Bogdan
Szlachta Ph.D.
The Monarchy and the Rule of Law.
Essays on History of English Political Thought until
the End of Tudors
The book presents the evolution
of most important political concepts of early English history turning
points - from the Norman conquest until the decline of the Tudor rule.
It comprises an analysis of attitudes justifying the Norman invasion,
wchich referred to main Mediaeval dispute about the church-state relations
concerning feudal relations to be the foundation of political order,
and preparing arguments to be used in controversies over the necessity
of introducing public law and its contents. The author presents political
doctrines constituting the grounds for later English thinkers dealing
with the supremacy of precedent law over the royal will which was
especially important when the Stuarts attempted to introduce Roman
law institutions at cost to common law ones as well as the way of
understanding political superiority rooted in Roman doctrines, which
required the recognition of a ruler's will and sanction to be the
only source of legal, customary and precedent standards.
Doctrines by Glanville,
John Pecham, Richard FitzRalph, totally unknown to Polish readers
have been complemented by sketches about John of Salisbury and Henry
Bracton. Apart from those thinkers pondering upon contemporary relations
between spiritual and temporal power the book describes disputes held
during the War of the Roses (Reginald Peacock, Thomas Littlejohn,
and above all, John Fortescue). It reports doctrines of the Tudorian
era which - as presented in the last two sketches - produced not only
Richard Hooker (who, referring to St Thomas Aquinas, prepared the
grounds for John Locke's concepts), but also adherents of royal absolutism
(eg. Christopher St Germain and Hadrian Saravia) as well as its adversaries
(Thomas More and Thomas Starkey among others). Apart from that the
book presents the concepts of Elisabethan Jesuits, Philp Sidney's
Arcadia, Hooker's polemics with puritans
and arguments of the first parliamentary superiority followers (Thomas
Smith).
The book will be
published by Centre for Political Thought (Osrodek Mysli Politycznej)
in Cracow, as a part ot the series called The Library of Political
Thought (Biblioteka Mysli Politycznej).