1 - The political community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
How did people understand their political communities? We will look first at universitas (literally, all-togetherness); then at body – including the ‘organic analogy’ between society and the human body; and then at civitas (the ancient Roman term for civic community or state) – including both Cicero's and Aristotle's political languages. Second, what were the salient political values? We will look at purposes ascribed to political communities and the concept of ‘the common good’; at liberty and the relation of individual to community or state; and at the state in relation to justice and the law.
There existed an enormous diversity of expressions for units of government: a random list would include regnum, civitas, universitas or communitas regni or civitatis, dominium, corpus, provincia, ducatus, commune. Among these diverse expressions, universitas, communitas, corpus and civitas were generic terms which could be used of any state, and the first three of other groups (cities, monasteries, villages, guilds and so on) as well; civitas could also refer either to a city or a city-state. These terms referred, moreover (with the occasional exception of civitas) to the political group, without implying any specific distribution of power within it (compare ‘nation’ today), as regnum and commune usually did. Universitas, originally a Roman term for a sub-political corporate body or ‘lesser association’, had by the high Middle Ages become a general term and one very commonly found in political and legal documents of many different provenances.
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- Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 , pp. 14 - 41Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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