Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PART I THE PERSONALITY OF ASSOCIATIONS
- PART II POLITICAL PLURALISM
- 5 Maitland and the real personality of associations
- 6 Figgis and the communitas communitatum
- 7 Barker and the discredited state
- 8 Cole and guild socialism
- 9 Laski and political pluralism
- 10 The return of the state
- PART III THE PERSONALITY OF THE STATE
- Bibliography
- Index
- Ideas in Context
6 - Figgis and the communitas communitatum
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PART I THE PERSONALITY OF ASSOCIATIONS
- PART II POLITICAL PLURALISM
- 5 Maitland and the real personality of associations
- 6 Figgis and the communitas communitatum
- 7 Barker and the discredited state
- 8 Cole and guild socialism
- 9 Laski and political pluralism
- 10 The return of the state
- PART III THE PERSONALITY OF THE STATE
- Bibliography
- Index
- Ideas in Context
Summary
A note at the end of Maitland's introduction to Gierke records the thanks that were owed by the author ‘for many valuable suggestions to Mr J. N. Figgis whose essays on The divine right of kings (1896) and on the Politics of the Council of Constance will be known to students’. Figgis was a young clergyman and historian who had in 1896 returned to his old Cambridge college of St Catherine's as a lecturer in history. While in Cambridge, Figgis fell under Maitland's spell, and in due course he came to share in his mentor's enthusiasm for Gierke and Genossenschaftstheorie. But though the two men enjoyed the same intellectual interests, they were temperamentally rather different. Figgis was in no sense a fastidious man (Geoffrey Elton, in a bizarre introduction to one of Figgis's books, describes him as ‘large, greedy, desperately untidy’), and in his writing he exhibited few of Maitland's scruples about branching out into political philosophy proper. Nor did he seek to confine his historical enquiries to the legal field in which Maitland had proved himself pre-eminent. Figgis was a historian of ideas in something closer to our current sense, exploring the history of political theory and dogma for their own sakes. He was prepared, in ways that Maitland was not, to engage directly with the persistent issues of political thought, concerning what Maitland would call the state's very nature, and the very nature of such freedoms as it might contain.
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- Information
- Pluralism and the Personality of the State , pp. 124 - 149Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997