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

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.

Author: Corinne Comstock Weston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12/11/2003
Pages: 440
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.27lbs
Size: 8.58h x 5.66w x 1.08d
ISBN: 9780521892865

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