ENGLISH

Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England

By Corinne Comstock Weston , Janelle Renfrow Greenberg

Book information

Year
2003
ISBN
0521892864, 9780511558658, 0521232724, 0511558651, 9780521232722, 9780521892865
LCC
JN339 .W47
Open Library ID
OL4115706M
Language
english
Format
DJVU
Filesize
3 MB (2998936 bytes)
Pages
438\438
DPI
300
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

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.

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