Liberty and popular sovereignty : Johannes Althusius (1563-1638) and humanist political thought

Abstract

This thesis supplies a new interpretation of the theory of popular sovereignty developed by Johannes Althusius in his Politica, methodice digesta, showing how it is underpinned by a particular understanding of civil liberty as well as re-examining its polemical character. The thesis begins with a full account of the development of humanist political thought in Renaissance Germany, and then moves on consider Althusius’s contribution to each of the topics singled out for debate by the German humanists. Although Althusius is chiefly known as a Calvinist political theorist, he turns out to be addressing a range of issues more characteristic of the Renaissance than of the Reformation. By approaching Althusius’s treatise in this way, the thesis is at the same time able to offer a richer account of what he is doing in presenting his central constitutional doctrine, his theory of popular sovereignty. Althusius’s theory first of all embodies a critical response to some prevailing assumptions about the character of well-instituted communities and about the role of citizens in the creation and maintenance of such an ideal. But Althusius’s theory also embodies a forceful reaction to the arguments put forward by the contemporary theorists of absolute sovereignty. Althusius is often claimed to be at least partially indebted to the work of these writers. By emphasising Althusius’s reliance on a Roman-law understanding of civil freedom, however, this thesis is able to challenge this interpretation. It argues that what Althusius lays out is a theory not of absolute but of ‘limited’ popular sovereignty. By focusing on Althusius’s contribution to the political debates of the Renaissance, the thesis is thus able at the same time to illustrate the different ways in which the concept of popular sovereignty was discussed by contemporary political theorists.