Summary
The central problem for historians of thefoundations of modern international thoughtshould…be, “How did we”—whoever “we” may be—”cometo imagine that we inhabit a world of states?”
David Armitage, Foundations of Modern InternationalThoughtJean Bodin (1529/30–1596) exaggerated the noveltyof his analysis of political power, and historianshave exaggerated the novelty of his exaggeration.That Bodin stressed his originality is forgivable;that is an author's prerogative. That historianshave accepted his contention without carefulscrutiny is less understandable.
Kenneth Pennington, ThePrince and the Law, 1200–1600This book has two main aims. The rst is to provide atightly focused account of the most pivotal episodein the historical evolution of the idea ofsovereignty—which I dene generically as thesupreme authority to command, legislate, andjudge—in the thirteenth century. Although theexisting historiographical literature is repletewith studies that trace the evolution of thatidea—even if they don't use the word “sovereignty”to describe it—in the fourteenth, fteenth, andsixteenth centuries, no such account exists for thethirteenth century. To be certain, over the pasthalf-century or so a great deal of research has beendone on aspects of the political thought during thisera. But these eorts have tended to be fragmented,following dierent lines of inquiry, andemphasizing dierent themes. A conceptually focusedinterpretation, one foregrounding the role played bythirteenth century thought in the evolution of acoherent theory of sovereignty, has been lacking. Myhope here is to begin to address this lacuna byproviding an account of how a series ofthirteenth-century contests over the locus andcharacter of supreme authority ultimately made itpossible “to imagine that we inhabit a world of[sovereign] states.”
My secondary goal, hinted at in the epigraphs above, isto reconnect early modern theorists of sovereigntyto the medieval intellectual tradition out of whichthey emerged. Thinkers like Bodin and Vattel did notinvent the modern concept of sovereignty out ofwhole cloth. r ather, they assembled it out of theintellectual resources inherited from their medievalforebears, in the rst instance fromfourteenth-century thinkers like Marsilius, Baldus,and Bartolus, but via them from thethirteenth-century thinkers discussed in thisbook.
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- Medieval Sovereignty , pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022