Abstract
Occupying a comparatively small geographical region at the far western extreme of the Eurasian land mass, Europeans had fashioned for themselves a remarkable patchwork of political forms across the centuries between the disintegration of Roman authority and the advent of an inchoate ‘national’ sense during the early modern period. More the product of reflexive contingency than the result of any thoughtful, planned construction, there was nothing to compare with the congeries of European governmental models in the Ottoman lands, in South Asia, or in the vast expanses of the East generally. By 1500 there were literally hundreds of more or less independent political units in Europe, each one headed by rulers who were more often than not first among equals, with sometimes hundreds of competing power holders within often shifting boundaries. This situation dictated that all prospective state-building programmes would involve a process of agglomeration and absorption, at the inevitable cost of affronting tradition and privilege, and prompting jurisdictional feuds, at almost every turn.1 In an important respect political thought in the early modern period consists of ‘a series of reactions to this political change’, attempts both to justify and to oppose the expanding power of the state.2
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Notes and References
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Quoting Wolfgang Reinhard, ‘Power Elites, State Servants, Ruling Classes, and the Growth of State Power’ in Reinhard (ed.), Power Elites and State Building (Oxford, 1996), p. 1.
This great variety is discussed by Victor Kiernan, State and Society in Europe, 1550–1650 (New York, 1980), p. 4.
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In Alister McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the Protestant Reformation (Oxford, 1991), pp. 215–16.
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Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London, 1961), pp. 19–26, introduces the ascending and descending theories of government.
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© 1998 W. M. Spellman
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Spellman, W.M. (1998). Civil Authority in an Unfamiliar Setting. In: European Political Thought 1600–1700. European Culture and Society. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27200-6_2
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