Divine Sovereignty: The Origins of Modern State Power

by Daniel Engster

Overview

How did the modern state become the Leviathan that Hobbes described? Engster challenges the common assertion that the state emerged from a new secular philosophy at the time of the Renaissance. He argues instead that early modern theorists legitimized state power by portraying it as a sanctified force for moral order within an otherwise secular and contingent world.

Engster traces the modern development of state authority to the breakdown of medieval ideas of order encompassed in the "great chain of being." He then shows how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and statesmen such as Montaigne, Bodin, Richelieu, Bossuet, and Hobbes redefined the main principles of the state—including legislative sovereignty, executive prerogative, governmental regulation, and bureaucratic rationality—in ways that underlie state organization even today.

Providing a broad synthesis of early modern state theory and practice, Divine Sovereignty suggests that these writers envisioned the state as the center of divine and natural order in a world that had strayed from divine guidance. In revealing how early modern theorists and statesmen justified the new powers of their Leviathan, Engster also illuminates conflicts and paradoxes within the modern nation-state.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780875802756
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2001
Edition description:	1
Pages:	267
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Daniel Engster is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas, San Antonio.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Montaignian Moment
2. Jean Bodin
3. Cardinal Richelieu and the Birth of Modern Executive Power
4. Louis XIV and the Ideology of the Regulatory State
5. English State Theory
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Elegantly written... an innovative contribution to the literature on the origins of the modern state."

-Maurizio Viroli, Princeton University

"Illuminating."—Choice

From the Publisher