6 - The limits of subjection

Summary

In the final chapters Lawson returns to reiterate the themes surrounding subjection and sovereignty. Although there is repetition there is also elaboration – not always consistent with earlier discussion and there are shifts of emphasis.

The creation of hierarchical orders of subjection is of divine ordination through God's power (Pol. 353–4). Submission, a recognition of God's commands encapsulated in the Fifth Commandment and in Romans 13, is required across a full range of human relationships. That between sovereigns and subjects is paradigmatic of those between parents and children, husbands and wives, masters and servants, teachers and scholars. All involved in such relationships, however, are equally subject to God. It is of course this reiterated proviso which generates the quintessential problem of the human condition for Lawson, that defined by the clash between obedience to a remote God and to an immediate sovereign who only participates in and uses God's power (Pol. 355, 411 ff.). What is emphasised now, however, is that understanding this is largely a matter of having an adequate battery of appropriately discriminate classifiers. It seems that if we have not the terms to delineate the notion of subjection it is difficult for us to see the pattern of our obligations. Thus Lawson says of Bodin, he ‘mistakes much by confounding Civis (et) subditus. For though every Subject be Civis, yet every Civis is not a Subject’ (Pol. 356; cf. 26).