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

The book charts the establishment of the modern idea of parliamentary sovereignty.

Corinne Comstock Weston (Author), Janelle Renfrow Greenberg (Author)

9780521892865, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 December 2003

440 pages
21.6 x 14 x 2.7 cm, 0.576 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]