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).