H07(b) - Monarchy and Statesmanship
Date: Jun 2 | Time: 03:15pm to 04:45pm | Location:
Chair/Président/Présidente : Len Ferry (Niagara College)
Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Robert Sparling (University of Ottawa)
Communalism and Empire in Dante's Monarchia: James G. Mellon (Independent Scholar)
Abstract: Medieval political thinkers contended with such contending forces as the Church and papal claims to ultimate temporal sovereignty, the Holy Roman Empire and its claims to ultimate temporal sovereignty, the national monarchies and their claims to temporal sovereignty, feudalism, and the Roman civil law tradition. Working within parameters set by Augustinian, Thomistic-Aristotelian, and Aristotelianism as interpreted by Averroes, medieval thinkers simultaneously shared certain attitudes while differing in a number of ways. It is especially difficult in Dante's case to identify precisely the sources of his logic. His thought reflected a profound Thomist influence. Nevertheless, this was the case with thinkers like James of Viterbo, who argued in favour of ultimate papal temporal sovereignty, and John of Paris, who opposed such a position and supported the national monarchs within the temporal sphere, and Dante, who rejected the notion of ultimate temporal sovereignty for the Papacy but supported the claims of the Empire within the temporal sphere as opposed to both the Church and national monarchs. The paper proceeds by reading Monarchia, and seeking the elements that distinguish Dante not only from thinkers like James of Viterbo and John of Paris but from a fellow supporter of Empire like Engelbert of Admont.
Popular Corruption and a 'Kingly Hand' in Machiavelli's Thought: William Parsons (Duke Kunshan University)
Abstract: This paper examines Machiavelli's treatment of popular corruption in book I of the Discourses in Livy. It does so to explore the limits of both popular rule and "kingly" power in the preservation and regeneration of political orders. This constitutes part of a larger work studying Machiavelli's treatment of a number of virtuous princes who ascend amidst popular and generalized corruption.
Communicating the Goodness of Justice: Rawls on the Congruence of the Right and the Good: Jimmy Lim (McGill University)
Abstract: Rawls’s congruence thesis is widely considered a failure and did not survive his transition to Political Liberalism. I reject this view by reconstructing the relationship between congruence, stability, and the sense of justice and evincing the idea of congruence in Rawls's account of overlapping consensus. I propose that a sense of justice is a conception-dependent desire for justice. A citizen with an “effective” sense of justice is someone whose conception-dependent desire for justice is a decisive desire and guided by political conceptions of justice. I then argue that Rawls’s congruence thesis is meant for citizens with an “ineffective” sense of justice. These are citizens with conception-dependent desires for justice, but those desires are either supplementary desires or unguided by political conceptions of justice. Because they are not decisively persuaded by reasons of the right to support just laws and policies, the congruence thesis explains how they might be persuaded by reasons of the good. The political upshot of the congruence argument is the importance of appealing to prudential and doctrinal reasons for action—reasons of the good—in the politics of persuasion. If citizens with an ineffective sense of justice are representative of humankind, then the stability of justice crucially turns on the ability of statesmen to communicate the goodness of justice. Citizens with an ineffective sense of justice may reject just laws and policies otherwise perceived as incongruent with their prudential interests or doctrinal values. But properly educated, they may perhaps support just laws and policies for reasons of the good.
Republicanism’s Rival: Monarchic Humanism in Early Modern France and England: Zachariah Black (University of Toronto)
Abstract: Since J.G.A. Pocock’s magisterial Machiavellian Moment was published in 1975, republicanism has steadily grown into a major field of research in political theory. Without criticizing the republican paradigm directly, this paper argues that the focus on republicanism in political theory has caused important rival traditions to be occluded to the detriment of our understanding of European political thought. I turn to France and England to outline a tradition of monarchical humanism that grew up alongside and in dialogue with civic republicanism.
After outlining the broad contours of monarchical humanist thought in England and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I examine three exemplary figures in this tradition: François Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, and Thomas Hobbes. In opposition to civic republicans, authors in the monarchic humanist tradition elevate stability and peace over dynamism and martial spirit as well as participation in society over participation in political decision-making. I show how this more mundane view of the purpose of politics informs the relationship between monarch and subject, and how it anticipates certain important features of the liberal tradition to come. Re-examining the monarchical humanist tradition has consequences for our understanding of Renaissance humanism, monarchical and absolutist political thought, and the pre-history of liberalism.