Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Texts used and a concordance for the ‘Politica’
- List of abbreviations
- PART I Historiographical And Biographical Preliminaries
- PART II An Exposition Of Lawson's Politica
- 3 God and human society
- 4 Community and political power
- 5 The Keys
- 6 The limits of subjection
- PART III An Examination Of The Politica
- PART IV The Fate Of The Politica From The Settlement To The Glorious Revolution
- PART V Conclusions
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
6 - The limits of subjection
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Texts used and a concordance for the ‘Politica’
- List of abbreviations
- PART I Historiographical And Biographical Preliminaries
- PART II An Exposition Of Lawson's Politica
- 3 God and human society
- 4 Community and political power
- 5 The Keys
- 6 The limits of subjection
- PART III An Examination Of The Politica
- PART IV The Fate Of The Politica From The Settlement To The Glorious Revolution
- PART V Conclusions
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
Summary
In the final chapters Lawson returns to reiterate the themes surrounding subjection and sovereignty. Although there is repetition there is also elaboration – not always consistent with earlier discussion and there are shifts of emphasis.
The creation of hierarchical orders of subjection is of divine ordination through God's power (Pol. 353–4). Submission, a recognition of God's commands encapsulated in the Fifth Commandment and in Romans 13, is required across a full range of human relationships. That between sovereigns and subjects is paradigmatic of those between parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and servants, teachers and scholars. All involved in such relationships, however, are equally subject to God. It is of course this reiterated proviso which generates the quintessential problem of the human condition for Lawson, that defined by the clash between obedience to a remote God and to an immediate sovereign who only participates in and uses God's power (Pol. 355, 411 ff.). What is emphasised now, however, is that understanding this is largely a matter of having an adequate battery of appropriately discriminate classifiers. It seems that if we have not the terms to delineate the notion of subjection it is difficult for us to see the pattern of our obligations. Thus Lawson says of Bodin, he ‘mistakes much by confounding Civis (et) subditus. For though every Subject be Civis, yet every Civis is not a Subject’ (Pol. 356; cf. 26).
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- Chapter
- Information
- George Lawson's 'Politica' and the English Revolution , pp. 71 - 76Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990