart of Marsiglio’s “generic” approach to political theory. 35. Ibid., 2.18.15. 36. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages, 112, declares on the basis of this passage that “Marsilius had concluded that his earlier remarks on the possibility of numerous communities as sufficient to ensure earthly peace were not to apply when a specifically Christian society was under consideration. Here only a universal ruler, provided that he was an emperor and not a bishop, could suffice, and was indeed necessary when considerations of salvation were to be taken into account.” 37. Condren, The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts, 196.

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In turn, the Defensor minor applies these precepts to a concrete political situation: Ludwig of Bavaria’s struggle with the papacy and his local conflict within the German kingdom to maintain control of his crown against various claimants. In order to advance his control over Germany, Ludwig sought during the late 1330s to marry his son, Ludwig of Brandenberg, to Margaret Maultasch, countess of Tyrol and Carinthia.38 Several problems were posed by this scheme, all caused by the German king’s rocky relations with the Church. First, a divorce was required between Margaret and Prince John Henry of Bohemia, who had been wedded in childhood and who had allegedly never consummated their union. Second, the holy sacrament of marriage had to be performed in order to sanction the new dynastic connection. Third, issues of consanguinity existed in the potential marriage of Margaret and Ludwig the Younger. Since the Church claimed a monopoly over the legitimation of all aspects of the wedded state, and since Ludwig and his family and associates had long since been declared excommunicate by the papacy, there was concern that the alliance produced by the marriage could be undermined at some later stage. These problems shape the central questions that the Defensor minor addresses: Marsiglio sets out to refute the Church’s alleged authority to excommunicate, to give dispensations from marital union and consanguinity, and to solemnize marriage. Consequently, the Defensor minor is not primarily a work of imperial political theory at all, at least not if we compare it with such classic defenses of the medieval empire as Dante’s De monarchia, Lupold of Bebenberg’s De iuribus regni et imperii, or Engelbert of Admont’s De ortu et fine imperii.39 As in the Defensor pacis, opposition to the pretensions of the Church to control secular affairs drives the arguments of the Defensor minor. Marsiglio devotes the first eleven chapters of the Defensor minor to a highly critical examination of various ways in which the papacy and its minions have claimed to be able to punish and otherwise coerce human beings in the present life for the sake of eternal salvation. Through38. On the circumstances surrounding the composition of the Defensor Minor, see Jeannine Quillet, “Defensor Minor. Introduction Generale,” in Quillet and Jeudy, eds., Marsile de Padoue, Oeuvres Mineures, 142–68, and Nederman, “Introduction,” Writings on the Empire, xvi– xviii. 39. For an examination of more conventional conceptions of empire in Marsiglio’s time, see Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450, 92–108; and J. H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy 1400–1525 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 5 and passim. It is interesting that neither of these treatments count Marsiglio among the adherents to imperial ideals.

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out those initial chapters, hardly a word is mentioned about the Roman Empire, the Roman emperor, the Roman people, or any other factor directly tied to Ludwig’s title. Instead, Marsiglio appeals to essentially the same mechanisms and principles that guided him in the Defensor pacis: it pertains to the “community of citizens, or its greater part,” rather than the priesthood, to establish any laws that enjoy coercive force in the present world; this community is called “the legislator” by Marsiglio; the role of the legislator extends to “the primary and proper authority without qualification to coerce transgressors”; and should any ruler or judge claim the power of coercion, he can only validly do so on the basis of a grant from the legislator, “since the power to coerce transgressors is not his own without qualification but is given to him by others and is potentially revocable by the same people.”40 From these precepts, Marsiglio concludes not merely that priests cannot legitimately usurp powers of coercive legislation and enforcement (including excommunication), but also that they are subject to the legislator in all matters connected with their own temporal persons and property as well as the goods of the Church. In Chapter 12 of the Defensor minor, Marsiglio begins to address the specific situation of the Roman Empire. The context for this discussion is important. Marsiglio has just completed presenting his case for the General Council as the supreme legislative authority within the Church. Only the Council is competent to decide the basic tenets of the faith as well as to establish the appropriate rituals and offices of the Church: the Council stands “in place of all faithful Christians” in supervising the governance of the universal Church.41 Marsiglio reasons that the “priority of the Roman bishop of the Roman Church is conceded by the supreme faithful human legislator,” presumably acting through the mechanism of the General Council which represents it, rather than as a grant (say, through the legacy of St. Peter) independent of the common will of the believers.42 The Council, not the pope or the college of cardinals, is the seat of ecclesiastical government. But the universal character of the Church, and thus of its General Council, poses some obvious practical and institutional problems. How can such a council be assembled? Who has the authority to undertake this task? Marsiglio can hardly turn to the pope or to any body of priests, since he has just identified ecclesiastical government as the executive agent of the General 40. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 1.4–5; Writings on the Empire, 2. 41. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 7.2; Writings on the Empire, 21. On Marsiglio’s conception of the representativeness of the General Council, see chapter 7 above. 42. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 11.3; Writings on the Empire, 39.

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Council and therefore unable to act of its own accord. No provincial or national ruler enjoyed the prestige, let alone the power, to convoke a universal gathering of the representatives of the faithful. The competence to compel attendance at such an assemblage of all Christians required a ruler whose coercive authority extends (at least in principle) to all the lands of Christendom. And only one governor fit this criterion: the Roman emperor. This is a conclusion that Marsiglio, significantly, does not seem to reach in the Defensor pacis, where he stated simply that “it pertains only to the authority of the supreme faithful human legislator, or to the person or persons to whom it has granted such power, to call a General Council, to name suitable persons to it, to have it duly assembled, solemnized and consummated.”43 Marsiglio repeats this claim in the Defensor minor, but now identifies that “person or persons” whom he regards as possessed of the power to draw together faithful Christians from throughout the world into a single conciliar body. The supreme human legislator, especially from the time of Christ up to the present time ..... is and was and ought to be the community of human beings who ought to be subject to the precepts of coercive laws, or their greater part, in each region and province. And since this power or authority was transferred by the communities of the provinces, or their greater part, to the Roman people, in accordance with their exceeding virtue, the Roman people have and had the authority to legislate over all of the world’s provinces. If this people has transferred its authority to legislate to its rulers, then its rulers may likewise be said to possess such power.......44

Here we encounter an explicit statement of the doctrine of lex regia, namely, that the power of the emperor derives from the people. This is a position that some scholars have read retrospectively into the Defensor pacis.45 But Marsiglio never actually employs lex regia in the Defensor pacis, and even in the Defensor minor he uses it only in a profoundly revised form. The point of the Marsiglian version of lex regia is to demonstrate how, without violating the basic principle of consensual government, a single contemporary ruler might achieve the competence to convoke a truly universal General Council of faithful Christians. It appears to be for this rea43. Marsiglio, Defensor pacis, 2.21.1. 44. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 12.1; Writings on the Empire, 39. 45. For example, Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages, 113, and J. A. Watt, “Spiritual and Temporal Powers,” in Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, 419.

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son that Marsiglio is careful to demonstrate that the powers of the Roman emperor were acknowledged to be legitimate by Christ Himself as well as by his disciples. Their words “testify that everyone is admonished to obey and subject themselves to the already mentioned power, and also to obey the above-mentioned people as well as their ruler under threat of eternal damnation.”46 In other words, the empire is said to have a special place in the Christian scheme, its wide dominion perhaps prefiguring the universal reach of the Christian religion. (Marsiglio even speaks of an end to the schism between the Greek and Roman Churches in this connection, possibly in the belief that Byzantium no less than the West continued to be subject in principle to the Roman emperor.)47 Drawing his authority from his people, the Roman emperor enjoys unique prerogative as well as legislative powers in connection with the maintenance of the universal faith. It is at his command that the General Council comes together to transact its business. Marsilglio consequently advises Ludwig of his right—indeed, his responsibility—to call together a council of the faithful from throughout Christendom in order to confirm dogma (and coincidentally to approve the German king’s plans for his son and dynasty). None of the evidence thus far cited constitutes a ringing endorsement of the principles of imperial sovereignty or absolutism. Indeed, Marsiglio is careful to emphasize the contingency of the Roman claim to superior rulership: it is grounded on neither the will of God nor the necessity of nature. The Defensor minor instead regards the rights accorded to the Roman people (which have been ceded to its emperor) to be completely delegated: The authority or power of legislation (namely, of the Roman people and its rulers) has endured for so long a time and ought reasonably to endure, until such time as it might be revoked by the communities of the provinces from the Roman people or by the Roman people from its ruler. And we maintain that such powers are duly revoked or revocable when the communities of the provinces, by themselves or by their syndics, have been duly congregated and they, or their greater part, have performed deliberations about such revocation.48

Marsiglio refers for his authority on this position to the twelfth chapter of the first discourse of the Defensor pacis, which is concerned with the procedures for legislation and in which he insists that any communal public 46. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 12.2; Writings on the Empire, 40. 47. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 12.4; Writings on the Empire, 41. 48. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 12.1; Writings on the Empire, 39–40.

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decisions must arise from the consent of the governed stated expressly in a public forum. Thus, even in the Defensor minor, consent takes priority over all other justifications of authority: the Roman empire enjoys prerogatives because they have been ceded by an agreement freely entered into by the communities that have subjected themselves to Rome. Marsiglio goes so far as to make the historically improbable case that the rule of the empire in its earliest days was extended by means of consent rather than conquest. In opposition to those who regard the origins of Roman dominion as tyrannical and unjust, he responds that many provinces, observing the benevolence of Roman rule and wishing to live tranquilly and peacefully, elected by their own volition to subject themselves to and be protected by the above-mentioned Roman people and their rulers. For this reason, it is written in I Maccabees 8 about Judas Maccabee and his brothers and the whole Jewish people that they subjected themselves voluntarily to the friendship and rulership of the Romans. A similar pattern may be ascribed to the rest of the world’s provinces.49

Marsiglio supports this assertion with vague reference to unspecified “chronicles or histories” as well as to Scripture. But the accuracy of his claim is hardly the issue. He is merely demonstrating what must be true for the Roman empire to meet the standards of legitimacy required by his theory.50 Marsiglio’s primary dedication is to the theoretical principle of communal assent: he regards the extension of the empire to be an example of consent and thus an application of his theory. The argument is intended to have a logical force, not an empirical one: All legitimate rule rests on consent; the Roman empire is legitimate; therefore, the Roman empire rests on consent. Taking the major and minor premises to be true, Marsiglio then seeks independent historical confirmation to support his conclusion. But his claim would presumably remain valid in his own mind even if such evidence could not be located. Once Marsiglio moves beyond Chapter 12 of the Defensor minor, the basic equation of Roman ruler with Roman people with human legislator is simply taken for granted. The discussion thereafter turns to the more 49. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 12.3; Writings on the Empire, 41. 50. We ought not to reproach Marsiglio in retrospect for his failings as a historian; he was subscribing to precisely the standards of historical writing typical of his day. However, I remain utterly unconvinced by the recent effort by George Garnett to find a conventional providentialism in Marsiglio’s historical understanding (see Marsilius of Padua and “The Truth of History” [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006]).

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technical aspects of the dissolution of marriage and the exemption of wedding partners from the prohibition on consanguine couplings. In order to accomplish this, he reaffirms the division between human and divine law that he had established at the beginning of the Defensor minor.51 Human law is concerned with reward and punishment in the present life, divine law with what is necessary to achieve salvation. All of the exemptions and authorizations necessary for the marriage of Ludwig the Younger to Margaret are shown to fall under the classification of human law: Marsiglio regards divorce and marriage to be civil affairs, and argues that exemption from consanguinity is a matter of human discretion. The only way in which the theoretical foundation of Marsiglio’s case changes in the latter part of the Defensor minor is in his apparent assumption that the Emperor can decree human law directly, without public consent or consultation. He remarks, for instance, that “there is also, in accordance with human law, a legislator, such as the community of citizens or their greater part, or the supreme Roman ruler who is called Emperor.”52 Similarly, in the concluding paragraph of the Defensor minor, Marsiglio states that “the authority and coercive power” of making and enforcing human law “belongs to the community of citizens or the supreme ruler who is called the Roman Emperor.”53 It is largely on the basis of these scattered comments—and there are only one or two more of them—that the Defensor minor has acquired a reputation for promoting imperial absolutism. But this ascription seems overstated. For Marsiglio is careful not to replace completely the universitas with the Emperor. The implied equivalence of the powers of the community with those of the Emperor must be referred back to the transfer of authority that Marsiglio discusses in Chapter 12: the Emperor (via the medium of the Roman people) holds his legislative powers in trust from the communities. Thus, the Roman ruler can never act independently from the original legislator; his legislation must remain true to the standards upheld by the consent of the civil body; if he oversteps his authority, his powers may be revoked and returned to their source.54 By employing the formula “universitas civium vel princeps Romanus,” Marsiglio preempts any attempt to mistake the Emperor for an absolute or autonomous power. 51. Cf. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 1.2–4; Writings on the Empire, 1–2. 52. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 13.9; Writings on the Empire, 50. 53. Marsiglio, Defensor minor, 16.4; Writings on the Empire, 63. 54. Consistent with what Marsiglio says in chapter 19 of the first discourse of the Defensor pacis.

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It is, in any case, a distortion to categorize such a scattered set of remarks about the legislative prerogatives of the Emperor as a “theory” of imperial power. Rather, as Marsiglio himself suggests in the Defensor minor, the rights of the Emperor provide simply a case study in the concrete application of the basic precepts of the Defensor pacis. When referring in the Defensor minor to the creation or enforcement of human legislation, Marsiglio generally directs the reader back to the relevant sections of the first discourse of the Defensor pacis for a full discussion. Hence, he seems to regard his conception of the Emperor as fully compatible with, and indeed derived from, his theory of the legislative powers of the community. The conditional transfer of such powers to the Roman ruler exemplifies one way in which human communities may choose to use the civil consent that resides with them. Only if the grant were unconditional, and therefore nonrevocable, would it be invalid. Nor need Marsiglio hold that all rights of legislation and jurisdiction must have been transferred to Roman hands. In line with his arguments in Defensor pacis I.17 (a chapter that he cites, for instance, in Defensor minor 16.4), the authorization of a single supreme government does not entail the suppression of lesser jurisdictions or legislative bodies.55 Even if the communities under the rule of the Empire did approve the Emperor’s ultimate authority to legislate for and judge them, they did not thereby give up legislative or judicial rights wholesale. The Emperor may have superior jurisdiction as a result of a transfer of power; but he cannot claim as a consequence to have a monopoly on governmental powers. When read as Marsiglio asks us to read it, the Defensor minor looks a great deal less like a change of heart on its author’s part than an extension and application of the principles that he had formulated fifteen or more years earlier in the Defensor pacis. The inconsistency some scholars have detected turns out to be based on a sort of false expectation about Marsiglio’s political theory, namely, that it must ultimately advocate a single system of government or form of rule in preference to others. For most other political theorists of the Latin Middle Ages, this expectation would be warranted. But just as in so many other instances, Marsiglio frustrates our expectations: his approach is distinctive among his contemporaries for exactly the “generic” quality of its argument. This “generic” feature of his thought did not change with time. The Defensor minor illustrates how the “generic” framework can be applied as required in order to lend polemical support to a given temporal ruler. 55. On this point, see Nederman, Community and Consent, 123–42.

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This means, quite simply, that the Defensor minor does not reflect any great change of heart about or pragmatic renunciation of Marsiglio’s “true” republican principles. Certainly, Marsiglio’s “generic” account of politics could be adapted in support of a republican regime, such as existed in many of the medieval Italian cities. But we must never forget Conal Condren’s observation about the nature of Marsiglian argument: If he was concerned to combat a universal enemy, then parochial concerns, be they Paduan or Parisian, could only serve to limit his audience ....... The logic of his position is more clearly revealed by asking how it proved possible for a man to appeal across the manifest institutional diversity of christendom and define a common enemy in terms that all could see as immediate.56

We neglect the polemical and rhetorical force of Marsiglio’s thought at our own interpretive peril. The success of his goals depended crucially on his articulation of principles that abstract away from any concrete historical or constitutional arrangements. It is these principles—indifferent to republicanism or any other specific system of rule—that remain the constant throughout Marsiglio’s writings. This also supplies an answer to the question: Was Marsiglio a Romanist? If by that question we mean “Does Marsiglio’s political theory urge us to prefer the rule of the Roman Empire to other political entities?”, then the answer must be in the negative. Not only does he refrain from employing the doctrines typical of medieval proponents of Roman imperial authority, but he strives to uphold the non-imperial principle of civic consent as a prior restraint on the powers exercised by the Emperor. But if we pose the question differently—in the manner of “Can the rule of a universal Roman Empire be justified on a Marsiglian foundation?”—then our response must be affirmative. The Defensor minor attests that just as no principle will lead us always to prefer empire, so no principle excludes its legitimacy, at least as long as its establishment and operation remain consistent with the precepts Marsiglio lays down. To express the issue of Marsiglio’s attitude towards the Roman Empire in the manner generally adopted by scholars as an “either/or” proposition is to overlook the texture of his thought.57 Marsiglio’s political theory has far too much the complexion of a chameleon to be classified in such simplistic terms. 56. Condren, “Democracy and the Defensor Pacis,” 312–13. 57. An especially egregious example of this false dichotomy may be found in Gewirth, “Republicanism and Absolutism in the Thought of Marsilius of Padua.”



11

T r ans l at i o I m p e r ii Medieval and Modern

n t h e f o r e g o in g c h ap t e r s , we have encountered a number of recent scholars for whom the medieval and early modern periods are of one piece. Indeed, this position has achieved a nearly orthodox status in the current historiography of European political thought. Still, as noted in the introduction, a few scholars have resisted the historiographical tendency to emphasize complete and unremitting continuity between medieval and modern visions of political thought. Perhaps the most prominent figure in this camp is John Pocock, who, following in the line of scholarship pioneered by Hans Baron, endorses entirely a rupture between these two political worldviews. Pocock’s position was forcefully stated in his classic 1975 study, The Machiavellian Moment, but he has returned to it time and again.1 The thesis of discontinuity is stated with particular stridency, for example, in The First Decline and Fall, the third volume of Barbarism and Civilization.2 Pocock’s major aim in The First Decline and Fall is to demonstrate that the “decline and fall” theme associated with Edward Gibbon derives from the Florentine transformation in political thought in the fifteenth century and thus constitutes a decisive rejection of the doctrines of the Latin Middle Ages. 1. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1975), 50. 2. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Vol. 3: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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Pocock’s main evidence favoring this distinction is the widespread appropriation and application of the theme of translatio imperii in the late classical and medieval periods, that is, the notion of an unbroken continuity between past and present forms of universal human governance connected with Roman rule and its association with the Respublica Christiana.3 In turn, the postulation of a persisting link between past and present mediated through a universal political institution was replaced during the Renaissance by “decline and fall,” which viewed the empire as one more system of governance existing in time that follows a “natural” pattern of change and eventual death. Thus, more explicitly than in his previous writings, Pocock seeks in The First Decline and Fall to explicate the intellectual differences between medieval and modern times that exemplify the great divide inherited from Baron. Adapting this approach to the wider historiographical field posed by the medieval/modern distinction is a useful one. Indeed, I share Pocock’s evident suspicion that the continuities between medieval and early modern political thought have been overplayed in the hands of scholars of the neo-Figgisite orientation, who render the categories of “medieval” and “modern” for all intents and purposes meaningless when it comes to the analysis of the history of European political thought. In The First Decline and Fall, Pocock offers compelling evidence that the “all-continuity, all-the-time” position is overdrawn: medieval thinkers did see themselves as direct heirs to the Roman Empire—hence, the widespread use of the translatio imperii theme—in a way that at least some Renaissance thinkers (the important ones for Pocock) did not. Pocock’s argument seems to me to swing the pendulum somewhat too far in the other direction, however, by apparently recalling the specter of an Iron Curtain between the “backward looking” (literally—hence the obsession with the Empire) medieval point of view and the accomplishments of the Renaissance civic republicans in introducing the new “decline and fall” perspective. He admits that, as a matter of historical record, “the translatio died hard if it died at all, and persisted alongside many of the writings we shall consider as making a transition to Decline and Fall.”4 Likewise, Pocock directly challenges scholars who have found evidence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of important republican themes that he 3. Ibid., 99–100. 4. Ibid., 144. Pocock cites Thomas Izbicki and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Three Tracts on Empire (Bristol: Theommes, 2000). Pocock does not evince awareness of the important relevant study by Werner Goez, Translatio Imperii: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtsdenkens und der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1958).

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and Baron identify specifically and initially in European history with “the Florentine humanism of the quattrocento and cinquecento.”5 Considering Brunetto Latini, Ptolemy of Lucca, and Marsiglio of Padua, Pocock discovers in all of them an abiding devotion to translatio imperii that, in his view, comports ill with the robust republicanism (and connected introduction of “decline and fall”) of Leonardo Bruni and other fifteenth-century Florentines. In the present chapter, I propose to challenge the conceptual clarity and historical accuracy of Pocock’s scheme. I examine textual evidence in order to offer reasons why Pocock’s narrative concerning imperialism and republicanism requires further elaboration in recognition of the complexity of the issues he investigates. First, his employment of Marsiglio of Padua’s De translatione imperii without reference to the Defensor pacis, of which it is explicitly derivative, skews the meaning of Marsiglio’s specific use of that theme, in particular by imputing to it an unwarranted universalism. Second, fifteenth-century thinkers who continued to employ the translatio imperii construct often drew from it conclusions that were widely at variance with those that Pocock believes to be central to the discourse. I illustrate the latter claim with reference to Nicholas of Cusa’s De concordantia catholica. I conclude that Pocock’s strict conceptual division between translatio imperii and “decline and fall” models has an a priori character that often does not fit texts to which it should in principle apply. In closing, I offer some attenuated reflections on why the limitations of Pocock’s argument matter to the more general historiography of European political thought. Pocock places the theme of “universality” at the core of the translatio imperii perspective, whether in its imperialist or its papalist instantiations: “The myth of the Roman empire, translated, universal and persisting to the end of time, was still a necessary component of Latin Christian discourse.”6 Thus, in Pocock’s view, Marsiglio of Padua, writing in support of the cause of Ludwig of Bavaria, found it necessary to compose a treatise De translatione imperii in order to bolster the German’s cause against the papacy. The circumstances of Marsiglio’s involvement with Ludwig should be mentioned here. Marsiglio probably wrote the De translatione imperii almost immediately after completing the Defensor pacis, in the second half of 1324 or 1325, when he was still resident in Paris. A thorough reexamination of 5. Pocock, The First Decline and Fall, 144. 6. Ibid., 145.

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the sources by the German historian Frank Godthardt has profoundly altered what we know about the circumstances of Marsiglio’s departure from Paris. There is no evidence that Marsiglio was hounded or subjected to any charges on the basis of his authorship, which, despite common myth, was hardly anonymous, since he peppers the book with unmistakable references to himself (“son of Antenor”) and to his known associates (Matteo Visconti). Rather, when Marsiglio and his colleague John of Jandun departed Paris and took up residence with Ludwig there was no panicked “flight,” no hint of danger. The best evidence points to a planned and calculated decision to enter the service of Ludwig, an event that probably occurred around the time Marsiglio wrote De translatione imperii—and not 1326, the date universally ascribed in present scholarship. Even with this departure, there seems to have been no hue and cry about the heretical character of Marsiglio’s book, no immediate change in the eyes of the Church.7 Given the highly charged political context, Marsiglio’s intention in De translatione imperii was surely not to engage in historical writing in a later sense, as Pocock correctly notes.8 The treatise is pure polemic, a work meant to counter the standard claim (found in an analogous treatise composed in 1324 by Landolfo Colonna, among many other sources) that the pope possessed sole authority for bestowing imperial rights and that he could translate the empire to whomsoever he wished.9 But this does not answer the question that is salient for Pocock: Is Marsiglio working within the bounds of “the myth of the Roman empire [as] translated, universal and persisting to the end of time”? I suggest that Marsiglio has already stepped outside of this paradigm. While Marsiglio’s intent is not historical objectivity, he does evince a rudimentary historical consciousness about the contingency of empire. This is revealed in the complete absence of “Latin Christian discourse” in chapter 1 of De translatione Imperii; there is no hint of divine ordination in his account of either the early history of or the worldwide dominion exercised by Rome. Indeed, Marsiglio is perfectly 7. The research supporting this narrative is reported by Frank Godthardt, “The Philosopher as Political Actor—Marsilius of Padua at the Court of Ludwig the Bavarian: The Sources Revisited,” in Gerson Moreno-Riaño, ed., The World of Marsilius of Padua (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 29–46. 8. Pocock, The First Decline and Fall, 150. 9. For a more extensive discussion, see the “Introduction” to Marsiglio of Padua, Writings on the Empire, ed. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xi–xiii. The original Latin text may be found in Jeannine Quillet and Colette Jeudy, eds., Marsile de Padoue: Oeuvres Mineures (Paris: CNRS, 1979). Citations in the present chapter will be to my English translation.

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aware that the Roman Empire exists in a double sense: it connotes both the localized authority of the emperors over the city of Rome and the “monarchy over the whole world, or at any rate over the majority of the provinces, such as was the government and city of Rome as these emerged.”10 In fact, in a lengthy passage, Marsiglio proposes that the “magnificent achievements” of the Romans in conquering their vast empire during the Republican era resulted from a combination of “human fortitude and luck.”11 No explanation is given of why the Republic gave way to the imperial monarchy at the time of Augustus, but it is clear from Marsiglio’s comments about Julius Caesar that he assumes a transformation from Roman “empire” in the first sense to the second sense occurred only in the time of Octavian (Julius Caesar being identified as a usurper of legitimate republican government). The point at which many medieval Christians both before and after Marsiglio would cite the coincidence of Augustus and Jesus is elided in De translatione imperii; the shift to empire in the second sense is simply taken without comment as a historical occurrence. Such nonsupernaturalistic historicism reinforces the impression one receives from Marsiglio’s other writings that he regards the Empire as a wholly contingent (and perhaps not entirely desirable) political entity. In the Defensor pacis, to which De translatione imperii is simply an auxiliary appendage, there is no comparable translatio imperii account. Likewise, in Marsiglio’s Defensor minor, he makes no bow to the translatio imperii theme, treating imperial power instead as entirely consonant with the Defensor pacis’s theory of popular consent as the single legitimate foundation of government, as discussed in the previous chapter. The German Empire in the Defensor minor becomes a kind of test case for the application of Marsiglio’s “generic” theory of the legitimate basis of rulership. His only general comment on the question of the universality and necessity of world empire comes in chapter 18 of the first discourse of the Defensor pacis, a remark quoted above in chapter 10. In this discussion, Marsiglio evinced a studied skepticism about the universalistic and supernatural bases of the Roman Empire; indeed, we may recall, he found “heavenly causes” to point away from universal monarchy of any sort. To maintain, then, that Marsiglio’s recounting of the transfer of the empire in De translatione imperii betokens his acceptance of the mythology of “Latin Christian discourse” seems to me to be unsustainable. Rath10. Marsiglio, Writings on the Empire, 66. 11. Ibid., 67.

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er, the appeal to translatio imperii strikes me as yet another instance of Marsiglio’s remarkable ability to speak many different political, theological, and philosophical “languages” as the rhetorical situation and political agenda dictated.12 Pocock may well be right that many other apparent republicans of the later Middle Ages did not break with the assumptions built into translatio imperii; I do not think that he has grounds to say this about Marsiglio. By contrast, although Pocock makes no reference to the De concordantia catholica of Nicholas of Cusa (composed in 1433–1434) in The First Decline and Fall, Cusa would seem to be precisely the sort of author who fits the mold of an imperialist after his time.13 Scholars have generally associated Nicholas with a commitment to a version of universalism quite in line with the Renaissance translatio imperii school. Paul Sigmund has remarked that “the yearning for a universal empire and universal Church, and the hopes for the universal agreement among men which characterized De Concordantia Catholica, remained with Nicholas until his death.”14 Likewise, Morimichi Watanabe discerns Nicholas’s “failure to recognize the emergence of the nation-state, which had been gradually gaining ground in Europe.”15 Jeannine Quillet finds in Nicholas “a basis and sanction for the progressive development of a ‘universal commonwealth’ as the utopian conclusion of an ecumenism whose theoretical foundations he propounded with a boldness that goes well beyond Dante’s anticipatory ideas.......”16 And Bernard Guenée implicates Nicholas in a renewal of “the old idea of universal Empire” from which “confusion was created which was ultimately responsible for the persistence of the German dream of universal hegemony.”17 On the face of it, there seems to be little that distinguishes Cusa’s political doctrines from preceding advocates of universal empire such as Dante. 12. On this “discourse” model of medieval political theory, see Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7–13. 13. Along with Flavio Biondo and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who are examined in The First Decline and Fall, 179–202. 14. Paul Sigmund, Nicholas of Cusa and Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 292. 15. Morimichi Watanabe, The Political Ideas of Nicholas of Cusa with Special Reference to De Concordantia Catholica (Geneva: Droz, 1963), 144. 16. Jeannine Quillet, “Community I: Community, Counsel, and Representation,” in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 544–45. 17. Bernard Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, trans. Juliet Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 17.

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In De Concordantia Catholica, he emphasizes the naturalistic foundations of the earthly social and political community. Insisting that rational faculties distinguish human beings from animals, he asserts that “the exercise of their reason” led men to form associations, adopt laws, and appoint rulers.18 Human reason, Nicholas maintains, provides access to the precepts of natural law that guide all valid political institutions and powers. But reason is not equally distributed among human beings. Cusa remarks that some people are “better endowed with reason,” so that these “wiser and more outstanding men are chosen as rulers by the others to draw up just laws by the clear reason, wisdom and prudence given to them by nature and to rule the others by these laws.”19 Consequently, Nicholas posits a strict distinction between the wise few and the foolish multitude, which dictates that the latter can play no direct role in their own rule. He says, “Almighty God has assigned a certain natural servitude to the ignorant and stupid so that they readily trust the wise to help them preserve themselves.”20 Reason dictates the dominance of the few over the many and thus the rule of a small governing elite over the subjected masses. If reason justifies government in general, then specifically imperial government derives from its superior, spiritual calling. Cusa constructs a hierarchy of regimes stretching from the king of the Tartars—who “is the least worthy because he governs through laws least in agreement with those divinely instituted”—through Islamic governance to Christian monarchs. On top of the pyramid, “according to the standard of holiness of rule, I maintain that the authority of the Empire is the greatest.”21 He reasons that the chief purposes of all rulers, and especially of Christian kings, are the maintenance of religion and the promotion of eternal ends; all other goals of government are “subservient.” Thus, “our Christian Empire outranks the others, just as our most holy and pure Christian religion is highest in holiness and truth. And as every kingdom and prince should care for his kingdom, so the Emperor should care for the whole Christian people.”22 Other Christian princes are therefore beneath the Roman emperor and must 18. I follow the excellent translation of De Concordantia Catholica by Paul Sigmund, Nicholas of Cusa: The Catholic Concordance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 205–6. The Latin text is Nicholas of Cusa, Opera Omnia: Vol. 14. De concordantia catholica, ed. Gerhard Kallen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1959–1965), which I have used occasionally to amend Sigmund’s rendering. 19. Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, 98. 20. Ibid., 206. 21. Ibid., 237. 22. Ibid., 237–38.

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submit to him in matters concerning the protection of Christ’s Church.23 Given Nicholas’s polemical intention to lend support to the efforts of Emperor Sigismund to intervene in the Council of Basle, he could hardly have adopted any other position.24 It is the emperor, in his view, to whom the duty pertains to enforce conciliar decrees. Hence, imperial authority must extend to all Christian believers: “Because he is guardian of the universal faith and the protector of universal statutes [canons] which could not be effectively executed without a ruler over all, and since the universal statutes respecting the Christian faithful bind all faithful Christians to maintain and apply them, all are subject to the Emperor’s rule insofar as he is established to maintain those directives.”25 Such a universal jurisdiction stems from the fact that “the whole Christian people” transferred power to him to act as enforcer of canon law and “guardian of the faith.”26 In these matters, little room would appear to be afforded for national governments to exist as anything other than local agents of the emperor. Yet Cusa is careful to stipulate that the honor due to the empire, and hence its universalistic character, pertains only to its status and functions in the spiritual realm. Previously in De Concordantia Catholica, he had acknowledged that political rule also naturally and necessarily involves nonreligious functions that are properly exercised by Christian and non-Christian regimes alike.27 Natural reason and the survival of the incompetent multitude demand the existence of political order and communal law. In performing these duties, it seems, the emperor’s authority does not derive from God and the Christian people. How, then, does any particular regime emerge to provide these services? He claims that all people—even the most ignorant— are held to assent to the terms of their governance, both originally and on a continuing basis. According to Nicholas, the “enslavement” of the ignorant to the wise does not undercut the voluntary character of political arrangements. It may be true that “those better endowed with reason are the natural lords and masters of the others but not by any coercive law or judgment imposed on someone against his will.” This is because human beings possess a natural equality in their power and freedom. Since all are by nature free, every governance ..... by which subjects are compelled to abstain from evil deeds and their freedom directed towards the good through fear of punishment can only come from the agreement and consent of the sub23. Ibid., 239–39. 25. Ibid., 239–40. 27. Ibid., 205–6.

24. See ibid., 250–67. 26. Ibid., 239, 238.

  t r ans l at i o i m p e r ii   185 jects. For if men are equal in power and equally free, the true properly ordered authority of one common ruler who is their equal in power cannot be naturally established except by the election and consent of the others, and law is also established by consent.28

Of course, the volitional basis of political community is not deemed by Nicholas to be participatory in character.29 The consent of the masses has the wholly formal character of silent submission and deference. Insofar as the wise enjoy privileged access to the reason by which all are governed, there is no cause for public deliberation on the part of the multitude. The wise remain instead the natural trustees of the common good: “The rule of the wise and the subjection of the ignorant are harmonized through common laws that have the wise as their special authors, protectors, and executors, and the concurrent agreement of all the others in voluntary subjection.”30 Law and rulership rest upon the rational foundation of natural law that the wise few are particularly qualified to discover and uphold. What the principle of consent does contribute, however, is a powerful justification for localized variations in political rule. Because political order and law depends upon human volition, at least in its temporal applications, valid systems of government must always be traced to public consent apart from spiritual authorization. This also implies that political arrangements are historically mutable and capable of reorganization over time. Consent, then, becomes the touchstone of local diversity in political rule. The emperor’s “power to command,” Cusa asserts, “does not extend beyond the territorial limits of the empire under him,” citing a decree of the Carolingian Emperor Louis, who, although he “describes himself as Emperor, ..... issues commands only to the inhabitants of the kingdom of France and the Lombards who were his de facto subjects.”31 Even the claim made on behalf of the Roman emperor “to be lord of the world as ruler of the empire that the Romans once conquered by their valor” must be tempered by the fact that Rome never extended its conquests to the larger part of Asia and Africa that, if not heavily populated (to Nicholas’s knowledge), are of great geographic expanse.32 The only reasonable conclusion is that 28. Ibid., 98. 29. See Cary J. Nederman, “Rhetoric, Reason, and Republic: Republicanisms—Ancient, Medieval, and Modern,” in James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 261–62. 30. Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, 208. 31. Ibid., 235. 32. Ibid., 235–36.

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the phrase “lord of all the world” must be interpreted narrowly and figuratively in its application to the emperor: “If rulership is only rightly possessed through the elective agreement of the subjects as argued above, then he is only lord over those who are actually subject to him and we should conclude that the Emperor is lord of that part of the world over which he exercises effective authority.”33 Cusa never questions the legitimacy of the political rights enjoyed by the many kingdoms of the world beyond the boundaries of the Western Empire nor does he insist upon a global reach (even potentially) for the temporal authority of the emperor. This is implied, for example, in his explanation of the emperor’s right to arrange the seating of other temporal princes in attendance at a General Council: “The ranking of the secular participants depends on the emperor, since everyone, including those not otherwise subject to him, is under him in the council because of his role as protector of the council. Therefore he has jurisdiction over all of them.”34 But that jurisdiction stems purely from the sacral dimension of the imperial majesty. The emperor’s duty as protector of the Catholic faith has no corollary in a secular responsibility for all the peoples of the earth, because the latter requires public consent that has not been given, whereas the permission of the body of Christian believers authorizes the former. Consequently, Cusa clearly believes that the scope of the imperial jurisdiction in Europe possesses a purely political (that is, historical and conventional) character. In a series of chapters tracing the decay of the empire since the time of Emperor Otto I, De Concordantia Catholica demonstrates how the extent of the emperor’s authority has both grown and shrunk according to the provinces that have placed themselves under its guardianship—a sort of pro-imperialist restatement of “decline and fall.” Initially, the domains under Otto I’s command included “the kingdom of Italy and the Lombards, the kingdom of Burgundy” as well as “the kingdom of the Germans of which his father, Henry, is supposed to have been the first king.”35 Gradually, other peoples—Cusa names the Hungarians, Bohemians, Danes, Norwegians, Poles, and Prussians—placed themselves under the empire on account of its unparalleled ability to make effective its laws and uphold communal peace and order.36 Their rulers, on Cusa’s account, became imperial functionaries: “It was also decreed at that time that princes, dukes, and counts should be appointed to public office at the com33. Ibid., 236. 35. Ibid., 287.

34. Ibid., 260. 36. Ibid., 287–88.

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mand of the Emperor and should be removable at his will with an obligation to give an account of their ministry to the public treasury.”37 He describes virtually a “golden age” of imperial majesty and honor in which “everything tended to the public good.”38 In more recent times, by contrast, the empire is in a state of decline and decay. Not only have those nations that once submitted to the emperor and his laws withdrawn their consent because peace is not maintained, but even the imperial princes within Germany have asserted their autonomy and claimed rights formerly reserved for the emperor.39 Nicholas laments, “A mortal disease has invaded the German empire and unless an antidote is found at once, death will surely follow. You seek the Empire in Germany and you will not find it. As a result others will take our place and we will be divided and subjected to another nation.”40 Nicholas the imperialist sounds oddly like Bruni the republican in endorsing a “decline and fall” narrative. Nicholas, of course, does not regard “decline and fall” as an inevitable outcome, calling instead for immediate reform of the empire to promote its recovery. Such a restored empire would still be by no means a universal (or even trans-European) one: it encompasses only Italy, Lombardy, Burgundy, and the whole of Germany—that is, the original extent of Otto I’s jurisdiction41—of which Nicholas had earlier said “our Empire is composed” and which “have maintained fidelity and loyalty to it.”42 Such reform is a far cry from the universalism that is sometimes ascribed to Cusa. And indeed, the closing chapters of De Concordantia Catholica read like nothing so much as a blueprint for the building of a federated nation, with proposals for national and regional assemblies (complete with a sophisticated balloting system), a customs union, fiscal administration and taxgathering, and a paid national army. Nicholas recognizes that the foundation of popular consent to earthly government means that even if such a far-flung empire did once legitimately exist, its validity has been eroded by later patterns of communal choice. While he may value universality as a quality necessary for the sake of the Church, he recognizes that the shifting and wholly conventional nature of political volition means that such a global system of temporal government cannot be justified as the permanently “best” or “ideal.” Cusa’s emphasis on the “historicity” of secular political life, and hence the inescapable diversity of systems of rule, may indeed be 37. Ibid., 289. 39. Ibid., 291–95. 41. Ibid., 295–96.

38. Ibid., 290. 40. Ibid., 295. 42. Ibid., 287.

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viewed as a recurring theme in his social thought. Cusa’s appeal to the historical character of nationality in De pace fidei, written twenty years after De Concordantia Catholica, constitutes one of the central pillars upholding his conception of religious toleration.43 In the later work, Nicholas in fact praises the peaceful expression of national pride through different forms of religious rites (non-Christian as well as Christian) typical of each natio without denying the truth of a single set of universal religious principles. In advancing an explicit story of imperial “decline and fall” from an overtly nonrepublican perspective, Nicholas demonstrates that the waters dividing the medieval from the modern banks are indeed quite a lot muddier than Pocock’s account permits. Consequently, Nicholas of Cusa has the earmarks of a universalistic imperialist, who, lacking exposure to the republicanism flourishing in Florence, continued in the medieval mode to promote the themes associated with translatio imperii. Yet Nicholas proves as difficult a case as Marsiglio of Padua. Both thinkers drink at the well of medieval imperialism, yet neither wind up adopting the position that Pocock’s historiography would lead us to expect. Is this a fatal criticism of Pocock’s narrative? Perhaps not. It occurs to me that a somewhat less strident version of his argument, permitting for greater variation on both the medieval and the early modern shores of the divide, could still do much (although not all) of the work of his thesis in its current form. Acknowledging that the waters separating the Middle Ages and the Renaissance could be forded on occasion, at least by creative political thinkers such as Marsiglio and Nicholas, would go a long way toward the formulation of a historiographical perspective that actually fits the range of examples at hand. Perhaps the broader problem with Pocock’s interpretation of the divide between the medieval and the modern ways of conceptualizing politics stems from his fascination, derived from Hans Baron, with the revival of classical republicanism as the hallmark of modernity. This is hardly a novel observation. Numerous scholars during the past thirty years have dined on the carcass of Pocock’s historical and conceptual understanding of republican thought.44 But this critical literature itself largely retains an obsession with finding the “true” kernel of modern republicanism (or of 43. See Cary J. Nederman, Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleraion, c.1100– c.1550 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 89–95. 44. An up-to-date review of the relevant literature is supplied by Vickie Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–9, 22–27.

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the classical variant, for that matter). More fruitful may be the recognition that “republicanism” (modern or classical) denotes a range of interlinked, but also potentially contradictory, discourses that often start from radically different premises and principles.45 As Janet Coleman has argued, during the Middle Ages the term respublica could be a virtual synonym for “good government,” regardless of the institutional arrangements, and thus often applied to monarchies of many types.46 Such a usage seems antithetical to the scholarly literature on republican theory and practice, which insists on an equivalence of republicanism with antimonarchism and anti-imperialism. How and when the common medieval, generic meaning of “republic” disappeared remains uncertain and in dire need of further examination. Yet we must admit that republics were by no means as discretely and selfevidently distinct from other modes of political life as Baron and Pocock would have it, a point that Mikael Hörnqvist has forcefully underscored in the case of Machiavelli.47 Thus, “kingship” or “empire” need not be juxtaposed to “republic” in the way that Baron and Pocock implicitly assume. Imperialism, monarchy, and republicanism may have common and mutually reinforcing intellectual threads that are missed when the doctrines are rigidly constituted. Thus, categories such as “medieval” and “modern” can and should be gainfully deployed, yet always with the understanding that they are not fixed and firm. While Marsiglio of Padua deserves to be labeled a “medieval” thinker on more than simple chronological grounds, he broke free from some of the constraints imposed by the political attitudes conventionally associated with the Middle Ages. This does not make him “modern,” but it does mean that his understanding of empire resonated with later visions. Nicholas of Cusa, too, borrowed the tools of medieval imperialism, but employed them to craft doctrines that were infused with decidedly nonmedieval overtones. Failure to invoke the distinction between the “medieval” and the “modern” periods erodes our capacity to understand Marsiglio’s and Nicholas’s places in the history of Western political ideas. 45. Nederman, “Rhetoric, Reason, and Republic,” 248–49, 268–69. 46. Janet Coleman, “Structural Realities of Power: The Theory and Practice of Monarchies and Republics in Relation to Personal and Collective Liberty,” in Martin Gosman, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Jan Veenstra, eds., The Propagation of Power in the Medieval West (Gronigen: Egbert Forsten, 1998), 207–30. 47. Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).



12

C h r is t iani t y an d R e p u b l icanis m Another Look

n t o n y B l ac k h as d r aw n attention to a major lacu na in the present literature on the history of republican thought: its failure to take account of the Christian contribution to the development of Western republicanism.1 Black laments that scholars assume without warrant the equation of the Christian tradition of politics with monarchical absolutism, systematically ignoring the fact that republican practices as well as theories were central to the development of Christianity from its earliest days.2 He implores us to set aside an “essentialist” tendency to view republicanism as a purely secular phenomenon, antithetical to the hierarchical concord so commonly propounded by Christian (especially medieval) political authors.3 “Monarchical thought,” he insists, “was not implicit in Christianity.” Rather, it 1. Antony Black, “Christianity and Republicanism: From St. Cyprian to Rousseau,” American Political Science Review 91 (September 1997): 647–56. The essay was republished by Black in his collection Church, State and Community: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (London: Ashgate/Variorum, 2003), chap. 16. 2. He mentions Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), and John Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), among others. 3. This is emphasized in Black’s response to my own objections to his approach (which I reiterate in the present chapter) found in “Christianity and Republicanism: A Response to Nederman,” American Political Science Review 92 (December 1998): 920.

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formed merely a “potential” doctrine consistent with Christian teaching, alongside an equal potential to valorize republican governance.4 Black adds a crucial dimension to the study of the development of republicanism. He has not, however, achieved this considerable accomplishment without introducing some new and significant confusions into the discussion. Specifically, in the present chapter, I wish to suggest two difficulties in Black’s presentation of the Christian tradition of republicanism. First, he continues to rely upon a primarily secular reading of medieval political thought, one that filters out precisely those elements of Christian cosmology and theology that distinguish the republicanism of the Latin Middle Ages from either its classical or modern instantiations. There is more at stake than meets the eye in Black’s apparently wry remark that he “will not attempt to define Christianity,”5 since reference to the distinctly Christian character of “Christian republicanism” is precisely what his account lacks. Second, by positing an ideal typology of republicanism, he imposes a singular vision upon a republican tradition that was (and is) diverse and multiplicitous. This leads, in particular, to an anachronistic opposition between republic and monarchy to which many “republicans” of medieval Europe would not subscribe. As Janet Coleman has observed, Latin Christian thought was characterized by a discernable “lack of a neat and oppositional distinction between regnum and respublica.”6 In short, medieval Christians did not share the inclination of both ancients and moderns to contrapose royal and republican regimes in a way that rendered them incommensurable. In support of these claims, I sketch the outlines of a form of Christian republicanism typical of the Latin Middle Ages, one that is imbued with the belief system of Christianity and is by no means hostile to the principle of monarchy. To defend this view of Christian republicanism fully would, of course, require a magisterial examination of the full range of medieval political writings. In the present context, I illustrate my understanding of Christian republicanism by examination of the ideas of a major contributor to late medieval political theory: Jean Gerson. Gerson figured centrally in the conciliar movement within ecclesiology that Black considers 4. Black, “Christianity and Republicanism,” 654. 5. Ibid., 647. 6. Janet Coleman, “Structural Realities of Power: The Theory and Practice of Monarchies and Republics in Relation to Personal and Collective Liberty,” in Martin Gosman, Arjo J. Vanderjagt, and Jan Veenstra, eds., The Propagation of Power in the Medieval West (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998), 217; see 215–17.

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to be “the strongest evidence for convergence between republicanism and Christianity.”7 My analysis of Gerson sustains the validity of Black’s general thesis that the history of republicanism cannot be told without reference to Christianity, while also demonstrating that this claim requires the narration of a more complicated and less Whiggish history than he recounts. The key to medieval Christian republicanism, I maintain, is a theologically informed conception of social and political institutions as organic unities, a topic already examined at length in chapters 3 and 5. Of course, organic conceptions of political community enjoyed a history prior to Christian times and were also attractive to political thinkers working within non-Christian religions such as Islam. The medieval European reliance upon organic discourse and imagery arises from its embeddedness in a Christian cosmology that posited not so much a “chain of being” as an animated but differentiated totality. According to a line of Christian thought that runs back to the Church Fathers, God created the universe as a unity, composed of many different parts, each of which is itself an organic unit that both partakes of the greater whole and has a distinct purpose within the larger scheme. In a letter, Pope Gregory the Great stated: The provision of divine dispensation established that the ranks and diverse orders are distinct, so that when the lesser ones show reverence to the greater ones and the greater ones use love towards lesser ones, one combination of love is made out of diversity and the administration of each office is properly carried out. For the whole could not exist in any way if the great order of this difference did not serve it. But since creatures cannot be governed or live in one and the same equality,...... it is clear that they are not equal but differ one from the other, as you know, in power and in order. If this distinction is known to exist among those who are without sin, what man will resist submitting willingly to this same dispensation......?8

Within each organic unit, as within the universe as a whole, there is higher and lower, superior and inferior. Yet this hierarchical ordering does not exclude the lesser members of the body from a proper and worthwhile role within the whole. When transferred by analogy to the political realm, these themes coalesce into a coherent republican position: the ruler is restricted in what he can do by the reciprocity built into the body politic; the participation of the other members of the organism in the business of 7. Black, “Christianity and Republicanism,” 651. 8. Cited in Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 271.

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the common welfare both sets limits on the actions of the head—he cannot properly interfere with their unique tasks—and establishes a “check” on the head in cases where it oversteps its appropriate scope of activity.9 The Parisian theologian Jean Gerson, whose importance Black himself has noted,10 affords a clear case of the distinctive form of republicanism I have identified. Gerson is best known as an advocate of the supremacy of the General Council in the governance of the Church. Gerson’s conciliar credentials are well established. He was personally active in promoting a conciliar solution to the Great Schism in the early fifteenth century, and his writings were widely disseminated throughout the period of the Councils of Pisa and Constance.11 Yet Gerson’s conciliarism conforms less to the typology of antimonarchic institutional and civic republicanism offered by Black than to the organic Christian republicanism I have described. As a consequence, Gerson simultaneously subscribes to a conciliar ecclesiology and to a strong defense of papal monarchy. To understand how Gerson was able to endorse what may seem to us antithetical principles, it is first of all necessary to grasp his very conception of the nature of government. All legitimate exercise of power, he contends, must be limited according to law. He states flatly that “spiritual [jurisdiction] should be exercised according to canonical laws toward the ultimate end of realizing beatitude,” just as “temporal [jurisdiction] should be exercised according to the civil laws.”12 This pertains directly to the governance of the Church. Spiritual jurisdiction in Gerson’s view is placed principally in the hands of the pope, who serves as a judge whose determinations must occur on the basis of law. Specifically, papal jurisdiction is constituted by “the juridical power of excommunication or interdict by denial of ecclesiastical sacraments and the communion of faith to those who rebel against and disobey the Church.”13 The pope, in other words, 9. See Cary J. Nederman, “Freedom, Community and Function: Communitarian Lessons of Medieval Political Theory,” American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992): 981, 982–83. 10. Antony Black, “The Conciliar Movement,” in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 575, 580, and Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 171–72. 11. John B. Morrall, Gerson and the Great Schism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960); Louis B. Pascoe, Jean Gerson: Principles of Church Reform (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973); and Brian Patrick Maguire, Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). 12. Jean Gerson, De potestate ecciesiastica, in Palemon Glorieux, ed., Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Descée: 1965), 6: 216. 13. Ibid., 218.

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is charged with primary authority for the maintenance of faith and morals among the body of Christian believers to be accomplished by the enforcement of Church law. Gerson’s requirement that the papacy must govern in accordance with law does not, however, entail a denial of papal plenitude of power, that is, the independence of the authority of the pope’s office from any superior except God. Gerson remarks simply that “the papal plenitude of power was granted by Christ in those things which are supernatural [and] stands supreme.”14 This principle is accepted throughout Gerson’s writings. In turn, the theoretical basis for the pope’s indispensable plenitudo potestatis may be located in Gerson’s analysis of the nature of ecclesiastical power in general. Gerson argues that all offices within the Church have, formally speaking, been ordained by God.15 In this sense, the powers pertaining to the pope cannot be curtailed or controlled by any human authority without violating the divine will. Rather, ecclesiastical power in its plenitude is formally and subjectively in the Roman pontiff alone....... The plenitude of ecclesiastical power is the power of order and jurisdiction which was supernaturally given by Christ to Peter, as His direct and first King, for himself and for his successors to the end of time, for the edification of the Church militant toward the achievement of eternal felicity.16

It is thereby erroneous to attribute to Gerson the position that “the pope’s apparent plenitude of power is in effect conceded to him as a matter of administrative convenience.”17 On the contrary, Gerson believes that the papal plenitudo potestatis is of divine origin and is absolutely essential for the conduct of the Church’s main business, namely, the salvation of souls. In no way ought the pope to be construed as ancillary to or derivative of the full spiritual life of the Church. Thus far, Gerson may sound to us like an extreme papalist. However, he also recognized that the doctrine of plenitudo potestatis has perpetuated an exaggerated vision of the pope’s office. Consequently, he allows that ecclesiastical power may also be understood to convey two other meanings: a “material” or “respective” sense, related to its assignment “to particular persons by legitimate right”; and a sense connected to the “exercise or execu14. Jean Gerson, In recessu regis romanorum, in Palemon Glorieux, ed. Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Desclée, 1963), 5: 479. 15. Gerson, De potestate ecclesiastica, 226. 16. Ibid., 277–78. 17. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:116.

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tion” of power.18 Materially speaking, the pope (or any ecclesiastical officer) must be chosen and consecrated, activities that appropriately inhere in the whole Church. The Church as the mystical body of Christian believers retains ultimate authority over the specific occupants of the papal office.19 Analogously, the power of regulating the use to which particular persons put the rights attached to ecclesiastical government is to be found in the corporate Church.20 Papal jurisdiction exists not for its own sake, but instead in order to “edify” the Church, to serve the common good of salvation.21 And should a given pope not aim at this end, the authority pertaining to the papal office is abused rather than rightly used. In sum, Gerson believes that “the regulation of the use” of papal power is confined to those circumstances in which “it is liable to be turned into abuse.”22 The Church does not control the office; it instead supervises the conduct of the individual incumbent of the papacy. The regulatory role with which the Church is endowed arises because of the uncertainties surrounding human moral will: “Since the supreme pontiff ..... is open to sin and may wish to turn his power to the destruction of the Church,” it is necessary for “abuse of this sort to be repressed, limited and moderated” by the whole Church.23 Yet, on the other hand, the pope whose behavior is appropriate to the office that he occupies is beyond any scrutiny; he is protected by his plenitudo potestatis. The pope can do whatever is demanded for the edification and welfare of the Church without any limit or supervision. When its incumbent acts according to the precepts of faith and charity, the papacy must be totally free to exercise and impose its jurisdiction: “We are able to do what we are able to do rightfully.”24 Abuses of power are defined only in terms of actions arising from an evil will which places its private interests above the needs of the public. The “limitation” of papal authority can only be applied to the use of the powers by individual occupants, and never to the direct control of the office itself, which is a matter for divine determination. Gerson’s attitude is summarized by his declaration, “Papa fluit, papatus stabilis est” (“The pope changes, but the papacy is stable”).25 18. Gerson, De potestate ecclesiastica, 220. 19. Ibid., 223. 20. Ibid., 232. 21. Jean Gerson, De auferibilitate sponsi, in Palemon Glorieux, ed., Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Desclée, 1962), 6: 300. 22. Gerson, De potestate ecclesiastica, 232. 23. Ibid., 233. 24. Ibid., 221. 25. Jean Gerson, Propositio facit coram angelicis, in Glorieux, ed., Oeuvres Completes, 6:132.

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Such considerations also inform the relationship between the pope and the General Council. Gerson argues that just as a pope is only elevated to office when he has been formally elected and consecrated, so he can only be ousted from the papal throne by a public proceeding and final judgment within the context of a General Council.26 But Gerson also makes it clear that the reason popes are deposed by councils stems from human frailty and imperfection. Insofar as an individual pope may fall into sin, he is susceptible to the judgment of Church and council, “to which he is subject in the same manner as one who is capable of erring to what can never err.”27 In other words, because it is exercised by fallible humans, the papal will is “accidentalis atque mutabilis” (“contingent and also mutable”),28 whereas the will of the General Council is without moral defect and may therefore always be expected to reach the correct decision in matters of papal turpitude. The determinations of the council are effectively the actions of a morally superior and incorruptible body. In one sense, then, the pope does require the approval of the Church manifested through the General Council.29 Yet the council hardly functions “politically” at all in the sense a secular republican might understand, since it is under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, addressed in chapter 7 above. The Church itself aims solely to perpetuate a unified orthodoxy, about which there could be no disputed opinion. Therefore, the General Council idenifies and enforces catholic doctrine, that is, the truer and higher common good shared by all Christians.30 In this, the faithful have no civic status, since their actual participation as individual members of the Church is not necessary. The mystical body of the Church is far greater than an aggregate of its particular members. This vision of Christian republicanism was not unique to Gerson, but rather seems to have been shared generally among conciliarists of the fifteenth century. As we observed in chapter 3, the De Concordantia Catholica of Nicholas of Cusa propounds doctrines that echo republicanism admixed with Christian theology and the acceptance of monarchic rule. Like Gerson, Nicholas posited the council as infallibly capable of discovering and mandating the true and objective interests of the Church as an united entity. Nicholas’s republicanism thus depended upon prior accep26. Gerson, In recessu regis romanorum, 309. 27. Jean Gerson, Tractatus de unitate ecclesiae, in Glorieux, ed., Oeuvres Completes, 6: 140. 28. Ibid., 137. 29. Gerson, In recessu regis romanorum, 479. 30. Ibid., 478–79.

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tance of distinctively Christian principles of theology, and it does not conflict with adherence to the preferability (indeed, necessity) of monarchy. Indeed, this helps to explain why Nicholas could uphold conciliarism, on the one hand, and yet within a few years defect to the position of extreme papalism.31 Black is surely warranted, then, in his conclusion that elements of medieval Christian republicanism did not simply disappear with the Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the other harbingers of modernity. In particular, he seems correct to locate resemblances between “the ecclesiological concepts of inerrancy and unanimity,” on the one hand, and “the concept of the general will,” on the other.32 But insofar as the premises of Rousseau’s community were manifestly “non-Christian,” as Black admits, such connections are perhaps at best superficial. The organic communalism of Christian republicanism required acceptance of theological assumptions that Rousseau certainly rejected, not least conceptions of natural hierarchy and the necessity of monarchic rule. Nor should it be forgotten, as discussed in chapter 7 above, that Rousseau reviled the system of parliamentary representation that he associated with the “degraded” and “dishonorable” practices of medieval life—an explicit rejection of the line of republicanism that Black sketches.33 Rousseau’s passion for equality, not to mention his secularist orientation, place him at a distance from republicanism as it was conceived and practiced by the conciliarists and other thinkers grounded in medieval Christian doctrine. Black thus merits praise for his reminder that Christianity was one of the discourses at work in framing the history of Western republican thought. Christianity is not inherently more sympathetic to a strictly monarchist than to a republican position. But Black’s account seems marred by a desire to construct direct lineages between medieval Christian approaches to republican institutions and modern doctrines of republicanism. This leads to the neglect of some features that are most distinctive and constitutive of Christian republicanism: that it derived from more general beliefs 31. On the wider implications of Nicholas’s apparent change of heart, see Constantin Fasolt, Council and Hierarchy: The Political Thought of William Durant the Younger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), 318–19. Fasolt stresses that the very distinction between “papalism” and “conciliarism,” like the supposed opposition between clusters of other “isms” (e.g., “constitutionalism” and “absolutism,” “republicanism” and “monarchism”), results from an anachronistic application of these categories to the Middle Ages. 32. Black, “Christianity and Republicanism,” 654. 33. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, ed. D. A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 198–99.

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about the divinely ordained organic structure of the universe; and that this cosmological premise of organic hierarchy was by no means antithetical to the office of the king (whether papal or secular). Once these elements are supplied, the medieval contribution to the history of republican ideas takes on a complexion very different than that described by Black. Specifically, it becomes possible to propose an alternative “ideal type” of republicanism more consonant with the main (although by no means exclusive) intellectual currents of the Christian Middle Ages, founded on a set of principles relatively detached from modern debate (à la Rousseau). Such republicanism, exemplified by the writings of Jean Gerson and other conciliarists, incorporates: (1) moral-theological rather than formalinstitutional limitations on the person of the ruler who exercises political power; and (2) accountability of both government and citizens to a corporate or spiritual authority rather than to an actual community composed of free and equal individuals. Both of these medieval doctrines were gradually eroded and replaced in modern Europe by principles owing more to secularized patterns of thought. And, as a consequence, quintessentially medieval, Christian republicanism gave way to its modern counterpart: a republican vision that indeed accords more directly with the typology constructed by Black.

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The Virtues of Necessity Economic Principles of Politics

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T h e O r i g ins o f “P o l ic y ” in T w e l f t h - C e n t u r y En g l an d

t h a r d ly c o ns t i t u t e s an e x a g g e r at i o n to say that European economic life during the twelfth century underwent a dramatic transformation. In particular, the historical watershed crossed after 1100 may be characterized by three key factors. First, market relations became a central feature of the social structures of the Latin Middle Ages, generating what Robert Lopez many years ago proclaimed to be a “commercial revolution.”1 Among the tokens of this revolution were the increased circulation of coinage, the expansion of long-distance trade, the formation of national markets, the emergence of systems of credit and banking, and the rising prominence of cities. Second, the twelfth century witnessed a period of technological development and improved productivity without precedent in Europe, running parallel to patterns of demographic growth and extension of arable. The management of agriculture yielded levels of fertility (and wealth) that were earlier unimaginable.2 Finally, political and legal institutions capable of regulating and directing economic resources on a 1. See Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages 950–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Additional analysis is provided by John Day, The Medieval Market Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 2. Among the scholars who have have documented elements of this development are Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, trans. Howard B. Clarke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 155–270; H. E. Hallam,

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larger scale appeared rapidly after 1100. Government—whether in the form of kings and other territorial lords or of urban communes—received recognition as an important agent of economic administration and also as a beneficiary (through taxes, customs, and duties) of a vigorous economy.3 Although the emergence of these phenomena in various locales was by no means uniform or unilateral, Europe in 1200 was a very different place economically—and also politically, legally, and socially—than it had been a century before. The intellectual, religious, and moral authorities of Western society were not slow to react to the changes wrought upon twelfth-century Europe.4 Some authors seemingly embraced the values associated with the new economic realities. Hugh of St. Victor, who may be included among the most influential figures of twelfth-century philosophy and theology, lauded manual labor and valorized commerce. Throughout his corpus, but most directly in the Didascalicon (c. 1120)—a treatise on the organization of human knowledge—Hugh counted farming, craftsmanship, and commerce among the mechanical arts that fell into the realm of human “wisdom.”5 In Hugh’s view, all such activities were worthy to be pursued by human beings. Specifically, the purpose of the mechanical arts is to overcome or combat the natural deficiencies of human life imposed by mankind’s fallen state. Since Hugh’s main focus in the Didascalicon was the classification of knowledge, however, his remarks about the mechanical arts remained fragmentary and did not amount to a thorough examination of the wider social implications of economic innovation. In general, when the latter issue was raised in the twelfth century, the discussion given tended to highlight Rural England (1066–1348) (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1981) ; and George Ovitt Jr., The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 3. See Richard Bonney, ed., State and Fiscal Administration in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–160, and Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 39–66, 155–339. 4. Some elements of this reaction are charted by Franco Alessio, “La filosofia e le ‘artes mechanicae’ nel secolo XII,” Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 6 (1965): 71–155; Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990); David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1997), 15–20; and Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). 5. Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalion, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961) 1.5, 2.20–26 (pp. 51–52, 74–79). Another important text that seems to share some of Hugh’s views is De Diversis Artibus by Theophilus; see John Van Engen, “Theophilus Presbyter and Rupert of Deutz: The Manual Arts and Benedictine Theology in the Early Twelfth Century,” Viator 11 (1980): 147–63.

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the moral and religious dimensions of economic practices. Thus, the writings of early canon lawyers evinced concern about the regulation of commerce so as to minimize the detrimental effects to the souls of both merchants and those who associate with them. Was it proper for the Christian to sustain himself by buying cheap and selling dear? Do loans at interest or the acquisition of money necessarily entail avarice and thus jeopardize one’s salvation? Must the possession and enjoyment of earthly comforts or luxuries lead to damnation? The main concerns of canon law, then, were with the spiritual and otherworldly consequences of economic enterprise. Wherever the pursuit of private profit endangered the state of the human soul, the canonists sought to legislate economic intercourse.6 A similar orientation may be found in the twelfth-century preachers and theologians reacting to the currents of economic change. Peter the Chanter and his followers, who flourished in Paris around the turn of the century, for example, devoted considerable attention to the control of usury and attendant impermissible practices on the grounds that these were sinful and wicked, constituting threats to the supernatural beatitude of those who engaged in them. Such teachings—supported by scriptural authority, canon law, and conciliar decree—enjoyed considerable currency among preachers, as revealed by a number of extant sermons that echo the prohibitions on precisely the same basis.7 Moreover, members of Peter’s circle offered advice to princes concerning fiscal management of their realms—including taxation and coinage—but again always with an eye to the impact of public conduct upon personal salvation.8 In sum, theological authors remained as deeply concerned as canonists about the detrimental spiritual effects stemming from the operation of the new economic mechanisms. The work neither of canon lawyers nor of theologians, then, amounted to a systematic philosophical analysis of the consequences of the new economic practices spreading throughout Europe for social life in the present life. Indeed, scholarship has more or less universally maintained that the theorization of the temporal implications of the emerging European economy awaited the thirteenth century rise of Scholasticism and the university curricula in arts and theology. John Baldwin argued expressly for this 6. John W. Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists, and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society 1959), 31–37. 7. John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 1: 261–311. 8. Ibid., 1: 228–51.

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view for two reasons: first, only with Scholastic theology does the concept of earthly justice receive a sufficiently rigorous interpretation to be applied to practical questions about economic interaction; and second, the circulation in the mid-thirteenth century of the key works of Aristotle’s social thought (especially the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics) reinforced and further stimulated examination of economic issues with reference to principles of justice.9 Odd Langholm, in the first chapter of his magisterial Economics in the Medieval Schools, adopts a position similar to Baldwin’s. Langholm posits a transformation achieved by Scholastic thinkers after the dawn of the thirteenth century: At the outset they had only the vaguest notion of economics in the sense of a set of separate social phenomena and relationships and hardly thought them worthy of investigation. But, on his journey to God, man needs bodily sustenance as well as spiritual guidance. Moreover, because that journey is not, by most men, undertaken alone but as members of societies, part of their spiritual guidance must relate to the means of their bodily sustenance.10

What escaped the attention of twelfth-century authors, in Langholm’s view, soon occurred to their Scholastic successors: that the earth-bound aspects of economic life demand some appraisal (and even positive evaluation) in their own right. In this regard, Baldwin, Langholm, and others seem to assume (in the words of John McGovern) that “economic thought lagged behind the practice,” in the sense that “new economic ideals first appeared, rather suddenly, during the thirteenth century.”11 This presumption may explain why so many general surveys of the history of economic thought skip entirely over the twelfth century.12 The claim of a radical and rapid conceptual shift in economic ideas 9. Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the Just Price, 58–63. 10. Odd Langholm, Economics in the Schools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money and Usury according to the Paris Theological Tradition 1200–1350 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1. 11. John F. McGovern, “The Rise of New Economic Attitudes—Economic Humanism, Economic Nationalism—During the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, A.D. 1200– 1550,” Traditio 26 (1970): 224, 223; see also John F. McGovern, “The Rise of New Economic Attitudes in Canon and Civil Law, A.D. 1200–1550,” The Jurist 32 (1972): 39. 12. For example, Edgar Salin, Politische Ökonomie: Geschichte de Wirtschaftspolitischen Ideen von Platon bis zur Gegenwart (Tübingen: Mohr, 1967), 24–41; Barry Gordon, Economic Analysis before Adam Smith: Hesiod to Lessius (London: Macmillan, 1975), 111–243; S. Todd Lowry, ed., Pre-Classical Economic Thought: From the Greeks to the Scottish Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer/Nijhoff, 1987), 115–45; Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought, 5th ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 29–41; and Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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around the year 1200 leading to the exclusion of the 1100s from the story of medieval economic ideas is a view in need of some revision, however. While certain elements of technical economics awaited the emergence of university-based Scholasticism, there were already twelfth-century thinkers who engaged systematically and cogently the temporal impact of the technological, commercial, and fiscal changes experienced by European society. In particular, English political thought during the 1100s contained the early glimmerings of a concern with “policy,” by which I mean (following John Pocock) the recognition that economic problems and their management form a core part of public affairs. Pocock has argued that the origination of the English term “policy” in the fifteenth century signals a transformation in the very meaning of “politics” from the classical paradigm (which divided political identity from household [oikos] stewardship) toward modern conceptions of “political economy” and national jurisdiction over markets.13 “Policy” thus stands as an intermediary way of thinking about the relationship between political and economic realms, and it is an invention that speaks with a noticeably English accent all the way up to the time of Adam Smith. I suggest that some of the underpinnings of “policy” understood in this manner may be discovered in key twelfth-century English texts on “the art of government.” In the present chapter, I consider two important contributions to this body of literature: John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, the work of a highly placed English Churchman whose extensive education was matched by his broad political experience; and Richard FitzNigel’s Dialogue of the Exchequer (1177–1179), a manual designed to codify and explain the operations of the English royal fiscal mechanism that collected and processed revenues. In many ways, these tracts might seem to have little in common—the latter being mainly a technical discussion, the former imbued with a large measure of the classical and Christian learning in which its author was steeped. Indeed, there may be a certain sense in which FitzNigel’s book may be read as critical of what he perceived to be John’s idealism. In their fundamental conclusions, however, I believe that John and Richard concur about the fundamental nature and goal of government as a manager of the fiscal interests of the realm, concerned to balance the material wealth of the king and his subjects with the potentially corrupting effects (moral and political) of commerce and the circulation of money that had overtaken England in a short period of time. They both 13. J. G. A. Pocock, “The Political Limits to Premodern Economics,” in John Dunn, ed., The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 138–40.

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eye this growth of wealth with suspicion, while recognizing the benefits it offers to the king and his subjects as well. The leading principle that supports John of Salisbury’s organic vision of social order that was sketched in chapter 5 above, including his conception of economic practice, is a rigorous naturalism. Nature licensed the production and circulation of goods—the fruits of the mechanical arts— but only for the advantage of each and all of the members of the communal body. Hence, commerce, construed as private profit from the sale of commodities, stands opposed to the common benefit embodied in the well-ordered organism. And money represents for John the purest expression of the preference for personal interest over public good. He sets out this argument explicitly in Book 4 of the Policraticus, in the course of a commentary on the command of Deuteronomy 17:17 that the king should not have a large quantity of gold and silver. It is not appropriate for a ruler to possess a substantial amount of wealth, John reasons, because it promotes in him the vices of avarice and covetousness.14 But the tendency of the rich to become greedy is not the only grounds he gives for resisting the excessive acquisition of money. He relates the tale, drawn from Petronius, of the Roman craftsman who discovered a glass so hard that it rivaled precious metals and could not be broken even if thrown down on hard pavement. The talented craftsman presented a vessel made of this substance to Caesar, demonstrating dramatically its properties. Yet the ruler, so far from praising and rewarding the artisan’s efforts, determined that no one else knew about the unbreakable glass and ordered its maker to be immediately killed. The rationale for such an apparently ungrateful action was the potential of the miraculous glass for the devaluation of money: “If this process should come into common knowledge gold and silver would become as cheap as mud.”15 The ruler’s desire to maintain his own personal wealth overwhelmed the benefit of unbreakable glass to the community as a whole. John declines to judge the factual truth of the story; his concern, rather, is the moral lesson that the exemplum teaches.16 He delivers a stinging rebuke of the ruler: 14. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 2 vols., ed. C. J. J. Webb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), 4.5 (1: 248). I must use this edition until such time as the second volume of K. S. B. Keats-Rohan’s new version of the Policraticus is published. Translations are mine. 15. Ibid., 4.5 (1: 248–49) 16. On the importance of exempla in John’s thought, see Peter von Moos, “The Use of Exempla in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury,” in Michael J. Wilks, ed., The World of John of Salisbury (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 207–61.

  t h e o r i g ins o f “p o l ic y ”   207 I consider that the devotion of a most able craftsman was ill requited, and that it is a barren prospect for the human race when an excellent art is wiped out in order that money and the material of money—the fuel of avarice, the food of death, and the cause of battles and quarrels—may be held in high value.17

The innovation introduced by the unfortunate artisan constitutes for John a contribution to the improvement of the human condition. To sacrifice such material benefit for mere money perverts the true utility of physical objects. The story from Petronius thus affords John the opportunity to provide a quite extensive and critical appraisal of the consequences of the circulation of money—a passage that has received (to my knowledge) no previous attention from historians of economic thought. In particular, money leads to the misvaluation of people: in a society where cash value determines human worth, the poor man is “trampled on” and the rich man is “honored solely on account of his money.” Moreover, unlike objects that directly meet human needs, money has no intrinsic value; its desirability is determined by “opinion” alone. In this connection, John invokes nature as the standard by which to judge the value of things: “The only really valid kind of value is that the usefulness of which is recommended by nature, the best guide of living.” The naturalism characteristic of the Policraticus thus becomes an absolute and universal yardstick for differentiating between the worthless and the worthy: Bread and victuals, which consist of necessary foodstuffs or clothing, are regarded as valuable everywhere throughout the earth by the dictates of nature. Things that please the senses are naturally valued by all....... Things that derive their value from nature are not only everywhere the same, but are held in esteem among all peoples; those that depend on opinion are uncertain, and as they come with fancy, so they disappear when the fancy passes.18

The value of the goods produced by the mechanical arts is sanctioned by nature and hence entirely beyond question. These objects directly meet material and evident human needs. By contrast, money is at best a mechanism for facilitating the exchange of useful goods. Indeed, John commends to his readers the policy advocated by the Greek figures Lycurgus and Pythagoras (according to him) of completely eliminating money and commerce from society. 17. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 4.5 (1: 249). 18. Ibid., 4.5 (1: 250).

208  e c o n o m ic p r incip l e s o f p o l i t ics To far better advantage have certain peoples sought to banish utterly from public business this subject-matter of disputes and litigation, this cause of hatred, to the end that, the cause being removed, the resulting ill-will and its consequences might disappear.19

The absence of money as a mediating force in social relations could only improve, in John’s view, the strength of the communal bond, for then nothing would interfere with the proper values being placed on people and things. Nor ought we to expect that the elimination of monetary currency would occasion the collapse of exchange relations necessary for “naturally” valuable goods. Apparently referring back to the tale from Petronius, John comments, “The emperor therefore had no need to fear that the material of commercial dealings would become lacking, since buying and selling are common even among those peoples who are not acquainted with the use of money.”20 The preferred economic system of the Policraticus—the one most consonant with nature—evidently depends upon barter and direct trading of goods produced for use. Money corrupts this natural economy by introducing into the process a foreign medium of no intrinsic value and thus displacing the only genuine measure of value. Thus, it is hardly a wonder that John fails to include merchants (whose enterprise is expressly associated with money) among the parts of the body politic. Indeed, his Metalogicon (a companion work to the Policraticus composed at about the same time) condemns the “sordid, worldly occupations” associated with money making for their single-minded, immoral devotion to heaping up liquid wealth: “They lend out cash at interest, alternately accumulating uneven round-numbered sums and increasing these to even multiple round numbers by their additions. They deem nothing sordid and inane, save the straits of poverty. Wisdom’s only fruit for them is wealth.”21 Sharp business practices and devious dealings are only to be expected of people whose entire life is devoted to accumulating corrupt and unnatural riches in the form of metallic currency. Those who enter commercial professions “have been sucked into the abyss of avaricious money-making, pleading need and duty, but really thirsting for lucre.”22 Money appears in John’s writings as a quasi-Manichaean force of moral 19. Ibid., 4.5 (1: 249). 20. Ibid., 4.5 (1: 250). 21. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall and K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 1.4 (19–20). 22. Ibid., 1.4 (20).

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corruption, which, once introduced, renders virtuous devotion to the public good extremely difficult, if not virtually impossible. The distorting effects of money become especially dangerous, John seems to feel, when they infect the life-blood of politics. John complains that “it is impossible to seek justice and money at one and the same time; for either a man will cleave to one and despise the other, or else he will be perverted by the worse and lose the better.”23 The concern is twofold. First, royal officials only properly dedicate themselves to the duties of their position when they shun opportunities for private gain. Second, the king himself must take special care to ensure the honesty and probity of his administration, so that the corruption that stems from money does not become a hallmark of his rule. Much of the argument in Books 5 and 6 of the Policraticus focuses on the regulation of royal servants in order to prevent the values of commercial life from pervading government. Two principal elements comprise John’s advice for the king’s officers in economic matters. In the first place, he insists repeatedly that bribery must be resisted in all forms.24 Courtiers are not to sell access to the halls of power, nor conversely to sell inaction and silence.25 This is a widespread problem, according to John: “The dishonesty of court officials is so well known that it is in vain for a suitor to place his trust in the testimony of his conscience, the integrity of his character, his unblemished reputation, the genuineness of his cause or the eloquence with which it is presented, without the intervention of a bribe.”26 The courtly thirst for gold has undermined the ability of the republic to function according to its natural design. Likewise, John counsels provincial administrators, royal judges, sheriffs, and all other secular officials as well as incumbents of ecclesiastical offices that the acceptance of money is incompatible with the tasks to which they have been assigned.27 The example of the biblical Samuel is held up as a mirror of magistrates: “Surely this man did not extort villas or lands, or immense sums of gold or silver, or masses of costly furniture or apparel.”28 Instead, Samuel dispensed justice equitably without expecta23. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 5.9 (1: 322). 24. For John’s contribution to discussions of bribery, see John Noonan, Bribes: The Intellectual History of a Moral Idea (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 155–72. 25. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 5.10 (1: 323–25). 26. Ibid., 5.10 (1: 326). 27. For example, ibid., 5.11 (1: 332–34); 5.15 (1: 346–49); 5.16 (1: 352–58); 5.17 (1: 364–68). 28. Ibid., 5.16 (1: 351).

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tion of earthly gifts and rewards, and he was in consequence found worthy of the people over whom he exercised authority. Bribery may constitute the most pervasive example of the corrupting results of commercial values, but outright usurpation of property and rights forms a still more serious threat. Hence, John cautions that the servants of the king are to take care lest by laying their hands upon the goods of subjects they overreach. The most obvious opportunity for abuse stems from the collection of taxes. John acknowledges the necessity of the people supporting the activities of the king with their pocketbooks, and he even identifies a specific part of the body politic—the “unarmed hand”—as the proper conduit for the funneling of such revenues. But he warns that this unarmed hand is uniquely placed to exploit its power for the enhancement of personal wealth. In a long and somewhat tortured analogy, John describes tax collectors as swarms of highly destructive insects (locusts and their ilk) that strip the land and people of all their goods, consuming “the fruits of the earth utterly” and ingesting “the labors of men.” Like the insect, the collector of royal revenues harms those near-by and those far off, and when he has settled himself down upon any person, devours his fortune and does not depart until he carries away all his victim’s substance. Who can count how many wards such an official has dutifully defrauded, how many farms his wrong-doing has put up for sale, and how many of our people the license of such men has stripped of their possessions and in the name of religion or some other pretext has sent them overseas......?29

John admits, then, that the actions of the king’s agents have a very material bearing upon the welfare of citizens. When royal servants are motivated by their own financial gain rather than by the common good of the body politic, the results will be devastating. Because the unarmed hand is directly implicated in the collection of cash, it stands especially vulnerable to the debasing effects of money. It is little wonder, in John’s view, that the ancient “publicans” acquired the reputation for rapaciousness that they enjoy in both Scripture and secular literature. How, then, can official corruption be effectively curtailed? This is the job of the king, John insists. The disintegration of the republic caused by money constitutes one of the gravest threats to the just governance and reciprocal order of the body politic. Thus, the elimination of such corrosive 29. Ibid., 6.1 (2: 5; cf. 2: 3–7).

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influences forms a central mission of a good ruler. There are two strategies for successfully accomplishing this goal: “It is important, therefore, for the prince to curb the malice of his officials and to provide for them out of the public funds in order that all occasion for extortion may be removed.”30 In other words, John advocates a “carrot-and-stick” approach. On the one hand, the temptation to exact payment in return for the performance of one’s assigned duties arises especially when magistrates are insufficiently compensated for their labors. Hence, royal rulers ought to ensure the good behavior of their officers by paying them an adequate salary. Acknowledging the lesson of “mother nature, the most loving of parents,” which protects the internal organs with ribs and flesh, “in the republic it behooves us to follow this pattern of nature’s craftsmanship and from the public store supply these officials with a sufficiency for their needs.”31 John’s logic is compelling: royal officials involved in financial activities will “covet immoderately the things of others” if they do not receive payment commensurate to their station and contribution: All those whose offices touch the inner parts of the republic, and whom we called above the financial officials and bailiffs and overseers of private property ..... must have subsistence in sufficient quantity, and this should be interpreted on the basis of need and use, having due regard for distinction between persons. For if it is absorbed too greedily and not sufficiently distributed, distempers will be produced that are incurable or difficult to cure.32

John offers a canny observation at this juncture. Royal agents are not only to be adequately compensated, but they are to receive payment in direct proportion to their contributions to the common good. Orderly public administration presupposes officers who may reasonably expect some uniform relationship between their revenues and their honest labors. In turn, when the king’s servants misbehave, the royal stick must be applied sharply. “Because the license of officials has a freer rein in that they can use the pretext of their office to despoil or harass private persons,” John reasons, “all usurpations contrary to their duties must be punished with a proportionately heavier penalty.”33 Magistrates are uniquely situated to abuse their powers by converting to their own personal use the goods of the people. John stipulates that no subject may licitly resist the demands of royal agents: “Against these men, although they are extortioners, despoil30. Ibid., 5.10 (1: 328). 32. Ibid., 5.9 (1: 322).

31. Ibid., 5.9 (1: 322). 33. Ibid., 6.1 (2: 3).

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ers, and torturers, it is not permissible even to breathe a word; for they are the visible ministers of the law.”34 The Policraticus expressly forbids self-defense as grounds for refusing to hand over one’s money and chattels. While these officers may be nothing more than publicly sanctioned thieves, the fact that they represent the majesty of the king suffices to render them immune from any resistance. Thus, the king himself—who alone may judge and correct his servants—must remain vigilant concerning the conduct of those who act in his name. If the ruler governs wisely, John says, “he will curb their jaws with bit and bridle, so that they cannot, in the manner of wolves driven on by unclean gluttony, lay waste and mangle the province.”35 The prince is responsible to his subjects immediately, and to God ultimately, not only for his own conduct in office, but also for that of his magistrates. He will be judged by history and eternity on the basis of the rigor of his control over his administration. There is also a utilitarian element to John’s advice about the conduct of royal officials. He recognizes that the king’s interests are best served when the property of subjects is protected and their wealth augmented. This conclusion derives from the communal and reciprocal structure of property holding posited in the Policraticus: neither king nor subjects are true owners of their goods in the modern sense, that is, as individual, private, and independent proprietors. On the one hand, the king is merely a steward of the wealth that he possesses or collects from the community. The ruler properly looks upon his riches as belonging to the people. He will not therefore regard as his own the wealth of which he has custody for the account of others, nor will he treat as private the property of the fisc, which is acknowledged to be public. Nor is there any reason for wonder, since he is not even his own man, but belongs wholly to his subjects.36

When it comes to matters of finance, the properties and revenues of the monarch may be dissolved into those of the realm: in person and estate, the king embodies truly a common good. Hence, the royal charge is to respect and defend the rights and liberties of his subjects according to their just distribution: “Each receives on the basis of his worth the resources of nature and the product of his own labor and industry.”37 One detects in John’s conception of the king’s role in regulating the distributive share 34. Ibid., 6.1 (2: 7). 36. Ibid., 4.5 (1: 250).

35. Ibid., 6.1 (2: 8). 37. Ibid., 1.3 (1: 20).

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of material goods echoes of the normative naturalism stemming from the proper arrangement of the body politic. When every person possesses what nature has determined that he deserves, according to his contribution to the whole, justice is done and the health and welfare of the body are preserved. But when the ruler disturbs this natural order—say, by treating certain property as his private patrimony rather than a public good—he dismembers the realm.38 The latter reflects the willful commands of the tyrant, rather than the virtue of the true king. Yet, on the other hand, John realizes that the king’s position requires him to possess wealth adequate to his many vitally important tasks.39 His income is to be cheerfully provided by his subjects to meet his needs, since the members of the body require the protection that he uniquely provides. In this regard, the principle of reciprocity ensures that the ruler who defends his realm will have the resources to hand to perform his proper functions. What is to the advantage of the provincials is to the advantage of the prince. All things belonging to the provincials are by law subjected and made available to the necessity and advantage of the prince. The whole province is accordingly like the prince’s strongbox, and whosoever drains it offends most grievously against the prince by diminishing his resources. For the provincials are like tenants by superfices, and when the advantage of the ruling power requires, they are not so much owners of their possessions as mere custodians. But if there is no such pressure of necessity, then the goods of the provincials are their own and not even the prince himself may lawfully abuse them.40

For the very reason, then, that the king must depend for his own income upon the economic health of his people, he must carefully guard against their maltreatment by magistrates. When the king fails to control his agents, he injures his own well-being by exhausting “the whole strength of the republic,” as well as eventually succumbing to poverty and rendering himself hateful to his subjects. Because the property of the people is the storehouse for the wealth of the ruler, it falls to his interest to safeguard it against the deprivations of avaricious and unscrupulous officials. Ultimately, the king does well for himself by doing justice to his subjects, according to John. 38. John cites royal claims on hunting rights that result in the dispossession of farmers of their arable as exemplifying how the king may disorder the just economic organization of the realm; see ibid., 1.4 (1: 31–32). 39. Ibid., 4.5 (1: 248). 40. Ibid., 6.1 (2: 8).

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On the face of it, the Policraticus would seem to have little in common with Richard FitzNigel’s Dialogue of the Exchequer, a work purporting to recount a discussion between a Master and a Student designed to provide an entirely practical curriculum replete with detailed descriptive accounts of the operations of King Henry II’s fiscal system. Richard’s purpose in recording how and why this office performs its various functions is to pass his knowledge on to future generations of royal servants. Thus, Richard declines to make grandiose claims for the content and the expression found in the Dialogue. When the Master, who is called upon to offer instruction about the Exchequer, initially refuses to write about a topic so mundane and simple, his interlocutor, the Student, proclaims: “Those who delight in novelties, or in hunting for fine distinctions, have Aristotle’s and Plato’s books....... Your writing is not to be subtle but useful.”41 Likewise, the Master’s concern that his language will be too familiar to suit the subject is waved away by the Student: “Writers on the liberal arts have compiled large treatises and wrapped them in obscure language, to conceal their ignorance and to make the arts more difficult. You are not undertaking a book on the arts, but on the customs and laws of the Exchequer, which, because these ought to be a common matter, must necessarily use words that are known to the speakers.......”42 Richard signals that the book that follows is to be regarded as a work of practical advice, of the sort that was becoming more common by the end of the twelfth century,43 rather than as a sophisticated philosophical investigation. He proposes to draw on his own experience, instead of upon the wisdom of the ancients and arguments of subtle logic, to fill the pages of his volume. Thus, Richard appears far less skeptical than John about the king’s need to gather wealth in order to rule effectively. In the dedication of the Dialogue, he sets a somewhat authoritarian tone by insisting that the duties of royal subjects extend to providing without question for the material sustenance of their ruler:

41. Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. and trans. Charles Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 5. I generally follow Johnson’s translation with occasional modifications. 42. Ibid., 6. 43. For example, see Dorothy Oschinsky, ed., Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); G. D. G. Hall, ed., De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae qui vocatur Glanvill (London: Thomas Nelson, 1965); and Theophilus, De diversibus artibus, ed. C. R. Dodwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

  t h e o r i g ins o f “p o l ic y ”   215 We ought to serve them by upholding not only those dignities in which the glory of kingship displays itself but also the worldly wealth that accrues to kings in virtue of their position. The former confers distinction, the latter power. Their power indeed rises and falls as their moveable wealth flows or ebbs. Those who lack it are prey to their enemies, those who have it prey upon them. And although this wealth is not always theirs as a result of strictly legal means, by procedures sometimes lawful, sometimes from secret devices known only to their hearts, and sometimes even from their arbitrary wills, still their subjects have no right to question or condemn their determinations.44

To those familiar with John of Salisbury’s teachings about the expectation that the true king (as opposed to the tyrant) will place himself entirely under the laws of God and of his nation, as well as the famous doctrine of tyrannicide enunciated in the Policraticus, Richard’s assertions sound harsh indeed. Richard evidently expects total submission and obedience to the king’s fiscal exactions; anything less is an affront to God, who has conferred power on the ruler. The Dialogue quickly downplays this authoritarian rhetoric, however, by stressing that kings will commonly use their coffers only for righteous purposes that ultimately benefit all of the inhabitants of their realms. “The glory of princes consists in noble actions in peace and war,” Richard observes, “but it excels in those in which is made a happy bargain, the price being temporal and the reward everlasting.”45 The success of kings may indeed depend upon the requirement to act in accordance with virtue and faith, but this goal is only facilitated when they possess a properly funded treasury. No matter how much a monarch may desire to serve God and goodness, his intentions are easily frustrated if he lacks the resources to realize his aims. There are occasions on which sound and wise schemes take effect sooner through the agency of money, and apparent difficulties are smoothed away by it, as though by commercial exchange. Money is no less indispensable in peace than in war. In war it is lavished on fortifying castles, paying soldiers’ wages, and innumerable other expenses, determined by the character of the persons paid, for the defense of the realm; in peace, though arms are laid down, noble Churches are built by devout rulers, Christ is fed and clothed in the persons of the poor, and by practicing the other works of mercy mammon is distributed.46 44. FitzNigel, Dialogus, 1. 46. Ibid., 2.

45. Ibid., 2.

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Richard clearly believes that the efficient collection of revenues by the king is a lynchpin in the realization of the public good. Subjects who refuse to contribute to the meeting of royal needs in the end do not recognize their own advantage, for the ruler spends what he receives for the sake of improving the condition of the kingdom. The Dialogue therefore reviles those residing in the realm who object to contributing their fair share or who otherwise protest the propriety of exacting royal revenue. Consequently, the work of the Exchequer in receiving, calculating, and dispensing the royal treasury lies at the heart of government. Those clerks who serve as officials of the Exchequer “all have the same duty and aim, to protect the king’s advantage without injustice.”47 For the good of the king is inseparable from the good of the kingdom, and an assiduous financial magistrate demonstrates his devotion both to king and country. Nor should the royal servant become too fussy or critical about the precise sources of his master’s revenue: “Therefore, however questionable may be or appear the origin or the method of the acquisition of wealth, those whose duty it is to guard it have no excuse for slackness, but must give anxious care to its collection, preservation and distribution, since they must give account of the state of the realm, the security of which depends upon its wealth.”48 The loyalty and honesty of royal fiscal administrators are made by FitzNigel into the sine qua non of a well-ordered society and a properly functioning government. Indeed, this forms precisely the normative thrust behind Richard’s supposedly empirical project: he wishes to teach future generations of magistrates how to conduct themselves because he believes that upon them rests the burden of ensuring the continuation and glory of the king and the realm. Richard may not be writing philosophy in the technical sense that he dismisses, but his book has a moral and political force that ought not to be ignored. Lest we imagine that Richard embraces the rise of the monetarized economy and its values more wholeheartedly than John of Salisbury, we need to attend to some countervailing features of his analysis in the Dialogue of the Exchequer. Richard gives a fascinating (and fanciful) historical reconstruction of the emergence of money as the measure of wealth for the English government.49 In the time of the Conqueror, he reports, the Crown lived directly off the produce of its own lands; its tenants provided the victuals necessary to feed the royal household, while any coinage in 47. Ibid., 13. 49. For what follows, see ibid., 40–42.

48. Ibid., 1–2.

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the king’s treasury accrued from payments by urban locales lacking agricultural goods. When rent-in-kind was collected by the sheriffs, court officials translated its value into monetary terms (a shilling for a certain quantity of wheat, four pence for a sheep, and so on) as a matter of convenience only. During the reign of King Henry I, however, necessity and invention altered the method by which rents for Crown lands were assessed. On the one hand, Henry’s extended foreign sojourns required liquid wealth rather than consumables in order to supply his retinue. On the other hand, the farmers on royal lands, suffering economic hardship as well as “countless inconveniences,” protested against the requirement that rent must be paid in kind. Thus, a bargain was struck between Henry and his tenants according to which a census of the value of the Crown lands was established and each sheriff was made responsible for collecting a certain total sum from his region. The shift from rent-in-kind to money rent alleviated the king’s need for coinage; the change from individual to collective responsibility for rents meant that particular farmers who fortunes waned would not be oppressed. The advantage of the king and of the English people happily coincided. An immediate consequence of this development in the early twelfth century, Richard acknowledges, was the more widespread availability of money throughout England. Whereas coins had previously been common (and useful) only in the towns and villages in which trade occurred, now the agricultural economy became widely monetarized—an important aspect of the “commercial revolution” of high medieval England about which modern historians speak.50 The effects of this development were by no means uniformly positive, according to Richard. Rather, the fact that many regions of the country did not have local coinage forced the Exchequer to accept for a long period money of uncertain provenance, and hence of unknown quantity and quality. Consequently, the Crown could not adequately gauge whether it was receiving the full value of its rents. The problem of irregular currency persisted well into the reign of Henry II, who finally “appointed one weight and one money throughout all the realm under his sway,” so that during Richard’s tenure as a royal official “every county has become bound by the same law, and must make its payment in legal tender.”51 Yet even the regulation of specie does not en50. See R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 51. FitzNigel, Dialogus, 10.

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sure its conformity. As the Student asks, “Since all the coin in the realm must be stamped with the king’s likeness, and all moneyers are bound to work to the same standard weight, how does it come about that their work does not all weigh alike?” The Master responds: “It comes about through forgers, and mutilators and clippers of the coin. You see, English money may be bad in three ways: the weight, the alloy, or the stamp may each be bad.”52 Consequently, the officials of the Exchequer must vigilantly impose consistent standards in judging the quality of the coinage received as payment from sheriffs.53 Otherwise, the Crown runs the risk of losing a considerable amount of its income from its lands and rights as the result of bad money. (It would take some time yet for the king’s treasurers to realize how the manipulation of its monopoly on the minting of money by altering its content could be turned to its own advantage, a topic to be taken up in chapter 15 below.) The administrative problems engendered by widespread use of money in twelfth-century England have an obvious moral dimension. Currency manipulation posed not merely a technical problem, but also a legal issue, since it was akin to theft from the king. Likewise, as Richard admits, payment of rents, texts, and other revenues owed to the king in liquid form enabled subjects to hide their true assets and thus to avoid their liability. This deception is especially rampant among merchants whose dealings occur on a cash basis: The bulk of the possessions of those who have land and live by agricultural pursuits consists in sheep, cattle, and grain, and in such things as can hardly escape the notice of neighbors. But those who tend to matters of trade, and who save and scrape with all their might to augment their wealth, are more concerned with coined money. For money is the tool of the trader, and can easily be hidden safely away, which is the reason why rich men whose wealth is concealed are often thought to be poor.54

The threat of tax evasion was exacerbated by the shift to a monetarized economy: it became easier to dissemble about one’s wealth and to deny to the king his due income. Richard argues that punishment should be greater for such evasion because “a superabundance of riches should never appear to be exhausted,”55 a claim which I take to mean that a mendacious assertion of poverty in order to enhance one’s own private riches consti52. Ibid., 12. 54. Ibid., 108.

53. Ibid., 38–39. 55. Ibid., 108.

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tutes an affront to the royal majesty and to the kingdom alike. Surplus money should be made available for the public good upheld by the ruler, just as surplus fruits of the land should be rendered to the Crown when the needs of the realm require it. Another serious issue raised by the wide circulation of money was the growing practice of lending money for interest. The Dialogue of the Exchequer contains an extended diatribe against the forms of usury apparently practiced in the twelfth century. Richard’s tone in this passage is moralistic and uncompromising. He recognizes that the Church prohibits outright legal condemnation of Christians who engage in usury: “As we are told by those learned in the law, the crown has no ground of action against a Christian usurer, clerk or layman, so long as he is alive; for he may have time to repent.”56 Rather, ecclesiastical authorities enjoy jurisdiction over the punishment of the usurer in his own lifetime; if he is found to be guilty of the crime of lending money at interest, the Church may require penitence and demand restitution and may even impose excommunication, all forms of spiritual punishment. But if a usurer dies unrepentant, jurisdiction shifts to the secular power. When any holder of a lay fee, or even a city-dweller (civis), is an open usurer and dies intestate or disposes by his testament of his ill-gotten gains without making restitution to those whom he has wronged, not therefore distributing the mammon, but keeping it in his own hands—because by clinging to the possessions he is considered not to have given up the will to keep them—his money and all his chattels are at once confiscated, and brought into the Exchequer by the proper officers without summons. The heir of the deceased must content himself with his father’s land and other real property, and be thankful not to have lost them.57

Hence, temporal government has a duty to stamp out the moral and spiritual evil of usury by demonstrating that no one—not even the child of the deceased usurer—can profit from perfidy. The king must directly concern himself with regulating economic activities so that they remain consonant with moral rectitude. Moreover, royal authority over usury extends not only to the so-called open usurer, who directly charges interest in return for the loan of money, but also to so-called hidden (non publicas) usury. This term refers to the practice, apparently growing during Richard’s time, of circumventing 56. Ibid., 99. 57. Ibid., 98.

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ecclesiastical usury prohibitions by engaging in a sort of pawn arrangement: “A man takes a manor or Church in exchange for what he has lent, and without abating the principal takes the issues of it until the principal is repaid. This kind, on account of the labor and expense involved in cultivation, has been regarded as more permissible; but it is undoubtedly an unclear thing, and deserves to be reckoned as usury.”58 Richard insists that identical punishments pertain to the hidden usurer both before and after his death as to the open usurer. More intriguing is the greed that the common availability of money seems to induce. Even men who have some moral scruples seem intent upon profiting from their possession of money. Thus, they look for loopholes in the legal and ethical rules about usury that permit them to take interest for their loan without danger of spiritual and temporal sanction. Even Richard, who stresses the importance of wealth (especially in liquid form) for the welfare of king and kingdom, realizes that moral considerations must be paramount in its accumulation and that the monetarized economy yields serious threats to those moral constraints. The practicalities of the market economy must submit before the pieties of Christian moral theology. The economic doctrines of both Richard FitzNigel and John of Salisbury resonate with later English proponents of “policy.” Around 1530, Thomas Starkey, in his Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, wrote that the true common weal ..... is the good order and policy by good laws established and set, and by heads and rulers put into effect by which the whole body as by reason is governed and ruled, to the intent that this multitude of the people and whole communalty so healthy and so wealthy having convenient abundance of all things necessary for the maintenance thereof, may with due honor, reverence and love religiously worship God, as fountain of all goodness, maker and governor of all this world, everyone also doing his duty to others with brotherly love, one loving one another as members and parts of one body.59

Starkey’s equation of “policy” here with both the material and the spiritual goodness of the kingdom and its constitutive elements as regulated by the royal ruler was unexceptional for its day.60 More to the point, he cap58. Ibid., 100. 59. Thomas Starkey, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer (London: Royal Historical Society, 1989), 34. I have modernized and slightly modified the English. 60. On early modern uses of “polycie,” see Thomas F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Neal Wood, Foundations of

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tures essentially the same set of social and political ideals that one can find in writings dating to the twelfth century. For both John and Richard, royal government, when properly disposed, ensured that the physical welfare of subjects was served by careful management of the economic resources of the realm. Yet such economic considerations were circumscribed by the larger set of moral and religious principles which it was incumbent upon the king to submit in guiding his subjects. Thomas Starkey and his contemporaries would very likely have recognized a deep affinity with, if not a direct lineage from, the views of John and Richard. The doctrines proposed by John and Richard thereby help us to delineate the place of England in the intellectual history of their own time as well as in the course of future developments. In time, this approach to “policy” would spread throughout Europe and define important elements of the late medieval as well as early modern terrain of intellectual history, as we shall discover in subsequent chapters. Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).



14

Ec o n o m ic Lib e r t y an d t h e P o l i t ics o f W e a lt h



u r in g t h e Lat in Mi d d l e A g e s , as in the modern world, the language of liberty was applied in a bewildering array of contexts. In part, this is due to the large variety of traditions concerning liberty available to the Middle Ages, as discussed in chapter 5 above. The multiple manifestations of freedom in the medieval world, and their application in theory as well as practice, have received wide attention from recent scholars. In particular, we now enjoy an enhanced appreciation of how the discourses of liberty arising from the Latin Middle Ages were received, restated, and transformed in modern Europe.1 But one significant facet of the medieval languages of liberty—the economic dimension—has been systematically overlooked in the lit1. See Edward Peters, “Libertas Inquirendi and the Vitum Curiositatis in Medieval Thought”; Giles Constable, “Liberty and Free Choice in Monastic Thought and Life, Especially in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries”; Robert L. Benson, “Libertas in Italy (1152–1226),” in George Makdisi, Dominique Sourdel, and Janine Sourdel-Thomine, eds., La notion de liberté au Moyen Age Islam, Byzance, Occident (Paris: “Les Belles Lettres,” 1985), 89–118, 191–213; Brian Tierney, “Freedom and the Medieval Church”; John H. Munday, “Medieval Urban Liberty”; H. G. Konigsberger, “Parliaments and Estates”; and J. H. Baker, “Personal Liberty under the Common Law of England, 1200–1600,” in R. W. Davis, ed., The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 64–202; and Cary J. Nederman, “Toleration, Skepticism, and the ‘Clash of Ideas’: Principles of Liberty in the Writings of John of Salisbury,” in John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 53–70.

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erature. Doubtless, this reflects the more general assumption that medieval Europe was a “closed” economy, controlled by a small group of landed nobles and urban oligarchs, and thus antagonistic to expressions of economic freedom. Moreover, it seems widely presumed, and certainly with some good reason, that the Church functioned as a constraining force in the extension of liberalizing commercial values and practices. One need look no further than St. Thomas Aquinas’s pronouncements about the evils of monetary exchange and economic profit seeking to realize that key forms of economic freedom were commonly equated in the medieval mind with the road to vice and damnation.2 As is so often the case with broad statements about the Latin Middle Ages, however, these generalizations about medieval economic life and thought require some modification and qualification. In the preceding chapter, we noted the conclusion of recent historical research that Europe between roughly 1100 and 1300 underwent little short of a commercial revolution, reflected in rapid monetarization, market expansion, urbanization, and so forth.3 By the end of the Middle Ages, central elements of economic organization were in place that would condition the emergence of capitalism during the early modern period. Indeed, the Roman Church, so often regarded as a source of reaction in matters of material acquisition, has lately been touted by a group of economists as a paradigmatic instance of “an economic firm.”4 In sum, the economic life of medieval Europe was by no means so monolithic and “closed” as scholars have sometimes implied. Still, one might reasonably ask, in the words of Lester K. Little, whether the economic morality promoted by medieval Christian theologians, philosophers, and lawyers was “so uncompromising ..... that virtually any 2. St. Thomas Aquinas, De regno, 2.3, in R. M. Spiazzi, ed., Opulscula philosophica (Turin: Marietti, 1954): “If the citizens devote their life to matters of trade, the way will be opened to many vices. Since the primary aim of traders is to make money, greed is awakened among citizens through the pursuit of trade. As a result, everything in the city will become vendable....... Each person will work only for his own profit, despising the public good....... In a city, civic life will of necessity be corrupted” (my translation). 3. See Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Richard H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); and Richard Britnell and Bruce M. S. Campbell, eds., A Commercialising Economy: England 1068 to c. 1300 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 4. Robert B. Ekelund et al., Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Also see John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, 1969).

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participation in the upper levels of the commercial economy involved the dangers of sin and conjured up visions of appalling punishments”?5 In other words, it might be objected that the theory failed to keep pace with the practice up to the end of the Middle Ages, yielding a rejection in the abstract of those manifestations of economic liberty that occurred daily (and that perhaps even directly benefitted the theoreticians who reviled them). This conclusion certainly appears warranted on the basis of the examination of the best recent scholarship concerned with economic freedom in medieval thought, found in the writings of Odd Langholm.6 Langholm points out how medieval Latin Schoolmen departed from their ancient and early Christian antecedents in their understanding of economic choice. Whatever their other differences, Aristotle, classical Roman law, and St. Augustine adopted an expansive notion of volition in connection with economic matters.7 They shared the view, specifically, that actions taken under the pressure of “necessity” or “need” counted nevertheless as “free” rather than coerced. The only examples of “unfree” acts were those that arose from direct force or fraud. Hence, the logic of premedieval teachings (though not necessarily their overt substance) seemed to justify mutual consent as an adequate standard of free action in the marketplace. By contrast, Langholm argues that medieval Scholastics consistently treated “need” as a limiting case of free exchange.8 If the seller in a market relation possessed an item that the buyer required for his physical sustenance (say, water or bread), a form of compulsion was built into the economic interaction. Should the seller insist upon a price greater than that which would otherwise obtain (the ordinary market value), even in times of scarcity, he placed himself in mortal danger; independent mechanisms of supply and demand, let alone the explicit consent of the exchanging parties, were subordinate to the legitimate need of the buyer. Consequently, medieval Schoolmen rejected the self-regulation of the marketplace as inadequate to protect the seller from the potential coercion that existed in every act of exchange. Some authors advocated strict price controls on victuals, while most simply concluded that the “common estimate” of val5. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy, 41. 6. Odd Langolm, “Economic Freedom in Scholastic Thought,” History of Political Economy 4 (1982): 260–83; Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money and Usury According to the Paris Theological Tradition, 1200–1350 (Leiden: Brill, 1992); and Langholm, The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought: Antecedents of Choice and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 7. For the following, see ibid., 15–56. 8. Ibid., 59–136.

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ue should form the thumbnail guide for valid exchanges. In Langholm’s view, however, the medieval Schoolmen were united in their antipathy toward the position that only force and fraud constituted sufficient reasons to interfere in the consenting relationship between economic actors. Moreover, Langholm claims, the difference between medieval and premedieval economic perspectives on the nature of market liberty continues to shape discourses in the modern era, even into twentieth-century debates over the principles of neoclassical economics.9 Without question, Langholm’s insights are valid for most of the literature that he surveys. It seems true that the mainstream of medieval thought set limits on economic liberty that derived from moral and theological, rather than strictly individual and voluntary, considerations. I wish to argue, however, that Langholm’s account is incomplete, to the extent that he leaves out of his narrative thinkers who inherited and absorbed more directly the lessons of classical (by which I mean, ancient pagan and early Christian) economic doctrines, and who were thus more amenable to a market-driven conception of freedom. In the present chapter, my attention will first be focused on an author who falls clearly within the Scholastic tradition: John of Paris, a Thomist who attained the status of master of arts at the University of Paris, flourishing around 1300. I maintain that John based his economic teachings on elements of the Roman legal tradition, which dispensed with any measure of value exogenous to the free operation of the market. Volition for the contributors to the Corpus iuris civilis formed a sufficient condition of a just exchange, a doctrine that Romanists expressed in the form of the maxim Res tantum valet quantum vendi potest (“A thing is worth the amount for which it can be sold”).10 The only circumstances in which the legal literature sanctions intrusion into the market and correction of an exchange are force and fraud. In turn, this doctrine was encapsulated in a maxim about property rights first found in the code: Quisque suae rei est moderator et arbiter (“Everyone is the moderator and arbiter of his own goods”).11 Individuals are endowed with a full range of control over their property, designated by the term dominium (lordship, ownership), such that consent alone can be the mark of the legitimate alienation or transfer of one’s possessions. When these two prin9. Ibid., 178–200. 10. Digest 13.1.14.pro, 36.1.1.16, and 47.2.52.29; see Langholm, The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought, 32–38, 78. 11. Code 4.35.21, 4.38.14; also Digest 41.1 passim. See Langholm, “Economic Freedom in Scholastic Thought,” 261–62.

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ciples are fully embraced, the notion that moral precepts are relevant to the judgment of free market interactions is profoundly diminished, if not erased. The reputation of John of Paris, and his major work of political theory, De potestate regia et papali (c. 1302), has formed a topic of considerable debate in recent years. On the one hand, Janet Coleman locates John’s thought at the root of an intellectual tradition regarding private property and political power that culminated in the central chapters of that watershed of liberalism, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. While Coleman acknowledges that the building blocks of De potestate’s doctrine are largely conventional—in some cases directly adapted from the slightly earlier writings of Godefroid of Fontaines—she insists that the scenario he constructs is innovative in a manner that presages early modern natural rights theory.12 By contrast, Langholm’s comparison of passages of De potestate with economic texts of the Scholastic era, as well as with John’s other works that comment on economic concerns, leads him to underscore the wholly conventional character of the former. John’s views are “in fact a compound of Aristotle and Roman law,” so that any association of them “with the tradition in early modern political theory whose most prominent exponent is Locke, is to demonstrate the full danger involved in anticipatory interpretation of ideas.”13 As antithetical as these interpretations appear, there is an element of truth in each. Langholm is correct to emphasize John’s debt to a range of commonplace sources, while Coleman is right to highlight the novelty of his combination of those materials. Yet both scholars miss some of the significance of John of Paris’s creative synthesis. The central concern of De potestate is not to establish the indestructibility of “the private property of individuals or their natural rights to property” (Coleman); but neither is it entirely valid to say that John “never intended to raise as a separate issue the emancipation of individual property holders from either moral or legal authority” (Langholm).14 The core of John’s teaching about property and 12. Janet Coleman, “Dominium in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Political Thought and Its Seventeenth-Century Heirs: John of Paris and Locke,” Political Studies 31 (1985): 73– 100; Coleman, “Poverty, Property and Political Thought in Fourteenth Century Scholastic Philosophy,” in Christian Wenin, ed., L’homme et son univers au moyen age (Louvain-la-Nueve: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1986), 845–55. 13. Langolm, Economics in the Medieval Schools, 393. 14. Compare Janet Coleman, “The Individual and the Medieval State,” in Coleman, ed., The Individual in Political Theory and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 25, with Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools, 394.

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community, I maintain, is to be found in his extension of the Roman law principle of economic liberty to the point of formulating a version of the doctrine of the primacy of the free market in relation to public affairs. To understand this, we must turn to the text of De potestate. Whether or not De potestate was composed as a single treatise, and whether or not it bears some relation to the polemical conflict between the French King Philip IV and Pope Boniface VIII,15 it takes as one of its main themes the differentiation of the types of rights over property that persons of various ranks and statuses (lay versus clerical conditions, secular versus ecclesiastical rulers) may claim. John sharply distinguishes throughout the work between dominium (lordship) and iurisdictio (jurisdiction), arguing that powers conferred by the former are primary and antecedent in relation to the latter. Thus, a public official (spiritual or temporal) may be able to judge in certain circumstances whether a member of the secular community is putting his property to an unjust use—that pertains to the realm of jurisdiction. But such judgment does not amount to a denial of the preexisting ownership of the property nor of the rightful control over property exercised by its dominus. Rather, John declares, “the temporalities of laymen are not communal.”16 The earthly goods of nonclerics are rightfully apportioned by some means other than assignment by clergy or princes. If the authority to use property does not in the first instance derive from a political/legal act or a moral/theological assessment, whence does it arise? John gives a summary of his answer in chapter 3 of De potestate: Each is lord [dominus] of his own property as acquired through his own industry, therefore there is no need for a single person to dispense lay temporalities in common, since each is his own dispenser to do with his own at will [ad libitum].17

This point is developed at greater length in chapter 7. The external goods of the laity are not granted to the community, as is ecclesiastical property, but are acquired by individual people through their own art, labor, or industry, and individual persons, insofar as they are individuals, have right [ius] 15. Janet Coleman, “The Intellectual Milieu of John of Paris OP,” in Jürgen Miethke, ed., Das Publikum politischer Theorie im 14.Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992), 173–206; Coleman, “The Dominican Political Theory of John of Paris in Its Context,” in Diana Wood, ed., The Church and Sovereignty, c. 590–1918 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 187–223. 16. John of Paris, De potestate regia et papali, ed. Fritz Bleienstein (Stuttgart: Klett Verlag, 1969), 82. The translations from this text are mine. 17. Ibid., 82.

228  e c o n o m ic p r incip l e s o f p o l i t ics and power and true lordship over them. And each person is able to order, dispose, dispense, retain, and alienate his own according to his will [pro libito] without injury to others, since he is lord. And therefore such goods do not have order and connection amongst themselves nor towards one common head who has them to dispose and dispense, since each one may order his things according to his will [pro libito]. And therefore neither the prince nor the pope has lordship or the power of dispensing such things.18

A disproportionate share of attention has been drawn by scholars to John’s apparent statement of a labor theory of acquisition. Langholm is correct to note, however, that the appeal to industria is a fairly conventional move in medieval legal and Scholastic literature, as is the claim that the individual is “dispenser” of his own goods.19 So in what way is John’s conception of property innovative or unique? The key, I believe, lies in the meaning of the penultimate sentence of the passage just quoted. In an assertion for which I know no precedent in medieval writings, John denies any basis for the idea that earthly goods were a gift granted in the first instance by God to the human race as a common possession. The former reflected the view of St. Thomas and nearly every other Schoolman (and indeed, John Locke, too). By contrast, John of Paris holds that one’s lordship over temporalities owes nothing whatsoever to an interlocking system of property relations created artificially by a “just” division of the common. If this position is to be sustained, then private goods enter into some social setting only by an act of volition on the part of their proprietors. No person enjoys a preeminent moral claim on the goods of another—even, presumably, in a case of pressing need. Property is antecedently private and individual, and takes on a communal bearing only by virtue of the will of its owner. Here is the sine qua non of a free market: individuals enter voluntarily with one another into an exchange relationship, the existence of which derives its entire legitimacy from the liberty of the participants. As John underscores at the close of chapter 7 of De potestate, “Each one disposes of his own as he wills.”20 The exercise of this freedom is in accordance with right and in itself harms no one. But what about the jurisdiction enjoyed by rulers over the just and unjust uses of temporal goods? Does this not constitute a severe constraint on the liberty associated with private lordship over property? John is very pre18. Ibid., 96–97. 19. Langholm, Economics in the Medieval School, 393. 20. De potestate regia et papali, 98.

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cise in constructing his explanation of the connection between individual property and the political/legal authority of secular rulers. Jurisdiction is rendered necessary by the entry of private proprietors into voluntary mutual relations with one another. For the reason that it sometimes happens that the common peace is disturbed on account of such external goods, as when someone takes that which is another’s, and also at times because some people, who are excessively fond of their own, do not convey it according to what the needs and utility of the country require, therefore a ruler is instituted by the people to restrain such acts, in the manner of a judge discerning the just and the unjust, a vindicator of injuries, and a measurer of the just proportion owed by each for the common needs and utility.21

According to John, the temptation on the part of some to override the liberty of others, in conjunction with a failure of self-absorbed individuals to calculate and acknowledge the social costs of the profit they obtain by entering into reciprocal economic intercourse, comprise the only justifications for the jurisdiction of rulers. The “moral” limits that are imposed by government are those that arise directly from the failure of individuals to accept and act according to the principles of a market society. Moreover, only those who antecedently enjoy private property rights can authorize the appointment of a judge and executor over themselves and their goods. If something falls within one’s exclusive dominion, then only that person’s consent can confer jurisdiction over his property upon someone else. Granted that John’s position is not quite an economic theory of political authority, he nonetheless recognizes that the exercise of individual free ownership forms the salient source of the friction and conflict that government is created to resolve. The priority of liberty thus crucially informs the economic as well as the political doctrines of De potestate. Holding to a conception of private property loosely derived from Roman law teaching, John of Paris proposes an extensive notion of the free sphere of individual action. The ability of government to fix limits on that realm of freedom requires direct and demonstrable harm to another—precisely the criteria invoked by classical Roman law. One’s liberty to do with one’s goods as one wishes is otherwise to be protected. No moral claim of dire need may properly constrain the terms under which one chooses to alienate (or to retain) property, since one’s legitimate possessions derive from a wholly individual source and 21. Ibid., 97.

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stand in no intrinsic or natural relation to the goods or rights of any other. Economic liberty is woven for John of Paris into the very fabric of human existence. John of Paris was not, however, a lone voice. For instance, the two treatises by William of Pagula discussed above in chapter 8 also contain extensive discussion of the political consequences of an economic conception of liberty. Specifically, the Speculum regis Edwardi III refers to economic liberty in order to criticize contemporary English royal policies. Although there is some question whether William’s attack on purveyance accurately reflects practices current in the early 1330s,22 the issue at hand is not historical facticity but theoretical foundations. Given the focus of its complaints, William’s work concentrates heavily on the exchange relation, understood in terms of the nature and role of the market in the process by which money is given for goods. He seeks to defend the position that the royal use of purveyance constitutes an injustice, namely, theft—that is, a form of economic coercion—since the person subject to the exaction has no choice in the matter. Consequently, he needs to demonstrate a regulative principle for a properly ordered (i.e., noncoercive) system of price and value. To achieve this goal, he relies upon the model of the unconstrained marketplace. William’s account derives in fairly obvious ways from the Roman law view of market freedom. In the Speculum regis Edwardi III, complete and unlimited liberty of exchange is rendered an explicit and seemingly absolute principle. In order to defend the proposition that the king and his servants are in effect guilty of robbery, William repeatedly and adamantly privileges volition. He begins with an idea, formulated in a largely conventional manner, that each person “is lord [dominus] of his things, so that nothing is seized from his goods against his will.”23 For William as for John of Paris, dominium connotes an exclusive realm of power over one’s property with which no other individual may rightfully interfere. “In this world,” William declares, “men ought to be free to do for themselves and theirs, according to their will.”24 In lordship and volition, one encounters 22. See Cary J. Nederman and Cynthia Neville, “The Origins of the Speculum Regis Edwardi III,” Studi Medievalia, 3rd Ser., 38 (1997): 323–26. 23. Speculum Regis Edwardi III, B 16. The English translation is found in Cary J. Nederman, ed., Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-Century England: Treatises by Walter de Milemete, William of Pagula, and William of Ockham (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies/Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 73–139. 24. Ibid., A 5.

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the twin principles that undergird the Roman law tradition of economic liberty. Concomitantly, William draws the conclusion that robbery is an infringement of one’s basic liberty, since lordship entails the freedom to do as one wishes with what one legitimately possesses. He asserts it as a universal and binding standard of conduct that “no goods should be seized against the will of their lords to whom they belong.”25 For anyone (even the king) to violate this constitutes an unjust act.26 Theft, construed as the denial of the legitimate consent of the property owner, seems never to be justified, even in cases of extreme need. The will of the person who possesses goods is in all cases sovereign. To condemn the impropriety of theft hardly seems an exceptional position to adopt. But William applies the doctrine to include compulsory exchanges of money for goods. Historically, the customary “privilege” of purveyance permitted the king’s officials to buy whatever goods they required (as stipulated by the terms of their written commissions or patents) at a fixed rate. Only exceptionally did royal servants deny all payment, although such cases were known to occur. But William’s point is that mandatory or enforced sale still constitutes a form of extortion or theft, inasmuch as it violates the lord’s right to set his or her own price or to refrain from selling altogether. If [royal servants] find the oats of any man, they say that wish to pay up to 3 pennies for a bushel of oats, even if it is worth 5 pennies; and if they find not oats but barley, they seize from the unwilling owner 1 bushel of barley for 3 pennies, even if it is worth 9 pennies. If, however, they do not find barley, but beans, they seize 1 bushel of beans for 3 pennies, even if 1 bushel is worth 12 pennies.27

Such actions are as much an affront to dominium as robbery, since the consent implied by one’s lordship over an object is absolute and exclusive. Thus, as often as Edward III is admonished about the evil and injustice of taking his subjects’ goods against their will, he is also warned “not to seize things for a lower price than the seller wants to receive.”28 The two points are indeed inseparable. How can there be justice or equity these days, when something is bought for a lower price than the seller wishes to receive for it and when consent is constrained, inasmuch as buying and selling arise from the law of nations [ius gentium]? For 25. Ibid., B 8. 27. Ibid., A 12.

26. Ibid., A 1, B 44. 28. Ibid., B 20.

232  e c o n o m ic p r incip l e s o f p o l i t ics where there is no consent, there is not sale but extortion, not justice but seizure, not equity but falsehood and iniquity.29

Likewise, should an individual not wish to sell her goods at all, William asserts that no political privilege can override or cancel that will, even if an adequate price is paid. William narrates a (possibly apocryphal) story of a “poor woman” from whom a royal servant forcibly purchases a hen, “from which she could have four or five eggs to keep her and her children.” She is given “one denarius or at the most one and half denarii,” yet “this poor woman did not want the hen to be sold for even three denarii.”30 It is as much a violation of freedom of ownership and exchange for the king’s minions to demand the purchase of an item at a “fair” price as at one below the market level. The market relationship only exists when free contract is fully ensured. When the liberty to sell or not as one sees fit is curtailed, the consequence is the violation of one’s property rights: objects are in effect taken by force, without the will or approval of their rightful owners. Insofar as purveyance violates the free and consensual operation of market exchange, the Speculum concludes, it is indistinguishable from theft. It is important to highlight that William’s defense of a market-based conception of liberty is proposed by him as an attack on the power and privileges of the political and economic elite. Given his insistence upon the primacy of liberty, the question naturally arises: What if the king refuses to lay aside the prerogative of purveyance, as the Speculum regis Edwardi III insists they must do? What recourse exists for those whose rights to their property have been violated? As we saw in chapter 8, the Speculum maintains that the king’s violation of the liberty of his subjects will result in danger to his own position. By disregarding the express volition of subjects, Edward III undermines the love that his subjects would otherwise afford him; he is to blame for the consequences. In the Speculum regis Edwardi III, then, the conception of market liberty given expression by Roman law sources is transformed into a compelling criticism of current political and administrative practices. The will of the property owner is so complete that any king who takes his subjects’ goods without his or her consent—even by means of an enforced payment scheme—risks loss of his legitimacy and the withdrawal of popular support. William of Pagula thereby takes the logic of economic liberty one step further down the trail 29. Ibid., A 1. 30. Ibid., B 43.

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that leads to the modern appraisal of political systems solely or primarily according to their economic consequences. To be sure, as with John of Paris, William’s thought remains solidly grounded in the intellectual universe of the Latin Middle Ages: he wraps his ideas in the language and doctrines of Christian teaching and of classical learning. Yet William is still able to mine from these sources lessons about the centrality of personal dominion over one’s property that stand at a distance from the mainstream of medieval economic thought. In the final chapter of The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought, Odd Langholm highlights the persistence in recent philosophical and economic debates of the tension between unlimited and constrained conceptions of liberty. In Langholm’s view, of course, the constrained idea of freedom constitutes a central contribution of medieval Scholasticism to the modern world of economics. In the current chapter, by contrast, I have attempted to demonstrate how the present tension in economic theory in fact echoes a divergence of perspectives on the role of individual freedom and the nature of market relations almost seven centuries old. I do not deny Langholm’s central historical thesis, namely, that Scholasticism was overwhelmingly concerned with setting limits (moral, theological, and sometimes political) upon free market relations among individuals. The literature addressing usury, the just price, and analogous matters was far too extensive to suppose otherwise. My point, instead, is that medieval Scholastics were not always so completely wedded to a constrained vision of economic liberty as has been supposed. In the cases of John of Paris and William of Pagula, we encounter two authors who, although possessing excellent Scholastic credentials, provide intellectually compelling reasons to extend the sphere of economic freedom in a manner consonant with the more “libertarian” inclinations of their Roman law sources. I do not mean to impute “modernity” to the texts of John and William, however. As is clear from even a cursory glance at their writings, their conceptions of economic liberty remained imbedded in the religious and ethical concerns typical of the Schoolmen. John and William certainly labor under assumptions fundamentally at odds with those operative in, say, Hobbes—or even Grotius or Locke.31 Yet Scholasticism ought not to be taken as so rigid that none of its adherents could endorse uncoerced and consensual market exchange as an adequate measure of economic freedom. 31. See Langholm, “Economic Freedom in Scholastic Thought,” 260–61; Langholm, The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought, 139–77.

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John and William differ most notably from the main stream of Scholastic thought in their apparent belief that political institutions and governments may appropriately be judged by the standard of economic well-being as well as in accordance with ethical and spiritual ends. Thus, the intellectual current followed by John and William culminates in the early stirrings of “policy” and political economy during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.32 John and William are not “anticipations” of modernity; rather, modern thinkers are simply “continuations” of patterns of thought and discourse that had their initial expressions in medieval Europe. 32. See Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). Some similar themes in Scholastic literature have been treated by M. S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought: Moral Goodness and Material Benefit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).



15

M o n e y an d C o m m u ni t y Nicole Oresme

n e o f t h e m ain c e n t e r s for the emergence of po litical economic thinking in the Late Middle Ages seems to have been the French royal court. The Valois King Charles V was noteworthy for his promotion of cultural and intellectual life generally and for associating himself with some of the finest minds of the late fourteenth century.1 Among those upon whom members of the court showered patronage was Nicole Oresme, a University of Paris–trained philosopher, theologian, and churchman who, among numerous other contributions, produced beautifully illuminated French-language translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics for Charles V.2 The proximity of Oresme to the pinnacle of authority in France afforded an opportunity to offer practical advice in the reasonable expectation that it might be heeded. (The late Capetian monarchy had initiated the tradition of recruiting highly educated individuals into the ranks of the most trusted 1. On this milieu, see Jeannine Quillet, Charles V le roi lettre: Essai sur la pensée politique d’un règne (Paris: Librarie Académique Perrin, 1984). 2. A discussion of Oresme’s place in the court of Charles V may be found in Claire Richter Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in Fourteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 13–22. For general appraisals of Oresme’s contributions as a political thinker and philosopher, see Susan Babbit, Oresme’s Livre du Politiques and the France of Charles V (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1985) and James M. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 203–40.

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royal advisors, evident at least as early as the reign of Philip the Fair.)3 One of the topics that Nicholas considered to be crucial to a well-governed kingdom was the promotion of the physical well-being of subjects by following economic policies likely to enhance the wealth of the nation. Such a concern directly informs Nichole’s mid-fourteenth-century work, Tractatus de origine et natura, jure et mutationibus monetarum, better known as De moneta.4 Oresme’s De moneta is virtually sui generis in the medieval Latin philosophical corpus. A relatively brief tract of fewer than 10,000 words, De moneta falls outside of the conventional genres of late medieval Scholastic philosophy writing: it is neither a commentary, a summa, nor a publicistic tract. Historians of political thought have largely shunned the work. Instead, since its rediscovery in the nineteenth century, De moneta has primarily been the object of attention among historians of economic thought. Early scholarship hailed it as an original and singular contribution to the theory of money, while later analysis found it to be derivative either of the work of another important fourteenth-century Schoolman, Jean Buridan, or of medieval Aristotelian thinking more generally.5 In any case, De moneta has seldom been accorded a place in the history of European political theory, let alone political economy. Despite the fact that De moneta certainly contains technical economic analysis of the nature of money in an Aristotelian mode, both the circumstances of its composition and the main lines of its argument suggest that it deserves treatment as a profoundly political work. In 1356, the French king John II (the Good) was captured by the English at the Battle of Poitiers and held for ransom for a sum of four million crowns. Among the proposals floated by royal counselors to raise the requisite sum was the debasement of the French coinage, a procedure from which the Crown had already been profiting for many years.6 Ultimately, the Dauphin Charles (the future King 3. This is examined by Franklin J. Pegues, The Lawyers of the Last Capetians (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), and Joseph R. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 4. A critical edition and translation was prepared by Charles Johnson, ed., The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1956). In the following, I employ Johnson’s Latin text but often retranslate the English. 5. For a summary of the recovery and interpretation of De moneta, see Odd Langholm, Wealth and Money in the Aristotelian Tradition (Bergen: Univerisitetforlaget, 1983), 13–20. The most recent work to make significant use of De moneta is Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6. On the earlier history of debasement, see John Bell Henneman, Royal Taxation in Four-

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Charles V) decided against further devaluation as a means for securing the ransom, and negotiations produced the eventual release of John for a fraction of the amount originally demanded. After his return, furthermore, the king ordered the reform of the French currency in order to restore the value that had been systematically stripped from it by successive debasements.7 It was in this context that Oresme produced De moneta; the work seems likely to have been written during 1357 or 1358 (and certainly before 1360),8 just after its author had become closely associated with the royal household, perhaps consequently enjoying the ear of the Dauphin. A French translation of De moneta was produced by Oresme himself sometime thereafter. While it may overstate matters to say that Oresme’s tract was immediately responsible for directing the course of royal monetary policy, scholars of economic history quite reasonably regard De moneta as an influential and powerful case favoring the stabilization of the value of money over against the royal temptation to raise revenue through reminting or coin clipping.9 As Odd Langholm has observed, De moneta itself is organized into three fairly distinct sections: the first, comprising the initial eight chapters, concentrates on the nature of money; the second, composed of the subsequent six chapters, addresses the debasement of currency; and the third, constituting the final dozen chapters, assesses the social and political ramifications of debasement.10 In previous scholarship on De moneta, the first and second sections, and hence Oresme’s technical economics, have been the central focus of attention. Economic historians have presumably been impressed by the thorough and relatively dispassionate way in which Oresme analyzes money and debasement. By contrast, the closing (and most extensive) segment of De moneta has been dismissed as a “moral admonition” or “an ethical judgment” on economic matters and thus simply a replication of conventional Aristotelianism.11 Such a conclusion fails, teenth Century France: The Development of War Financing, 1322–1356 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 7. John Bell Henneman, Royal Taxation in Fourteenth-Century France: The Captivity and Ransom of John II, 1356–1370 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976). 8. On the dating of De moneta, see Langholm, Wealth and Money in the Aristotelian Tradition, 100–101, and Denis Menjot, “La politique monétaire de Nicolas Oresme,” in Pierre Souffrin and A. Ph. Segonds, eds., Nicolas Oresme: Tradition et innovation chez un intellectuel du XIVe siècle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1988), 179–93. 9. Richard Bonney, “Revenues,” in Richard Bonney, ed., Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 466–67. 10. Langholm, Wealth and Money in the Aristotelian Tradition, 90–91. 11. Ibid., 12, 91.

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however, to take seriously Oresme’s own expressed purposes in the composition of De moneta. In his prologue, he states both the political nature of the problem that he undertakes to discuss and the practical goal that he seeks to achieve: Some perceive that any king or ruler on his own authority can, by right [de iure] or privilege, freely alter the money circulating in his realm and order it to his will, and also take any amount of profit or gain from this; but others perceive the opposite....... I submit everything to the correction of my betters, who perhaps from what I am saying can be stimulated to determine the truth of the matter, so that all wise people [prudentes] can join in the unity of the same judgment about a difficult matter and can contrive something about this that will in the future profit rulers and subjects, and indeed the whole republic.12

Oresme’s intention is clearly to advise his countrymen in a pragmatic fashion about a matter of public policy. His specialized economic analysis is merely preparatory to his main point. In this sense, the political theory contained in the final part of De moneta merits serious attention as an attempt to bring economic concerns to bear on the duties of rulers and the needs of their subjects. This is not to suggest that the opening chapters of De moneta may be ignored. Oresme elaborates there principles that prove to be central to his later argument regarding the public regulation of economic affairs. In particular, he insists upon the irrevocably communal character of money, and with it the trade that currency is created to facilitate.13 Aristotle (and most medieval Aristotelians) largely dismissed the acquisition of monetary wealth as an end in itself, since those engaged in making money generally come to see it as inherently desirable, rather than as a means to achieving some other good. Aristotle had regarded wealth as at best instrumental to leading a life of leisured civic virtue, in which the citizen engages in political rule and moral action over and above the prepolitical life of acquiring necessities (oikonomia in its original and literal sense).14 Oresme, however, argues that money “is well-suited for intercourse among a large number of 12. Oresme, De moneta, 1. Oresme’s comments about the purpose of his treatise are stated far more extensively in the prefatory remarks to his French version, which are translated by Johnson in ibid., 97–99. 13. Ibid., 7. See Lianna Faber, An Anatomy of Trade in the Medieval World: Value, Consent and Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 32–37. 14. Aristotle’s analysis of money may be found in Nicomachean Ethics 1133a19–b28 and Politics 1257a30–1259a36. Some medieval elaborations of Aristotle’s views are discussed by Langholm, Wealth and Money in the Aristotelian Tradition, 22–33.

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human beings, and the use of it is good in itself.”15 The ambivalent (and sometimes downright hostile) sentiments toward trade and commerce that one finds in much Christian Scholastic literature,16 as in Aristotle’s writings, are not evident in De moneta. When Oresme expresses reservations about economic enterprise, they are directed against practices demonstrably detrimental to the public welfare, which is the intended result of exchange relations. Interestingly, Oresme’s authority for this teaching is one of his favorite sources in De moneta: Cassiodorus, the late Roman imperial official whose papers on public administration, the Variae, circulated during the Middle Ages. Commentators on De moneta attach no significance to the fact that Oresme’s citations of Cassiodorus rival in number his references to Aristotle.17 Yet the recurrent reliance upon Cassiodorus surely hints at the practical tone Oresme sought to convey in De moneta. Since trade and commerce impact so markedly on the common good for Oresme, it should hardly be surprising that he identifies the enabling medium of money as the property of the community rather than of the ruler. Oresme stresses this point throughout De moneta. Although the ruler is assigned responsibility for the actual minting and regulating of the money supply, he is to be considered merely an executive agent of the community, deputized to realize the public good of sound currency and equitable exchange. The dominant theme of Oresme’s treatise is the communal ownership, and thus ultimate control, of money.18 From this principle follows the advice of De moneta about the debasement of coinage as well as the broader contours of its political theory. Since the community requires money in order to engage in a full range of economic activities, and hence to promote the good of its individual members, the very idea that coinage pertains to the private patrimony of a ruler is excluded from the start. As a result, the Crown is strictly prohibited from manipulating the coinage in order to profit itself or its intimates. Implicit in the ascription of money’s ownership to the community is an economic conception of the common good itself.19 In more conven15. Oresme, De moneta, 5. 16. The tensions posed by the emergence of commercial values in the Latin Christian society are examined by Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 35–41, 173–83. 17. For instance, Langholm, Wealth and Money in the Aristotelian Tradition fails to mention Oresme’s reference to Cassiodorus at all. 18. Oresme, De moneta, 10–11, 16–17, 39–42. 19. Kaye, Nature and Economy in the Fourteenth Century, 153–56, does not perhaps sufficiently underscore Oresme’s novelty among political thinkers in this connection.

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tional strains of medieval Aristotelianism, the terms associated with the common good (utilitas, bonum, commodum, iustitia) tended to be defined in terms of the promotion of virtue and religious conviction among members of the community. Hence, good government was understood to be rulership consonant with ultimate moral principles, whereas bad government, or tyranny, was synonymous with the governance of citizens in a manner inconsistent with their ethical and spiritual improvement.20 At times, Oresme draws upon this traditional moralistic distinction between “true kingship” and “tyranny” in explicating the difference between wellordered and evil government.21 But his examples of just and unjust rule are invariably couched in terms of the economic impact of a government’s actions. Thus, in explaining why manipulation of the value of currency by a ruler is unjust, he draws an analogy to political interference in agricultural markets: “It would be like fixing a price for all the grain in his kingdom, buying it, and selling it again at a higher price. Everyone can clearly see that this would be an unjust exaction and indeed tyranny.”22 The value of the economic goods within a community can only be established in the first instance by voluntary exchanges among individuals. Tyranny thus occurs when legitimate economic choices are countermanded for the self-interest of those who hold political power. In this way, Oresme’s account of tyranny or unjust government accords with the customary Aristotelian definition of the tyrant as the ruler who “paying no heed to the common good, seeks his own private good.”23 But the conception of good government or kingship in De moneta subtly replaces the customary ethical overtones of the “common good” with an economic connotation: the king reigns, one might say, not in order to make people “better,” but to make them “better off.” Consequently, judgments about government policy rest on determinations about the economic welfare of the community. That which detracts from the public weal, especially if it benefits the ruler, counts as tyrannical action, while a good government enhances the material advantage of subjects. Oresme’s account of the communal ownership of currency, with its concern for the public advantages of trade, does not, however, license the 20. See István Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, 1200–1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). 21. Oresme, De moneta, 42. 22. Ibid., 16. 23. Thomas Aquinas, De regno, 1.3, in R.M. Spiazzi, ed., Opulscula philosophica (Turin: Marietti, 1954).

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unlimited accumulation of money or unrestrained pursuit of profit. While, in a sense, individuals qua individuals own wealth (and its monetary representation), their economic activities are subject to regulation according to standards of the public good. In this connection, Oresme invokes what appears to be a conventional Aristotelian prohibition on activities such as usury and money-changing (campsoria).24 Yet even his analysis of these supposedly “unnatural” economic transactions is tinged with a practical, rather than a merely moralistic, orientation. Having soundly condemned both usury and money-changing on the predictable grounds that they are incompatible with the true purpose of money—namely, to facilitate the exchange of produced goods—Oresme nonetheless refuses to prohibit them unconditionally: “Yet sometimes from necessity or advantage some vile business, such as the art of money-changing, or some evil one, such as usury, is permitted.” These enterprises (like the maintenance of “public houses of prostitution”) may be sanctioned in order to avoid a greater evil or scandal within the community.25 Oresme invokes this utilitarian claim in order to draw a direct contrast with the debasement of money by rulers, an activity for which he can find no valid warrant.26 Indeed, he characterizes “making profit by the mutation of money” as “even worse than usury,” since at least the usurer’s client consents to the transaction, whereas currency manipulation “is less voluntary and more against the will of subjects, incapable of profiting them, and entirely beyond necessity.”27 The criteria of volition is central to Oresme’s case: And inasmuch as the usurer’s interest is not so excessive, nor so generally prejudicial to the multitude, as this [debasement], which is imposed deceitfully as well as tyrannically against and upon the whole community, so I wonder whether it should better be termed violent robbery or fraudulent exaction.28

The usurer-borrower relationship remains (barely) tolerable insofar as it involves a voluntary agreement between parties. By contrast, debasement is nonconsensual and therefore constitutes an act of force committed by the ruler upon the community. The volitional standard, one of the hallmarks of just economic exchange, disappears in the manipulation of currency, rendering the king-community relation an unequal and coercive one. The 24. Oresme, De moneta, 25–27. 26. Ibid., 27, 29. 28. Ibid., 28.

25. Ibid., 29. 27. Ibid., 28.

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community becomes instead “enslaved” economically to the private interest of its government,29 as well as impoverished to the extent that “the amount of the ruler’s profit is necessarily the same as the community’s loss.”30 De moneta’s main objection to debasement (and presumably other claims of governmental economic privilege, such as public monopolies, which Oresme also opposes)31 therefore stems from the economic impact upon the community. An unjust policy employs coercive means to detract from the communal wealth in order to enhance the income of those who wield political power. Debasement precipitates the economic decline of the republic in a number of ways, which Oresme describes in careful detail, based on his observations of events that “have lately been seen to occur in the kingdom of France.”32 First, an unstable currency is ruinous for all manner of trade. Imports cease, since “merchants ceteris paribus prefer to travel to those locales in which they may obtain good and certain money.” In similar fashion, “the business of internal commerce in such a kingdom is disturbed and impeded by such changes” of currency, while fixed incomes are thrown into flux and “cannot be properly and justly valuated and taxed.” Moreover, debased currency destroys the system of credit upon which commercial activity relies. In sum, inasmuch as “merchants and everything else mentioned are either necessary or extremely useful to human nature,” alterations of coinage “are prejudicial and harmful to the whole civil community.”33 In addition, debasement has a debilitating effect upon the good order of the community. On the one hand, some individuals (other than the ruler himself ) profit exorbitantly from changes in the money supply. Oresme mentions not only money-changers and their ilk, but also royal intimates and their friends, who engage in a medieval version of insider trading by taking advantage of the advance knowledge they possess about the future occurrence of debasements.34 On the other hand, debasement disadvantages those “parts of the community [that] are occupied in business honorable or useful to the whole republic,” such as “men of the church, judges, soldiers, farmers, merchants, craftsmen and the like.”35 These people are denied the ability to make an adequate livelihood, since so many of the agreements into which they enter depend upon the presumption of sound currency. Oresme contends that the members of such occupations, “who 29. Ibid., 40, 43, 47. 31. Ibid., 16. 33. Ibid., 33. 35. Ibid., 33.

30. Ibid., 24. 32. Ibid., 30. 34. Ibid., 34.

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are the best parts of the community, are impoverished [depauperantur] by this” mutation of coinage; “the ruler in this way punishes and excessively burdens the larger and better [section] of his subjects.”36 Ultimately, the economic condition of the kingdom is rendered chaotic and turbulent: computation of expenditures and receipts becomes impossible, lawsuits and disputes over payments multiply, and outright fraud and abuse run rife.37 Unreliable currency produces a multitude of negative material consequences and inequities far beyond the simple injustice of a ruler profiteering from his role as minter of the coinage and regulator of its value. A monarch prone to monetary manipulation not only harms his own reputation and honor, but also destroys the economic foundations of his realm, upon which he relies for his ordinary revenues, and demoralizes the subjects who are a direct source of his own wealth and well-being.38 Indeed, Oresme even darkly hints, in a manner reminiscent of prior medieval authors such as John of Salisbury and William of Pagula, that the ruler who introduces the many evils associated with monetary manipulation endangers the hold on the kingdom enjoyed by his dynasty. Referring explicitly to the situation in his own nation, Oresme observes that the “free hearts of Frenchmen” will not stand to have slavery thrust upon them; and the French royal house, “bereft of its ancient virtue, will without doubt forfeit the kingdom.”39 Underlying Oresme’s relentless attack on debasement is a normative model of a well-ordered society that only comes to the fore near the end of De moneta. Specifically, Oresme elaborates a vision of the body politic fashioned along the lines of the “communal functionalist” framework surveyed in chapter 5 above. Oresme’s reliance on the communal functionalist paradigm was already signaled by his concern over the consequences of debasement for the “productive” segments of the community, which he described as “honorable” as well as “useful.” But he returns to this theme in the penultimate chapter of De moneta, employing two analogies in order to support his case that currency manipulation destabilizes the communal order. Initially, he invokes the organic metaphor between the community and the living body, citing the doctrine found in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus in support of the view that “the republic or kingdom is thus like a sort of human body.”40 (John’s Policraticus, translated into the vernacular 36. Ibid., 34. 38. Ibid., 30–31. 40. Ibid., 43.

37. Ibid., 35. 39. Ibid., 46–47.

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by Denis Foulechat in 1372, was a popular work at the fourteenth-century French court.)41 On Oresme’s presentation, the body is construed as the standard for the distribution of wealth in the community. Each segment of society must have revenues sufficient for it to perform its function, and no member may grow rich at the expense of others. Just as the body, therefore, is badly disposed when the humors flow too freely into one member of it, so that that member is often inflamed and overgrown while others are withered and shrunken and due proportion is destroyed, and such a body cannot live long, so likewise is a community or kingdom when riches are attracted beyond measure [ultra modum] by one part of it.42

In particular, Oresme is concerned that debasement will lead to a sort of hydrocephalic condition within society. For a community or kingdom whose rulers increase their riches, power and station enormously in comparison with subjects is like a monster, like a man whose head is so large, so heavy, that it cannot be sustained by the rest of the body. And just as such a man cannot support himself or live long, so neither can a kingdom survive when its ruler draws to himself excessive riches, as is done by the mutation of money.......43

Oresme’s adaptation of the organic metaphor is striking not least for its explicitly economic interpretation of the social body. The common good marked by the balanced and reciprocal relation between the parts is viewed in terms of the income received by each. Oresme apparently takes for granted that every functional part of the body is deserving of a “natural” (or perhaps normal) measure of revenue. When one segment profits at the expense of others, the organic process breaks down. Likewise, presumably, the good health and longevity of the body is promoted and enhanced when every member receives its due. The organic metaphor, on Oresme’s account, represents not so much the proper arrangement of political power as the satisfactory distribution of economic resources. Indeed, his lesson is that the superior authority of rulers is abused when they interfere with the “natural” operations of the economic constitution of the social body. Oresme does not merely see government as a negative factor in economic life, as becomes evident when we turn to the second analogy he deploys to elucidate his conception of the well-ordered society. He proposes 41. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 8. 43. Ibid., 43–44.

42. Oresme, De moneta, 43.

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that the activities of the community share certain properties with a choral performance. In a chorus, “a proportional and measured difference of tone is required” of the individual members in order to achieve the proper harmony; neither unison nor dissonance contributes to the “sweet melody of a joyous choir.” Similarly, “equality of possessions or powers in all parts of the community is neither convenient or concordant, but also too great a disparity dissipates and corrupts the harmony of the republic.” In facilitating the appropriate proportion of economic goods among members of the community, the ruler should take the lead to ensure a harmonious distribution: “He is in the kingdom like the tenor and leading voice in singing.” But when the royal performer is too loud or out of tune, “the sweet melody of the regal polity [regalis policie] will be disturbed.”44 Oresme’s musical analogy thus largely confirms the point of the organic metaphor: it is necessary for each section of the whole to receive a material reward adequate and suitable to its contribution. But he is more definite about the ruler’s pivotal role in the maintenance of harmony among the various segments of society. It is for this reason, we may infer, that debasement of coinage is especially heinous, since by enriching the king at the expense of the rest of the community, it stands in direct conflict with his assigned duty of ensuring economic concord within his realm. The problem with debasement is not merely that the ruler abuses his legitimate powers for his own benefit, but that he does so in a manner entirely inconsistent with a central purpose of his office, namely, the promotion of the orderly distribution of material goods. It seriously misrepresents the scope of De moneta, therefore, to classify it strictly as a work of conventional medieval Aristotelian thought. Rather, Oresme’s treatise seems to presage an entirely new genre of writing, devoted to merging political theory with practical economic advice—in sum, a work recognizably in the vein of political economy. Of course, Oresme’s synthesis was achieved by combining standard medieval materials, such as Aristotelian economics and an organic conception of society. But the priority he accords to the economic realm in his idea of the common good, as well as his concern for the impact of political processes on the production and circulation of wealth, marks De moneta with a distinctive stamp. While certainly not the product of a prototypically modern economic mind-set (as some nineteenth-century commentators had proclaimed), De moneta still constitutes an innovative and perhaps singular contribution to 44. Ibid., 44.

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the formulation of the issues of political economy as they emerged at the end of the Middle Ages. De moneta was also the relatively youthful work of a prolific author whose contributions to French intellectual life in the late fourteenth century were luminous. Joel Kaye has demonstrated clear parallels between Oresme’s economic theories and his scientific thought, in particular with regard to the use of mathematical analyses.45 The political economy framework adopted in De moneta also seems to have resonance in Oresme’s famed French-language edition, translation, and gloss of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics (as well as of the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics). In the latter works, Oresme is noticeably less hostile to physical labor and commercial enterprise than his source, Aristotle. While he cannot bring himself to depart from Aristotle so greatly as to reject the Philosopher’s exclusion of laborers and merchants from the ranks of citizens, Oresme’s commentaries and manuscript illumination program play up the worthiness of economic activity and its importance for the good order of the community. For example, his commentary on the Politics noticeably valorizes agricultural labor by presenting it, in word and image, as conducive to harmony and public order.46 Likewise, the illustration of the activities of craftsmen and merchants in the manuscripts of Oresme’s version of both the Ethics and the Politics offers a positive portrayal in contradistinction to Aristotle’s outright condemnation of the values of the marketplace.47 Finally, he continued to employ throughout his remarks on Aristotle’s Politics the organic conception of the community that he introduced in De moneta.48 Oresme’s sympathetic outlook toward commerce is on far more overt display in his sermons where, as Kaye documents, the virtues of the marketplace and the merchant are extolled.49 Odd Langholm has observed that “Oresme’s treatise was not academically a very influential book.”50 Regardless of the influence De moneta exercised, either practically or philosophically, in its own day, however, it constitutes a benchmark in the emergence of a European synthesis of political and economic concerns. On the one hand, it draws together in com45. Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century, 201–25. 46. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 246–49, 290–91. 47. Ibid., 144, 149. 48. Nicole Oresme, Le livre de politiques d’Aristote, ed. Albert D. Menut (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1970), 49, 87, 209, and 290. 49. Kaye, Economy and Society in the Fourteenth Century, 149–51. 50. Langholm, Wealth and Money in the Aristotelian Tradition, 13.

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pact fashion many currents of late medieval thought concerning economic life. Oresme incorporates the lessons about money taught by moral theology and philosophical ethics; but he also integrates the insights of earlier political theorists, such as Marsiglio of Padua (whose Defensor pacis he cites in his Politics commentary),51 who were beginning to realize that the contemporary manifestations of commercial society had significant implications for the conduct of public affairs.52 On the other hand, De moneta precociously addresses themes that were to become far more predominant during the following two centuries among authors who are already regarded as the “founders” of political economy. By acknowledging and exploring the necessity of a symbiotic relationship between good government and the common wealth, Oresme maps out the rudiments of a route that would be traveled time and again in European political and social thought. 51. See Cary J. Nederman, “A Heretic Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret History of Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis in the Thought of Nicole Oresme,” in Ian Hunter, Cary J. Nederman, and John Christian Laursen, eds., Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Ashgate, 2005), 71–88. 52. See Cary J. Nederman, “Community and Self-Interest: Marsiglio of Padua on Civil Life and Private Advantage,” Review of Politics 65 (Fall 2003): 395–416.



16

C h r is t in e d e P izan’s E x pan d in g B o d y P o l i t ic

ic h o l as O r e s m e , as we have seen in the preceding chap ter, represents one important contributor to the medieval tradition of political economy associated with the late medieval French court. Another figure within the ambit of royal culture in France during the Latin Middle Ages who proves worthy of attention as a thinker cognizant of the “political” dimension of economic conditions is Christine de Pizan. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Christine counts among the most prolific political writers in medieval Europe, although she remains among the most overlooked. She is credited with no fewer than nine treatises concerned with “politics” broadly construed—a function, no doubt, of her close association with the Valois court, at which she was raised and upon which she depended for patronage. Yet, at least until quite recently, the body of Christine’s political writings has been systematically ignored or dismissed by scholars (a function as much of her gender as of a careful reading of her texts, one suspects).1 Christine’s work adopts a highly personal tone, root1. Christine’s name does not merit a mention in the surveys by Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought 300–1450 (London: Routledge, 1996). She receives only a few passing references, and no sustained analysis, in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Much has been done to restore Christine to her rightful place by the contributors to Margaret Brabant, ed., Politics, Gender, and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Boulder:

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ed in her own experiences and observations. In her three best known political writings—Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405), Le Livre des Trois Vertus (1406), and Le Livre de Corps de Policie (1406)—she identifies herself as writing from the perspective of a woman, an immigrant to France, and an individual of nonnoble birth.2 She does not hesitate to deplore various mores and practices current in her time, basing her remarks upon her knowledge of historical and geographic variations, as well as her familiarity with Scholastic, scriptural, and patristic sources. Throughout Christine’s books, the advice she offers has a practical turn, suggestive of someone who has been on intimate terms with many stations of life and the travails they can cause. There are moments in her narrative—such as when she offers advice to widows about coping with their late husbands’ creditors3—which seem to stem directly from predicaments that she confronted personally. Because of her financial dependence upon the French court, as well as her deep admiration for members of the ruling dynasty,4 Christine’s approach to political affairs is generally conditioned by practical considerations. As with Oresme, she was sensitive to the financial pressures endured by the centralized monarchic governments of late medieval Europe. Yet she also demonstrated deep concern about the needs and interests of a large portion of the populace—among them women, city dwellers, and the poor—by insisting upon the inescapable reciprocity of the relationship between the French people and the royal regime. Christine’s thought is thus characterized by the striking inclusiveness of the audience she addresses and the social complexity she acknowledges. In one of her two works directed explicitly to a female readership, the Cité des Dames, she defends women as a group from various slanders against their intelligence and capacity to achieve moral and political virtue.5 The other of these writings, the Trois Vertus, examines with precision the conduct appropriate to women of each and every social distinction, exWestview Press, 1992). Further efforts to revive Christine’s political thought may be found in Marilynn Desmond, ed., Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and Kate Landgon Forhan, The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 2. Christine’s background and career has been thoroughly documented by Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Her Works (New York: Persea, 1984). 3. Christine de Pizan, A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies, trans. C. C. Willard (New York: Bard Hall/Persea, 1989), 197–202. This is a translation of Le Livre des Trois Vertus. 4. On Christine’s political circumstances generally, see Charity Cannon Willard, “Christine de Pizan: From Poet to Political Commentator,” in Gender, Politics and Genre, 17–32. 5. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E. J. Richards (New York: Persea, 1982).

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tending from princesses and the nobility to artisans, prostitutes, and the destitute. Likewise, Christine’s Corps de Policie discusses in detail the humbler orders within the realm, such as the commercial and working classes, as well as the education and behavior of the king and his well-born companions.6 She thereby awakens her courtly colleagues to some of the new social and economic realities that were altering the landscape of late medieval institutions and practices. In all of these works, moreover, she reflects sensitivity to the preceding traditions of political economy. Christine captures this social complexity in a way that, on the face of it, seems very traditional. She constructs harmonious social organization and cooperation on the model of the organic metaphor of the body politic that pervaded medieval political thought.7 She declares that “everyone should come together as one body of the same polity, to live justly and in peace as they ought.”8 Superficially, perhaps, the organic analogy may appear designed to justify hierarchy, inequality, exclusion, and subordination. But for Christine as for a few of her predecessors,9 the image of the body politic also suggested an inclusive, reciprocal, and interdependent conception of community. Just as the human body is not whole, but defective and deformed, when it lacks any of its members, so the body politic cannot be perfect, whole, or healthy if all the estates of which we speak are not well joined and united together. Thus, they can aid and help each other, each exercising its own office, which diverse offices ought to serve only for the conservation of the whole community, just as the members of the body aid to guide and nourish the whole body.10

Christine’s very image of communal order is when the health of the entire public unit is preserved through the mutual coordination of the tasks necessary for its existence.11 To despise any of the members, or reduce them to a state of servitude, is an attack on the well-being of the whole organism. 6. Christine de Pizan, Book of the Body Politic, trans. Kate Langdon Forhan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 7. Interestingly, however, the standard survey of medieval organic thought makes no mention of her contribution; see Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1978). 8. Christine, Book of the Body Politic, 59. 9. See Cary J. Nederman, “Freedom, Community and Function: Communitarian Lessons of Medieval Political Theory,” American Political Science Review 86 (December 1992): 978–79, 981–82. 10. Christine, Book of the Body Politic, 90. 11. Ibid., 91.

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Christine’s use of the organic metaphor extends medieval precedent by imputing to it a noticeably secular orientation. Unlike her immediate source for the analogy, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus,12 she makes no reference to the “soul” of the body (i.e., the priesthood), nor does she draw upon standard medieval depictions of the supremacy of the Church to the temporal sphere. Of course, she assumes that the king will honor God and care for the churches within his jurisdiction.13 But the Corps de Policie reverses conventional expectations by, for instance, asserting a corrective role for the good ruler, since no “prelate, priest, or cleric is so great that he will dare withstand or complain about the prince who reproves him for his manifest vice or sin.”14 This is consistent with Christine’s conception of the king as the ordainer and regulator of all the estates within the realm, including the priesthood, and her identification of the clergy within the body politic as one of the three branches of the common people.15 No other late medieval thinker, with the exception of Marsiglio of Padua, was so disposed to count the priestly function as essentially a civil office, contributing to an expansive and secularist idea of public welfare in which salvation and moral rectitude were not the sole aims of government. The overtly secular bearing of the body politic comes to the fore in Christine’s discussion of economic issues. Throughout her writings, she displays an awareness that one of the main sinews of political community is the physical well-being and, indeed, material improvement of its members. The ruler must therefore gage his policies and their implementation so as to “increase and multiply the virtue, strength, power, and wealth of his country.”16 This list of the central aims of government—especially the inclusion of an economic goal—is more extensive than one is likely to find in many of Christine’s predecessors, for whom the king was generally charged preeminently with promoting moral and religious rectitude above all else. Of course, Christine avers that wealth ought not to translate into conspicuous consumption and luxury; one of her standard pieces of advice to men and women of those social classes that possess discretionary income is to abstain from exorbitant expenditures on clothing and other finery.17 In fact, she even advocates that the state should design its taxation 12. On her deployment of this source, see Kate Langdon Forhan, “Polycracy, Obligation, and Revolt: The Body Politic in John of Salisbury and Christine de Pizan,” in Brabant, ed., Politics, Gender, and Genre, 33–52. 13. Christine, Book of the Body Politic, 12. 14. Ibid., 14. 15. Ibid., 19, 95–99. 16. Ibid., 36; italics mine. 17. Christine, A Medieval Woman’s Book of Honor, 174–76, 189–90, 193–95.

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policies so as to discourage excessive patterns of consumption and display of wealth.18 Yet she acknowledges that the accumulation of wealth by the various orders of society is a worthy pursuit, and she realizes that government plays a crucial role in the ability of individuals to achieve this aim. Christine’s strikingly economic conception of community and governance is especially evident in the detailed attention she pays to the lives of merchants, artisans, and laborers, as well as to their relations with the king. Although she again employs language reminiscent of the Policraticus,19 she demonstrates considerable sympathy both for the contributions made by the “humbler” classes and for the plight arising from their varied tasks, especially commercial affairs. She insists that burghers and men of commerce are not to be disdained, at least if they are honest and knowledgeable in the conduct of their business.20 The merchant class is very necessary, and without it neither the estate of kings and princes nor even the polities of cities and countries could exist. For by the industry of their labor, all kinds of people are provided for without having to make everything themselves, because, if they have money, merchants bring from afar all things necessary and proper for their lives.21

Christine’s commendation of merchants is noteworthy, in particular, for its assumption of the importance of the economic well-being of citizens. Traders provide an extremely useful social service, permitting a more efficient use of labor than would be otherwise possible. “It is very good for a country and of great value for a prince and to the common polity,” she maintains, “when a city has trade and an abundance of merchants.”22 Such persons “in many countries are held in high esteem” on account of “the good they do for everyone.”23 In a classic example of organic reciprocity, Christine holds that all classes benefit when commercial society is permitted and encouraged to flourish. In similar terms, Christine praises craftsmen and peasants, since “if the republic excluded laborers and artisans, it could not sustain itself.”24 Indeed, she defends both groups against the ignominy that is heaped upon

196.

18. Ibid., 195. 19. Forhan, “Polycracy, Obligation, and Revolt,” 43–44. 20. Christine, Book of the Body Politic, 104. 21. Ibid., 103; this judgment is seconded by Christine, A Medieval Woman’s Book of Honor, 22. Christine, Book of the Body Politic, 104. 23. Ibid., 103–4.

24. Ibid., 105.

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them. She remarks, “Although some think little of the office of the craftsmen that the clerics call ‘artisans,’ yet it is good, noble, and necessary”; likewise, “the estate of the simple laborer or others of low rank should not be denigrated, as others would do....... The estate of the poor which everyone despises has many good and worthy persons in purity of life.”25 Again, Christine reasons from the necessity of the activities performed by artisans and day laborers for meeting the physical needs occasioned by human existence to the conclusion that their work must be valued by society: “The varied jobs that the artisans do are necessary for the human body and it cannot do without them....... [Laborers] support the body of every person with their labor. They do nothing that is unpraiseworthy.”26 One’s material contribution to the physical sustenance of the community is thus to be factored heavily into the determination of social inclusion. Judgments may be made about how well individuals perform in their diverse offices, but no office in and of itself is to be demeaned or disdained if it contributes a vital function to the material welfare of the community. A large burden of responsibility falls upon the prince, in turn, to ensure that the economic condition of the realm is maintained and enhanced, as well as to oversee the efficient coordination of the tasks necessary for the survival of the body politic. Christine declares that the ruler ought to desire that his subjects perform their best in whatever office God has placed them....... Each one, whatever his rank, ought to live by good policy, without extortion or overcharging, so that each may live properly under him [the prince], and that they love him as a good prince ought to be loved by his people.......27

A central duty of royal government, then, is to uphold the legal and social structures that permit private economic relations between individuals, that is, to protect against force and fraud. The king is not to interfere with (or micromanage) the daily performance of economically necessary activities, but he is to guarantee that nothing interrupts or deflects subjects from doing such tasks. This implies, moreover, that the ruler must be familiar with the various duties necessary to the health of the body, and must be cognizant of the conditions of the lesser estates: “He ought to hear sometimes about the common people, laborers, and merchants, how they make their profit from the poor and the rich, and similarly all kinds of things, so that his understanding is not found ignorant of anything that can be virtuous25. Ibid., 105, 108, 109. 27. Ibid., 40.

26. Ibid., 105, 107.

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ly known.”28 In this way, the prince will appreciate fully the contributions that the lower orders make to the health of the realm and will be prepared to guide and govern them knowledgeably and competently. Most importantly, perhaps, the king must understand how the consequences of his own policies and their implementation by his officials impact the economic conditions of his realm. For example, Christine points out how soldiers “pillage and despoil the country,” leading directly to economic hardship on the part of the rural poor, because they are inadequately compensated by government. “If soldiers were well paid,” she observes, “one could restrict them on pain of punishment to take nothing without paying for it, and by this they could find provisions and everything that they needed economically and plentifully.”29 Likewise, the king must weigh the consequences of his taxation schemes. Christine does not deny the legitimacy of taxing subjects to meet public needs.30 But the ruler must be guided by the principle of gathering only “the legal revenue that it is reasonable to collect and take from his country, without gnawing to the bone his poor commoners.”31 Christine objects, in particular, to the inequities of royal taxation policies, which exempt the rich while burdening the poor disproportionately. It is not merely that such schemes are unjust, but that they have materially deleterious effects upon those who are already impoverished: “There are some who come to pay this money imposed on them and then they and their poor household starve afterwards, and sell their beds and other poor possessions cheaply and for nothing. And it would please God if someone informed the king and noble princes.”32 As a consequence of the organic unity of the realm, the ruler must realize that his own actions may directly harm the material wellbeing of his subjects, which in the end will only redound to his own injury, since the people’s despoilment means that the realm itself will become impoverished and will generate less income in the future. Christine takes it as axiomatic that wise “princes would rather be poor in a rich country, than to be rich and have plenty in a poor country.”33 This is not merely a moral principle; it reflects an economic doctrine that naturally follows from an organic conception of communal interdependence. The lessons about inclusion that Christine derives from the body metaphor she also transfers to her discussion of women’s estates. Christine ad28. Ibid., 10. 30. Ibid., 19–20. 32. Ibid., 20.

29. Ibid., 17. 31. Ibid., 19. 33. Ibid., 22.

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vocates the competence of women to contribute (perhaps even uniquely) to the tasks associated with the maintenance of secular well-being. In Cité des Dames, she proclaims that in case anyone says that women do not have a natural sense for politics and government, I will give you examples of several great women rulers who have lived in past times ..... [and] of some women of your own time who remained widows and whose skill in governing—both past and present—in all their affairs following the deaths of their husbands provides obvious demonstration that a woman with a mind is fit for all tasks.34

Christine surely knew Aristotle’s argument for the exclusion of women from a role in public life, which was a mainstay of medieval political literature. Yet she challenges this claim directly, even to the point of asserting that a princess may help to quell disturbances in her land that arise from her husband’s acquiescence to evil councillors: “If the prince, because of poor advice or for any other reason, should be tempted to harm his subjects, they will know their lady to be full of kindness, pity and charity. They will come to her, humbly petitioning her to intercede for them before the prince.”35 The princess is envisioned by Christine as a sort of ombudsperson, a conduit between hostile forces (whether within or without the realm) whose clashes might otherwise disturb public order.36 Construed in organic terms, then, the princess is to further the process of intercommunication between the parts of the body by serving as a mediating force between the king and the people.37 Nor does Christine deem it “unsuitable for a princess to lavish attention on her lowlier subjects.”38 Rather, she is to meet on occasion with burghers, merchants, and artisans in order to facilitate “love and good will” among subjects, and thereby strengthen public order and unity. Indeed, she regards this function as crucial to the king’s harmonious rule: The subjects create the lord, not vice versa. If people want to be troublesome, they will much more easily find someone to take them on as subject than a lord will find subjects to accept him as ruler....... Even if at a given time he had the military power to destroy them, he would also destroy himself....... Their respect for him will arise from his concern for them, rather than from force. Otherwise his power 34. Christine, The Book of the City of Ladies, 32. 35. Christine, A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor, 85. 36. Ibid., 84–87. 37. Ibid., 85. 38. Ibid., 110.

256  e c o n o m ic p r incip l e s o f p o l i t ics will be in question. A common proverb reinforces this point: “No one is lord in his country who is hated by his people.”39

The princess thus plays a delicate role in maintaining the structure of reciprocity entailed by the organic order of the community. If she declines to perform this function, the health of the body itself is imperiled. Christine also demonstrates sensitivity to the unique circumstances of humbler women’s stations. She recognizes that to be a woman of the commercial or laboring classes imposes special burdens that may render it difficult to achieve the virtues espoused for royal or noble women. Not surprisingly, she evinces real compassion for the special predicament of poor women, and she is gentle in her admonitions toward them.40 By no means is Christine’s advice for the conduct of the female commoner any less practical than for the princess. For example, she warns the wives of merchants to “avoid ostentation” in dress not simply out of concern for moral rectitude, but also because a conspicuous display of wealth “can cause new taxes for their husbands.”41 Christine is thus closely attuned to the complexities associated with the intersection of gender and social class, and she proffers appropriate and useful counsel to women of various stations with the goal of sustaining a harmonious and cooperative body politic. Christine’s attention to the interplay between gender and economic life seems to reflect her belief that most of the arts and civilized forms of labor—indeed, organized society itself—were feminine in origin. In the Cité des Dames, she provides a lengthy accounting of “the earthly benefits accruing thanks to women ..... who gave the sciences and arts to the world.”42 Among “the arts, manifested in manual works of labor,”43 invented by women, Christine includes weaving, extraction of olive oil, cart construction, metal working, cultivation, tool making, and gardening.44 Moreover, she ascribes to Ceres the formation of communal association among human beings who had previously lived as beasts. Adapting a widely employed account of social origination, derived from Cicero’s De inventione,45 Christine recounts how Ceres 39. Ibid., 110–11. 40. Ibid., 219–23. 41. Ibid., 6. 42. Christine, The Book of the City of Ladies, 142. 43. Ibid., 71. 44. Ibid., 73–77. 45. See Cicero, De inventione, 1.1–3. The medieval reception and dissemination of this text is examined by Cary J. Nederman, “Nature, Sin, and the Origins of Society: The Ciceronian Tradition in Medieval Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 3–26.

  c h r is t in e d e pizan’s b o d y p o l i t ic   257 had the people of that time gather together in communities. They had traditionally lived scattered here and there in the forest and wilderness, wandering like animals. She taught them to build cities and towns of permanent construction where they could reside together. Thus, thanks to this woman, the world was led away from bestial living conditions to a rational, human life.46

Moreover, Christine contends, Isis did likewise in Egypt.47 Hence, woman are to be credited with the major achievements in the development of human culture and the improvement of the species’ material circumstances and comfort. Without women’s innovations and contributions, she implies, humanity would have remained in a state of physical depredation and misery. Christine admits that some thinkers may not view the material development of the human race as a laudable accomplishment. “Several authors,” she observes, “have argued that this world was better off when people lived only from haws and acorns and wore nothing more than animal skins.” She takes strong exception with such authorities, however, on the grounds that the physical improvement of humanity ultimately enhances the worship of God. With all due respect ..... for those who argue that it is unfortunate for the world that such things were discovered for the ease and nourishment of the human body, I would maintain that the more goods, favors, and boons the human creature receives from God, the better he is required to serve God.48

Living a materially adequate existence is not inconsistent with the divine plan, but is instead the realization of those capacities and faculties that God has granted to humanity. Hence, the condition of the physical body and those works that provide creature comforts for it are not to be disdained but appreciated and promoted. The improvement of agricultural techniques and of diet, for instance, confer upon human beings more beautiful and radiant bodies and stronger and more flexible limbs, for this food is more beneficial and useful for humans....... By organizing men to perform field labor, this woman [Ceres] made it possible for so many cities and towns to be populated and for their residents, who perform the other works necessary for life, to be supplied.49 46. Christine, The Book of the City of Ladies, 76. 47. Ibid., 77. 48. Ibid., 82. 49. Ibid., 79.

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As in Christine’s other writings, the Cité des Dames finds nothing contemptible in those economic activities that aid in meeting the needs of the body. To the contrary, “God has wished to provide the world with many necessary and profitable things ..... through these women.”50 Coping with physical necessity is part of the divinely ordained human condition for Christine, and those who have contributed to the development of arts which improve material life are deserving only of ovation. In the writings of Christine de Pizan, then, we encounter a theoretical framework designed to cope with the meeting of the physical needs of humanity by means of a complex and diverse social and economic order. Her attention to the conditions and interests of women as well as the disenfranchised and the poor within her vision of a properly regulated community stands as a significant contribution to the process by which the discourse of political economy emerged in Europe. In many ways, her approach to politics continues to be couched in quite customary terms. But she alters the context for this conventional advice by setting it within more intricate social patterns requiring of the ruler a greater range of practical public management skills than had been envisaged by the typical medieval author. Christine does not wish the prince to surrender the moral and religious precepts that her predecessors had promoted. She does seem to think, however, that these qualities are not sufficient to govern effectively in a society in which material well-being and economic profit legitimately compete with eternal salvation as goals worthy of recognition and pursuit. Hence, the effect of Christine’s work is to challenge the simplicity (and perhaps naiveté) of the worldview so often assumed by medieval thinkers. Kings will only be able to maintain themselves on the throne, and their realm in peace, to the extent that they understand fully the needs and interests of the range of subjects over whom they rule. It is thereby a primary aspect of their governance to be cognizant of the sources of wealth within their nations and to manage the economic resources of the realm for the public good. 50. Ibid., 79.

Pa rt V

Modern Receptions of Medieval Ideas 



17

T h e P e r sis t e nc e o f Ec o n o m ic N at i o na l is m John Fortescue

n a p r o vo cat iv e and wide-ranging study of The Spirit of Capitalism, Liah Greenfeld grapples with what she takes to be the central unanswered question of modern economic history: Why did the capitalist economy succeed in “taking off” (in the economist’s sense) when and where this occurred, while failing to do so elsewhere until later (if at all)? She rejects the materialist arguments favored by both liberal and Marxist economic thought, to the effect that the response to this question must be found internal to economic processes per se. Following a broadly Weberian line, Greenfeld argues that a fundamental shift in values—the postulation and acceptance of “a new set of ethical considerations and social concerns that invested economic growth with a positive value and focused naturally diffuse social energies on it”1— constituted the indispensable prerequisite for capitalist “take off.” The “spirit of capitalism,” the driving force behind the endorsement and expansion of “economic civilization,” preceded and prepared the way for the spread of capitalist practices and relations. Yet Greenfeld eschews the orthodox Weberian explanation. She takes it as given that religion—especially of a Calvinist or Puritan variety—does not provide the salient historical explanation 1. Liah Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002), 24.

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for the reorientation of values that made capital accumulation a worthy goal. To that extent, the critics of Weber, such as R. W. Tawney, were correct. Greenfeld proposes instead that the dissemination of nationalism (of a particular sort) yields the reason why Britain achieved its “economic miracle” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries while other locales that seemed to have the same (or even more propitious) material and religious conditions (the Low Countries in particular) did not embrace economic growth of their own accord. This is hardly a surprising claim from an author whose previous book was entitled Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity.2 Greenfeld builds her case around two main points. First, nationalism of the British variety, which she terms “civic-individualistic,” in contrast with “civic-collectivist” or “ethnic-collectivist,”3 “represents the foundation of the moral order of modern society, the source of its values, the framework of its characteristic—national—identity, and the basis of social integration in it” in terms of a common good that pertains to all the members of society in equal manner.4 Hence, according to Greenfeld, Anglo nationalistic patriotism posits that “the individual as the highest social value and the fundamental moral unit of society—that is, as an independent moral actor—adds dignity to the national identity and, taking much farther the commitment to egalitarianism that every nationalism preaches, makes its practice in individualistic nationalism much more consistent than in nationalisms of other types.......”5 Stated more succinctly, by promoting individualism, the English version of nationalism generated both unprecedented loyalty and unreserved desire to increase wealth. Second, Greenfeld maintains that the stunning success of the “British economic miracle”—the fact that a relatively underdeveloped nation by the commercial standards of c. 1500 became within a century the epitome of economic growth—served as the stimulus for other countries to develop nationalistic fervor that generated “the formation of the modern ‘economic civilization’” on a global scale.6 The reason, simply, is that Britain’s accomplishments provoked international competition that sooner or later coalesced nationalism of a similar sort in other countries. The initial spark ignited by British nationalism rendered economic “competitiveness” 2. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 3. Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism, 2. 4. Ibid., 24. 5. Ibid., 25. 6. Ibid., 24.

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a hallmark of capitalist expansion, on account of “the members’ investment in the dignity of the nation—that is, its prestige—which is necessarily assessed in relation to the status of other nations.......”7 The aim to prove themselves “as good as” or “better than” the British led governments and their citizens in modern Europe to develop their own capitalist economies oriented toward the primary goal of unrestrained growth. Ultimately, Greenfeld concludes, nationalism was not merely the “source” of the spirit of capitalism, it was coextensive with that spirit, “the ethical motive force behind the modern economy of growth.”8 Greenfeld’s thesis, defended over the course of a volume that runs to more than five hundred pages, has by now been dissected and criticized from a number of perspectives.9 My aim in the present chapter is not so much to add to the body of critical literature as to point out a historical limitation in her argument as presented that may—depending upon how it is understood—constitute either a confirmation or a criticism of her main points. Greenfeld takes the emergence of nationalism in Britain after 1500 to be “a radical transformation of social consciousness, nothing less than a conceptual revolution” that is in effect coextensive with modernity itself.10 Nationalism presupposes “an inclusive, sovereign, and in essence egalitarian community” and thus stands “in sharp contrast to the hierarchical and compartmentalized image of the feudal society of orders in which nationalism first arose.”11 The sort of nation Greenfeld has in mind—a nation founded on equality and individual interest as the defining characteristics of the polity—seems utterly removed from essentially medieval assumptions about society composed of diverse orders and ranks in which group or communal identity trumps private advantage. While the latter 7. Ibid., 23. 8. Ibid., 58. 9. The Spirit of Capitalism has been appraised in popular as well as academic venues, including these reviewers: Christoper Dyer in History Today 53 (2003): 57–58; John A. Hall in Journal of Economic History 63 (2003): 300–302; Dudley Baines in Business History 45 (2003): 135; Carl Strikwerda in American Historical Review 108 (2003): 159–60; Robert Skidelsky in New York Review of Books, 13 March 2003, 28–31; Duncan Kelly Political Quarterly 74 (2003): 123–27; Eric Jones in Journal of Economic Literature 40 (2002): 1273–75; Mark N. Hagopian in American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 803–4; and John Gray in Times Literary Supplement, 7 June 2002, 9–10. The book also received the 2002 Donald Kagan Best Book in European History Prize. 10. Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism, 31. Interestingly, many elements of this thesis are also defended, albeit from a quite different perspective, by another recent study: Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2002), 93–121. 11. Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism, 32.

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may persevere in “collectivist” forms of nationalism that lack any inherent economic content12—types of nationalism that she clearly believes to be incomplete or partial—only modern civic-individualist nationalism takes “economic achievement, competitiveness, and prosperity ..... as positive or important national values.”13 While briefly acknowledging that in the transition from premodern values (those views, such as “traditional Christian teaching,” that “inhibit economic growth”)14 to modern ones, public interest may have taken the initial priority over private interest, the two were ultimately and irresistibly seen to be wedded.15 Nationalism is not only the spirit of capitalism for Greenfeld, it is the harbinger of modernity in all its characteristic forms. Yet nothing Greenfeld (not to mention other scholars who might broadly assent to her thesis)16 says about the integral connection between nationalism and economic growth—neither about the primacy of economic values for political and social order nor about the promotion of competition through self-conscious assertions of nationality—comes as much of a surprise to the student of high and late medieval political and economic thought. The phrases “economic nationalism” and “economic humanism” were, as discussed in chapter 13, deployed a generation ago by John McGovern to describe lines of thought that pervaded philosophical, theological, commercial, and legal writings from 1200 onward.17 More recently, McGovern’s terminology has been supported and extended by Diana Wood, who detects a broad “shift in attitude,” commencing during the twelfth century already, shaped by “both economic nationalism and economic humanism, the one advocating the wealth of the State, starting with that of the ruler, the other the wealth of the individual.”18 England provided a particular fertile—although by no means distinctive—territory for works in this vein. From John of Salisbury and Richard FitzNigel in the second half of the twelfth century to William of Pagula toward the middle 12. Ibid., 2–3, 24. 13. Ibid., 23. 14. Ibid., 24. 15. Ibid., 26. 16. Two studies of the early modern period come immediately to mind: Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); and Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 17. John F. McGovern, “The Rise of New Economic Attitudes—Economic Humanism, Economic Nationalism—during the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance, A.D. 1200–1550,” Traditio 26 (1970): 225–26. 18. Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 117; see 117–20.

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of the fourteenth century, advice to the king about the management of his realm for the sake of the economic well-being of all formed a recurrent feature of political thought.19 Likewise, many early works of vernacular English literature explicitly concentrated on the promotion and diffusion of economic ideas and commercial motivations: Wynnere and Wastoure (1350s or 1360s) and the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye (1436/37) are but two of the better known examples of this genre.20 The civic-individual nationalism that Greenfeld posits as the hallmark of modernity and the birth of the capitalist spirit had long been a feature of English discourse. My purpose here is not to play Werner Sombart to Greenfeld’s Max Weber by attempting to push the nationalistic origins of capitalism well back into the Middle Ages.21 Rather, I want to reexamine a rather more cherished feature of Greenfeld’s analytical apparatus, namely, the strict distinction between “collectivist” and “individualistic” approaches to nationalism that she believes holds so much of the key to persistent differences in levels of political and economic development among nations even today. According to Greenfeld, as we have observed, only the individualistic version of nationalism is capable of promoting the convergence of personal and public economic interest and the competitive spirit of economic internationalism. In the remainder of this chapter, I will investigate a nationalistic theory, spun out of a series of tracts written in the second half of the fifteenth century by John Fortescue, that is clearly rooted in a medieval, collectivistic outlook but which promotes economic values (economic achievement, competitiveness, and prosperity) that comprise Greenfeld’s 19. See the studies contained in Part IV of the present volume. 20. The texts are to be found in: Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Stephanie Trigg (London: Early English Text Society, 1990) and The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, ed. George Warner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926). For discussions of their leading ideas, see Lois Roney, “Winner and Waster’s ‘Wyse Wordes’: Teaching Economics and Nationalism in Fourteenth-Century England,” Speculum 69 (1994): 1070–1100; and Roger Ladd, “‘Cheryshe marchandyse’: The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye and Pro-Mercantilism,” paper presented at the International Congress of Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo Michigan, May 2001. (My thanks to Professor Ladd for sharing a copy of his paper with me.) On the ethos in which these and similar works were created, see Tracy Adams, “‘Noble, wyse and grete lordes, gentilmen and mauchauntes’: Caxton’s Prologues as Conduct Books for Merchants,” Parergon 22 (2005): 53–76; Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 87–169; David Harris Sacks, “The Greed of Judas: Avarice, Monopoly, and the Moral Economy in England, ca. 1350–ca. 1600,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998): 263–307; and Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965), 3–129. 21. On Sombart’s critique of Weber, see McGovern, “The Rise of New Economic Attitudes,” 217–25.

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“spirit of capitalism.” I conclude that, if Greenfeld is right about nationalism as the “source” or concomitant of the capitalist spirit, she must be incorrect about the necessity of either its modernity or its individualistic quality. Fortescue is something of an enigma in the history of Western political thought: he has been taken both as a culmination of medieval trends and as a forerunner of modern developments. He has been crowned the last great theorist of classical natural law, and also the harbinger of modern political doctrines such as constitutional government.22 Neal Wood, in particular, has drawn attention to Fortescue as a “forerunner” of the economic reform movement of the early Tudor period that affords some of the primary evidence for Greenfeld’s account of the (early) modernity of economic nationalism.23 Yet Fortescue’s central sources and doctrines, not to mention his methodology, are firmly rooted in the Scholastic discourse of the preceding two centuries. In particular, Fortescue appropriated and reconfigured many of concepts and terms developed in De regimine principum, Ptolemy of Lucca’s continuatio of the de regno tract commonly attributed to Thomas Aquinas.24 Scholars have devoted considerable attention in recent times to the relationship between Fortescue’s writings and his medieval antecedents,25 a topic that I do not intend to address at present. Nor am I interested 22. Among the scholars weighing in on this topic are Max Adams Shepard, “The Political and Constitutional Theory of Sir John Fortescue,” in Carl Witke, ed., Essays in History and Political Theory in Honor of Charles H. McIlwain (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 289–319; Franklin Le Van Baumer, The Early Tudor Theory of Kingship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 4–12; Donald W. Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth: The Development of Civic Consciousness in English Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 217–52; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 9–30; and Robert Eccleshall, Order and Reason in Politics: Theories of Absolute and Limited Monarchy in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 102–9. 23. Wood, Foundations of Political Economy, 44–69. Similar observations are made by Eberhard Isenmann, “Medieval and Renaissance Theories of State Finance,” in Richard Bonney, ed., Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 41–43. 24. On the twisted textual history, see James Blythe’s very useful introduction to his translation of Ptolemy of Lucca: On the Government of Rulers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 3–5. 25. Especially noteworthy are S. B. Chrimes, “Sir John Fortescue and His Theory of Dominium,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 17 (1934): 117–47; Felix Gilbert, “Sir John Fortescue’s ‘Dominium regale et politicum,’” Medievalia et Humanistica 2 (1944): 88– 97; J. H. Burns, “Fortescue and the Political Theory of Dominium,” Historical Journal 28 (1985): 777–97; J. H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship, and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy 1400–1525 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 58–70; and Edwin T. Callahan, “The Apotheosis of Power: Fortescue on the Nature of Kingship,” Majestas 3 (1995): 35–68.

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in his immediate polemic agenda in the midst of the violent and tumultuous conflicts between parties contending for royal supremacy. Rather, my interest lies in how he employs these sources to articulate a version of economic nationalism that reaches Greenfeld’s threshold for collectivism. In chapter 7, I examined the main elements of Fortescue’s constitutional theory as propounded in a series of legal-political treatises composed in the 1460s and 1470s. Fortescue borrowed his intellectual terminology from two categories of constitutional regime that Ptolemy had described in De regimine principum: dominium regale (royal lordship, or the rule of a single man according to his own will) and dominium politicum (political lordship, namely, a mixed constitution based on consensual law and the sharing of power—in sum, a republic). Fortescue’s innovation was a proposed synthesis of these systems into a more satisfactory constitutional order, which he labeled dominium regale et politicum. This regime for Fortescue had been fully and adequately realized in the rule of the English monarchy. And corresponding to the particular characteristics of this system is an idea of governance distinct from that conceived by Ptolemy (a republican) or the author (usually still identified as Aquinas) of the earlier portion of De regimine principum (a monarchist). In turn, we also observed in chapter 7 that the superiority of the hybrid system rested on two factors: first, there are distinct advantages to the king arising from the political character of his regime; second, and perhaps most significantly, clear and tangible benefits accrue to those who are governed by a political and royal system. And these arguments turn him toward a doctrine of economic nationalism. Fortescue’s preference for dominium regale et politicum is reflected specifically in his conception of the proper aim of government. “All the power of a king ought to be applied to the good of his realm,” he comments, “which in effect consists in the defense of it against invasions by foreigners, and of the protection of the inhabitants of the realm and their goods from injuries and rapine by the native population. Therefore, a king who cannot achieve these things is necessarily to be judged powerless.”26 Like John Locke two centuries later, Fortescue upholds the central (perhaps sole) responsibility of government to be the protection of the life, liberty, and estate of the inhabitants.27 (It is hardly surprising, in fact, that Locke in the 26. Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 53. 27. A fact not missed by some of Fortescue’s commentators; see Shepard, “The Political and Constitutional Theory of Sir John Fortescue,” 302–4.

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Second Treatise explicitly cites Fortescue as an antecedent authority on the nature of government.)28 Fortescue consequently believes that those who submit to dominium regale et politicum enjoy far greater benefit than the subject of merely royal government for reasons that are strictly instrumental. The civic dimension of communal life is useful inasmuch as it contributes to the ability of individuals to administer, consume, and augment their personal possessions as they choose without interference from neighbors, foreigners, or magistrates.29 The king’s main goals should be avoidance of “poverty and lack of goods,” and instead promotion of “riches and property,” so that his kingdom is “the mightiest and most wealthy realm of the world.”30 Fortescue resists assigning spiritual and moral goals to government, turning rather to material satisfaction (whether fear of its loss or desire of its increase) as the primary factor motivating a populace to acknowledge political authority. And so the greater the likelihood that subjects will be free to take full advantage of their bodies and properties, the better by definition that government will be. The theme of reciprocity between regime type and the physical welfare of the people runs throughout both of Fortecue’s major writings, De laudibus legum Anglie and The Governance of England. In the latter work, Fortescue explicitly assesses the relative “fruits” of royal, as contrasted with royal and political, government by comparing the circumstances of France with those of England. The French king’s royal regime, which taxes subjects arbitrarily and heavily, is held directly to blame for the immiseration of the populace. The French “commons are so impoverished and destroyed that they can barely live,” since the harshness of the king’s exactions ensures that “they live in the most extreme poverty and misery, and yet they dwell in one of the most fertile realms of the world.”31 Fortescue provides a very detailed depiction of this poverty—describing the diet, clothing, and working conditions of the French nation32—and lays the blame squarely on the royal system of rule through which France is governed.33 And just 28. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 426. 29. For Fortescue’s concomitant quasi-Lockean individualism in respect to the acquisition of property, see Edwin T. Callahan, “Blood, Sweat, and Wealth: Fortescue’s Theory of the Origin of Property,” History of Political Thought 17 (1996): 21–35. 30. Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, 138; these phrases derive from an alternate version of chapter 16 of On the Governance of England that Lockwood includes as an appendix. 31. Ibid., 88, 89. 32. Ibid., 89. 33. Ibid., 90–92.

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as the purely royal king causes such poverty, so he must constantly be on his guard, lest his subjects muster the courage to rise up and oppose him, contributing to the general instability of the realm.34 The contrast with England, and its “mixed” royal and political system, is striking. According to Fortescue, “This land is ruled under a better law; and therefore the people are not in such penury, nor thereby hurt in their persons, but they are wealthy and have all things necessary to the sustenance of nature. Wherefore, they are mighty and able to resist the adversaries of this realm....... Lo, this is the fruit of ‘political and royal law,’ under which we live.”35 The major reason for this, says Fortescue, is that the English king is restrained in his ability to lay claim to the goods of subjects, should he ever desire to do so. The Governance of England recounts in great detail the structure of fiscal administration that bridles the king.36 On the one hand, the English king is assured a sufficient income to perform the tasks appropriate to his office, so that he will not be tempted to pursue illegal sources of income. But, on the other hand, the prerequisite of parliamentary approval conjoined with the independent authority of royal counselors and magistrates together form a check upon and barrier to the whims to which a king who reigns royally might easily succumb. Consequently, the royal and political ruler takes it as integral to his office not to drain income away from his subjects into his own coffers, but to enact policies that enhance the wealth of the entire nation. “It is the king’s honor,” Fortescue remarks, “and also his duty, to make his realm rich; and it is a dishonor when he has but a poor realm. Yet it would be a much greater dishonor, if he found his realm rich, and then made it poor.”37 In turn, the wealth of subjects that arises from royal and political rule acts as an assurance of public order. Inhabitants who enjoy material well-being are, in Fortescue’s estimation, more willing and able to fight for their realm; they are less likely to engage in rebellious and seditious activities; and they possess the resources, not to mention the good-will, to subsidize the government in times of particular need. Fortescue’s view, in short, seems to be that the public bearing of the governed is strictly determined by the measurable impact of government upon private benefit: if the people are contented with their physical lot, they will gladly subject themselves to the king and will perform their roles; but if their ruler adopts policies that impoverish them, they will express their displeasure directly 34. Ibid., 88, 110–11. 36. Ibid., 92–108, 112–20.

35. Ibid., 90. 37. Ibid., 109.

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and violently. “The greatest safety, truly, and also the most honor that may come to the king is that his realm should be rich in every estate,” Fortescue observes.38 A more succinct statement of the principle of economic nationalism would be difficult to locate. The physical benefits accruing to those who submit to dominium regale et politicum are also underscored by Fortescue in De laudibus legum Anglie. He directs our attention to “the results of only royal government, such as that with which the king of France rules his subjects; then [he counsels us] to examine the practical effect of the royal and political government, such as that with which the king of England rules over his subject people.”39 In French territories, despite the fact that they are naturally rich, the privileges of the king despoil the people of their goods. On royal authority, knights are billeted and fed without charge (or at least below market value) wherever they go in the realm; monopolies over essential commodities such as salt and wine compel the populace to pay extortionate prices; and the Crown demands arbitrary and constant payments in the form of monetary taxes and assessments in kind and in person. “Exasperated by these and other calamities,” Fortescue concludes, “the people live in no little misery.” He then describes the very stark poverty that the subjects of the French king (or at any rate, the vast mass of the populace) endure, echoing the depiction presented in The Governance of England.40 The royal character of French government, by permitting the king to impoverish the inhabitants of his lands with impunity, directly causes the material suffering of subjects. By contrast, the English king, who rules royally and politically, does not enjoy the privilege of purveyance, nor the right of monopoly, nor the power to levy taxes arbitrarily.41 Thus, the English harvest the fruits of the earth in all their abundance, without fear of confiscation. Because it is by their own consent that subjects of a royal and political king are ruled, they cannot be involuntarily denied their goods and abused in their persons. On Fortescue’s account, the immediate result of such government renders England a sort of Garden of Paradise.42 Who could fail to prefer a form of government that defends and protects the populace and its property to a system whose ruler “is so overcome by his own passions or by such poverty that he cannot keep his hands from despoiling his subjects, so that he 38. Ibid., 110. 40. Ibid., 49–51. 42. Ibid., 52–53.

39. Ibid., 49. 41. Ibid., 52.

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impoverishes them, and does not allow them to live and be supported by his own goods”?43 As in The Governance of England, the presumed criteria employed here by Fortescue to judge the impact of regime type on citizens are not fundamentally civil, moral, or religious, but instead economic and physical. Individuals are satisfied to leave the conduct of the daily affairs of government to the king and his ministers, so long as their material wellbeing is not imperiled. In turn, as private persons, they are encouraged (indeed, expected) to contribute to the public good by seeking their personal advantage in economic activity. Thus, a nation that possesses large numbers of merchants engaging in commerce is one, Fortescue insists, that has been truly blessed by God.44 All of the evidence thus far presented might seem to confirm Greenfeld’s analysis of nationalism as a force for “jump-starting” capitalism in England. Fortescue appears as simply an early voice of the new social consciousness that would take off in the sixteenth century and beyond. Yet Greenfeld’s account requires not nationalism per se, but a particular sort of nationalism—civic-individualist nationalism—to form the “spirit of capitalism.” And Fortescue, for all of his apparent attention to the centrality of economic life, does not meet the criteria for civic individualism; he remains, at heart, a civic collectivist. This is seen especially in the social theory underlying his account of nationalism, which reaches back to the quintessentially medieval conception of the communal order as a body politic, an organic totality greater than the sum of its parts. Fortescue’s self-conscious perpetuation of organic imagery marks him as firmly within the intellectual terrain of the Latin Middle Ages. Although Fortescue makes reference to the body politic throughout his political writings, it is in De laudibus legum Anglie that we find the most thorough exposition of the analogy. Chapter 13 of that treatise addresses the question of how the “political” regime originated, arguing that government of this sort must have a “voluntary” basis. Citing Augustine and Aristotle,45 Fortescue asserts that a “kingdom ruled politically” emerges when a people, sharing a community of interest and law, appoints a head. A people does not deserve to be called a body when it is acephalous, that is, without a head. Because, just as in natural things, what is left over after decapitation is not a body, but what we call a trunk, so in political affairs, a community without 43. Ibid., 53. 44. Ibid., 75. 45. Although his direct source seems to be Ptolemy of Lucca; see James M. Blythe, “Aristotle’s Politics and Ptolemy of Lucca,” Vivarium 40 (2002): 126–31.

272  m o d e r n r e c e p t i o ns a head is not by any means a body....... So a people that wills to erect itself into a kingdom or any other body politic must always set up one man for the government of all that body....... Just as in this way the physical body grows out of the embryo, regulated by one head, so the kingdom issues from the people, and exists as a mystical body, governed by one man as head.46

In many ways, Fortescue’s position constitutes a straightforward restatement of a quite hierarchical version of the organic metaphor. He clearly lacks any sympathy for republican or popular conceptions of self-governing political institutions. Any political body worthy of the name must be ruled from above; this is what nature teaches. Moreover, the reference to the community as a “mystical body” certainly echoes the theological language that other theorists had left aside in favor of thoroughgoing naturalism. Even the claim that the head arises from a public act of the people does not entail populist conclusions inasmuch as it does not require accountability or constitutional limitation of power. As I demonstrated in Chapter 7 above, however, De Laudibus legum Anglie does not leave the people entirely passive in relation to the king. Rather, Fortescue argues that it is the people, not the ruler, who keep the body politic alive and active. And just as in the natural body, as the Philosopher said, the heart is the first living thing, having in itself the blood that it sends forth to all the members, whereby they are quickened and live, the will [intencio] of the people is the first living thing, having in it the blood, namely, political provision for the interest of the people, which it transmits to the head and all the members of the body, by which the body is nourished and quickened.47

The head is not the supreme or final authority in the life of the body politic, for the king’s will extends only to what has been approved by the people for their interests. The head does not give direction autonomously, but according to the principle of the public welfare from which he originates and to which he remains permanently responsible. Indeed, this is what differentiates a “political” regime from a purely “royal” one—the latter is arbitrary and governs without necessary reference to the common good.48 Just as the body cannot exist without the head to coordinate and organize its activities, so neither the head nor any other member can survive with46. Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, 20. 47. Ibid., 20–21 48. Ibid., 19–20.

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out the continuous functioning of the heart, which establishes the common purposes that define the community. The equilibrium of the body politic derives from the operation of the heart in the circulation of blood. This is a somewhat different way of describing the source of reciprocal equity within the political organism than we have previously encountered, but it evokes the fundamental idea that public order is not identical to simple subordination and rule. Nor does this complete Fortescue’s employment of physiological images to describe the “political” community. Recall that what distinguishes a “political” regime, according to him, is its foundation in law. Following Augustine, Fortescue holds that the wellspring of a people—even before they authorize a head—is their agreement about shared legal principles. Thus, as one might expect of an author trained not only just in Scholastic philosophy but also in English common law, a central place must be made in the body for legal statute. Law becomes the muscular structure of the realm: The law, indeed, by which a group of men is made into a people, resembles the sinews of the physical body, for just as the body is held together by the sinews, so this body mystical is bound together and preserved as one by the law, ..... and the members and bones of this body, which signify the solid basis of truth by which the community is sustained, preserve their rights through the law, as the natural body does through the sinews.49

The heart, as the popular will, may pump the blood through the limbs and organs. But what permits the body to act in concert—to move itself forward—is the unity generated by the law. Without the system of muscles, the body would remain limp and inert. In turn, because the law reflects an agreement among the members of the body before the selection of a royal head, the king lacks the authority to make any modifications of the law. And just as the head of the physical body is unable to change its sinews, or to deny its members proper strength and due nourishment of blood, so a king who is head of the body politic is unable to change the laws of that body, or to deprive that same people of their own substance uninvited or against their wills.50

The organic metaphor thus functions also in Fortescue’s account as a way of stipulating the constitutional limits of “political” power. Just as the head cannot change the physiology of the body—to do so would be self-destructive 49. Ibid., 21.

50. Ibid., 21.

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as well as dangerous to the other members—so the king is prohibited from altering the legal conditions under which he rules. The physical constitution of the body becomes a direct model for the legal constitution of the polity. It should not escape our attention that the physiological analogy at the core of Fortescue’s civic-collectivism is explicitly economic in nature. He recognizes that a direct consequence of the organic community is the defense of the material interests, including property, of all of its members. As noted in chapter 7 above, the royal head firmly “bound” by the legal muscle of the body “is set up for the protection of the laws, the subjects, and their bodies and goods, and he has power to this end from the people.”51 A properly arranged body politic is one in which subjects can enjoy their own lives and property securely. Fortescue states clearly that people are motivated by the desire “to possess safer than before both themselves and their own, which they feared to lose.” But such a goal “would be thwarted if a king were able to deprive them of their means, which was not permitted before to anyone among men.”52 Fortescue indeed sometimes moves beyond merely or simply the level of analogy to a more direct correspondence of bodies: the political organism is not merely like a natural creature, it is immediately productive of the natural well-being of the human bodies that form its membership.53 Thus, a sort of physiological microcosm and macrocosm may be detected in Fortescue’s use of the metaphor. This organicism does not fit comfortably within the specific nationalistic framework that Greenfeld holds to stand behind England’s “economic miracle.” There is no particular presumption of individual rights and certainly no sense that pursuit of perceived interest can occur or be justified outside the regulation of the legal sinews of the body. What Fortescue depicts, in other words, is something far closer to the East Asian communitarian capitalist model than what Greenfeld ascribes to sixteenth-century England. And yet, given the attributes that she believes are necessary for capitalist “takeoff,” namely, a social emphasis on economic achievement, competitiveness, and prosperity, there is no reason to suppose that Fortescue’s civic-collectivism would be less effective at stimulating capital accumulation than civic-individualism. The ethos of organic holism propounded by Fortescue, and grounded in the predecessor culture of the European Middle Ages, shows itself equally suited to attain the kind of na51. Ibid., 21–22. 52. Ibid., 23. 53. Fortescue’s somewhat obsessive use of organic language is noted by both Burns, Lordship, Kingship, and Empire, 67–70, and Callahan, “Blood, Sweat, and Wealth,” 26–30.

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tionalistic fervor that Greenfeld holds to be essential to the capitalist spirit. In line with Fortescue, people will view economic goals as worthy of pursuit for the sake of king and country instead of private advantage. This does not mean that individualism is incompatible with capitalism, at least in its early phase, simply that concentration on the individual is not required or entailed. That conclusion, however, undermines the entire rationale for Greenfeld’s distinction between individualist and collectivist versions of nationalism. There is a broader historiographical issue concerning the “modernity” of capitalism at stake as well in this discovery of a capitalist spirit inhering within civic-collectivist nationalism. If Greenfeld’s general point about nationalism is sustained, then there is nothing necessarily or particularly “modern” about capitalism; the capitalist spirit as she conceives it could, and perhaps in some ways did, flourish during the Latin Middle Ages. And if so, why did no full-blown capitalist practice emerge until later times? Two answers suggest themselves. On the one hand, the transformation of the “cognitive and moral organization of reality,” in sum, of “social consciousness,” that Greenfeld posits as the precursor of capitalism as a material way of life simply took far longer than she imagines and can be traced to the cultural and intellectual developments that characterized the rise of legal, Scholastic, and political doctrines in medieval Europe. This would certainly be in line with what we are coming to realize generally about the nature of economic reflection—including what I have previously termed “policy” or early political economy—from 1100 onward. Such a conclusion would also be in line with the emerging tendency, among intellectual historians at any rate, to identify far more consistency between medieval and early modern Europe than earlier generations supposed. Alternatively, we might conclude that Greenfeld is simply wrong, in the sense that nationalism was not in fact the salient stimulus to capitalism, since values she holds to be the requisite ones for the creation of capitalist enterprise were entirely consonant with and acceptable within a noncapitalist worldview. I leave it to the reader to decide which conclusion to endorse. Regardless of one’s choice, however, one must take issue with the presumption—and it is only ever an unstated premise in Greenfeld’s work— that a bright line exists between the intellectual terrain of modernity and that of the medieval era. Time and again, this modernist prejudice has been proven grossly inaccurate or just plain mistaken, yet scholars continually return to the same well of historical ignorance. One cannot help concluding that this arises from an invidious stereotype among historians

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of modernity that caricatures the European Middle Ages as rigidly and monolithically dedicated to a narrow set of principles and ideals rooted in Roman Christianity. Indeed, this perception has sometimes been inadvertently encouraged by medievalists themselves, whose occasionally infelicitous choice of terminology (think of R. I. Moore’s “persecuting society”) lends itself readily to popularization that conforms to and reinforces existing preconceptions. The myth of the unified and “authoritarian” Respublica Christiana plays as well into the hands of modern secularists and skeptics as once it did into the haughty self-image of popes and potentates. Medievalists and scholars attuned to the Middle Ages know better.



18

V i r t ù , F o r e si g h t , an d G r ac e Machiavelli’s Medieval Moments

f

e w t o pics c o nc e r nin g the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli inspire more controversy and contention than his attitude toward religion, in particular, Christianity.1 To be sure, Machiavelli was no friend of the institutionalized Christian Church as he knew it. His examination of republican political theory, the Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy, makes clear that conventional Christianity saps from human be-

1. See Delio Cantimori, “Machiavelli e la religione,” Belfagor 21 (1966): 629–38; Bruno Di Porto, “Il problema religioso in Machiavelli,” in Le religione in Machiavelli, Guiccardini e Pascoli (Rome: Idea, 1968), 5–50; Mario Tenenti, “Le religione di Machiavelli,” Studi storici 10 (1969): 709–48; Giuseppe Prezzolini, “The Christian Roots of Machiavelli’s Moral Pessimism,” Review of National Literatures 1 (1970): 26–37; Giuseppe Prezzolini, Cristo e/o Machiavelli (Milan: Rusconi, 1971); Clifford Orwin, “Machiavelli’s Unchristian Charity,” American Political Science Review 72 (1978): 1217–28; J. Samuel Preus, “Machiavelli’s Functional Analysis of Religion: Context and Object,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 171–90; Sebastian de Grazia, “Machiavelli’s Biblical Accuracy,” Renaissance and Reformation17 (1981): 141–45; Paul Norton, “Machiavelli’s Road to Paradise,” History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 31–42 ; Timothy J. Lukes, “To Bamboozle with Goodness: The Political Advantages of Christianity in the Thought of Machiavelli,” Renaissance and Reformation 8 (1984): 266–77; Vickie B. Sullivan, “Neither Christian nor Pagan: Machiavelli’s Treatment of Religion in the Discourses,” Polity 26 (1993): 259–80; Vickie B. Sullivan, Machiavelli’s Three Romes: Religion, Human Liberty and Politics Reformed (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); essays by Benedetto Fontana, John Najemy, Marcia Colish, and Cary Nederman in a special issue of Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (October–December 1999) devoted to “Machiavelli and Religion”; and Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Machiavelli and the Politics of Grace,” MLN 119 Supplement (2004): S224–S246.

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ings the vigor required for active civil life.2 And his notorious little book the Prince speaks with equal parts disdain and admiration about the corrupt and worldly condition of the Roman Church and its papal head.3 Scholars have taken such evidence to indicate that Machiavelli was himself profoundly anti-Christian, preferring the pagan civil religions of ancient societies such as Rome, which he regarded to be more suitable for a city endowed with virtù.4 At best, Machiavelli has been described as a man of conventional, if unenthusiastic, piety, prepared to bow to the externalities of worship but not deeply devoted in either soul or mind to the tenets of Christian faith.5 The main dissenting voice of note has been Sabastian de Grazia, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning intellectual biography Machiavelli in Hell attempted to rescue Machiavelli’s reputation from those who view him as deeply hostile to Christianity.6 De Grazia argued that not only do central biblical themes run throughout Machiavelli’s writings, but that these works reveal a coherent conception of a divinely centered and ordered cosmos in which other forces (“the heavens,” “fortune,” and the like) are subsumed under a divine will and plan. Machiavelli in Hell points to evidence from throughout the Machiavellian corpus supporting an idea of divine ordination of earthly events, especially in the case of the accomplishments of extraordinary individuals. For de Grazia’s Machiavelli, success in human affairs depends primarily upon the friendship of God. If de Grazia’s basic observation is well grounded, why have Machiavelli’s religious ideas been so widely overlooked (or indeed dismissed) by recent scholars? To explain this, we have to take into account Machiavelli’s own exaggerated statements regarding the originality of his teachings, 2. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, ed. Alan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965), 228–29, 330–31. I have occasionally altered Gilbert’s translation when I felt that it strayed too far from Machiavelli’s clear meaning; when I have disagreed with Gilbert, my alteration has been based on my consultation of Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1971). 3. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 29, 44–46, 65, 91–92. 4. See Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), 196–232; Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 203–18, 238–54. 5. Dante Germino, “Second Thoughts on Strauss’s Machiavelli,” Journal of Politics 28 (1966): 372–84; J. G. A. Pocock, “Prophet and Inquisitor,” Political Theory 3 (1975): 385–401. 6. Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 30–87, 376–84. Note, however, that de Grazia realizes that Machiavelli’s Christian sentiments did not extend to the ecclesiastical persons and institutions of his day: “Niccolò cannot be found to speak irreverently of God. The same cannot be said for his writings about the church and churchmen” (87; cf. 88–121).

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as well as his already mentioned antipathy toward the institutions and officials of the Roman Church. Just as significant, perhaps, has been the tendency of scholars to suppose the devout Christianity of Machiavelli’s day to be just like—or at least very similar to—ours, and thus to judge him by modern (post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment) standards. As I argue in the present chapter, however, tenets of Machiavelli’s belief system—such as his conflation of the revelation of a divine plan with various stellar movements and mundane omens and portents—that have been deemed irreligious or pagan were in fact not merely acceptable but intellectually respectable to mainstream Christian thinkers of his time. Machiavelli’s adherence to the study of the occult sciences as the necessary means to overcome the uninspired subjection of men to fortune (Fortuna) indeed reflected a long-standing and well-established view of medieval doctrine, as I intend to demonstrate. Occult knowledge, in other words, represented for many medieval and Renaissance authors a bridge through which a few wise men might establish an understanding of the inner workings of the divine plan. Machiavelli’s adaptation of this essentially Christian worldview comports well, in particular, with his recognition that the most salient quality that a ruler could possess was foresight. In his Prince as well as in many other works, Machiavelli argued that all governments were subject to the fluctuations of Fortuna, which were largely inscrutible to the ordinary person, who relied mainly on chance and habit to guide his own actions. By contrast, the ideal Machiavellian politician, possessed of the property termed virtù (variously translated as skill, strength, prowess), is able to dominate fortune by foretelling future events: “All wise rulers ought ..... not only to pay attention to immediate crises, but to foresee those that will come, and to make every effort to prevent them. For if you see them coming well in advance, then you can easily take the appropriate action to remedy them .......” In essence, once the cause of the crisis has occurred, it is too late to prevent events from unfolding. “In politics,” Machiavelli holds, “if you foresee problems while they are far off (which only a prudent man is able to do) they can easily be dealt with; but when, because you have failed to see them coming, you allow them to grow to the point where anyone can recognize them, then it is too late to do anything.”7 Despite Alasdair Macintyre’s claim that Machiavellian Fortuna is insusceptible to the sort of reduction to rigorous nomological explanation that typifies modern 7. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 16–17.

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social science,8 Machiavelli evidently believed that the politically attuned individual could indeed draw sufficient conclusions about future events through careful study that he might control his own destiny. In part, Machiavelli thought that this capacity to predict and thus to dominate the future could be refined through the study of history and the imitation of the great rulers of the past. He is skeptical, however, that such a method will assure success: “ ..... you cannot walk exactly in the footsteps of those who have gone before, nor is it easy to match the skill [virtù] of those you have chosen to imitate.”9 The reason, presumably, is that Fortuna is too fickle and unstable to assure that the circumstances in which some previous historical figure succeeded will be identical to those faced by his imitators. Hence, it will always be unreliable to use the past as a pointer to the future, unless one can be absolutely sure that the situation one confronts in the present is precisely the same as that which some great leader dealt with before. And Machiavelli imagines that such knowledge of identical circumstance largely eludes human grasp. Since history and experience are inadequate for human beings to achieve systematic predictive knowledge such that they may control their futures, then, Machiavelli endorses an alternate, occult path to such foresight: the magical arts, and especially astrology. As Anthony Parel has exhaustively documented, Machiavelli’s writings are littered with references to the motions of the heavens, fate, the humors, and much of the related language associated with the pursuit and application of occult knowledge. Parel contends that the appeal to extraterrestrial forces is not “window dressing” or rhetorical flourish in Machiavelli’s thought; it demands to be taken with the utmost seriousness.10 Parel asserts that “Machiavelli appears to accept the contemporary position of astrological natural philosophy that the heavens are the general cause of all the particular motions— human, elemental, and natural—occurring in the sublunar world.”11 Thus, Machiavellian Fortuna amounts to a shorthand expression for all of the occult effects that govern the lives of human beings without their knowledge.12 And Machiavellian virtù involves the ability to employ knowledge 8. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1984), 88–108. 9. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 24. 10. Although see the attempted reply by Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 228–63, that Machiavelli’s orientation is radically “sublunar” and thus “temporal.” 11. Anthony Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 7. 12. Ibid., 63–85.

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of the hidden realm of existence (through divination, astrological charts, phrenology, etc.) in order to predict and control its effects so as to sustain stable governance (whether of principalities or republics).13 Astrology and related arts constitute, then, the quintessential elements of Machiavellian political “science.”14 Parel concludes from this, however, that Machiavelli overthrew Christian beliefs about Providence and free will in favor of the more (if not entirely) deterministic cosmology of the ancients, endorsing a fully “pagan” vision of the operations of the planets upon human nature that he encountered in some of the scientific literature of his era. “What Machiavelli really wants to do,” Parel declares, “is to attack Christianity on the basis of the principles of sixteenth-century astrological historiography.......”15 In support of this view, Parel posits an unbridgeable chasm between religious opposition to astrology (manifested by medieval thinkers such as John of Salisbury in the Policraticus and Nicole Oresme in Livre de divinations, as well as numerous Renaissance Christian humanists) and the neo-Ptolemaic naturalism found in a large body of Renaissance natural science.16 By contrast, I maintain that Machiavelli’s conception of religion in general is more conventionally Christian and less incompatible with the views of orthodox religion than Parel and many others have given credit. As a direct corollary, I contend that Machiavelli’s occult attachments represent not a rejection of Christianity, as Parel’s argument presumes, but an affirmation of an astrological understanding that formed part of accepted Christian cosmology and natural philosophy. Even Parel acknowledges that during Machiavelli’s time Giovanni Pontano attempted to offer a “compromise” position that denied any “incompatibility” between the Christian foes of astrology and its “naturalistic” friends.17 Parel does not seem to realize, however, that Pontano was merely reiterating a claim that stood at the core of a large body of quite conventional writing with which Machiavelli may have been familiar. This literature includes the advice books to princes indebted to the pseudoAristotelian Arabic treatise the Secreta (or secretum) secretorum and the many Latin and vernacular translations of that tract, as well as various 13. Ibid., 86–100. 14. Parel admits that many other leading scholars of Machiavelli and the Renaissance, including Eugenio Garin and Hans Baron, also noted the importance of astrology in his works; cf. ibid., 4–6. 15. Ibid., 61. 16. Ibid., 11–25. 17. Ibid., 24–25.

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Scholastic defenses of astrology and related forms of knowledge that were disseminated throughout Europe between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. By the time Machiavelli set pen to parchment to compose his major and minor writings in the early sixteenth century, there would have been nothing especially irreligious about maintaining that the key to political success was a complete and careful knowledge of the occult sciences that afforded foresight into the future and the consequent ability to control events before they happened. Mainstream Christian thought had long before Machiavelli’s lifetime embraced astrology and its associated arts as a valid and fruitful methodology for confronting and staving off political adversity. In turn, Machiavelli reproduces the central features of the theological and political underpinnings that supported the Christian endorsement of “magical” techniques. The foretelling of events on the basis of the stars was consonant with free will; insight into the occult promised to open a path to political success in the management of temporal affairs; and the ability of human beings to attain the “secret” knowledge of the meaning of extraterrestrial events itself depended upon God’s grant of understanding in the form of grace. Machiavelli’s writings share all of these themes with medieval Latin forebears. In support of this claim, we must initially turn to the question of the status of the occult sciences in the centuries immediately preceding Machiavelli. Despite Parel’s assertions about the poor reputation of astrology during the Latin Middle Ages, there were plenty of orthodox and conventionally Christian authors for whom the study of the stars in their relation to earthly events was uncontroversial. Valerie Flint explains the acceptance of astrological investigation on the basis of both its authorization by irreproachable orthodox sources (such as Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede) and its observable practicality in matters such as agriculture and medicine.18 At the very minimum, medieval thinkers maintained that the foresight produced by astrological knowledge readied one for the inevitable: “The wise man ruled the stars and foreknowledge of events eased their impact and enabled men to prepare for disaster.”19 But there was certainly a proactive element implicit in many forms of astrologically derived prediction. General or mundane astrology, which dealt with broad patterns in 18. Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 128–46. A useful set of sources has been compiled by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed., The Occult in Medieval Europe, 500–1500: A Documentary History (New York: Palgrave, 2005). 19. Sophie Page, Astrology in Medieval Manuscripts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 31.

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the natural and human worlds (including weather and the transformations of nations), might be employed to make decisions about when it was most propitious to enter into warfare or to sue for peace, as well as which plants or minerals afforded useful effects. Judicial astrology, dealing with particular human affairs such as personal character, certainly lent itself to determinations of when to undertake specific plans of action, whom to trust, and how to treat one’s friends and enemies.20 Mastery of astrological knowledge thus afforded a political tool of potentially incomparable value. An especially clear instance of the dissemination of the political dimensions of astrology is afforded by the widely circulated Secreta secretorum, which entered the West via Philip of Tripoli’s Latin translation. In all essentials, the Arabic version of the Secreta secretorum that Philip rendered into Latin after 1230 was the text known and disseminated throughout the West—including its considerable advice about the political uses of occult knowledge. Indeed, Sophie Page regards the Latin version of the Secreta secretorum to be a vital source for the diffusion of astrological teachings during the High and Late Middle Ages.21 The prologue to the Secreta secretorum reports that the keys to successful rule demand both “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” forms of knowledge.22 The former comprises the moral principles known to all (such as liberality and justice) by which governance ought to proceed; the latter involves the “secrets of the ancient philosophers and just counselors whom glorious God has chosen and endowed with His knowledge [scientia].”23 In other words, occult knowledge is understood by the author to be a divinely granted gift that is open to a few who have been judged wise and worthy. Here, as throughout the treatise, God is seen to be the source of those qualities necessary for successful rule and no king will prosper without religion.24 In turn, the author (purportedly Aristotle) promises to convey to his royal reader (Alexander the Great) all of the “intrinsic” knowledge that he himself has received from his insight into divine wisdom, in order to assure a fruitful and stable reign. A central feature of “intrinsic” knowledge is acquaintance with the extraterrestrial forces that guide the universe under the general plan laid by 20. Ibid., 26–31. 21. Ibid., 37–40. 22. Secreta secretorum cum glossis et nolutis, ed. Robert Steele in Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, fasc. V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 141–42. All translations from Latin are mine. This edition also contains an English translation by A. S. Fulton of the Arabic text, which differs in important respects from Philip of Tripoli’s Latin version. 23. Ibid., 42. 24. E.g., ibid., 47–48, 54–57, 123–25.

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divine creation by means of astrological inquiry. Aristotle declares to Alexander that “if you can do it, neither stand nor sit nor eat nor drink nor do anything else without the counsel of men expert in the art of astrology. You know for certain that glorious God does nothing in vain or useless in nature, but everything that happens occurs for a cause and a most certain reason.”25 In other words, astrology is an inspired means of improving one’s understanding of God’s plan, not an irreligious spurning of divine providence. Purity of soul is a prerequisite for openness to knowledge of the divinely ordained scheme: the truth of prophesy or divination depends on a mind and vision open to inspiration.26 Thus, Aristotle cautions Alexander against “those who say that knowledge of the planets is so difficult to learn that no one can attain it,” as well as against “others no less foolish” who assert that since “God foresees and preordains everything from eternity, ..... one may not act on foreknowledge of future events which ought to occur necessarily. Why therefore should one wish knowledge of the stars?”27 The Secreta secretorum directly confronts the challenge posed by skeptics as well as theologians to the nature of astrological knowledge. The gist of the response is not to deny directly the inevitability of future events, but to cast astrology commonsensically as yet another weapon of preparation and protection. Surely there is nothing religiously dangerous or dishonorable about making accommodation for the change of seasons—laying up appropriate supplies in expectation of the cold of winter or the heat of summer—or indeed for laying away stores of food when famine or other natural disasters threaten. Likewise, astrology simply deepens our knowledge of natural patterns so that we are readied to react: “If [events] may be pre-known, they may be tolerated more readily, avoided more prudently, and in a certain measure evaded, because, should future events be in my notice and foresight, when they occur they will be received with care and discernment, and endured without molestation and without great disturbance.”28 At the very least, the Secreta secretorum points out, we may pray to and exhort God in His mercy to intervene by miraculous action to avert whatever the stars may have in store for us. Thus, astrology may even serve as a stimulus to repentance and religiosity.29 It may seem that this represents a fairly weak and passive attitude toward the ability of human beings to employ occult science in order to con25. Ibid., 60. 27. Ibid., 61. 29. Ibid., 61–62.

26. Ibid., 164. 28. Ibid., 61.

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trol events. After all, prayer and patient acceptance are no substitute for outright avoidance. Yet the language of the Secreta secretorum also suggests that individuals may put astrological knowledge to use in order to escape what might otherwise be their fate. When the Secreta secretorum advises Alexander that “your works in public and in private are to be ..... set forth in the manner appropriate to the narration and qualities or dispositions of the science of the stars,”30 it is because knowledge of heavenly causes sharpens the king’s ability to achieve his political goals. The text confirms this implication by employing both general and particular forms of prediction made on the basis of reference to the stars. The mundane form of astrology, for instance, provides the king with highly useful information about the nature and use of talismans and of the star-determined properties of naturally occurring entities, such as plants and minerals. Aristotle explains that all manner of created existence has a sort of prototype in the heavenly world, and that the former “is the cause of the existence” of the latter and “rules it,” so that “all inferior forms are ruled by heavenly forms.”31 In turn, the relationship between the mundane and the celestial is governed by the particular qualities and motions of the stars, in sum, astrological principles.32 The overtly Neoplatonic cast of this position ought not to distract us too greatly from its occult implications: those who know and understand the celestial realm come to grasp, by extension, the true and hidden physical characteristics of earth-bound objects. To be among the select who possess the science of comprehending the relations between the stars and the sublunar world gives one a tremendous amount of power. For instance, the king can benefit from the creation of amulets that combine the properties of natural objects in astrologically informed ways, inasmuch as such a talisman confers kingship and reverence and draws out favor and obedience and repels enemies with fear and trembling; it inflicts the envious, the unyielding, and enemies; and it creates loving and hating, laughing and crying, raging and calming, and it performs great and strange and stupefying miraculous works that are long recounted.......33

The possession of a properly aligned talisman is indeed a potent weapon of political control. Likewise, the prince who has knowledge of the occult characteristics of individual natural types—stones and plants—may make 30. Ibid., 154–55. 32. Ibid., 159–60.

31. Ibid., 157. 33. Ibid., 162.

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use of them to his own advantage.34 There is a strong impulse toward control over future events, then, in the recommendation to the king that he learn the arts associated with mundane astrology. In the field of judicial astrology, the Secreta secretorum cautions the king to employ occult investigation in the appraisal of both his own condition and of the persons who surround him. Aristotle cautions Alexander to use the stars to determine the apt moment for medical treatment: And do not open veins at some time unless you receive counsel and approval of men knowledgeable in the high science of astrology, because the power [virtus] of nature is made clear in this. Beware, therefore, O Alexander, that you do not take medicine or open veins or be scarified at some time except with the permission of astrological knowledge, because the utility of medical science is exalted or improved by this.35

The author then offers precise and extensive advice about when in the changes of the firmament one should accept various forms of medical treatment, with an emphasis placed on “the signs of the sun and the moon.”36 Likewise, astrology should be consulted to determine when a ruler should fight a battle or commence a war. The “disposition of the celestial spheres” foretells the martial vigor of one’s own troops and the potentency of one’s enemies.37 The ability to predict the actions and reactions of those who surround the king, such as his counselors, depends on an astrological analysis of their birth (genesis or nativitas) with an eye to the disposition of the planets.38 All of these appeals to judicial astrology assume that a ruler forewarned will be strengthened in his capability of warding off evils and threats to his power: in sum, advance knowledge permits control. The claim widely repeated among scholars that the Secreta secretorum was the subject of late thirteenth-century ecclesiastical censorship and expurgation, directed particularly toward the examination of the occult sciences, has been systematically and convincingly refuted by Steven Williams.39 Although some manuscripts eliminated references to astrology and related topics, the excisions seem to have been guided more by the audience to whom the redactor was directing his work. This is especially apparent when the Secreta secretorum was included in collections of Aristo34. Ibid., 160–61, 114–22. 35. Ibid., 108. 36. Ibid., 108–10. 37. Ibid., 155–56. 38. Ibid., 136–37. 39. Steven J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 142–82.

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telian libri morales, such as that compiled by Engelbert of Admont in the early fourteenth century.40 Where the intended readership was comprised of scholars in the field of natural philosophy, however, the astrological and other “magical” sections remained largely intact and even foregrounded, as in the case of Roger Bacon’s appropriation of the work.41 Likewise, the many vernacular translations dating from the later Middle Ages, which were presumably intended for a courtly audience, commonly reproduced the discussions of occult knowledge found in the Latin version, and sometimes even supplemented them with more recent discoveries.42 Thus, Williams seems to me to be quite correct about the diversity of the medieval hermeneutics of the Secreta secretorum: its reception, and the consequent condition of the text, tended to turn upon the readership for whom the work was being adapted. Bacon’s use of the Secreta secretorum is especially significant for present purposes. He challenged head-on the major supposed Christian objection to astrological ideas and practices: namely, that they lead ineluctably to the denial of free will. On the contrary, Bacon remarked, “the powers of the heavens and the stars do not constrain free will but alter bodily complexions, to which alterations the mind is attracted, so that without coercion it wills freely that toward which it is attracted.”43 In other words, Bacon, and other thirteenth-century Scholastics such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, built on the standard Christian distinction between body and soul. Because they partake of substance that is different from and superior to earthly corporeal matter, human voluntary and rational powers are exempt from control by the stars, at least in the case of persons who are capa40. Discussed by ibid., 257, 264–65. 41. Ibid., 282–86. See also Hilary Carey, Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, 1992), 1–36. 42. This can be confirmed from a cursory glance at some of the printed versions of later medieval various translations and adaptations, such as Aristotle, Secreta Secretorum (London, 1528; reprinted New York: Da Capo Press, 1970); Oliver A. Beckerlegge, ed., Le Secré de Secrez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1944); Philip B. Jones, ed., The Secreto de Los Secretos: A Castilian Version (Potomac, Maryland: Humanistica, 1999); M. A. Manzalaoui, ed., Secreta Secretorum: Nine English Versions (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1977); and Robert Steele, ed., Three Prose Versions of the Secreta Secretorum (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., for the Early English Text Society, 1898). For one example of the continuing interest in, indeed deep fascination with, astrology and magic at late medieval courts, see Anthony Gross, The Dissolution of the Lancastrian Kingship: Sir John Fortescue and the Crisis of Monarchy in Fifteenth-Century England (Stamford, Connecticut: Paul Watkins, 1996), 13–27, 110–21. 43. Secreta secretorum, 121.

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ble of resisting domination by the flesh.44 The slogan “The wise person will rule the stars” was often repeated during the Middle Ages.45 Indeed, Albertus went so far as to assert in his Speculum astronomiae that it was reckless and contrary to free will to refrain from acting at times when astrological charts suggested the best prospects for success.46 The basic position that astrological investigation could be squared with freedom of the will would be echoed and sharpened by Latin Christian scholars for the next three hundred years or more.47 While during the later Middle Ages some authors, such as Nicole Oresme and Henry of Langenstein,48 adopted a form of Christian naturalism that denied occult forces, there were equally forceful voices that persisted in upholding the direct effects of stellar forces on sublunar events. Perhaps the best known among the latter was Pierre d’Ailly, a leading Scholastic theologian at the University of Paris who was also deeply involved in the politics of the Church in the early days of the Great Schism. As Laura Smoller has exhaustively demonstrated, d’Ailly devoted a great deal of intellectual effort to mastering and applying astrology at a level well beyond that of basic textbook learning. D’Ailly’s concern, in particular, was the development of an astrological interpretation of the course of human history that was not merely retrospective but also predictive. D’Ailly wished to determine whether the Great Schism—the existence of two papal claimants, each with a veneer of legitimacy, that had commenced in 1378 and continued until 1417—constituted a momentous sign of the impending arrival of the Antichrist and the final struggle or whether instead it carried less fearful overtones than a signal of Armageddon. Indeed, Smoller has shown that as he improved his knowledge of astrology, he fundamentally changed his judgment on this matter, moving from a more to a less apocalyptic perspective in the years after 1400.49 44. On this, see Laura Ackerman Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 30–31. 45. See G. W. Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 175–77. 46. Albertus Magnus, Speculum astronomiae, ed. Stefano Caroti et al (Pisa: Domus Galilaeana, 1977), 145. 47. Another late medieval thinker who grappled mightily with these issues was the Franciscan mystic and natural philosopher John of Rupescissa (c. 1310–1364); see Leah DeVun, John of Rupescissa and the States of Nature: Science, Apocalypse and Society in the Fourteenth Century (New York: Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of History, Columbia University, 2004), esp. chap. 4. 48. See Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers and Herbert Pruekner, Studien zu den astrologischen Schriften des Heinrich von Langenstein (Leipzig: Teubner, 1933). 49. Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars, 102–30

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For present purposes, two facets of d’Ailly’s astrological thought may be highlighted. First, he followed very closely the views of Bacon and the other thirteenth-century thinkers who had pioneered the Christian interpretation of astrology as compatible with free will. D’Ailly systematically proposed and defended a “concordance of astrology and theology,” the view that God’s hand may be seen in the motions of the stars and their earthly effects and hence that astrological inquiry aids in the revelation of the divine plan.50 Second, d’Ailly came to hold that the human understanding of stellar causation could positively impact the capacity to produce positive outcomes in earthly events, that is, to control the future by means of reason and will. Specifically, once he accepted that the Schism was not a sign of immediate Apocalypse, he turned to the problem of how astrological knowledge could be employed to heal the divisions within the Church by earthly means. If the Schism did not signal an epochal moment in the ultimate divine design, then the stars could be used to prognosticate the resolution of the conflict and the renewed order and good health of the Church, accomplished by the reinvigorated efforts of men of goodwill. D’Ailly, in other words, turned to the realm of free action to end the Schism by the imposition of human control over the contending parties. Did Machiavelli know some version of the Secreta secretorum, or was he perhaps familiar with the astrological debates of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance? Given our relative lack of knowledge about his education, and his own clever concealment of many of his sources and references, this question is probably impossible to answer definitively. Judith Ferster, for one, seems to suppose that Machiavelli could not have been ignorant of the Secreta secretorum, whether he knew the text itself or some adapation in a medieval mirror.51 At minimum, it appears reasonable to assert that Christian versions of astrology and other occult sciences were as much “in the air” as the pagan ideas that Parel ascribes to Machiavelli. More to the point, the outlines of the conventional Christianized astrological thought that I have surveyed fit comfortably with Machiavelli’s own remarks about the heavens and human capacities, as well as his appropriation of the theological language of grace and free will. In other words, I believe that we may see how the supposedly anti-Christian reliance in Machiavelli on classical “naturalism” in fact reflects long-standing themes of Latin Christian50. Ibid., 124. 51. Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 160–73.

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ity concerning the role played by the stars in determining mundane events and the ability of humanity to employ knowledge of this by means of reason and will—foresight, one might say—to control the future successfully. The reason for his appeal to occult forces has to do with what we might conceive of as the quintessential Machiavellian quandry. In a 1506 letter to Giovan Battista Soderini, Machiavelli purports to be perplexed by the apparently unpredictable consequences of political action: “I do not know why it should happen that different ways of acting are sometimes both successful and sometimes both unsuccessful, but I would certainly like to know.”52 In turn, precisely this dilemma animates the core of his political thought. In the Prince, for example, he comments, “I would observe that one sees a ruler flourishing today and ruined tomorrow, without his having changed at all in nature or quality.”53 How are we to explain the variations in the success or failure of rulers? To answer this question, he turns his eyes to the stars. There is virtually no part of Machiavelli’s corpus that does not include reference to astrological themes, often discussed in conjunction with Fortuna.54 He recurrently refers to the irresistible force of fortune in terms of “the heavens” or other “occult” powers that direct human action.55 As he states in the Discourses, “If we observe carefully how human affairs go on, many times we see that things come up and events take place against which the Heavens do not wish any provision to be made....... Men are able to assist Fortune, but not to thwart her. They can weave her designs but cannot destroy them.”56 The same recognition of celestial forces is echoed elsewhere in the Discourses: “To achieve something good is difficult unless Fortune, aiding you, with her power overcomes” the obstacles set for human beings.57 The Prince is rife with similar remarks. From the 52. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 896. 53. Ibid., 90. 54. The literature on Fortuna is prodigious. For a sprinkling of diverse perspectives, see Mario Santoro, Fortuna, ragone e prudenzia nella civittà literaria de Cinquecento (Naples: Liguori, 1967); Thomas Flanagan, “The Concept of Fortuna in Machiavelli,” in Anthony Parel, ed., The Political Calculus: Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 129–56; Hannah F. Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); and Oded Balaban, “The Human Origins of Fortuna in Machiavelli’s Thought,” History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 21–36. 55. There is a clear confluence of this terminology in Machiavelli’s work, as was the case is the writings of many of his contemporaries; see Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, 229–30, 232–33. 56. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 406, 408. 57. Ibid., 512.

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dedicatory epistle onward, fortune is cited as the cause of the “greatness” or “malice” that people experience.58 Machiavelli concludes the often-cited chapter 25 with the declaration that “men are successful when they are in close harmony with Fortune, and when they are out of harmony, they are unsuccessful.”59 Human beings are largely victims of fortune; and fortune itself is aligned with heavenly motions and forces. Any ruler who counts on fortune to support him, or who bases his decisions and policies on the previous course of events, will inevitably be disappointed and eventually destroyed (unless, as in the case of Pope Julius II, death intervenes before circumstances can change).60 Interpretations of Machiavelli have often associated him with the humanistic assumption that individuals are capable of making their own choices and guiding their own conduct apart from occult forces.61 But Machiavelli gives us reason to believe that the real assurance of political success, and hence the conquest of fortune, stems from knowing stellar (and hence divine) principles. Book 1, chapter 56, of the Discourses affords the quintessential example of this position: “What causes it I do not know, but both ancient and modern instances indicate that nothing important ever happens in a city or a region that has not been foretold either by diviners or by revelations or by prodigies or by other celestial signs.”62 Machiavelli points to Savanarola’s prediction of the 1494 French invasion of Italy, as well as portents widely observed in Tuscany; he mentions the strange lightening strikes that immediately preceded the death of Lorenzo de’Medici Il Magnifico and the downfall of his own master, Piero Soderini. Machiavelli speculates that the key to political opportunity is held by those who are qualified to interpret correctly such events whose meanings are otherwise hidden, and he explicitly invokes the cosmological beliefs held by medieval Christian predecessors: The cause of this I believe should be considered and interpreted by a man who has knowledge of things natural and supernatural, which we do not have. Yet it could be that since, as some philosophers hold, the air about us is full of intelligences— and these through their natural abilities foreseeing future things and having compassion on men—these spirits warn men with such signs, so they can prepare for 58. Ibid., 11. 59. Ibid., 92. 60. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 92. 61. See Neal Wood, “Machiavelli’s Humanism of Action,” in Parel, ed., The Political Calculus. 62. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 311.

292  m o d e r n r e c e p t i o ns resistance. At any rate, however it is, so the truth seems to be; and always after such strange events new things happen to countries.63

It is odd that Mikael Hörnqvist quotes the first sentence of this passage (without citing the rest or mentioning the context) as proof positive of “Machiavelli’s categorical rejection of the providential perspective and of his equally radical emphasis on the sublunar world.”64 On the contrary, Machiavelli clearly seems to embrace a cosmological principle that opens up the possibility of foreknowing future events by supernatural means. He teaches the lesson here that those who enjoy occult knowledge are not restrained by the limits otherwise imposed by fortune. Indeed, they may achieve immunity from misfortune and full control over themselves. Machiavelli thus consistently implies that there is some plan (however inscrutable) standing behind the course of human events. This is evident in his remarks that fortune or the heavens or some other occult power actively selects certain individuals for a special role in history. Speaking in the Discourses of the reform of a corrupt city, he states, Truly the Heavens cannot give a greater opportunity for glory....... Those to whom the Heavens give such an occasion should observe the two roads put before them: one makes their lives secure and after death renders them famous; the other makes them live in continual anxieties and after death leaves them an ill repute that never ends.65

From this, it is evident that individuals are selected by a power or force outside of themselves for the task of rulership (although they still utilize their free choice in taking advantage of their opportunities, as we shall see). The active quality of supernatural design is also emphasized elsewhere in the Discourses: Men who commonly live amid great troubles or great successes deserve less praise or blame, because most of the time we see that they have been pushed into a destructive or elevated action by some great advantage that the Heavens have bestowed on them, giving them the opportunity—or taking it away from them—to work effectively. Skillfully Fortune does this, since she chooses a man, when she plans to bring about great things, who is of so much perception and so much ability that he recognizes the opportunities she put before him.66 63. Ibid., 311–12. 64. Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, 232. 65. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 223.

66. Ibid., 407.

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Likewise, in the Prince, Machiavelli remarks that the capacity of the ruler to “recognize the ills in his state when they spring up ..... is given to a very few.”67 That some plan or wisdom stands behind fortune forms an article of faith in Machiavelli’s thought. Even if the scheme cannot be discerned by most people (hence, the arbitrary appearance of fortune to most men at most times), it is present. Indeed, this counts for Machiavelli as a reason for optimism: people “ought never to give up as beaten, because, since they do not know [fortune’s] purpose, and since she goes through crooked and unknown roads, they can always hope.”68 To make the observation that fortune is purposive, even providential, is already to dispel as a byproduct of human ignorance the notion that events and circumstances occur without rhyme or reason. Machiavelli’s Prince, that supposedly sacrilegious and impious book, provides key evidence for his occultist Christian orientation. In it, he repeatedly defends the view that the only truly safe means of acquiring a state is through the exercise of one’s virtù, rather than by means of fortune, since rulers who depend upon chance circumstance to maintain themselves are invariably frustrated in achieving their goal. “He who depends least on Fortune sustains himself longest,” Machiavelli asserts, “Those who ..... become princes simply through Fortune may become so with little effort, but with much effort sustain themselves.”69 Now, at the same time, he realizes that fortune is the source of all opportunities to govern; no one can achieve rulership if he is opposed by fortune. But the examples of princes held in highest esteem by Machiavelli are drawn from among those who “had from Fortune nothing more than opportunity, which gave them matter into which they could introduce whatever form they chose; and without opportunity, their strength of will would have been wasted, and without such strength the opportunity would have been useless.”70 This, then, seems to form the essence of virtù: knowing when one is well situated to act and grasping the occasion. Such knowledge, in turn, depends upon insight into occult meanings. Consequently, virtù—the word that summarizes for Machiavelli the totality of skills, talents, and abilities that the successful ruler needs—cannot be activated without some supernatural element. Consider Machiavelli’s declaration in the Second Decennale:

67. Ibid., 54. 69. Ibid., 27.

68. Ibid., 408. 70. Ibid., 25.

294  m o d e r n r e c e p t i o ns Oh proud men, ever you have arrogant faces, you who hold the scepters and the crowns, and of the future you do not know a single truth! So blinded are you by your present greed which over your eyes holds a thick veil that things remote you cannot see. From this it comes that heaven, shifting from this to that, shifts your states more often than the heat and the ice are changed, because if you turned your prudence to learning the ill and finding its remedy, such great power from heaven would be taken.71

Rulers must set aside mundane interests and come to understand how the celestial realm guides sublunar events. Once they do so, they will be able to gain the foresight they require in order to escape from the throes of fortune. The role of a political advisor such as Machiavelli is thus at best only preparatory, as he himself admits in the Preface to the second book of the Discourses: “It is the duty of the good man to teach others anything of value that through the malice of the times and of Fortune you have been unable to put into effect, in order that since many will know of it, some of them more loved by Heaven may be ready to put it into effect.”72 To the extent that the individual is the source of his own success, Machiavelli supposes, this is a function of one’s attuned and educated insight and intellect cooperating with the divinely ordained plan. Thus, Machiavelli’s solution to the predicament with which he was obsessed—the inability of human beings to conquer fortune permanently—drew directly upon central themes of contemporary Christian belief. Transcendence of mere earthly affairs and grasping their supernatural significance constitute the sole source of control over temporal events. Completely fatalistic resignation is not, therefore, in keeping with Machiavelli’s teachings. While certainly attracted to a deterministic stance in order to explain both the failure and the success of human initiative in overcoming events, he does not utterly surrender human efficacy. This is suggested, for example, in the opening paragraph of chapter 25 of the Prince: I am not unaware that many have thought, and still think, that the affairs of the world are so ruled by Fortune and by God that human prudence is incapable of controlling them, as a result of which nothing that goes astray has a remedy; and therefore it could be judged that it is useless to worry too much about things, but let them be governed by happenstance....... When I think about this, I am some71. Ibid., 461.

72. Ibid., 324.

  m ac h iav e l l i ’s m e d i e va l m o m e n t s   295 times inclined, to some extent, to share this opinion. Nevertheless, so as not to eliminate our free will [libero arbitrio], I judge it to be the case that Fortune is the arbiter of half our actions, but that it lets us control roughly the other half.73

The way in which Machiavelli has phrased his observation is revealing, in particular because of his use of the technical Latin term for freedom of the will, liberum arbitrium, in a theological sense.74 Given the emphasis on free will by medieval proponents of astrology, Machiavelli seems to draw support from the Christian Scholastic discourse that rendered the effects of the movements of the heavens compatible with the human ability to master one’s fate through knowledge and action. We might then summarize Machiavelli’s position as follows. No one ought to think that he is capable, purely by dint of his own abilities and talents, of acquiring and maintaining a state; extrinsic limitations of fortune, as well as intrinsic constraints of human nature and character, are too formidable. Instead, the effective ruler grasps the occult meanings of the stars, and hence divine purposes. That Machiavelli had something very like this position in mind is confirmed by a remark in chapter 26, just following an account of heavenly portents of Medici success: “Everything points to your greatness. The rest you must do yourself. God does not do everything, so as not to take from us libero arbitrio and part of the glory that pertains to us.”75 Heavenly selection must not be an excuse for passivity, as though achievements will fall into one’s lap without effort. God provides the opportunity and the means for success, but the will of the chosen individual must still be exercised, his virtù must be displayed. As Machiavelli asserts in The Ass, To believe that without effort on your part God fights for you, while you are idle and on your knees, has ruined many kingdoms and many states....... There should be no one with so small a brain that he will believe, if his house is falling, that God will save it without any other prop, because he will die beneath that ruin.76

Machiavelli’s lesson is clear: God’s call to action is an awakening of the free will with the assurance that the course of conduct undertaken will produce the redemption sought. Only the “redemption” in question is not personal 73. Ibid., 89–90. 74. For the precise theological meaning of liberum arbitrium, see J. R. Korolec, “Free Will and Free Choice,” in Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, eds., The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 629–41. Previous scholarship regarding Machiavelli’s use of the phrase is summarized by Marcia L. Colish, “The Idea of Liberty in Machiavelli,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971): 325–27. 75. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 94. 76. Ibid., 764.

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salvation, but the attainment of a public salvation of the citizens and subjects over whom the ruler governs and the consequent realization of his own glory. If the practice of the occult sciences affords the means for overcoming fortune, Machiavelli also supposes that the possession of such knowledge itself still reflects an expression of divine providence. Those who ultimately succeed, while they undertake freely chosen actions, nonetheless do so because they enjoy God’s grace. The theme of grace runs throughout Machiavelli’s works, including such expressions of conventional Christian piety as “An Exhortation to Penitence” and “Allocution Made to a Magistrate.”77 In the former work, especially, a clearly Christian God is portrayed as a giver of gifts, and in turn the greatest sin human beings can commit is to be ungrateful to Him. In order to realize our ingratitude, it is necessary to consider how many and of what sort are the benefits we have received from God. Consider, then, how all things made and created are made and created for the benefit of man....... Consider the beauty of the things we see. Of these, part he has made for our use, part in order that, as we observe the glory and the marvelous workmanship of these things, upon us may come a thirst and a longing to possess those other things that are hidden from us....... See, then, with how much ingratitude man rises against such a great benefactor! And how much punishment he deserves when he perverts the use of these things and turns them toward evil!78

Machiavelli’s God has bestowed upon humankind every favor—from material goods and resources to speech and reason—and thereby demands penitence from those who do not accept and appreciate the great gifts they have been granted. Nor is penitence understood in terms of inward contrition alone; it must be manifest in actions consistent with gratefulness for what God has given us.79 The gracious nature of the Machiavellian deity thus directly correlates to the function of assigning personal destiny that is allotted to fortune and the heavens elsewhere in his writings. In the Prince, likewise, Machiavelli acknowledges one certain guarantee that fortune may be overcome: the gift of grace granted by God. In chapter 6, he singles out a few men “who through their own ability and not 77. On the “Exhortation,” see Anthony J. Parel, “Machiavelli Minore,” in Parel, ed., The Political Calculus, 199–208, and Norton, “Machiavelli’s Road to Paradise”; on the “Allocution,” see Anthony J. Parel, “Machiavelli’s Notion of Justice,” Political Theory 18 (1990): 525–44. 78. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 172. 79. Ibid., 173–74.

  m ac h iav e l l i ’s m e d i e va l m o m e n t s   297

through Fortune have been transformed into princes[:] ..... Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and the like.”80 In Machiavelli’s view, Moses seems to be the greatest among these. The obvious reason for this, as stated in the Discourses, is that “among all famous men those are most famous who have been heads and organizers of religion. Next after them are those who have founded either republics or kingdoms.”81 Moses thus stands atop Machiavelli’s list of glorious men: alone among those illustrations that he offers, Moses was the founder of both a religion and a state.82 The awe in which Machiavelli holds Moses is evident in the Prince: “Although Moses should not be discussed, since he was a mere executor for things laid down for him by God, nevertheless he ought to be exalted, if only for the grace [grazia] that made him worthy to speak with God.”83 Moses was God’s chosen, His anointed. Machiavelli notes later in the chapter—making a famous contrast with Savonarola84—that Moses was the ultimate “armed prophet,” prepared to employ force in a righteous cause against those who would oppose God’s will.85 As Machiavelli observes in the Discourses, “He who reads the Bible intelligently sees that if Moses was to put his laws and regulations into effect, he was forced to kill countless men who, moved by nothing else than envy, were opposed to his plan.”86 Machiavelli finds in God’s grace an authorization to act as necessary for the sake of realizing the divine plan. Having been selected to receive God’s favor does not constrain the range of options available to the ruler. If anything, the graced prince may act with greater impunity, knowing that his cause is righteous and that he enjoys an extraterrestrial assurance of a successful end to his endeavors.87 80. Ibid., 25. 81. Ibid., 220. 82. See John T. Scott and Vickie B. Sullivan, “Patricide and the Plot of the Prince: Cesare Borgia and Machiavelli’s Italy,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 897. 83. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 25. 84. See Donald Weinstein, “Machiavelli and Savanarola,” in Myron P. Gilmore, ed., Studies on Machiavelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1972), 251–64. 85. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 26–27. 86. Ibid., 496. 87. In light of Machiavelli’s reverence for Moses as an agent of divine grace, it is difficult to understand the remarks of scholars who, while acknowledging the role played by grace in his thought, deny its political efficacy. See, for example, Parel, “Machiavelli Minore,” 192: “Grace can produce spiritual regeneration in individuals; it cannot bring about political regeneration”; or J. G. A. Pocock, “Custom & Grace, Form & Matter: An Approach to Machiavelli’s Concept of Innovation,” in Martin Fleischer, ed., Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (New York: Athaneum, 1972), 171: “He had no great faith in the actions of a special grace in the field of politics.”

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Yet might not we say that Moses is unique in this regard, as the only prince on Machiavelli’s list who actually converses with God (at least if one discounts “unarmed prophets” such as Savonarola)? While Machiavelli clearly singles Moses out for special praise, however, he does not mean to suggest that the case of the Old Testament figure is entirely unique. Rather, he remarks, “But look at Cyrus and the others who gained and founded kingdoms. You will find them all amazing; and if you look at their actions and their individual methods, they seem no different than those of Moses, who had so great a teacher.”88 While Moses certainly benefited from direct divine guidance, the other founders whom Machiavelli praises also enjoyed some special favor from God, both in terms of the gift of an opportunity for acting propitiously and the divine encouragement to seize the chance that they had been granted. The possession of divine inspiration is the most fundamental source of the similarities between Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. For what other reason would Machiavelli term all new rulers—not simply Moses—profeti?89 The idea that secular rulers, no less than theocratic ones, are agents of the divine will and serve at God’s pleasure is not so contrary to conventional religion as it may seem at first glance. Rather, the worthiness of the greatest pagan rulers in the eyes of God was upheld by medieval thinkers. Witness the story of the Emperor Trajan, widely recounted during the Middle Ages: so just was he that, although a pagan, he was saved from the tortures of Hell after the intervention of Pope Gregory with God.90 Machiavelli indeed knew this tale, for in his “Allocation Made to a Magistrate,” he cites Trajan’s example of justice, quoting in this connection from Dante’s Purgatorio and concluding, “From this we can see how much God loves justice and mercy.”91 In a similar vein, medieval Christians saw God’s hand at work in the successes of other pagan rulers. As the late thirteenthcentury Scholastic Ptolemy of Lucca declared in De regimine principum, With regard to those [pagans] exercising lordship, God seems to have granted the legitimacy of lordship....... God makes a disposition on behalf of the subjects to bring about a better result when a ruler, although a sinner, strives to please God. 88. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 25. 89. Ibid., 26. 90. On the tale and its dissemination, see Parel, “Machiavelli’s Notion of Justice,” 539– 41, and Marcia Colish, “The Virtuous Pagan: Dante and the Christian Tradition,” in William Cafero and Duncan G. Fisher, eds., The Unbounded Community (New York: Garland, 1996), 43–91. 91. Parel, “Machiavelli’s Notion of Justice,” 526–27.

  m ac h iav e l l i ’s m e d i e va l m o m e n t s   299 Isaiah writes [in 4 Kings 15.1–7] about Cyrus, King of the Persians: “I, the Lord, say these things to my Christ, Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, so that I might subject the nations to him and turn the backs of kings. I will open the doors before him and the gates will not be closed.......” God disposed things in this way because Cyrus showed humility towards His faithful Jews....... As a result of these good and virtuous works in favor of the divine cult and the people of God, he obtained the monarchy of the entire East.92

So Machiavelli’s description of Cyrus as an “armed prophet” on par with Moses is neither singular nor sacrilegious after all. Rather, to claim that the success of rulers depends upon a gift directly from God, regardless of whether they enjoy some immediate relationship with the divine being, was a hallmark of Christian thought long before the Prince. At best, Machiavelli is simply adapting this tradition to explain how the greatest princes have managed to overcome the limitations imposed by fortune as well as their own natures and characters: they benefited from God’s aid. In the final chapter of the Prince, Machiavelli returns to the theme that rulers are sure to succeed only when the hand of God assists them. His goal is to implore the Medici family to look upon themselves as the new “redeemers” of Italy.93 In this regard, he compares the current predicament of Italy with the situations encountered by Moses among the Hebrews, Cyrus in Persia, and Theseus in Athens: in all cases, the nation was “without leadership, without order, beaten, despoiled, lacerated, devastated, subject to every sort of ruination,” in sum, ready for a new founding.94 Just as God had once granted the opportunity to act gloriously to His earlier “armed prophets,” so it exists in Machiavelli’s own day. Indeed, the Prince in this passage overtly invokes the divine dimension of Italy’s need for salvation, identifying God’s hand both in the existence of propitious circumstances and in the selection of a leader: And though up to now various gleams have appeared in some Italians from which we might judge them ordained by God for her redemption, nevertheless we have seen that, in the highest course of their actions, they have been disapproved by Fortune....... [Italy] is now praying to God to send someone to redeem her from such barbarous cruelty and arrogance....... There is not, at present, anyone in whom she 92. Ptolemy of Lucca, De regimine principum, in St. Thomas Aquinas, Opuscula Omnia necnon Opera Minora, v. I, Opuscula Philosophica, ed. R.P. Joannes Perrier (Paris: Lethielleux, 1949), 3.7.4. 93. Machiavelli, Chief Works, 96. 94. Ibid., 92–93.

300  m o d e r n r e c e p t i o ns can have more hope than in your glorious family, which, through its fortune and its wisdom and strength, favored by God and by the Church (of which it is now head), can make itself the leader of this redemption. This will not be very hard if you bring before you the actions and lives of those named above [viz., Moses, Cyrus and Theseus]. And although these men were exceptional and marvelous, nevertheless they were men; and every one of them had a poorer chance than the present one, because their undertaking was not more just than this, nor easier, nor was God more friendly to them than to you.95

Machiavelli then goes on to list numerous omens and portents (biblical in inspiration), which accord perfectly with the occultism that forms part and parcel of his Christian belief system. He proclaims that “now we see marvelous, unexampled signs that God is directing you: the sea is divided; a cloud shows you the road; the rock pours out water; manna rains down.......”96 These statements perhaps constitute the most extreme illustration of Machiavelli’s reliance upon a medieval Christian theology that made room for the sublunar understanding of supernatural plans. From this, he concludes that human beings cannot overcome the obstacles to rulership on their own, but must be selected by divine grace, and thereby authorized by God’s providence, in order to assure success. Is the intimation of the Medici’s divine appointment mere hyperbole or even sheer flattery on Machiavelli’s part? Scholars have certainly suspected as much. Hörnqvist asserts, for example, that the religious images of chapter 26 form “mere pretexts, or covers, for taking up arms, ..... rhetorical devices designed to promote Medicean expansionism.”97 But it should be evident that Machiavelli’s scripturally flavored forecast is entirely consistent with his remarks about grace elsewhere in his corpus. It is therefore plausible to sustain de Grazia’s conclusion that “the references to the divine in The Prince comprise significant metaphysical and theological statements, with political bearings just as significant”; hence, Machiavelli’s “remarks are not trivial.”98 Not only does Machiavelli articulate an internally consistent position with regard to the divine design regarding earthly political affairs, but he does so in a manner that perpetuates medieval Christian doctrines. And his reliance upon God’s ordination and grace has a very serious and important purpose: to act as a counterweight to the 95. Ibid., 93–94. 96. Ibid., 94. 97. Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, 258. 98. De Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, 31.

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claim that the forces of fortune necessarily constrain the ability of people to succeed in the conduct of government. Even with so much evidence on display that Machiavelli absorbed and embraced the Christian cosmology of his day, there remains a pronounced tendency to ignore the medieval backdrop to his ideas. Rather, Machiavelli’s doctrines are still ordinarily approached from the perspective of the debate between the via antiqua and the via moderna,99 or as constituting a radical break with the teachings of the Latin Middle Ages. Scholars seem happy to repeat uncritically the view that Giuseppe Prezzolini once bluntly stated: “Machiavelli is anti-medieval. He represents the most complete rupture with the medieval world, in the most extensive way.”100 Yet Machiavelli’s conception of rulership truly possesses, in the words of Silvia Ruffo Fiore, a “sacral nature”: “As a leader the new prince embodies the biblical prophet-king who has received a special divine call, a covenant from God to guide the destiny of the nation toward an appointed goal.”101 Nor is Machiavelli’s sacral ruler a mere “parody” of religious themes, as Fiore would have it. Machiavelli is, rather, deadly serious about the need for a ruler who activates his free will by means of acquiring occult knowledge of future events in order to fulfill the purposes stemming from the grace granted by God, for no other means of success is possible, given the natural and supernatural limits that otherwise burden human beings. The charge of an ironic or otherwise unserious stance on the part of Machiavelli toward God and supernatural powers is a most troublesome one. Among the more popular images of him is that of a satirist, a purveyor of parody, none of whose statements may be taken at face value.102 This is the reason, for instance, that the “Exhortation to Penitence” has been so 99. See Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in Henry Hardy, ed., Against the Current (New York: Random House, 1980); Nathan Tarcov, “Quentin Skinner’s Method and Machiavelli’s Prince,” Ethics 92 (1982): 692–709; Donald McIntosh, “The Modernity of Machiavelli,” Political Theory 12 (1984): 184–203; W. R. Newell, “How Original Is Machiavelli? A Consideration of Skinner’s Interpretation of Virtue and Fortune,” Political Theory 15 (1987): 612–34; Larry Peterman, “Gravity and Piety: Machiavelli’s Modern Turn,” Review of Politics 52 (1990): 189–214; Anthony J. Parel, “The Question of Machiavelli’s Modernity,” Review of Politics 53 (1991): 320–39; and Roger D. Masters, Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1996), 161–205. 100. Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli Anticristo (Rome: Casini, 1954), 86–87. 101. Silvia Ruffo Fiore, “‘Upon Eagle’s Wings’: The Sacral Nature of Machiavelli’s New Prince,” Rivista di Studi Italiani 3 (1985): 2. 102. Garrett Mattingly, “Political Science or Political Satire?” The American Scholar 27 (1958): 482–91; see Mary G. Dietz, “Trapping the Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception,” American Political Science Review 80 (1986): 779–80.

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readily rejected as hypocritical or worse. Indeed, one of the primary criticisms of de Grazia’s reading of Machiavelli is his credulity of the Florentine’s references to God. As one critic has asserted, it “would make more sense if de Grazia took his interpretation just one step further to question whether it was all a hoax. Perhaps the assertions regarding God and the conclusion that special treatment awaits the new prince are Niccolò’s way of easing the good prince into committing evil acts.”103 Another of de Grazia’s reviewers complained that he embraces “the sincerity premise that is conventional to modern scholarship. For whatever reasons, Machiavelli is sincere and never tries to trick his readers....... Nothing would have amused our Niccolò more.”104 What such critics lack is an explanation of why we should not take Machiavelli at his word on the subject of the divine and the supernatural. The reason appears to be that they have judged his Christianity by their own far more modern standards and found him wanting. The present chapter has attempted to demonstrate, on the basis of the human predicament posited by Machiavelli himself, why he had to be perfectly and profoundly serious in his references to the Christian God and to related supernatural forces, as well as to the power of free will. The cards are stacked against the ruler who supposes that his talents, abilities, and strength—apart from some divine ordination—are sufficient to earn him stable dominion over a state: the vicissitudes of fortune dictate that his ventures will end in failure in the short run or at best the medium term. Hence, the true, assured, and everlasting glory of the political leader, whether princely or republican, is to be found solely in extraterrestrial appointment. Of course, just as no one can know whether or not he is truly a bearer of divine grace, so Machiavelli advises in a passage of the Discourses already cited that no prospective governor ought to give up his cause as entirely lost. The Lord moves in mysterious ways, and any man, no matter how downtrodden, may properly hope and pray for the improvement of his present condition. In this way, Machiavelli encourages a sense of uncertainty, and optimism for future betterment, on the part of human beings: God may call upon anyone at some pivotal moment, and thus may confer glory everlasting (temporal as well as spiritual) upon any person. The whole thrust of Machiavelli’s political theory is the promotion of prepara103. Susan Benhuniak-Long, “The Elusive Machiavelli,” Review of Politics 52 (1990): 319. 104. Harvey C. Mansfield, untitled review of Machiavelli in Hell, American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 765.

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tion for divine ordination—albeit such readiness is accomplished as much by the study of the stars and portents as of the Holy Book. Nonetheless, the arbiter of political success and failure is God, not humanity. To ascribe some other view to Machiavelli would be to endow him with either an excessively positive or an inordinately negative view of the human condition that a careful examination of the full range of his writings will not sustain.



19

A r g u in g S o v e r e i g n t y in t h e Seventeenth Century Bracton’s Readers

o d e r n p o l i t ica l a u t h o r s read medieval texts—of that there can be no doubt. But does the modern reception, even the citation, of writings dating from the Middle Ages amount to a discernable “influence”? Some historians of political thought, perhaps most notably Quentin Skinner, have challenged the attribution of “influence” on the grounds that ideas are not disembodied “units” capable of transmission across the ages.1 Other scholars, such as Francis Oakley, insist that when modern writers draw upon medieval sources, we must judge them to have been “influenced” by the authorities that they choose to cite and quote.2 The dilemmas posed to the historian of European political thought by such methodological quandaries are immediately evident to anyone who has sought to appraise the use made of medieval political texts and doctrines by English au1. As Anthony Pagden stressed in his introduction to The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–2. For a classic statement of this view, see Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 4–22. A more elaborate discussion of issues stemming from the “unit idea” approach is presented by Conal Condren, “Ideas and the Model of Political Events: A Problem of Historicity in the History of Ideas,” Political Science 36 (1984): 53–66. 2. Francis Oakley, Politics and Eternity: Studies in the History of Medieval and Early-Modern Political Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 138–87.

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thors during the Civil War and its aftermath. Even a superficial survey of mid- and late-seventeenth-century tracts suggests that their authors were familiar not only with a host of Scholastic writers, but also with the socalled operative political theories contained in medieval English legal and administrative manuals.3 One finds references to the lawbooks Fleta and Speculum justiciariorum,4 and to the procedural handbook Modus tenendi parliamentum,5 in writings dating from the period between the outbreak of the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. Perhaps the most widely cited of the medieval treatises in this genre was the De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae customarily ascribed to Henry de Bracton. Scholars have long recognized that the presence of Bractonian ideas and language was a feature of political debate in seventeenth-century England.6 And true to the “unit idea” methodology, they have assumed that De legibus was an influence on, or a source for, the development of the political doctrines of its later readers. Thus, when it is observed that De legibus was quoted with equal approval by both parliamentarian and royalist authors, the presumption has been that this was only possible because of an ambiguity in Bractonian thought itself, an internal tension between constitutionalist and absolutist strains within the text.7 The following chap3. The distinction between Scholastic and “operative’’ theory is defended by Donald W. Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 12–13. 4. These two treatises are both available in modern critical editions: Fleta was edited by H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, 3 vols. (London: Selden Society, 1955–1972); and the Speculum justiciariorum by W.J. Whittaker (London: Selden Society, 1895). On the background to their composition, see Noel Denholm-Young, “Who Wrote Fleta?” English Historical Review 58 (1943): 1–12, and H. G. Reuschlein, “Who Wrote The Mirror of Justices?” Law Quarterly Review 58 (1942): 265–79. 5. The Modus tenendi parliamentum was edited most recently by Nicholas Pronay and John Taylor in Parliamentary Texts of the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 13–63. A useful appraisal of the text is that by George P. Cuttino, “A Reconsideration of the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum,” in F. L. Utley, ed.. The Forward Movement of the Fourteenth Century (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1961), 31–60. 6. See Charles H. McIlwain, Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1947), 73–74, and The Growth of Political Thought in the West (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 371–72; Frances D. Wormuth, The Origins of Modern Constitutionalism (New York: Harper, 1949), 37–39; R. F. Treharne, “The Constitutional Problem in Thirteenth-Century England,” in T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke, eds., Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 54; Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1966), 149–51; and D. E. C. Yale, “‘Of No Mean Authority’: Some Later Uses of Bracton,” in M. S. Arnold, T. A. Green, S. A. Scolly and S. D. White, eds., On the Laws and Customs of England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 390–92. 7. Among those who have emphasized such an irreconcilable tension between the abso-

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ter seeks to demonstrate, however, the falsity of this assumption. I propose instead that in order to make Bracton speak with a seventeenth-century voice, it was necessary to impose distinctively modern intellectual categories upon the text. A modern reading of De legibus could be accomplished in a number of ways. The present investigation does not pretend to be exhaustive;8 instead, the argument will be confined to four theorists of widely varying political commitments: Sir Robert Filmer, Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Algernon Sidney. These authors were united in their attempt to reconstruct the conception of kingship and government in De legibus with reference to a distinctively modern theory of sovereignty (construed as inalienable and indivisible).9 Such a notion of sovereignty was both intellectually and historically foreign to the Latin Middle Ages. Not only did medieval authors lack a term that we might consistently and coherently translate as “sovereignty,”10 but the political contexts within which they functioned yielded a conceptual matrix that was incompatible with the notion of a sovereign.11 The ability of thinkers during the Middle Ages to distinguish meaningfully between “regular” and “casual” power excluded a modern conception of sovereign authority.12 Nor would inalienable and indivislutist and the constitutionalist strains in the argument are McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 77–92; Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1961), 176–78; and Treharne, “The Constitutional Problem in the Thirteenth Century,” 55–60. 8. The list of seventeenth-century authors who drew on De legibus is startlingly long. A partial list compiled by Andrew Sharp from his doctoral thesis points to twenty or so tracts in which a Bractonian influence may be detected; see Andrew Sharp, The English Peerage in Political and Heraldic Thought during the Civil War and Interregnum (Cambridge: unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1971). One mixed monarchy theorist of some prominence who makes extensive use of Bracton is George Lawson, Politica Sacra et Civilis, ed. Conal Condren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 9. By this use of “sovereignty,” I mean only to imply a minimal, essentially Bodinian conception of a single and unified political power. I follow the usage of F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 27: “The idea of sovereignty was the idea that there is a final and absolute political authority in the political community; and everything that needs to be added to complete the definition is added if this statement is continued in the following words: ‘and no final and absolute authority exists elsewhere.’” 10. Gaines Post, “Review of Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages,” Speculum 39 (1964): 366–68. 11. Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 8–9 and 57. 12. This distinction is surveyed by Arthur S. McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 78–80; and Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 127–28, 134.

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ible sovereignty have had much appeal in circumstances where power was commonly understood in terms of “cooperation” or “sharing” among different individuals and groups.13 In sum, a “unit idea” approach to intellectual history will not suffice to explain how sovereignty could come to be ascribed to Bractonian political thought. It was not Bractonian ideas that stimulated seventeenth-century concepts of sovereign authority; the doctrines of De legibus are neither “sources” nor “influences” in a conventional sense. We must instead employ other categories to describe the citation of Bractonian political thought by the authors mentioned above. As discussed in chapter 6 above, De legibus operates from the premise of personal monarchic rule. The king’s potestas (power) rests upon the royal voluntas (will). The Bractonian royal voluntas is not primarily concerned with legislation. Laws are promulgated through a cooperative process; the king assents to those statutes that have received approval from the magnates and the community of the realm. In addition, De legibus acknowledges that local custom may also have the force of law. Hence, the law of the land is more properly understood as the creation of the subjects over whom it is imposed.14 The proper authority of the king is consequently exercised mainly by enforcement of law through judicial judgment and coercive punishment. De legibus regards the crucial feature of royal potestas as the performance of justice in conjunction with the penalization of offenders by means of the “material sword.” In view of this role, the king is likened to God. The divine will is both the ultimate source of all justice and the final avenger of all transgressions. Insofar as the ruler’s voluntas is characterized by analogous tasks, the royal office is an imitation (albeit imperfect and earthly) of the supreme will. It is for this reason that De legibus recurrently describes the king as the divine “minister” or “vicar.”15 The God-like stature and duties attributed to the Bractonian monarch implies that he can have neither peer nor superior. Although no king could possibly hear all cases and enforce all laws by himself, the ruler is ultimately responsible for regulating delegated authority and for protecting against abuses by lesser powers. But how can it be ensured that the monarch himself will uphold justice and judge in accordance with it? Why should the 13. The cooperative theme has been addressed by Cary J. Nederman, Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-Century England (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 6–13. 14. Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudines Angliae, ed. Samuel E. Thorne, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968–1977), 2:19 and 22. 15. Ibid., 2:33 and 305.

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king, against whom no writ runs, voluntarily obey legal statute? De legibus resolves this dilemma by construing the ruler’s voluntas in terms of a habitus (ingrained disposition) to perform justice.16 Thus, the king can be expected to do what is just because the characteristic moral orientation of his voluntas toward goodness entails a stable disposition to obey all just legislation. In this sense, the king is said to be “non sub homines, sed sub deo et sub leges” because he “bridles” himself through the self-imposed restraint of his own voluntas. No man can force the king to be just in his acts and decisions; it is sufficient that his will be so firmly fixed upon justice that it cannot choose an course of action that is unjust. To the extent that the king commits a positive and flagrant injury, however, he may be bridled by those persons—his barons and counts—whom he has associated with himself in the performance of justice.17 While the monarch has no peer in the commission of just deeds, neither has he an unlimited capacity to do injury to his subjects. Since the royal will is a characteristically good moral will, the king’s privileged status is erased by his refusal to correct a clear injustice. The magnates are thereby admonished to censure or impose judgment upon the tyrannical monarch in the royal curia itself. If they decline to do so, they will receive the same eternal damnation as their royal master; but no further action by the people short of prayer is contemplated.18 De legibus applies to the problem of the tyrannical ruler the typically medieval claim that a prince who ordinarily exercises a given set of political rights may, in exceptional circumstances, legitimately have his authority overridden by another power—without, however, losing or abrogating his original rights. Few features of the Bractonian conception of kingship and government were left untouched or unaltered by those seventeenth-century theorists committed to a strong doctrine of sovereignty. Rather, in view of the authoritative weight that the name of Bracton doubtless lent to any polemical position, authors working between the reigns of Kings Charles I and William III sought to “recover” what Sir Robert Filmer called “the true sense of Bracton’s words.”19 However, this process of recovery was ac16. Ibid., 2: 23. For a full discussion of the significance of the Bractonian theory of habitus for the understanding of the work’s political ideas, see Cary J. Nederman, “Bracton on Kingship Revisited,” History of Political Thought 5 (1984): 66–73. 17. Bracton, De Legibus, 2:109–10. 18. For a more thorough examination of this argument, see chaper 6 of the present volume. 19. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), 139.

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complished by means of the reconstruction of the political ideas contained in De legibus along lines consistent with indivisible and inalienable sovereignty. Filmer himself affords a prime case in point. His approach to Bractonian thought in Patriarcha derives from his promotion of absolute monarchy. According to Filmer, Bracton’s authority for “the unlimited jurisdiction of kings”20 rivals that of Scripture or the Fathers of the Church. Indeed, Bracton is preferable as a source of establishing royal sovereignty because he is an Englishman “who lived since the institution of Parliaments,” and thus had ample opportunity to observe the rights of the English Crown in relation to the alleged liberties of the Commons.21 Patriarcha’s quotations from the text of De legibus in support of royal absolutism are highly selective: Filmer consistently extracts excerpts that appear to exempt the king from the obligation to obey statutes and to render him subservient to God alone. Yet these remarks occur in the midst of passages of De legibus in which the principle of royal submission to law forms the major theme.22 That Filmer was untroubled by attributions that seem to us wholly fraudulent reflects his belief that genuine legislative proclamations logically require a sovereign who is above any law: “There can be no laws without a supreme power to command or make them..... . In a monarchy, the king must of necessity be above the laws. There can be no sovereign majesty in him that is under them. That which giveth the very being to a King is the power to give laws.”23 This concept of absolute and indivisible sovereignty is placed by Filmer directly into Bracton’s mouth. Filmer states (accurately enough) that Bracton defends the primacy of the king in the performance of justice, so that judges in the royal court should be regarded strictly as deputies of the Crown. But Patriarcha then insists that the Bractonian position entails the sovereign unity of legislation and adjudication: “It is most reasonable that the lawmaker should be trusted with the application or interpretation of the laws.”24 As proof that this is the actual view of “Bracton, that learned Chief Justice in the Reign of Henry III,” Filmer mistranslates a sentence of De legibus (without providing the Latin, which was his usual practice) to the effect that “in doubtful and obscure points the interpretation and will of our Lord the King is to be expected, since 20. Ibid., 96. 21. Ibid.,100. 22. Compare Filmer’s quotations at ibid., 100, with Bracton, De legibus, 2:33 and at Patriarcha, 104, with De legibus, 2:306. 23. Patriarcha, 105. 24. Ibid., 109.

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it is his part to interpret who made the law.”25 In the Latin text, the final clauses reads “..... cum eius sit interpretari cuius est condere” (“since it is for him who establishes to interpret”).26 The context is the discussion by De legibus of royal charters rather than of leges. Filmer, in brief, has altered the meaning of the passage from De legibus to reflect the only doctrine that makes sense to him: namely, if the king is the supreme judge, then he must also be the sole legitimate source of legislation within his realm. Filmer reaffirms and defends this basic stance in the Freeholders Grand Inquest.27 Against authors who would deny to the king any positive role in the pronouncement of law, Filmer again contraposes the quotation from De legibus about the interpretation of doubtful and obscure matters. But this time, he cites the passage more completely and in its proper context; he also replaces his extrapolation “who made the law” with the more accurate phrase “who makes the charter.”28 Nevertheless, Filmer feels justified in extracting the same lesson from De legibus as previously: “When Bracton wrote, the laws that were then made, and strived for, were called the King’s Charters, as Magna Charta, Charta de Foresta, and others, so that in Bracton’s judgment the King hath not only a legislative voice to hinder but an affirmative to make law.”29 By means of the identification of charters with laws—however historically suspect that might be—Filmer attributes to Bracton the doctrine that the royal will is characteristically legislative. De legibus becomes an authority for the traditional legislative role of the English king. And just as in Patriarcha, Filmer immediately joins this law-making capacity to the more genuinely Bractonian contention that the Crown is the source of all jurisdiction and judgment. According to Filmer, “Not only the law-maker, but also the sole judge of the people, is the King, in the judgment of Bracton,”30 an idea that Filmer had earlier construed to mean that “the King only and none but he, if he were able, should judge all cases, saith Bracton.”31 Bractonian political thought is thereby converted into a witness for the sovereignty of the English monarchy: the king is 25. Ibid., 109. 26. Bracton, De legibus, 2:109. 27. Although Filmer’s authorship of the Freeholders Inquest has been disputed, whether or not it is genuinely his work is not germane here. For the present, I shall continue the convention of referring to Filmer as author of the Freeholders Inquest until more definitive evidence emerges. On the reasons for questioning of Flimer’s authorship, see Corinne Comstock Weston, “The Authorship of the Freeholders Grand Inquest,” English Historical Review 95 (1980): 74–98. 28. Filmer, Patriarcha, 172–73. 29. Ibid., 173. 30. Ibid., 173. 31. Ibid., 154.

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vested with all powers of justice as well as legislation, none of which can be exercised by others except through his explicit authorization. Filmer’s belief that Bracton espoused such a conception of royal sovereignty, in turn, encourages him to confront some of the evidence favoring a different reading of De legibus. In particular, those who would contend that the king’s power is subservient to or dependent upon his subjects are mistaken if they find any authority for that view in Bracton. Filmer admits that, in the addicio de cartis, Bracton does appear to concede to law and to “a court of Earls and Barons” a place “above the King” (although he goes on to stress that the text mentions “not a word of the Commons, or the representative body of the kingdom being any part of the superior court”).32 But Filmer does not regard Bracton to have meant in truth that the king is inferior to any of his subjects; this would violate the principle of sovereignty already ascribed to the Bractonian king, and it would be inconsistent with statements found elsewhere in De legibus. Filmer thinks it possible, however, to resolve the apparent dilemma posed by the text without undermining royal sovereignty. As conceived by the Freeholder, the “superiority” of law and the baronage is of an advisory nature only: The law and the court of Earls and Barons ..... must of necessity be understood to be superiors, so far only as to advise, and to direct the King out of his good grace and will only: which appears plainly by the words of Bracton himself....... The same man, who speaking according to some men’s opinion, saith, the law and court of Earls and Barons are superior to the King; in this place he tells us himself, the King hath no superior but God: the difference is easily reconciled; according to the distinction of the schoolmen, the King is free from the coactive power of laws or counselors: but may be subject to their directive power, according to his own will: that is, God can only compel, but the law and his courts may advise him.33

It is important to note that the “difference” of which Filmer speaks only raises a problem under the assumption of an absolute and indivisible conception of sovereignty. Filmer effectively transforms “superiority” into “sovereign authority,” so that a true superior in one case must be superior in all instances. Thus, Filmer supposes that there must be two senses of “superiority” present in De legibus: one, reflecting political sovereignty or “coactive” power, is an unqualified prerogative of the king; the other, a right to counsel and guide royal decisions, may be found in laws and in the curia, 32. Ibid., 139. 33. Ibid., 140.

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but exists only at the behest and with the approval of the king himself. The second form of superiority is consequently of an inferior sort. Obviously, as a coherent interpretation of the text, Filmer’s attempted “reconciliation” is unsatisfactory,34 but more to the point, both the alleged contradiction and the proposed resolution are directly the product of Filmer’s attribution of the idea of royal sovereignty to the political argument of De legibus. Bractonian doctrines were used to similar effect by another eminent proponent of royal absolutism, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes’s interest in Bracton is manifested in the Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England.35 Like Filmer, Hobbes found in De legibus an authority of unimpeachable antiquity for the contention that the English Common Law, no less than the reasoning of philosophers, affirms the sovereignty of the Crown. Describing Bracton as “the most authentick Author of the Common Law,” Hobbes declares that De legibus is foremost among the legal “Books” to be consulted regarding “points of the Right of Soveraignty.”36 At the same time, Hobbes repeatedly states that Bractonian doctrines reflect “Reason”; in other words, they accord with the conclusions of rational inquiry apart from the authority of legal precedent. The Dialogue concentrates upon De legibus in a chapter devoted mainly to the question of whether there exist any independent grounds for subjects to resist the commands of sovereigns. Hobbes had established that human justice proceeds from the creation of legal statute: there is no justice or injustice before there is law defining it as such, and thus there is no property or secure possession in the absence of law.37 By extension, he argues that the very existence and continuation of law and justice (not to mention property) depend upon the vitality of the will of the sovereign who makes and enforces law: “It is in virtue of the Soveraignty, that every man may not enter into, and Possess what he pleaseth; and consequently to deny the Soveraign any thing necessary to the sustaining of his Soveraign Power, is to destroy the Propriety he pretends to.”38 Sovereignty and safe ownership are but two sides of the same coin; the presence of sov34. A quite similar reading of De legibus was proposed by Brian Tierney, “Bracton on Government,” Speculum 38 (1963): 314–16, and H. G. Richardson, Bracton: The Problem of His Text (London: Selden Society, 1965), 33–34. 35. The editorial history of the Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England is synopsized by Joseph Cropsey in his edition of the text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 2–8. References shall be to this edition, followed by the pagination of the first edition of 1681. 36. Ibid., 74; 38. 37. Ibid., 72–73; 36. 38. Ibid., 43; 36–37.

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ereignty is all that stands in the way of the assertion by individuals of their “Right to all things.”39 As a consequence, the welfare of subjects depends upon the ruler’s exercise of the full range of political powers. Hobbes specifies these powers by creating a pastiche of phrases derived from the text of De legibus. The distinct impression left by this compilation is that Bracton’s king was the maker as well as the enforcer of law, and that all the rights within the realm were inseparable from the Crown.40 Hobbes posits the Common Law tradition as the source of the indivisibility and inalienability of the monarch’s sovereign power. The philosophical interlocutor of the Dialogue asks, “If Bracton’s Law be Reason, as I, and you think it is; what temporal power is there which the King hath not? What is there that the King cannot do, except sin against the Law of God?”41 In short, the Bractonian monarch as reconstructed by Hobbes acquires all the salient characteristics of the absolute sovereign. Finding in De legibus such a reliable authority for royal sovereignty, Hobbes seeks to refute those opponents of absolute monarchy who ascribe to the Common Law a pervasive preference for popular liberty. The Dialogue infers from the Bractonian insistence that the king is supreme in the performance of justice that all royal acts are beyond question or resistance. But was not the inviolability of the royal will precisely an idea condemned by parliamentarians during the Civil War as incompatible with the principle of Common Law? To Hobbes, it appears that Bracton’s doctrine concerning “the Rights of Soveraignty so much cryed down by the long Parliament, is the Ancient Common Law, and that the only bridle of the Kings of England ought to be the fear of God.”42 It was the enemies of the Crown, rather than its proponents, who sought to overthrow the legal and political traditions endemic to the English. Any rational person could, Hobbes concludes, have adduced the doctrine of royal sovereignty from the Bractonian precept of the king’s superiority: There be many men that are able judges of what is right Reason and what not; when any of these shall know that a man has no Superior, nor Peer in the Kingdom, he will hardly be persuaded he can be bound by any Law of the Kingdom, or 39. Ibid., 73; 36. 40. Ibid., 74; 38. Oddly, Cropsey remarks, “Many of Hobbes’s quotations are to some extent paraphrases. He never, to my knowledge, corrupts the sense of what he renders ..... “ (49). Apparently, Cropsey did not bother to consult very carefully the text of De legibus. 41. Ibid., 74; 38. 42. Ibid., 74; 39.

314  m o d e r n r e c e p t i o ns that he who is subject to none but God, can make a Law upon himself, which he cannot also as easily abrogate, as he made it.43

Once again, the Bractonian statement that the king is superior in matters of justice is construed as a fully elaborated notion of sovereignty. For Hobbes, the stress in De legibus on royal superiority implies nothing less than a monarch whose will is legislative in nature and hence above law. It then becomes possible for him to transform the Common Law into a refutation of numerous facets of the parliamentary case. If De legibus did not support the limitation of royal power by the Commons or the laws of England, one of the major pillars of parliamentarian thought—that the ancient English constitution placed law above will44—collapses. The presentation of Bractonian ideas in the Dialogue, then, should not be characterized as either rhetorical flourish or as a superficial appeal to authority. Rather, Hobbes’s ability to invoke De legibus as a source clearly favoring royal sovereignty was crucial to his effort to bring the Common Law into line with the lessons of reason regarding the absolute nature of monarchy. While Bracton may have been a familiar and friendly name among advocates of English absolutism, he was no less popular among theoretically minded adherents to the parliamentary cause. Like their absolutist opponents, some parliamentarian theorists invoked a notion of sovereignty in order to interpret De legibus in an “un-Bractonian” fashion. Such filtering of a modern concept of sovereign power into the pages of De legibus in order to support popular rights is evident, for instance, in John Milton’s Pro populo Anglicano defensio.45 Milton’s reliance upon De legibus at first seems to be unexceptional. Bractonian citations are employed to explain the common medieval distinction between kingship and tyranny. The king rules well, according to reason and law, and thus as divine representative on earth; the tyrant, by contrast, is the image of the devil, governing by passion and force. Milton ascribes a similar foundation to law: “Nothing contrary to the laws of God or to reason can be considered law, any more than a tyrant can be considered a king, or the servant of the Devil a servant of God.”46 Like kings, laws must live up to the absolute standards imposed 43. Ibid., 75–76; 41. 44. On this doctrine, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Norton, 1967), 51–52. 45. The background to the Defensio is reviewed by William J. Grace in his preface to the edition of the text in D. M. Wolfe, ed. Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 4:285–86. 46. Ibid., 492.

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by God and reason. Should either a ruler or a statute fail the test, each loses its legitimacy: the king becomes a tyrant, the law is effectively no true law at all. Thus, conformity with divine and rational dictates constitutes the limit of obligation, in the sense that no one should obey an invalid law or submit to the will of a tyrant. The Defensio proclaims that “since law is above all else right reason, it appears that, if we must obey a king and a servant of God, for the same reason and by the same law, we must resist a tyrant and a servant of the Devil.”47 While De legibus itself did not explicitly draw such a conclusion, the doctrine that tyrants ought to be stripped of their power enjoyed a long history during the Latin Middle Ages. Certainly, nothing in Bractonian thought suggested that subjects ought to obey a tyrant just as they would a king. But Milton, recognizing the difficulties implied by the attempt to determine whether a specific ruler is a king or a tyrant, proceeds to argue that even a legitimate king is not exempt from external constraints. Governing in general accord with God’s law and reason does not render royal power absolute. Rather, the Defensio maintains on Bracton’s authority that since “there is doubt about the title more often than about the fact, the king of England, even though he has not lost the title of king, can and should be judged like any ordinary man.”48 It is not necessary for a monarch to be dethroned or otherwise proclaimed tyrannical as a prerequisite for him to face judgment and condemnation, a view for which Milton finds his source in the statement in De legibus that the king should be the last to receive justice. Similarly, Milton employs Bractonian grounds in order to specify the identity of those who may impose a verdict upon the king. Milton remarks that “since our king should be subject to judgment whether under the title of tyrant or king, it is easy to see who should be his lawful judges,” whereafter he cites the addicio de cartis section of De legibus in which the barons are described as royal “superiors” and “bridles.”49 Milton does not, however, deduce from the text that the magnates of the realm must occasionally rectify an injury committed by the Crown. Instead, he concludes that this is a statement of the ultimate supremacy of the people and its immediate representative, the Commons. Milton reasons that by “barons,” Bracton would have meant the representatives of the people rather than the peers of the realm. “The House of Commons is included under the name of barons,” the Defensio asserts, a claim that is justified by 47. Ibid., 492. 49. Ibid., 493.

48. Ibid., 493.

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reference to passages from the Modus tenendi parliamentum which demonstrate that “our most ancient writings on the law call them from time to time the ‘Peers’ of Parliament.”50 In other words, Milton locates in De legibus a defense of the ultimate right of royal subjects (by way of their chosen delegates) “not merely to bridle and restrain him but to judge and punish him as well ..... should the king do wrong to the whole people.”51 Parliament enjoys an independent authority, derived from its popular mandate, to bring the Crown to account for its conduct and to rectify the injuries committed by the monarchy. Milton’s use of the reputation of Bracton is thus diametrically opposed to that of the absolutists. The Defensio attributes to De legibus the ideas that the king is subservient to the people and that the latter retain a full set of sovereign powers. Milton argues that since, on a Bractonian account, the creation and authorization of law pertain to the common agreement of the populace, the justice that is rendered on the basis of statutes must derive solely from the people. Making direct reference to a passage of Fleta excerpted from De legibus,52 Milton concludes that “at first the right to judge belonged to the people themselves, and that the English never transferred that right to the king by any law of royalty, for the king neither can nor does judge anyone save by laws already established and approved....... This same power remains to the people undiminished in its entirety.”53 Once again, the presumption of the indivisible and inalienable nature of sovereignty influences the understanding of the political thought of De legibus: if law is popular in origin, then so must be the judgments to which it gives rise. The assignment to the king of responsibility for executing justice does not confer upon him any measure of independent sovereign authority. Milton asks, Will any king make a claim such as this, that he alone knows better than the whole people what is just and profitable, especially when according to Bracton III. 9, “He was created and appointed for this end, that he might dispense justice to all,” and dispense it in accordance with those laws which “the populace” has chosen?54

For Milton, the power to legislate is inseparable from the power to determine ultimately what is just. Hence, inasmuch as the people constitute the supreme legislative authority in the land, they must also be the wellspring and foundation of all adjudication. It is because of the sovereignty 50. Ibid., 493. 51. Ibid., 494. 52. Compare Bracton, De legibus, 2:305 with Fleta 2:36. 53. Milton, Defensio, 486. 54. Ibid., 496.

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lodged in the people (and wielded by their ordained representative, the Commons) that even kings may be judged and condemned. The obvious consequence of Milton’s reading of De legibus is a vast reduction in the role and status of the king as compared with the absolutist account. The Defensio does not deny the superiority of the Crown, but it asserts that the monarch’s claim to be superior is based purely on the fact that he enforces justice on behalf of the people. Thus, Milton says that while private persons ought to be subject to the determinations of the king, the monarch in turn must himself be subservient to the whole people, who legislate and define what is just. According to the Defensio, this sovereignty of the people is rooted in the oldest traditions of English Common Law: It is impossible to prove by any ancient evidence that the government of the Kingdom of England is absolute monarchy. “The King,” says Bracton, “has jurisdiction over all.” That is, in court, where justice is rendered in the king’s name to be sure, but according to our laws. “Everyone is subject to the king”: as an individual, that is, as Bracton himself makes clear.......55

The Bractonian king is transformed by Milton into an executive agent of the public justice codified in the law. The monarch is certainly the greatest magistrate in the realm, but his exercise of power over individuals is not to be confused with sovereignty. Indeed, even judgments by royal courts are to be free of interference from the king. Citing the precept of “our writer Bracton” that royal authority extends only to the performance of justice, Milton comments that “the king could imprison no man, confiscate no property, execute no men save after trial in another court whose decision has been rendered by the regular judges, not by the king, and, as I have said before, often in opposition to the king.”56 The monarch becomes little more than an administrative convenience, a civil servant whose task is to carry out the decisions of the judicial system in accordance with the laws approved by the people in their Commons. For Milton’s Defensio, such a conception of royal power is justified by the doctrines of De legibus: if the English people are sovereign legislators and ultimate judges, then any jurisdictional authority employed by the king must be delegated by and beholden to a popular source. Institutionally, this source is the Commons, which is charged with the careful regulation of royal power. Even after the Restoration, Bracton’s name was still associated with the cause of popular sovereignty espoused by English political authors. Perhaps 55. Ibid., 505.

56. Ibid., 500.

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the most extensive utilization of De legibus in the post-Commonwealth period is to be found in Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, a thorough commentary on, and rebuttal of, Filmer’s patriarchal monarchism. In the process, Sidney condemns Filmer for his willful perversion of the Bractonian text, while purporting to maintain complete fidelity to De legibus in his own interpretations. Specifically, Filmer is accused of seeking to put a false sense upon our law. According to his custom he takes pieces of passages from good Books, and turns them directly against the plain meanings of the Authors, exprest in the whole scope and design of their Writings. To show that he intends to spare none, he is not asham’d to cite Bracton who of all our ancient Lawwriters is most opposite to his Maxims.57

Sidney identifies the motive behind Filmer’s misrepresentation and distortion of the Common Law doctrines articulated in De legibus: it is to compel Bracton to speak with an absolutist voice. Yet Bracton will not meet Filmer’s own needs without the commission of violence against his text: ’Tis a strange impudence in Filmer to cite him [Bracton] as a Patron of the absolute Power of Kings, who dos so extremely depress them. But the grossest of his follys is yet more pardonable than his detectable fraud in falsifying Bracton’s words, and leaving out such as are not for his purpose, which show his meaning to be directly contrary to the sense put upon them.58

Sidney charges Filmer with nothing less than intentional deception. To ascribe an absolutist stance to De legibus is only possible, Sidney asserts, inasmuch as passages are quoted out of context and meanings are manipulated to fit extraneous purposes. The Discourses consequently aims to correct the corruptions of Bractonian political thought engendered by Filmer. Predictably, however, Sidney’s own reading of De legibus involves an equally inaccurate and selective interpretation of the text. In reaction to Filmer’s royalism, Sidney converts the Bractonian framework into a total vindication of the sovereign rights of the English people. In familiar fashion, Sidney begins with the Bractonian conception of the king’s relation to law. He proclaims that the English “have a King who reigns by Law. His power is from Law that makes him King”—a footnote expressly states “‘Lex facit ut fix Rex.’ Bracton”—“and we can know only from thence what he 57. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, 2nd ed. (London: J. Darby, 1704), 262–63. 58. Ibid., 264.

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is to command, and what we are obliged to obey.”59 The royal prerogative, in sum, is defined and circumscribed by law. In the terms of Bractonian discourse employed by Sidney, to be king is esse sub lege just as surely as “the meanest subject.”60 Law vests the king with power and simultaneously determines the nature of the justice that must in each case be performed. Thus, logic dictates the independence of the law from the will of the monarch; no ruler could ever become a tyrant if the legislation of the kingdom—departure from which constitutes tyranny—was wholly reliant upon the king’s personal whim. Where a tyrant does emerge, “it must be by departing from that which does not depend upon his will, and is a rule that is prescribed by a power that is above him. This indeed is the doctrine of Bracton who ..... said that the Power of the King is the Power of Law, because the Law makes the King.”61 The lesson that Sidney derives from De legibus is straightforward: the king is unerring and insusceptible to correction to the precise extent that he abides by the law.62 Sidney acknowledges that this statement has two possible yet completely consistent meanings. With regard to the “politick capacity of the King”—the monarch properly speaking, who always meets his duties—no one may presume to tell him how to conduct his government or may criticize him. This is how Sidney explains away the more overtly “absolutistic” passages of De legibus: a king in his “politick” capacity cannot commit a wrong because it is a necessary characteristic of kingship only to do what is right and just in accordance with law. By contrast, the monarch in his “natural” capacity is fallible: as an individual person, his will may be diverted from the path charted by law; when he strays, he must be corrected or even punished. Hence, to impose the law upon a particular officeholder is not to diminish the majesty of the Crown, since the “politick” aspect of kingship is constituted by perfect obedience to law. Sidney twice insists that this distinction between the “natural” and the “politick” is implicit in Bractonian discussions of monarchy.63 And it is alleged to be Filmer’s failure to identify the difference that generated his erroneous absolutist reading of De legibus. In contrast with Filmer, the Discourses maintains that the correct interpretation of Bracton’s text requires us to recall that English “Kings are subject to Laws, because they can make no Law.”64 The legislative process instead pertains solely and inalienably to the people of England as adequately 59. Ibid., 258. 61. Ibid., 287. 63. See ibid., 263–64.

60. Ibid., 283. 62. Ibid., 263–64. 64. Ibid., 261.

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represented in Parliament. Sidney proclaims that it has always been the case that the ultimate power within the nation was located in “such Councils or Assemblys of the People as had the power of the whole, and made or unmade such laws as best pleased themselves.”65 Inasmuch as Sidney assumes the unity of sovereign authority, the right of legislation immediately implies the concomitant right to determine the correct meaning of statutes and thereby to act as final judge in all litigation. The Discourses asserts that “our Parliaments having the power of making and abrogating Laws, they only can interpret” the true significance of legislation.66 In view of what amounts to a doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty (despite Sidney’s reluctance to employ that term), the Bractonian principle that the king is sub lege readily equates with the idea that the monarch is subservient to Parliament. Simply by proposing that to be king demands obedience to the law, De legibus becomes a vital tool in Sidney’s defense of the sovereign rights of the English people and Commons. What is especially striking about Sidney’s discussion in this regard is his claim that the rendering of judgment is not an inherent feature of the “politick capacity” of royal power. According to the Discourses, “The King, merely as King, has none of the qualitys required for judging all or any cases.”67 Such a doctrine we have seen implied in the use made of Bracton by Milton. But Sidney is explicit both in stating the idea and in ascribing it to Bracton. Lest the Discourses seems to contradict the Bractonian remark that the king alone should render judgment (if it were but physically possible for him to do so), Sidney suggests that this statement pertains to the person of the monarch and not to his office. That is, individual kings might prove to possess the skills necessary to be competent judges; when this has occurred, they have been empowered to perform tasks associated with rendering justice. Bracton was evidently referring to a situation of that sort, which is purely a matter of the natural condition of the monarch rather than his “politick” capacity. The Discourses contends that “we may conclude, without contradicting Bracton that no King as King has the power of judging, because some of them are unable and unfit to do it; and if any one has such a power, it must be confer’d upon him by those who think him able and fit to perform that work.”68 If whatever person who happened to become king were thereby allowed to judge, there would emerge an incongruity with the “politick” character of kingship, which requires the monarch to commit no 65. Ibid., 263. 67. Ibid., 339.

66. Ibid., 345–46. 68. Ibid., 339.

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injustice. In other words, to allow an unqualified ruler to judge—one who would inevitably commit injuries—is to violate the very essence of the royal office itself. That De legibus advocated precisely this view, Sidney claims, is visible from its discussion of the terms of both the coronation oath and the judicial mandate: the section of the oath that demands that the king give just judgment could never be honestly administered to a monarch untutored in law; at the same time, De legibus insists that only those persons with the highest personal and intellectual qualifications should be permitted to judge.69 The lesson of De legibus is that, because judgment must he given by skilled individuals in accordance with law, “Kings and their Officers do not possess their places for themselves, but for the People, and must be such as are fit and able to perform the dutys they undertake.”70 And the ultimate determinant of competence is the assent of the people (through their parliamentary delegates). Sidney asserts that “the question therefore is not, what is good for the King, but what is good for the People, and he can have no right repugnant to them.”71 The people alone must decide whether the justice they receive is satisfactory. Should the populace be displeased with its government, or should a ruler overstep the bounds of his assigned duties, Sidney is happy to say that the king (at least in his “natural” capacity) is himself susceptible to judgment at the hands of his subjects. Once again, Bracton is invoked to testify to the antiquity of Sidney’s position. The Discourses observes, “In England, the Kings do not judg, but are judg’d: and Bracton says, That in receiving justice the King is equal to another man; which could not be if judgments were given by him, and he were exempted from the judgment of all by that Law, which has put all judgments in the hands of the people.”72 Nor will Sidney accept apparently contradictory evidence from De legibus, such as the Bractonian claim that when the king refuses to amend his own actions the punishment of God the Avenger should be awaited.73 It is no less true of the murderer or thief that he will receive the divine penalty, comments Sidney, and yet we think nothing of judging such a criminal on earth as well. Why should the king, if he is also sub lege, be any different? The Discourses declares that “we all know how to proceed with those who being 69. Ibid., 339 and 340–41. 70. Ibid., 341. 71. Ibid., 340. 72. Ibid., 338. 73. The widespread appeal by the Bractonian author(s) to an avenging God has been addressed by Gaines Post, “Bracton on Kingship,” Tulane Law Review (1968): 525–35; and W. C. Jordan, “On Bracton and Deus Ultor,” Law Quarterly Review 87 (1972): 25–29.

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under the Law, offend against it. For the Law is not made in vain. In this case something more is to be done than petitioning.”74 Since the English people through Parliament make their own laws, which the king is beholden to observe, and since the people are simultaneously the supreme judge of all violations of law, the monarch who disobeys legislation—whose person does not live up to the office—may properly be summoned and condemned before his rightful master. The name of Bracton thus comes to be staunchly affiliated by Sidney with the cause of popular rule. Indeed, the Discourses occasionally even implies that the Bractonian defense of the people’s rights is more rigorous and resolute than Sidney’s own position.75 In turn, this interpretation of De legibus necessarily presumes that buried beneath the surface of the Bractonian text is a doctrine of inalienable and indivisible sovereignty, a belief that all political powers and rights may be traced to a single ultimate source. The fact that the Bractonian text was so widely cited by such a vast range of seventeenth-century authors originally inspired Charles McIlwain to ask the now-classic question: “Was Bracton, then, an absolutist, or a constitutionalist, or was he just a blockhead?”76 We ought to be able, at the conclusion of the present chapter, to recognize the extent to which it was an error even to ask such a question and thus to saddle De legibus (or indeed any medieval text) with the interpretive apparatus laid on it during the middle and late 1600s. The doctrines of De legibus were not transmitted or received in pristine fashion, unaffected by the radical changes in both political reality and mentalité that distanced the seventeenth century from the thirteenth. None of this, of course, explains why authors like Filmer, Hobbes, Milton, and Sidney felt the need to convert Bracton to their own views in the first place. The solution to that problem no doubt has much to do with the ideological functions of the English Common Law tradition.77 But we are perhaps now better positioned to realize that, in tracing apparent long-run continuities in political concepts and discourse, the historian of European political thought must be closely attuned to those important differences that often belie ostensible continuity. 74. Sidney, Discourses, 264. 75. Ibid., 287–341. 76. McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 73. 77. The most useful recent studies are Jeffrey Golsworthy, The Sovereignty of Parliament: History and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); J. W. Tubbs, The Common Law Mind: Medieval and Early Modern Conceptions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450– 1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).



20

H e g e l o n t h e M e d i e va l F o u n d at i o ns o f t h e M o d e r n S t at e

t h as b e c o m e a c o m m o np l ac e for political theorists and historians to emphasize that a complete appreciation of the emergence and nature of the modern state presupposes an understanding of the medieval backdrop out of which it evolved.1 This perspective has rightly been hailed by scholars in both disciplines for exploding the long-standing myth of the medieval period as a “Dark Age” separating the more enlightened epochs of antiquity and modernity. But it may be too hasty to assert that the “discovery” of the medieval foundations of the modern state is of recent vintage. It may be argued, rather, that far earlier thinkers acknowledged the contribution of the Middle Ages to the formation of the modern conception of the state. The social and political thought of the nineteenth-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel affords one example of such recognition. At first glance, Hegel may seem an unlikely advocate for the relevance of medieval political experience to modern politics. After all, throughout his career, Hegel never sought to mask his disdain for the political, social, and cultural world of the European Middle Ages. One memorable passage from the Lectures on the 1. This position was pioneered by scholars as diverse as Joseph Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974); and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

323

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Philosophy of History spoke of “the long, ominous and terrible night of the Middle Ages,”2 from which men were liberated only by the dawning of religious, scientific, and political enlightenment. Most particularly, Hegel was an implacable foe of what he took to be the typical form of medieval social and political organization, the feudal bond, as well as a fluent critic of contemporary theorists such as Montesquieu who evinced great sympathy for feudalism.3 Where the political system of Greek antiquity—and sometimes even of Rome—was lauded by Hegel,4 he found little to applaud in the medieval polity. Indeed, as W. H. Walsh comments, “Hegel writes as if there were no true state in the Middle Ages, only an aggregate of particular individuals, more or less personally powerful.”5 We ought not to be surprised, then, that scholars have devoted minimal attention to Hegel’s interpretation of the medieval moment in his historical and political analysis. Yet it is impossible to neglect the fact that Hegel’s idea of the modern state is constructed around numerous institutions and structures characteristic of medieval politics: monarchic government, intermediary bodies, guild values, militaristic organization. Hegel himself thus employs many elements crucial to the political model that he condemns the Middle Ages for upholding. For this reason, students of European political theory ought to ask: In what manner and to what extent do these features of medieval political life matter to the understanding of the Hegelian notion of the modern state? Provisionally, we may answer this question in the following terms: Hegel’s modern state is derived dialectically from historical experience in the European Middle Ages. Hence, while Hegel finds little to admire in medieval Europe on its own terms, the dialectical nature of historical progress, through which the past is retained in mediated form, renders the Middle Ages of significance to modern politics. Hegel seems to take seriously what so many postmedieval political theorists have not, namely, that the modern state emerged not directly out of classical society, but instead through the apparently circuitous route afforded by the medieval 2. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976), 871. 3. F. R. Cristi, “The Hegelsche Mitte and Hegel’s Monarch,” Political Theory 11 (1983): 601–22. 4. Hegel’s debts to the ancient Greeks and Romans are surveyed by Raymond Plant, Hegel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 17–27. 5. W. H. Walsh, “Principle and Prejudice in Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” in Z. A. Pelczynski, ed., Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 189.

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polity. As a profoundly historical thinker, Hegel did not dismiss this developmental transformation of the medieval into the modern; rather, he sought to demonstrate the rational kernel contained in its historical occurrence. Therefore, it is one thing to claim that Hegel harbored a deep distaste for the Middle Ages, and quite another to assert that he regarded the medieval period as irrelevant to the formation of the modern state. The first is quite obviously true, the second equally false.6 Still, it is easy enough to confuse Hegel’s aesthetic preferences with his political judgments, especially if we limit our focus to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, which contains his most detailed, yet most superficial, analysis of the Middle Ages. During medieval times, Hegel says, “the kings and emperors were no longer the chiefs of the state, but of the princes who were indeed their vassals, but possessed sovereignty and territorial lordship of their own. The whole social condition therefore ..... [was] founded on individual sovereignty.”7 The grounds for the claim to sovereignty were the power and prestige that certain individuals rather arbitrarily possessed: “Individuals were therefore obliged to consult for themselves by taking refuge with Individuals, and submitted to the authority of certain powerful persons, who constituted a private possession and a personal sovereignty out of that authority which formerly belonged to the Commonwealth.”8 Hegel’s image of the feudal system in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History is thus one of isolation and “chance power”—the Hobbesian state of nature taken as an actual historical instance.9 Only the Church seems to possess any measure of overarching sovereignty, and that in direct violation of its own inner spiritual principle.10 The conclusion to which we are led is that without a sovereign political authority, a true state within the context of the feudal system is impossible. This evaluation may initially appear to parallel Hegel’s political ideas 6. A similar ambiguity present in Hegel’s attitude toward Roman society has been explored by George Heiman, “Hegel and the Roman World,” a paper presented to the Canadian Political Science Association, 1983. 7. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, rev. ed., trans. J. Sibree (London and New York: Colonial Press, 1900), 371; Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, 813. 8. Ibid., 370; 811. 9. To be sure, Hegel does not make Marx’s error of romanticizing the manorial life of the Middle Ages; see Karl Marx, Early Writings, ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 114–15. 10. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 381–83; Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, 829–30, 836, 841.

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in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right. In the Phenomenology, for instance, Hegel suggests that because medieval society is merely a conglomeration of social classes or factions (Stande) that argue endlessly about the general good, it lacks a government, an essential power of decision that would direct the actions of a state in a nonpartisan manner.11 Whichever group has power at a particular moment, Hegel seems to suppose, controls social activity with reference to its version of the general good only. Hegel reiterates this point in the Philosophy of Right, commenting that in the feudal “constitution, political life rests on privileged persons and a great part of what must be done for the maintenance of the state is settled at their pleasure. The result is that their services are the objects not of duty but only of ideas and opinions.”12 Hegel uses this fragmentation as an example of the failure of a society that does not realize that sovereignty is not constituted by a faction or group (e.g., “the people” or “the monarch”), but by the state itself.13 The state as a unity is alone the bearer of sovereignty. Medieval society, as a mere conglomeration of factions, does not possess the harmony and unity of functions characteristic of the state. As Hegel puts it, Sovereignty depends on the fact that the particular functions and powers of the state are not self-subsistent or firmly grounded either on their own account or in the particular will of the individual functionaries, but have their roots ultimately in the unity of the state as their single self.14

A community that lacks the essential decision-making power (or will) to act for the genuine public good cannot be considered sovereign. The closest we come to sovereignty in the Middle Ages, Hegel asserts in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, is the a priori constitution that Charlemagne imposed on the Frankish empire. But since that system was “not based on the spirit of the people,” relying instead on the personal power and prestige of the king himself, it collapsed with the disappearance of the man who sustained it.15 The absence of a medieval state containing within itself a principle of 11. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 307; G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), 361. 12. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 178 (cf. 180); G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955), 238–39 (cf. 240). 13. Ibid., 182–83; 244–45. 14. Ibid., 178–79; 241. 15. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 368–69; Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, 808.

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unity reflects other more general qualities of society in the Middle Ages. As Hegel points out in the Phenomenology, medieval culture was constituted by a condition of self-estrangement in which all actions were taken in direct relation to the will of God.16 The driving force of the medieval world was the actualization of God’s universal plan on earth, so that the hierarchy of feudal relations held its authority not by any will in the present world, but by the will of God. Feudalism constituted a network of relations under God; God sat on the throne that would later be brought to earth in the form of the absolutist monarch (who would, of course, still claim divine right). When the essential will of the state, its basic power of decision, rests in the estranged realm of the beyond, however, each particular interested class or faction can possess a different notion of what God commands. So long as God stands at the pinnacle of the social system and is the universal essential will of society, the fragmentation that permeates the medieval world will not be overcome. The equation of “doing God’s will” with the principle of the general good simply offers an excuse for each faction to resist views contrary to its own best interests. Under such circumstances, the unification and articulation of public functions, which constitutes the principle of sovereignty, is impossible. This would only seem to confirm the supposition that time spent on Hegel’s treatment of medieval society is time wasted. But as with much of Hegel’s thought, the matter is not so simple as it might initially appear. In Hegel’s view, the sovereignty of the state has a double aspect. Sovereignty as the rationally constituted essential will of the state is merely sovereignty at home.17 A state’s sovereignty must also be seen from the perspective of its relationship to foreign states. That is, its sovereignty is also constituted by its negative relation to another state as something external, as an Other in which it discovers itself.18 Thus, a state is characterized not only by its own positive inner principle, but moreover by its selfmaintenance over against opposing sovereign powers. The latter is an essential moment of the state, since through its external relations a state defines itself as a unitary and individual power. Just as when formed into a government, the state alone is sovereign within its borders, so its authority to draw such boundaries at all concretizes that state in its negative rela16. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 295–96; G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 248–50. 17. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 181; G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 241. 18. Ibid., 208; 278.

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tion to other principalities. A state’s true independence and autonomy are tested precisely in its ability to maintain sovereignty vis-à-vis other states. In the recognition and acknowledgment of its sovereignty by state-powers external to it, one element of the state is established. And this aspect of a state’s sovereign authority is not grounded on will, but on force, that is, the strength that the state-power commands in relation to foreign states. Hegel thereby ascribes to the medieval polity a measure of sovereignty, so that it is in some sense a genuine state. It is, we might want to say, a “negative state,” since it derives its sovereignty solely from its external relations with foreign powers.19 “In feudal times,” Hegel says, “the state was certainly sovereign vis-à-vis other states.”20 While the internal activities of the medieval state might be subject to the instability of factional strife, still its territorial sovereignty, the unity in which it makes its appearance to other states, establishes the feudal system as fully political. Despite the fact that they lack inner articulation, for example, medieval France or England are states because they present a unified front in their external relations, they claim sovereignty within certain boundaries, and they are willing to fight for it. The absence of an internal authority or will does not indicate a lack of force in relation to foreign states. The “negative state” of the Middle Ages thus possesses “state-power” (the term Hegel continually uses with regard to medieval social consciousness) without thereby possessing a universal will of its own.21 It is only with the dawning of absolutist monarchy that state-power acquires a will of its own, becomes a government, from which commences the rise of the modern state. Even in the modern state, however, the two aspects of sovereignty— will and force—do not appear together, but come to the surface at different times. While both moments are essential to the modern state, one or the other predominates depending upon the circumstances. If the society is in a period of peace, “the particular spheres and functions pursue the path of satisfying their particular aims and minding their own business.”22 Their universal production still supports the social whole,23 but individuals are themselves unconscious of the wider implications of civil society. 19. The phrase “negative state” has been derived from Hegel’s description of “deise negative Beziehung des Staates auf sich” (“this negative relation of the state of itself ”), which he ascribes to the state as seen from the aspect of an Other (ibid., 209; 279). 20. Ibid., 180; 241. 21. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 301; Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 355. 22. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 180–81; Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 242. 23. Ibid., 123; 165.

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The general good rests on each individual doing what is good for himself. The general good is thus formed by a wide variety of disparate activities, none of which is by itself the embodiment of the general good. The sovereignty of the state at home—its Idea—is the harmonious activity of the commonwealth. In a time of war, however, the state comes into its own as force, as the unification of the divergent interests of civil society into the single directed activity of repelling and overcoming an external threat.24 The sovereignty of the state is the rallying point for the common defense, which transcends all particular interests and all internal mechanisms of society, since in war the general good is incontestable and unambiguous. The state’s sovereignty in its external relations is only really manifested in war. And this “negative” form of sovereignty is present not merely to a foreign state, but also to the citizens of one’s own state, during periods of war. There is a lesson in this dual aspect of sovereignty for the study of Hegel’s concept of the medieval state. For it is only when the general good can be served in an unambiguous manner, that is, only in wartime, that the medieval state seems able to claim sovereignty. Indeed, the institutions of feudalism are the institutions of a society that is based on war. We need only to think of Hegel’s comments in the Phenomenology about the noble consciousness to validate this view. Noble consciousness places itself at the service of state-power, but more than that, it is the conscious essence of universal state-power.25 Now, its service to the state is, in its own mind, service to God; the state represents the will of God on earth, through which the noble mind finds its salvation. It supposes itself merely to be performing the good works required for it to escape the present selfestranged world and find a permanent home in the world beyond. But the fact of the matter is that state-power is made actual only through the activity of the noble consciousness. State-power is a production of the noble consciousness insofar as the latter subsumes its own ends under the demands placed upon it by state-power. The sacrifice of possessions, wealth, and even life for the sake of the universal gradually brings noble consciousness to the awareness that it is the very essence of state-power itself. The renunciation engaged in by the noble consciousness is at the same time the establishment of the heroism of service, in the form of the knight who provides service to God and country on the basis of devotion to duty.26 24. Ibid., 181; 242. 25. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 306; Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 360. 26. Ibid., 306; 360.

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In its service, the noble mind can truly claim identity with state-power. But what is the nature of this service? Given the view that its sole criterion is renunciation, it can be nothing else than military service. Noble consciousness as actual state-power is based on the fact that the noble fights for the state in times of war, surrenders all that he has in the name of the state. In the military service that it provides in wartime, noble consciousness sacrifices itself as is demanded for the continued subsistence of the state. Noble consciousness carries the burden of responsibility for the state’s very future existence. Hence, the identification of the noble consciousness with state-power is premised on the circumstances of warfare. There the noble has but one duty and one interest: to conquer the foe and maintain the state. State-power proves to be the “negative state,” since the former denotes the force that the state exerts in opposition to other states in the conduct of war. The essential characteristic of the medieval state is warfare. Correspondingly, the whole system of state that the noble consciousness maintains begins to disintegrate only when there are no battles to be fought, when no external threats are posed to the state-power (the sovereignty of the state in its external aspect). At that point, particular interests and self-will begin to intrude: the noble mind, not surprisingly, expects some more tangible payoff for its willingness to risk everything in waging war for the state. Hence, high-minded service to the state is degraded through successive steps into a base grasping for wealth.27 In its one-sided negative character, then, the ultimate failure of the medieval state is that it cannot tolerate a prosperous peace. The state-power of the feudal system (as well as the actual consciousness that corresponds to it) is geared to warfare, and when none is forthcoming, the state rapidly loses its claim to sovereign authority. Various classes and factions form, each with their own best interests in mind, all asserting their unique true sovereignty (knowledge of the genuine public good) and aiming to reserve for themselves a preeminent place in the state apparatus. Each faction “maintains itself and in doing so is productive only of itself and not of the others at the same time,” as Hegel comments in the Philosophy of Right.28 The result is widespread unrest and competition between factions in which each side establishes itself as something of a state-within-a-state. The core of Hegel’s account in the Phenomenology of the collapse of the 27. Ibid., 312–13; 367. 28. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 188; Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 252.

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medieval political world is grounded precisely on the shift from wartime to peacetime.29 In a period of peace, the essential decision making of the monarch is required, since the general good is now a matter of hotly contested debate. The unambiguous imperative of “winning the war” is replaced by less straightforward matters of public administration. The peacetime society needs a will of its own, and so the absolutist monarch—the harbinger of the modern state—is empowered to perform the functions of arbitration and decision.30 Only when such an essential will of the state is in place can the notion of sovereignty at home (or in its internal aspect) come to have any meaning. Of course, absolutism is in itself only a start; it is eventually washed away to be replaced by a fully articulated constitutional system. What is interesting about this view of the medieval state is that it almost completely reverses the statement by Walsh quoted near the outset of this chapter. It is not that Hegel supposes there to be no true state in the Middle Ages, but that the medieval state clings too strongly to the highest principle of statehood. In his discussion of sovereignty and war in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel asserts that the state comes most completely into its own during a period of war, when its citizens must renounce all particular interests of life and property in order to defend the state’s sovereignty. War makes the citizenry aware that it is bound up with a larger social whole that transcends the private world of civil society and on which the latter is grounded. As the negative relation between states, war “is the moment wherein the substance of the state—i.e., its absolute power against everything individual and particular, against life, property, and their rights, even against societies and associations—makes the nullity of these finite things an accomplished fact and brings it home to consciousness.”31 Or, as Hegel puts it in somewhat more succinct fashion: “War is the state of affairs which deals in earnest with the vanity of temporal goods and concerns.”32 War signifies the unity of the state, the coming together of men, who at all other times have nothing in common, for the express purpose of defending the state as the foundation of their very existence. It is only in waging war for the state, Hegel says, that individual citizens recognize the relative unimportance of their own private goals, the universal and essential 29. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 308; Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 361–62. 30. Ibid., 310–11; 364–65. 31. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 209; Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 279. 32. Ibid., 210; 280.

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character of the state, and the community of interest that they share with all their fellow citizens. The sovereign status of the state achieved in times of war is unsurpassed by any other circumstances; war is that moment in which the state “is most supremely its own, the state’s actual infinity as the ideality of everything finite within it.”33 The state in such periods takes on the significance of being something even more essential and basic than the individual’s own life.34 The medieval state, as I have sketched it above, would seem to fit very well into this scheme of sovereignty and war. Hegel intended this account to be applied to the modern state. He was concerned with the implications of the theory of war proffered by various contractarian philosophers to the effect that the individual ought to serve his country in times of war in order to defend his own life, liberty, and property. In other words, such theorists grounded the state upon civil society—reversing Hegel’s formula—so that one’s “going to war for the state” is nothing more than the self-interested proposition that one is protecting one’s own stake in civil society. This principle has been presented in numerous more or less sophisticated versions throughout the history of political thought: it is the basic insight of positions ranging from crude egoism to the natural law doctrine (derived from Roman private law) that one has a subjective right to repel a physical threat against life or property with violence. Hegel’s objection to the account of war offered by those theories that place civil society at their core is devastatingly simple: if military service is really viewed in purely self-interested terms, then the true child of civil society would, at the first sign of war, “eschew military service and betake himself, with his family and [movable] property, to a safe shelter.”35 Such a cowardly course of action would clearly be the most rational given the civil society theorist’s view of the state; but it hardly produces the result desired by him, namely, a justification for taking up arms. Hegel pounces on this inconsistency in order to establish that the state must have a character that, at least at certain times (times of war), stands above civil society, places an objective demand on citizens, and hence makes apparent the contingency and externality on which civil society is based. In wartime, the true principle of the state is revealed to be in perfect harmony with— 33. Ibid., 209; 279. 34. For a more thorough analysis of Hegel’s attitude toward warfare, see D. P. Verene, “Hegel’s Account of War,” in Pelczynski, ed., Hegel’s Political Philosophy, 168–80; and Colin Tyler, “Hegel, War and the Tragedy of Imperialism,” History of European Ideas 30 (2004): 403–31. 35. Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 195.

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indeed, identical to—the true principle of each individual. The state thereby comes most completely into its own. It would appear, then, that Hegel’s analysis of the modern state contains, at least in one important aspect, an element also present in the medieval state, namely, that its universality and essentiality only come to be felt in the face of war. Of course, it is true that medieval “state-power” or the “negative state” is founded, according to Hegel, on the goal of actualizing God’s universal plan, that is, its internal sovereignty is displaced into a world beyond. But the point is not that Hegel means for us to view the medieval and modern states as wholly coextensive. Rather, the modern state takes up certain moments of the medieval state and rejects others; it is both founded on the medieval state, and, at the same time, less one-sided than its feudal predecessor. This transition occurs, of course, in successive steps from the feudal system (God as sovereign) to absolute or unlimited monarchy (divine right of kings) to a completely articulated system of sovereignty; but throughout, one aspect of the state, the appearance of its highest character and aspirations in war, is carried along and reintegrated at each level. As it stands, the medieval state is inadequate because it is one-sided; its acknowledged sovereignty derives solely from its negative power to make war. Internal sovereignty, since it rests with God in His heaven as absolute Lord and Master, is utterly estranged. Yet this onesidedness should not indicate to us a rejection of the medieval state out of hand. Rather, it guides the way to a completion of its development, culminating with the modern state. It is not that the state was unformed in the Middle Ages; it was merely unfinished. To find the state completed, we need to move beyond the Middle Ages and into the era of the modern nation-state.36 36. Hegel’s account of representation in the German Constitution and elsewhere only tends to confirm the significance of the feudal structure for the development of the modern state. He suggests, for instance, that it was the world-historical character of the feudal system that carried the idea of representation out of the “forests of Germany” and into the modern world, since in the deliberation of vassal with overlord on “matters of common concern ..... the vassal’s personal and representative capacities are not distinguished” (G. W. F. Hegel, Political Writings, ed. T. M. Knox [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964], 203–4; G. W. F. Hegel, Schriften zur Politik und Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Georg Lasson [Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1913], 93–94). In speaking for himself, the vassal speaks for his territory as well. As this system of representation was broadened in the late Middle Ages into a more fully formed organization of Estates, and participation was extended to the burgers and lesser nobility, the notion of representation took on the wider meaning that is adopted in the structure of the modern legislative process. See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 293–94, 201; Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 268–69, 270–71.

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The incompleteness that is exhibited in the medieval state also has another aspect, if we consider the structure of social life in the Middle Ages. As we have seen in Hegel’s analysis of the modern political world in the Philosophy of Right, the state only comes into its own during times of war; during periods of peace, civil society embodies the dominant mode of intercourse between individuals. Similarly, Hegel’s treatment of medieval society in the Phenomenology suggests that whereas negative state-power is manifested in wartime, wealth takes on the element of essentiality during peaceful epochs.37 When there are no wars to be fought, the pursuit of wealth becomes the individual’s mode of actualizing God’s universal plan, since it has the characteristic of providing for the common wealth of all. Moreover, Hegel seems to say in the Phenomenology that it is as a result of prosperous peace, rather than any other element, that medieval society reveals its own inner weaknesses and ultimately establishes the absolutist monarchy that puts a close to the political system of the Middle Ages. But though we have discussed previously how this occurs, we have still not adequately clarified why this must be so for Hegel. In other words, why does the medieval system of wealth fail in a way that the modern civil society does not and cannot? The solution to this puzzle must, I think, be found in Hegel’s view of the organization of medieval society during times of prosperous peace. Once again, we should not be misled by Hegel’s fairly simplistic account of the matter in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Predictably, Hegel there interprets the economic order of the Middle Ages in terms of the “isolated capacities” of individuals; as with the politics of medieval society, Hegel insists that the organization of wealth is founded on the “capricious” or “arbitrary” power of private individuals.38 Indeed, Hegel seems to make no meaningful distinction in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History between the two moments of state-power and wealth, wartime and peacetime, as he does in other texts. Fortunately, Hegel presents somewhat more interesting discussions of the structure of medieval peacetime society elsewhere. For instance, Hegel refers in the Phenomenology to the ambiguous status of the “general good” during peaceful eras; the will of the state at such times, he suggests, is divided up among “the various classes and ‘estates,’ and this, in spite of its chatter about the general good, re37. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 303, 313; Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 357, 367. 38. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 399; Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, 860–61.

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serves to itself what suits its own best interest.”39 So the medieval system of wealth did possess some measure of organization, even insofar as its classes engaged in endless debate and controversy about what course should be pursued. Regarding the nature of medieval “class,” Hegel says nothing more in the Phenomenology. In the Philosophy of Right, however, he seems to suggest that the social classes of the Middle Ages were not loosely structured, but rather highly organized, discrete, and self-contained units, “independent Corporations and societies.”40 The medieval social class was constituted by the corporation. Hegel’s paradigm here is certainly provided by medieval guilds,41 incorporated groups of artisans or professionals that controlled not only the livelihoods, but also the social and political circumstances, of their members. These corporations, each struggling for a privileged position within the political life of the medieval community, were decisive impediments to a fully formed and completed state. Through the corporations and societies, “the particular functions and powers of the state and civil society were arranged.” But since each was utterly self-contained and independent, “the state as a whole was rather an aggregate than an organism.”42 Indeed, the corporation was something of a state-within-a-state, hindering the full internal articulation of the state. The various corporations and societies all supposed that what was good for the community generally was coextensive with what benefited them specifically. Political decision making, consequently, was a virtual impossibility; it meant reaching an agreement among a broad range of self-interested groups that each claimed that their own version of the general good was correct. And obtaining agreement among parties so diverse as shoemakers, lawyers, and landed nobles could not readily be expected, as even a cursory study of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century European polity reveals.43 Hegel’s claim, then, is that so long as corporations, societies, and the like remained wholly independent and without tie to an overarching essential will, medieval society was 39. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 307; Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 361. 40. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 180; Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 241. 41. Antony J. Black, Guild and State: European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003) argues that “Hegel’s view of corporations was the first explicit attempt by a modern philosopher to give guild values and aspirations a central place” (202). 42. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 180; Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 241. 43. The possibilities for tension among various guilds and other corporate bodies during the Middle Ages are examined by Black, Guild and State, 7–10; and Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Knopf, 1979), 38–41.

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doomed to lack a state that was internally sovereign. Conversely, when the elements of a “disinterested” monarchy began to arise, the medieval system was bound to develop beyond its own principle. The aggregate character of such independent corporations, which was at the core of the peacetime world of the Middle Ages, must thus be seen as the leading cause of the incompleteness of the medieval state. Admittedly, Hegel has little to say about the medieval corporations in the Philosophy of Right. But in a passage from his essay on the Wurtemberg Estates Assembly, the matter is addressed at some length. When the early medieval kingship represented by the Carolingian Empire collapsed, Hegel says, the whole dissolved into atoms. This atomized society did not, however, take on the characteristic of mere personal power, as we might suppose from limiting our attention to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Rather, “the knights, freemen, monasteries, nobility, merchants and tradesmen formed themselves into societies and corporations to counteract this state of disorganization.” These associations were the direct products of a vacuum in public authority. Insofar as no sovereign state existed for the regulation of the activities of the various interests contained within the society, classes were compelled to introduce a structured system of “sectional communities” that merely tolerated one another as neighbors. In turn, this corporate system became increasingly closed and rigid, adopting what Hegel called “the spirit of a guild.” One presumes from this comment, and from his reference to the “aristocratic nature” of the corporation, that Hegel thought the medieval corporate system to be constituted by a strict hierarchy that imposed a “cramped formalism” on social relations. The corporation regulated all forms of social intercourse among its members; its authority, rather than that of any state apparatus, prevailed in peacetime, since the creation of the common wealth was under its direct control and guidance. As a necessary consequence, once the corporate structure was firmly in place, it served as “a hindrance and a danger to the development of the public authority.”44 Since corporations were essentially autonomous and self-regulating bodies, they resisted the creation of any sovereign power capable of standing above them and exercising greater authority than the incorporated associations themselves. The corporations thus atomized both the state and the private interests of inhabitants of the medieval social world; their very principle of organization as discrete units that merely 44. G. W. F. Hegel, Political Writings, 263; G. W. F. Hegel, Schriften zur Politik und Rechtsphilosophie, 176.

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“rubbed up against one another” militated against the rise of an internally sovereign peacetime state. The peacetime public authority, such as it was, could not lay claim to sovereignty because the final power over the characteristic activity of peaceful periods—the accumulation of wealth—was firmly planted in the corporations and similar associations of interests. The dominant role of the corporations and societies, which related to one another merely as inessential individuals, was the primary obstruction in the way of an adequate and articulated state. One consequence of the dominance of the corporation was that its fortunes fell in direct proportion to the rise of fortune of the absolutist monarchy. Once a universal sovereign will of the state was empowered—as a result (need it be said again?) of the inability of the aggregate corporations to decide on a common course of action for the state that reflected an actual general good—the independent corporations were increasingly seen to be redundant and even reactionary. Hence, “these subordinate communities and guilds were dissolved or at least deprived of their political role and their relation to internal constitutional law.” As “typically medieval” institutions, their value was thought to be counterfeit, a holdover from the quickly receding social and political chaos of the Dark Ages. But Hegel does not leave the matter at that, implicitly relegating the corporation to the scrap heap of the Middle Ages. On the contrary, Hegel suggests in the Wurtemberg essay that “it would surely be time, after concentrating hitherto mainly on introducing organization into the circles of higher state authority, to bring the lower spheres back again into respect and political significance, and, purged of privileges and wrongs, to incorporate them into an organic structure of the state.”45 In short, Hegel recommends the reintroduction of a corporate system into modern society—an idea borrowed and expanded upon in the Philosophy of Right. The modern corporation, Hegel insists, would resemble its medieval ancestor insofar as its internal cohesion would be based on shared interests, occupations, and the like.46 Moreover, the corporation serves to mediate the purely selfish economic goals of individual members of civil society, to draw together fragmented individuals into a fellowship which, though not so high-minded as the community that develops in the state at war, nonetheless allows members to recognize each other in some not entirely self-centered manner. Indeed, the modern corporation both looks 45. Ibid., 263; 176–77. 46. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 152; Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 204.

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after the general economic interests of its membership in the society at large and cares for individual members by providing education, welfare, and self-regulation. In a sense, the corporation is the individual’s family raised to the level of civil society, “a second family for its members.”47 Hegel remarks that “the sanctity of marriage and the dignity of corporation membership are the two fixed points around which the unorganized atoms of civil society revolve.”48 The similarities here to the role of the medieval corporation are striking; particularly on its internal side, in its function as a means for separate individuals to find a broader identity, the modern corporation parallels the role of earlier guilds and societies. But externally, in its relation to the state, the corporation has a “restricted and finite” existence.49 Its activities are susceptible to the legislation and continual supervision of the public power; it must maintain itself as a purely voluntary organization, and one utterly subordinate to the essential decision-making power of the state. Though on its external side, the corporation is the institutionalized mechanism for the defense of members against the state’s encroachment in economic matters,50 it cannot claim to know and do the general good. Rather, the modern corporation’s concern is selfconsciously the common interest of its members only; it is always acting solely for the particular sphere of interest that composes its membership, unlike the medieval corporation that declared itself a uniquely competent arbiter of what was good for all of society.51 In the structure of the modern constitutional state, debates about matters of the public good are left to the legislative process.52 Hegel’s insistence on the revitalization of the corporation is, like his claim about the connection between war and sovereignty, based on a rejection of various modern theorists—not only of the liberal-democratic variety, since Hobbes fits very well—who hold that there should be no intermediate bodies standing between the atomistic individual and the state. Given the preceding feudal system’s labyrinth-like layers of hierarchy, the theorists of the individual would seem to make good sense. But Hegel perceives in their revulsion at any regimented social structure some poten47. Ibid., 153; 205. 48. Ibid., 154; 206. 49. Ibid., 154; 206. 50. Ibid., 189; 253. 51. The modern corporation as Hegel envisages it is not so much reflected in the notion of a political party (the analogy suggested by Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State, 163) as in that of the political lobby for a special interest group. 52. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 197, 201; Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 263– 64, 268–69.

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tially dangerous consequences, especially with regard to the situation in which the individual would find himself vis-à-vis the state. If civil society lacks a corporate structure, and is nothing more than an accumulation of monads, then the individual is without rank or dignity, his isolation reduces his business to mere self-seeking, and his livelihood and satisfaction become insecure. Consequently, he has to try to gain recognition for himself by giving external proofs of success in his business, and to these proofs no limit can be set. He cannot live in the manner of his class, for no class really exists for him, since in civil society it is only something common to particular persons that really exists, that is, something legally constituted and recognized.53 In short, the individual who lacks a corporate identity can only assert himself over against his fellows through the accumulation of ever-increasing amounts of wealth. Not only is this child of civil society perpetually dissatisfied—no matter how much he possesses, it is never enough—but the amassing of tangibles becomes his single goal and purpose in life, to the detriment of his other social obligations, for instance, toward the state. The corporation serves the very definite function of acknowledging the intrinsic worth of the individual “as a somebody”54—just because he is a member of the corporation, and not on the basis of some external and purely contingent mark of achievement. The corporation stands as the solid foundation for the individual who participates in the proceedings of civil society. Moreover, the corporation gives the individual a sense that his voice can be heard, that he can have some measure of direct impact on the political structure of modern society. As a mediating force between the individual and the state, the corporation guarantees the individual influence in the making of decisions, at least with regard to matters of economic selfinterest. Faced with a large and necessarily bureaucratic nation-state, the individual tends to perceive himself as impotent and insignificant—the phenomenon to which we affix the sociological (as opposed to Hegelian or Marxian) meaning of the term “alienation.” But since the corporation is designed to reflect the individual’s interests—if it does not, he is at liberty to withdraw from it, which indicates the importance of Hegel’s proviso that the corporation be a voluntary association—he will have a much 53. Ibid., 152–54; 205–6. 54. Hegel uses this phrase in both the Wurtemburg essay (262–63; 176) and the Philosophy of Right, 153; 205.

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greater assurance that his particular concerns are taken into account in the process of legislating and executing the public will.55 The corporation thus fulfills an essential need in the balanced functioning of the organism of modern society on two counts, neither of which are considered by zealously individualistic political theorists. The individual stripped of an identifiable community lacks the recognition and self-certainty that forms the very groundwork of his existence. When the state is not at war, that is, when the highest public authority seems very distant and unapproachable, the corporation serves this purpose of identification admirably. So once again, Hegel draws on medieval experience in his construction of modern political society, and just as in his treatment of the relation between the medieval and the modern state, it is the one-sidedness of the medieval corporation that conditions its transformation.56 The medieval corporation, because it can tolerate no public authority standing over it, lacks the mediating character Hegel assigns to its modern successor. Since it overwhelms and subdues the will of the state, the incorporated association of the Middle Ages shares only its internal side with the modern corporation. Its external aspect must give way to the fully articulated constitutional state, which can genuinely determine and execute the general good. The corporation is still the highest authority in the system of wealth (civil society), but it has no pretensions beyond that. It exists solely for the protection of the common interests of its members. The modern corporation is thus the medieval corporation stripped of its one-sidedness and assigned defined powers and limitations. The former represents the Aufhebung of the latter, a simultaneous preservation and cancellation. As with his notion of the state, Hegel’s treatment of the medieval system of wealth—the peacetime predominance of independent corporations and societies—suggests mere incompleteness rather than abject failure. The corporation need not be a relic of the medieval past; when viewed from the proper perspective, as an entity wholly concerned with the interests of its membership, the corporation can be an indispensable element in the individual’s relation to his wider community. Despite Hegel’s consistent hostility to the feudal system, spread through the body of his writings,57 both the medi55. Ibid., 193; 258. 56. George Heiman, “The Sources and Significance of Hegel’s Corporate Doctrines,” in Pelczynski, ed., Hegel’s Political Philosophy, 111–35, provides a good overview of Hegel’s interest in corporatism and corporations and of the traditions with which he was working. 57. Hegel saw feudal traditions and practices as especially dangerous to the development of the modern state when they were associated with the institutions and interests of reaction.

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eval state and corporation find their completion, rather than their utter destruction, in the Hegelian conception of the modern social world. Hegel thus refused to cast aside the social and political experiences and institutions of the Middle Ages, any more than he rejected the developments of other historical epochs. Where certain theorists of modern society (say, Rousseau) dispensed with any aspect of social organization rooted in medieval principles, Hegel steadfastly held to a framework that dictated that no stage of human history lacked a moment of essentiality, and hence that each contributed to the development of the whole. Indeed, Hegel occasionally seems to employ feudal or medieval ideas as a counterbalance to the enthusiasm for wholesale change that tended to infect fellow theorists of a more individualistic bent. (The results of radical individualism— Locke’s way of ideas put into political practice—Hegel observed in the Terror that culminated the French Revolution.)58 While it is improper to see the modern state and civil society as mere extensions of medieval statepower and wealth in the Hegelian scheme,59 it is equally mistaken to suppose that the social and political system of the Middle Ages represented for Hegel an unfortunate incident in the history of Europe. Hegel, in spite of his relative distaste for the medieval period (so prominently displayed in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History), nonetheless understood the significant contribution that certain moments of that epoch could make to his own political theory of the modern world. It has been a shortcoming of commentators on Hegel’s political thought that they have focused so little attention on his treatment of medieval social and political organization. Deeper research illuminates Hegel’s own emphatic insistence that the Middle Ages left an indelible mark on the character of the modern state. Hegel, then, provides a clear example of the Hereclitean interpreta(See the essays on the German Constitution and the English Reform Bill in Hegel, Political Writings, 143–242, 295–330.) But Hegel’s hostility to the decidedly feudal reactionism of his own day must be separated from his views on feudalism as a historical phenomenon whose essential features are capable of making a positive, although one-sided, contribution to the modern world. 58. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 295–96, 355–63; Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 348–50, 414–22. 59. This seems to be the implication, for instance, of Jean Hyppolite’s statement: “State power and wealth correspond to what the last Philosophy of Right calls the ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ (or bourgeois society—die burgerliche Gesellschaft)” (Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman [Evanston, Ill,: Northwestern University Press, 1974], 395). Alternatively, it may be that Hyppolite did not recognize that Hegel’s notions of “state power” and “wealth” in the Phenomenology refer to peculiarly medieval, rather than modern, constructs.

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tion of the medieval/modern divide enunciated at the beginning of this book. His dialectic permits continuity without embracing it entirely. Hegel’s project, of course, was not that of the intellectual historian, but of the philosophically driven historical reconstructionist. Yet his lesson generalizes. The European Middle Ages were neither the fount of all things modern nor a theoretical and conceptual dead end. The intellectual terrain that connects and divides medieval and modern Europe represents, instead, a high point, one that affords the historian of ideas the opportunity to glance simultaneously backward and forward. Hegel understood this in the early nineteenth century. His insight is one from which twenty-firstcentury scholars might and should gain considerable benefit.

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Index

absolutism, 36, 47, 161–62, 172, 174, 190, 305, 309–14, 318, 319, 322, 327, 331, 337 Adrian IV, Pope, 69, 72 Africa, 185 Albertus Magnus, 287–88 Alexander the Great, 283–86 Alighieri, Dante, 56, 122–23, 141, 182, 298 “Allocution Made to a Magistrate” (Machiavelli), 296 Althusser, Louis, 52 Anderson, Perry, 21 Ankersmit, F. R., 100 Aquinas, St. Thomas, xiii, 56, 114, 223, 228, 266, 267, 287 Aristotle, 5–8, 19, 57, 74, 107, 112, 144, 146–48, 150–51, 213, 224, 226, 235, 238–41, 246, 255, 271, 283–84, 285, 286 aristocratic government, 165 Asia, 185, 274 Ass, The (Machiavelli), 295 astrology, 279, 280, 281, 282–84, 285–86, 287–88, 289, 290, 295 Athens, 299 Augustine of Hippo, St., xiii, 122, 224, 271, 273 avarice, 135, 203 Averrosim, 167 Bacon, Roger, 287, 289 Bagge, Sverre, xix Baldwin, John, 203–4 Ball, Terence, xv Barbarism and Civilization (Pocock), xviii, 177–79

Barber, Benjamin, 112 Baron, Hans, xviii, xxii, 142–43, 157, 177, 179, 188 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, xix Barzan, Jacques, xx Bede, Venerable, 282 Bible, 73, 137, 297 Birch, A. H., 100 Black, Antony, 9, 14, 30–37, 41, 99– 100, 190–91, 197–98 Blythe, James, 44 Bobbio, Norberto, 45 Bodin, Jean, 23–24, 25, 55 Boniface VIII, Pope, 227 Bracton, Henry de, xxii, 81–98, 305–22 Breviloquium (William of Ockham), 47 bribery, 209–10 Bruni, Leonardo, 179, 187 Burgundy, 186–87 Buridan, Jean, 236 Burke, Edmund, 46, 101 Burley, Walter, 95, 107 Burns, J.H., xvi, 3, 9, 109 Byzantium, 172 Calvin, John, 64 Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Burns), xvi, 3–4, 32 Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Burns and Goldie), 9 Cambridge University, 3, 11, 59 capitalism, xxiii, 45, 261–63, 266, 271, 274–76 cardinals, college of, 170 Carinthia, 169 Carlyle, A. J., 4, 10, 50

  369

370  in d e x Carlyle, R. W., 4, 10 Cassiodorus, 239 Catline, Chief Justice, 81 “Celestial Hierarchies Revisited” (Oakley), 8 Ceres, 256–57 Charlemagne, 326 Charles I, king of England, 308 Charles V, king of France, 235–37 Christine de Pizan, xiv, 138, 248–58 Christianity, 7, 45–46, 66, 103, 105, 138, 157–58, 167–68, 188, 190–91, 192, 196–98, 223–24, 276, 277–78, 279, 281, 289–90, 300 Church, 7, 20, 37, 40, 41–42, 43, 44, 53, 56, 69, 79, 102, 103, 104, 163, 164, 167–68, 169, 170, 187, 193–96, 219, 223, 251, 277–78, 279 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 66, 144–45, 256 citizenship, xviii, 6, 38, 45, 66, 75, 109–10, 112–13, 117, 119, 148–49, 154, 158–59, 165, 331–32 civil society, 331, 332, 334–40 Coleman, Janet, xiv, xx, xxiv, 189, 191, 226 Colish, Marcia, xvii commercial revolution, 201–2, 217, 223 communal functionalism, 43, 65–66, 67, 75–76, 80, 243, 244 communitarianism, 158 conciliarism, 10, 30–33, 34–37, 41–44, 45, 102–5, 191–92, 193 Condren, Conal, 34, 168, 176 Connell, William, 157 Conring, Hermann, xix conscience, 57, 63–64, 71, 80 consent, xvi, 6, 10, 25, 44, 48, 52, 53, 74, 76–77, 78, 105–6, 156, 165, 168, 172–73, 174, 181, 184–86, 187, 270 constitutionalism, xvi, xvii, xxii, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 25, 30, 32–33, 34–38, 43, 44–45, 48, 49, 52, 119, 266, 269–70, 273–74, 305, 322, 340 corporation, 19, 335–40 co-rulership, 95, 107 Cosmographia (Bernard Sylvester), 39 cosmology, 38, 41, 45, 192, 198, 278, 281, 291–92, 300–301 Council of Basle, 184 Council of Constance, 30–31, 193 Council of Pisa, 193

Cronmartie, Alan, 119 Cyrus, 297–99 d’Ailly, Pierre, 41, 288–89 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” 64 “Decline and Fall,” xviii–xix, 177–79, 187, 188 De concordantia catholica (Nicholas of Cusa), 37, 41–44, 179, 182–89 de Grazia, Sebastian, 278, 300–302 Defensor Minor (Marsiglio of Padua), 78–79, 160–63, 169 Defensor Pacis (Marsiglio of Padua), 46, 73–78, 101, 108–11, 160–68, 171–72, 175, 179, 181 De inventione (Cicero), 144–45, 256 De iuribus regni et imperii (Lupold of Bebenberg), 169 De laudibus legum Anglie (Fortescue), 115–18, 268, 270–73 De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae (Bracton), 81–98, 305–22 democracy, 8, 119–21, 159, 165 Democracy’s Discontent (Sandel), 158–59 De monarchia (Dante), 122–23, 169 De moneta. See Oresme De natura legis naturae (Fortescue), 114–5 d’Entrèves, Alexander Passerin, xxii, 49–60 De ortu et fine imperii (Engelbert of Admont), 169 De pace fidei (Nicholas of Cusa), 188 De potestate regia et papali (John of Paris), 226–30 De regimine civitate (James of Viterbo), 144 De regimine principum (Giles of Rome), 124, 132 De regimine principum (Ptolemy of Lucca), 266–67, 298 De translatione imperii (Marsiglio of Padua), 179–82 Deuteronomy, 206 Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England (Hobbes), 312–14 Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (Starkey), 220 Dialogue of the Exchequer (FitzNigel), 205, 214–21 Didascalicon (Hugh of St. Victor), 202

  in d e x   371 Discourses Concerning Government (Sidney), 318–22 Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy (Machiavelli), 277, 290–92, 294, 297, 302 dissent, xxii double majesty, 88–89 Durandus, William the Younger, 36 ecclesiology, 10, 30, 31, 37, 40–41, 99, 163, 191 Economics (pseudo-Aristotle), 246 Economics in the Medieval Schools (Langholm), 204 Edward II, king of England, 131 Edward III, king of England, 126–31, 231 Egypt, 257 empire, universal, xix, xxii–xxiii, 161–62, 166–68, 170–71, 172, 174–76, 178, 179, 180–81, 182, 183–84, 185–87 Engelbert of Admont, 169, 287 England, 6, 20, 100, 106, 113–15, 118, 124, 201, 217–18, 262, 264, 268–71, 274, 313–14 equality, 184, 262, 263 Europe, 99, 101, 114, 122, 202–3, 222, 249, 258, 263, 275, 282 excommunication, 78–79, 169, 170, 193, 219 “Exhortation to Penitence, An” (Machiavelli), 296, 301 Fasolt, Constantin, xix, xxi, xxiii–xxiv, 36–37, 44, 65 feudalism, 6, 7, 8, 21, 66, 101, 105, 113, 263, 324, 325–26, 327, 328, 330, 333, 336, 338, 340 Femia, Joseph, 18, 24 Ferster, Judith, 289 Figgis, John Neville, 10, 29–34 Filmer, Robert, 81, 306, 308–12, 322 Fiore, Silvia Ruffio, 301 FitzNigel, Richard, 205, 214–21, 264 Flanders, 168 Flathman, Richard, 112 Fleta, 84, 305 Flint, Valerie, 282 Florence, xviii, 144, 147, 168 foresight, 279–80, 282, 290, 294 Fortescue, John, xxiii, 101, 113–19, 138, 265–76 fortune, 278, 279, 280, 290–91, 292–93, 294, 299, 301, 302

Foulchat, Denis, 244 Foundations of Concilar Theory (Tierney), 10 Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Skinner), xvi–ii, 13–22, 52, 54 France, 6, 20, 106, 124, 153, 160, 185, 235, 242, 249, 268, 270 freedom of will, 281, 282, 287–88, 289, 295, 302 Freeholders Grand Inquest (Filmer), 310–11 French Revolution, 341 friendship, 148 Gaius, 112 General Council of Church, 30, 41–44, 103–5, 108, 163, 170–72, 186, 193, 196–97 general will, 197, 327 Germany, 169, 181, 187 Gerson, Jean, xxii, 41, 103–5, 191–98 Gewirth, Alan, 162 Gibbon, Edward, 177 Giles of Rome, 119, 124, 132 Godefroid of Fontaines, 226 Godthardt, Frank, 180 Governance of England (Fortescue), 115, 117, 268–71 grace, divine, 134, 282, 289, 296–97, 300, 302 Gratian, 31 Great Schism, 30, 103, 193, 288–89 Greece, xvii, 26, 100 Greenfeld, Liah, 261–66, 274–75 Gregory the Great, Pope, 192, 298 Grotius, Hugo, 233 Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (Ullmann), 4 Guenée, Bernard, 182 guild, 6, 335, 336, 337, 338 Hanson, Donald W., 88 happiness, 7, 79, 132, 163 Hegel, G. W. F., xxiii, 323–42 Henry I, king of England, 217 Henry II, king of England, 214, 217 Henry III, king of England, 97, 129, 309 Henry of Langenstein, 288 heresy, 78–79 hierocratic thesis, 4, 5–6, 7 History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Ullmann), 5 Hobbes, Thomas, 17–18, 26, 81, 101, 119, 233, 306, 312–14, 322, 338

372  in d e x Holofernes, 73 Hooker, Richard, 50 Hörnqvist, Mikael, 189, 292, 300 Hugh of St. Victor, 202–3 Huguenots, 25 humanism, 9, 142–43 humility, 132, 133 ideology, 13, 15–16, 17, 21 Inferno (Dante), 141 injustice, 90–91, 93, 96, 137, 173, 216, 227, 230, 231, 240, 242, 308 Isidore of Seville, 282 Isis, 257 Islam, 183, 192 Israel, 114 Italy, 6, 58, 73, 153, 163–64, 186–87, 291, 299 Jacquerie Rebellion, 124 Jerome, St., 41 John II, king of France, 236–37 John Ball’s Rebellion, 124 John Henry, prince of Bohemia, 169 John of Jandun, 180 John of Paris, 11, 47, 225–30, 233–34 John of Salisbury, xxii, 38–40, 43, 66–73, 80, 122, 205–13, 220–21, 243, 251, 264, 281 John of Turrecremata, 44 John of Viterbo, 144 Jones, William, 82 Juan de Segovia, 37 Judith, 73 Julius II, Pope, 291 Julius Caesar, 181, 206 Jurdjevic, Mark, 157–58 jurisdiction, 227, 229 justice, 73, 88, 89–90, 92–93, 128, 136, 145, 149–50, 151–53, 165, 209, 213, 225, 228, 229, 307–8, 309, 312, 316 Kant, Immanuel, 63–64, 80 Kaye, Joel, 246 kingship, 5–6, 8, 19, 21, 27, 71, 83, 85–86, 87, 88, 89–90, 91–97, 107, 114–18, 119, 123, 126–37, 183, 189, 196–97, 211–13, 214–16, 218–20, 232–33, 238, 240, 245, 251, 253–54, 255–56, 258, 267–68, 269–70, 271–73, 307–8, 309–12, 313–14, 314–15, 317, 318–20

Lagarde, Georges de, 161 Landolfo Colonna, 180 Langholm, Odd, 204, 224–26, 228, 233, 237, 246 Latini, Brunetto, xxii, 138, 141–59, 179 law: canon, 11, 87, 99, 184, 193, 203; divine, 215; human, 19, 32, 71, 74–75, 76–77, 78, 79, 89, 108, 111, 114–15, 116–17, 118, 125, 134, 152, 154, 165, 168, 170, 174, 175, 183, 193, 273–74, 307–8, 309–11, 312, 314–15, 316–17, 318–20, 322; natural, 47, 51, 134, 166, 185, 266, 332 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Hegel), 323–26, 334–36, 341 Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought (Langholm), 233 lese-majesty, 95–96 L’estat et le gouvernment comme les princes et seigneurs se doivent gouverner, 125, 131–38 Leviathan (Hobbes), 17–18 lex regia, 171 Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, 265 liberalism, xxii, xxiii, 57, 64, 80, 159, 261, 332, 338, 341 liberality, 134 liberty, xxii, 63–64, 66–73, 74, 77–78, 79, 80, 115, 143, 184–85, 222–23, 224, 225, 228, 229, 230–31, 232–33, 240, 241–42, 313, 332 license, 80, 115 Limits of History (Fasolt), xix Little, Lester K., 233 Livre de Corps de Policie (Christine de Pizan), 249–54 Livre de Divinations (Oresme), 281 Livre de la Cité des Dames (Christine de Pizan), 249, 255–58 Livre des Trois Vertus (Christine de Pizan), 249 Livres dou Tresor (Latini), 142–59 Locke, John, 81, 119, 226, 228, 233, 267–68, 341 Lombardy, 187 London, 106 lordship (dominium), 47, 93, 113–17, 155, 225, 227, 228, 230–31, 267–68, 325 Louis, Emperor, 185 love, 122–23, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132–33, 135, 137–38, 155–56, 255 Low Countries, 262

  in d e x   373 Ludwig of Bavaria, 160, 162, 166, 169–70, 172, 179–80 Ludwig of Brandenberg, 169, 174 Lupold of Bebenberg, 169 Luther, Martin, 64 Lycurgus, 207 Maccabees, 172 Machiavelli, Niccolò, xxiii, 51, 55, 57–58, 119, 134–35, 189, 277–82, 289–303 Machiavellian Moment (Pocock), 177 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 45, 64–65, 279 Macpherson, C. B., 45 Madison, James, 31 Magna Carta, xviii, 310 Maitland, F. W., 83 Manin, Bernard, 100 Mansfield, Harvey, 111–12, 120 marriage, 169, 174 Marsiglio of Padua, xviii, xxii, 11, 23–25, 42, 46, 51, 55–57, 66, 73, 101, 108–11, 138, 160–76, 179–82, 188–89, 247, 251 Marx, Karl, 56 Maultasch, Margaret, 169, 174 McGovern, John, 204, 264 McIlwain, Charles, 10, 322 mechanical arts, 145–46, 147–48, 154, 202, 207, 242–43, 246, 252–53, 255, 256–58, 336 Medici, Lorenzo, 291 Medici family, 295, 299 Medieval Contribution to Political Thought (d’Entrèves), 50, 55 Medieval Papalism (Ullmann), 4 merchants, 208–9, 218–19, 239, 242, 246, 252, 255, 256, 271, 336 mercy, 137 Metalogicon (John of Salisbury), 208 Miliband, Ralph, 52 Mill, John Stuart, 101 Milton, John, 81, 306, 314–17, 322 Minogue, Kenneth, 14 Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, 107, 305, 316 money, 148, 150–51, 206–11, 215, 217–19, 231, 236–45, 247 Monfort Rebellion, 97 Montesquieu, baron de, 101, 324 Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 11–12 Moore, Robert I., 276 Moralium Dogma Philosophorum, 144

Moses, 297–98 Muldoon, James, 10 nationalism, 58–59, 188, 262–66, 271, 274, 275 Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Greenfeld), 262 naturalism, 7, 8, 123, 147–48, 178, 206, 207–8, 211, 213, 244, 272, 274, 288 Natural Law (d’Entrèves), 50, 60 neo-Figgiste, xvii, 30, 31, 32, 35–36, 48, 178 Nicholas of Cusa, xxii, 37, 41–44, 179, 182–89, 196 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 144, 146–47, 150–51, 204, 235, 246 Notion of the State (d’Entrèves), 51–52, 55, 60 Oakeshott, Michael, 14 Oakley, Francis, xvi, xxii, 8, 30–37, 40–41, 304 obligation, political, 111–12, 315 occult, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284–85, 287, 289, 290, 293–94, 300, 301, 303 Octavian, 181 Oresme, Nicole, 235–49, 281, 288 organic metaphor, 38–44, 45, 70, 71, 72, 73, 117, 151, 192–93, 198, 206, 243–44, 245, 250–51, 254, 255, 271–74 Origins of the Great Schism (Ullmann), 10 Otto I, Emperor, 186–87 Oxford University, 11, 49–50, 126 Padua, 168 paganism, 278, 279, 281 Page, Sophie, 283 papacy, 8, 30, 36–37, 42, 44, 53, 69, 72, 104–5, 163, 164, 165, 166, 169, 170–71, 193–96, 278 Parel, Anthony, 280–82, 289 Paris, 35, 168, 179–80, 203, 225, 235 parliamentary government, 98, 99–100, 106–8, 118, 197, 269, 315–16, 316–17, 320, 321–22 Patriarcha (Filmer), 309–10 peace, 57, 74, 79, 80, 163, 164, 165, 186, 215, 328–29, 330–31, 334, 337 Pennington, Kenneth, xvi, xxiv, 10, 30, 31 Persia, 299 Peter, St., 170, 194

374  in d e x Peter of Celle, 38 Peter the Chanter, 203 Petronius, 206–7 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 326–31, 334–35 Philip IV, king of France, 227, 236 Philip of Tripoli, 283 Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 326, 330–31, 334–37 Piccolomini, Aeneas Sylvius, 37 piety, 128, 132 Pitkin, Hanna, 100, 110 Plato, 70, 213 plena potestas, 107 Pocock, John, xviii–xix, xxii, 112, 157–58, 177–82, 188–89, 205 Poitiers, 236 Policraticus (John of Salisbury), 39, 67–73, 205–13, 243, 251, 281 policy, 205, 220–21, 234, 275 political economy, xxiii, 123–24, 143–44, 152, 158, 205, 234, 245–46, 247, 250, 258, 275 Political Liberalism (Rawls), 64 political science, 146, 281 Politics (Aristotle), 5–8, 19, 74, 107, 144, 204, 235, 246–47 Pontano, Giovanni, 281 popular sovereignty, xvi, 7–8, 30, 317, 318–19 Post, Gaines, 93 Poulantzas, Nicos, 52 power, xxii, 5–6, 116, 167, 169, 170, 174, 193, 226, 307, 325–26 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 301 Prince (Machiavelli), 58, 135, 278–79, 290, 293–94, 296–97, 299–300 Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (Ullmann), 5 property, 170, 212–13, 225, 226–28, 229, 274, 312–13, 331, 332 Pro populo Anglicano defensio (Milton), 81, 314–17 providence, divine, 136, 137, 278, 281, 284, 292–93, 294, 296, 300, 327 Ptolemy of Lucca, 179, 266–67, 298 Purgatorio (Dante), 298 purveyance, 127, 128–29, 230, 231–32, 270 Pythagoras, 207

Quillet, Jeannine, 108–9, 162, 182 Radding, Charles M., 94 Rahe, Paul, 157–58 Rawls, John, 64 reason, 165, 166, 168, 183, 296, 314 representation, 10, 30, 44, 99–112, 118–20, 171, 197, 315, 317 republicanism, xxii–xxiii, 52, 73–74, 141, 152–59, 161–62, 176, 187, 188–89, 190–91, 192–93, 196–98 Republics Ancient and Modern (Rahe), 157 revolt, xxii, 97–98, 123–24, 130–31, 137–38, 232–33, 243, 255–56, 269–70 rhetoric, 145 Richardson, H. G., 87 Riesenberg, Peter, 112 rights, xiv, xvi, xvii, 10, 11, 32, 44, 45–48, 49, 57, 93, 226, 227, 332 Roboam, 137 Roman law, 66, 94, 112, 224, 225–26, 229, 230, 231, 233, 332 Rome, xvii, 7, 66, 100, 114, 162, 170, 173, 176, 178, 180–85, 324 Romulus, 297–98 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 23–24, 101, 159, 197–98, 341 Rubinstein, Nicholai, 161 Samuel, 209–10 Sandel, Michael, 158–59 Savonarola, Girolamo, 291, 298 Scholasticism, xvi, 203–4, 224–25, 233, 236, 239, 266, 275, 282, 287, 295, 305 Second Decennale (Machiavelli), 293 Second Treatise of Government (Locke), 226–29, 267–68 Secreta secretorum (pseudo-Aristotle), 134, 281, 283–89 self-interest, 74–75, 76, 77, 80, 111, 144, 149, 159, 240, 263, 269–70, 271, 272, 332, 334–35, 337, 339 Shapiro, Ian, 14 Sidney, Algernon, 81, 306, 318–22 Sigismund, Emperor, 184 Sigmund, Paul, xiii, 182 Skinner, Quentin, xvi–xvii, xxii, 13–28, 54, 73, 142–43, 304 Skocpol, Theda, 52 Smith, Adam, 205

  in d e x   375 Smith, Thomas, 118 Smoller, Laura, 288 Soderini, Giovan Battista, 290 Soderini, Piero, 291 Sombart, Werner, 265 sovereignty, xvii, 10, 53, 263, 306–7, 309, 311, 312–14, 316–17, 320, 322, 325–30, 331–32 Spain, 20, 106 Speculum astronomiae (Albertus Magnus), 288 Speculum justiciariorum, 97–98, 106, 305 Speculum regis Edward III, 125–31, 138, 230–34 speech, 145, 296 Spirit of Capitalism (Greenfeld), 261–64 Starkley, Thomas, 220–21 state, 13, 14–15, 18–25, 26–27, 49, 51–55, 58, 323, 324–25, 327–30, 331, 332–33, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341 Strauss, Leo, 45 Strayer, Joseph, 21 Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (Figgis), 29 subjects, 112–13, 117, 123, 129, 255 Summa de ecclesia (John of Turrecremata), 44 Sylvester, Bernard, 39 Tartars, 183 Tawney, R. W., 262 taxation, 118, 123, 152, 210, 216, 251–52, 254, 270 Terrence, 70 Theseus, 297–99 Thorne, Samuel E., 82–84 III Consideracions Right Neesserye to the Good Governaunce of a Prince. See L’estat et le gouvernment Tierney, Brian, xvi–xvii, xxii, xxiv, 9–11, 30–37, 45–48, 87, 99 Timaeus (Plato), 70 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 159 toleration, xxii, 20, 63–65, 67, 188

Trajan, Emperor, 298 translato imperii, 178–79, 181, 182, 188 Tuscany, 291 tyranny, 71–73, 74, 136–37, 173, 240, 308, 314–15, 319 Tyrol, 169 Ullmann, Walter, xxii, 3–12, 19, 31 unit idea, 16, 33–34, 35–36, 304, 305, 307 University of Paris, 225, 288 usury, 219–20, 233, 241 valentior pars, 108–9, 165 Variae (Cassiodorus), 239 vice, 69–70, 71, 72–73 Villani, Giovanni, 141 Vindicae Contra Tyrannos, 35 Viroli, Maurizio, 142 virtù, 278, 279, 280, 293, 295, 296 virtue, 67, 68, 71, 72, 116, 125, 132, 136, 138, 238, 251, 256 Visconti, Matteo, 180 von Gierke, Otto, 4 Walsh, W. H., 324, 331 war, 215, 328–30, 331–32, 334, 337, 338 Watanabe, Morimichi, 182 Weber, Max, 262, 265 “What Is Enlightenment?” (Kant), 63 Wilks, Michael, 162, 168 William I (the Conqueror), king of England, 216 William III, king of England, 308 William of Ockham, xiv, 46–47 William of Pagula, xxii, 47, 125–31, 138, 230–34, 243, 264 Williams, Steven, 286 wisdom, 136, 137, 183, 184, 185, 202 women, 249–50, 254–58 Wood, Diana, 264 Wood, Neal, 266 Wynnere and Wastoure, 265 Zabarella, Cardinal, 10

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