The French Wars of Religion were often characterized in historiography as a revolutionary period, when some very advanced political theories were put forward by the parties in conflict. Some historians spoke of the existence of a form of popular sovereignty in many of the political writings produced during that time, where different constitutional mechanisms for restraining the powers of the monarchy were imagined. The first to propose such theories were the Huguenot theorists, especially those which would gain fame as the (...) “Monarchomachs”, a term coined by the royalist writer William Barclay at the beginning of the seventeenth century to describe the promoters of a political model of a limited monarchy where the ultimate sovereignty rested with the people. With Huguenots in active rebellion against the Crown, especially after 1572, when the defiance against the king became openly acknowledged, the Monarchomachs strove to demonstrate that the people had a lawful right to actively resist a tyrannical monarch. The basis of their argument rested upon the concept of a political contract between the king and the people, which made the submission of the latter dependent on specific conditions set at the ascension of the king: if those conditions were violated, then the people were automatically released from their obligation of obedience. (shrink)

From 1922 to 1924, the Iroquois Confederacy — a federal union of six aboriginal nations — sought resolution of a dispute between themselves and Canada at the League of Nations. In this paper, the historical events of the 1920s League are employed as a case study to explore the development of the international society of states in the early 20th century as it relates to the indigenous peoples of North America. Specifically, it will be argued that the early modern practice (...) of excluding Amerindians from international political forums is related to the negative representation of indigenous peoples in the dominant theoretical discourse of the time: social contract theory. The diplomatic activities of the Iroquois, and the members of the League during this time period, demonstrate exactly how social contract theory has relied on presenting indigenous peoples as residing in a non-political and non-sovereign form, thus denying them the right to participate at the international level on par with other peoples. (shrink)

The doctrine of “sovereign immunity” holds that the U.S. government cannot be sued without its consent. This is not found in the Constitution’s text; it is justified on philosophical grounds as inherent to being a sovereign state: a sovereign must be able to issue commands free from constraint. The sources of this understanding of sovereignty—Hobbes, Bodin, and others—are, in turn, condemned by opponents of sovereign immunity as absolutists whose doctrines are incompatible with limited, constitutional government. This debate, and thus the (...) usual conception of sovereign immunity, rests on a fundamental mistake. Hobbes and his peers were careful to avoid the conflation of government with sovereignty. “Sovereign” immunity, then, is an imposter doctrine that protects government officials by falsely draping them in the sovereign’s cloak. The only sovereign actor, in the American polity, is the people in the act of making or amending the Constitution. Our true, Hobbesian sovereign immunity is nothing more than our unbounded freedom to enact constitutional law. (shrink)

Le contrôle de constitutionnalité, dont la magistrature parlementaire de l’Ancien Régime revendiquait le plein droit, n’était pas fondé uniquement sur les lois fondamentales du royaume, mais sur l’ensemble des principes (« les maximes ») tirés de la « Tradition ». Cette dernière était composée en premier lieu par le droit divin et le droit naturel, c’est-à-dire par des systèmes juridiques qui nécessitaient, tous les deux, une interprétation juridictionnelle ‘sapientiale’. Cette activité interprétative était ‘révélatrice’ d’un corpus de valeurs métaphysiques à laquelle (...) seule la Scientia Juris des magistrats pouvait puiser. Mais dans la sphère de la Tradition juridique rentraient aussi le « dépôt légal », c’est-à-dire l’ensemble de toutes les lois, même des lois ainsi dites « ordinaires », c’est-à-dire celles qui avaient été produites par la simple manifestation de volonté souveraine d’un roi prédécesseur « car tel avait été son plaisir » (moderne formulation du brocarde de droit romain : « quidquid principi placuit legis habet vigorem »). Ainsi la juridiction parlementaire donnait lieu à un jugement de constitutionnalité qui était normalement exercé de manière très flexible par le corps de la magistrature, dépendant des circonstances et des intérêts politiques momentanés des situations juridiques qu’elle voulait protéger. La hiérarchie des normes était ainsi un formidable instrument de protection de cet ordre juridique dont les legum doctores se sentaient les tuteurs. Elle était, donc, directement liée au gouvernement politique des juges. (shrink)

This article argues that Machiavelli’s chapters on the Decemvirate ( D 1.35, 1.40-45) advance an internal critique of the juridical discourse of sovereignty. I first contextualize these chapters in relation to several of Machiavelli’s potential sources, including Livy’s Ab urbe condita, Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Roman Antiquities, and the antiquarian writings of Andrea Fiocchi and Giulio Pomponio Leto. I then analyze Machiavelli’s claim that the decemvirs held “absolute authority” ( autorità assoluta)—an authority that was unconstrained by either laws or countervailing magistrates. (...) I proceed to argue that Machiavelli’s account of the decemvirs’ election contains a web of allusions to the lex regia, the “royal law” by which the Roman people were thought to have conveyed their sovereign power to an emperor. By modeling the decemvirs’ election on the lex regia, Machiavelli reveals the political limitations of the doctrine of popular sovereignty; moreover, he illustrates that even free and fair elections can easily give rise to tyranny. (shrink)

The longstanding debate over Jean Bodin’s (1530–1596) Six Books of a Commonweale—whether it championed an ideology of absolutism or pioneered a normative doctrine of the modern sovereign state—has profoundly influenced our understanding of Bodin’s intellectual legacy. This article challenges the influential absolutist reading by re-examining Bodin’s ideas of violence against tyrants. Proponents of the absolutist interpretation often view Bodin’s rejection of resistance against the tyrant as compelling evidence of his defense of absolutism, suggesting that this stance negates the constitutional constraints (...) imposed by fundamental and natural laws on the sovereign. However, this article contends that such a reading is overly simplistic. A closer analysis of Bodin’s nuanced perspective reveals that he does not remove the constitutional limitations established by both fundamental and natural laws. Instead, Bodin posits that sovereigns who violate these higher laws could face either domestic resistance or a just war of punishment. Thus, labeling Bodin merely as an absolutist ideologue is inappropriate, as it risks overshadowing the profound intellectual legacy he offers as a serious political thinker, jurist, and the father of modern state theory. (shrink)

The political philosophy of the late Middle Ages had often approached the problem of tyranny, even attempting to provide possible solutions, but it was the sixteenth-century Reformation which turned this matter into the key issue of a new political model. France, in particular, experienced fierce disputes over this question, as the French Wars of Religion saw the proliferation, to an unprecedented degree, which no one would have thought possible before, of theories of resistance against monarchical “tyranny”. At first, more timid, (...) then, after the massacre of Huguenots on the night of Saint-Bartholomew, with a much greater force, the Huguenots abandoned their previous position of unconditional obedience to the Crown: deceived in their expectations that compliance would earn them a degree of tolerance and protection, and confronted with a monarchy which, after Saint-Bartholomew, seemed to have embarked on a decidedly anti-Huguenot policy, the French Protestants turned instead to what they saw as the traditional legal limitations of the royal power in order to seek a solution from their predicament. A monarchy where the king’s will was firmly “bridled” by institutional constraints and the right of the subjects to oppose unlawful policies was given legal sanction seemed the best way to guarantee the safety of the Huguenots and justify their rebellion against the Crown. This paper argues that, during the first half of the Wars of Religion, from 1562 until 1576-1577, the Estates General of France played a significant role in the Huguenots’ theory of resistance, who advocated its convocation as a way to solve the realm’s troubles and argued in print for its right to take an active part in deciding the policy of the kingdom, as an alternative locus of sovereignty which could even overrule the king. (shrink)

¿Qué actitud asumió Jean Bodin frente al conflicto confesional que asoló a Francia durante el siglo XVI? ¿Qué respuestas ofreció al desafío de la tolerancia? He ahí los interrogantes que guían nuestra indagación. Según nuestra tesis, en efecto, las respuestas de Bodin parecen haberse postulado principalmente en dos planos: el político y el filosófico. En el primero, el angevino habría intentado ofrecer mejores fundamentos jurídicos a la posición de los politiques, grupo de intelectuales que buscaba terciar entre hugonotes y católicos; (...) en el segundo, habría propiciado el diálogo de los savants, únicos hombres capaces de deponer las pasiones a la hora de discutir sus diferencias religiosas. A través del análisis de dos importantes escritos del autor, Les six livres de la République y el Colloque entre sept savants, buscaremos dar sustento a nuestra hipótesis de lectura. (shrink)