Subjects and sovereigns : the grand controversy over legal sovereignty in Stuart England

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Subjects and sovereigns : the grand controversy over legal sovereignty in Stuart England

Corinne Comstock Weston, Janelle Renfrow Greenberg

Cambridge University Press, 1981

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Note

Bibliography: p. [379]-410

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Concerned in a general way with theories of legitimacy, this book describes a transformation in English political thought between the opening of the civil war in 1642 and the Bill of Rights in 1689. When it was complete, the political nation as a whole had accepted the modern idea of parliamentary or legal sovereignty. The authors argue that a conservative theory of order, which assigned the king a lofty and unrivalled position, gave way in these years to a more radical community-centered view of government by which the king shared law-making on equal terms with the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Although the community-centered ideology may appear unexceptional to the modern observer, it constituted a revolutionary departure from the prevailing order theory of kingship and political society that had characterized political thought in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Table of Contents

  • Preface
  • 1. The shift in political thought
  • 2. The keeper of the kingdom
  • 3. The new age of political definition
  • 4. That 'Poisonous Tenet' of co-ordination
  • 5. The curious case of William Prynne
  • 6. The idiom of restoration politics
  • 7. Co-ordination and coevality in exclusion literature
  • 8. The law-makers and the dispensing power
  • Appendix
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index.

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