From Personal Duties Towards Personal Rights

Part One examines the late medieval northern Italian city-state republics and the humanist depiction of their form of polity. Part Two reviews the legal (principally canonical) and political thought behind the development of a theory of popular consent and limited authority employed to resolve the Great Schism in the Western church. Part Three describes sixteenth-century Spanish neoscholastic political writings and their application to Reformation Europe and Spanish colonial expansion in the New World. Part Four examines the political thought of some of those who responded to new problems in church/state relations caused by the fracturing of medieval Christendom in the West: Luther, Calvin, and other Reformation writers; the Protestant resistance pamphleteers; and Richard Hooker. Featuring an extensive bibliography, From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights will be of specific interest to intellectual historians as well as historians of political ideas and political theories and students in history, political science, and religious studies.

The Circle of Rights Expands explores ideas of limit on political authority through a fresh reading of the political philosophy of the fifteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, including the work of representative thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, Athusius, Grotius, Hobbes, and Hume. Arthur Monahan examines problems of sovereignty, religious toleration, and individual rights, emphasizing the relationship between such individual rights and economic change.

The concepts of popular consent and limit, as applied to the exercise of political authority, are fundamental features of parliamentary democracy. Both these concepts played a role in medieval political theorizing, although the meaning and significance of political consent in this thought has not been well understood. In a careful, scholarly survey of the major political texts from Augustine to Ockham, Arthur Monahan analyses the contribution of medieval thought to the development of these two concepts and to the correlative concept of coercion.