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Rights, Resistance, and Revolution in the Western Tradition: Early Protestant Foundations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Extract

Over the past three decades, a veritable cottage industry of important new scholarship has emerged dedicated to the history of rights talk in the Western tradition prior to the Enlightenment.1 We now know a great deal more about classical Roman understandings of rights (iura), liberties (libertates), capacities (facultates), powers (potestates), and related concepts, and their elaboration by medieval and early modern civilians. We can now pore over an intricate latticework of arguments about individual and group rights and liberties developed by medieval Catholic canonists and moralists, and the ample expansion of this medieval handiwork by neo-scholastic writers in early modern Spain and Portugal. We now know a good deal more about classical republican theories of liberty developed in Greece and Rome, and their transformative influence on early modern common lawyers and political revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic. We now know, in brief, that the West knew ample “liberty before liberalism,” and had many fundamental rights in place before there were modern democratic revolutions fought in their name.

Type
Part II. Religious Thought in the Protestant Reformation and the American Civil War
Copyright
Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2008

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References

1. See sources in my God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006), chap. 1.Google Scholar

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6. Beza's, major works are in his Tractationum Theologicarum, 3 vols., 2d ed. (Geneva, 1582)Google Scholar[hereafter Beza, TT]. Missing from this collection is his important but controversial political work which was published anonymously in 1574 and in modern critical edition asDu droit des magistrats, ed. Kingdon, Robert M. (Geneva: Droz, 1970)Google Scholar, and in translation asConcerning the Rights of Rulers Over Their Subjects and the Duties of Subjects toward Their Rulers, trans. Gonin, Henri-Louis (Cape Town/Pretoria: H.A.U.M., 1956) [hereafterGoogle ScholarBeza, , Rights]Google Scholar.

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26. MC, N4r-O1r, P3r-P4r.

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34. Beza, , Rights, 35, 37, 64, 65, 81, 85Google Scholar. Here and elsewhere Beza used the terms “covenant,” ”contract,” “compact,” and “constitution” variously and interchangeably.

35. Ibid., 41-64.

36. Excerpted in Hotman, François, “Francogallia,” in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay, ed. Franklin, Julian (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 5570.Google Scholar

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42. Ibid., 25.

43. Ibid., 64-65.

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47. Ibid., 28-29, 84-86. See also TT 2:120-21.

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58. Ibid., 27, 36-38, 72-74.

59. Ibid., 64-65, 72-80.

60. Ibid., 27-29, 83-85.

61. Ibid., 66, 68, 74, 80.

62. Ibid., 27, 41, 72.

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