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THE CONSTITUTION OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE AFTER 1648: SAMUEL PUFENDORF'S ASSESSMENT IN HIS MONZAMBANO

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 1999

PETER SCHRÖDER
PETER SCHRÖDER
Affiliation:
University of Marburg
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Abstract

The examination of Pufendorf's Monzambano shows that he was strongly interested in the question of sovereignty, and that the complex reality of the Holy Roman Empire demanded a completely new approach to the question of where sovereignty within the Empire lay. Pufendorf developed his account of the Empire as an irregular political system by using essential aspects of Hobbes's theory and thus departed from all previous writers on the forma imperii. But Pufendorf's writing on the Empire has not only to be linked with political and philosophical discussion about sovereignty within the Empire but also with his own main writings where he developed a more detailed theory regarding the issue of sovereignty in general. The peace of Westphalia was not only an international settlement but it also shaped the constitution of the Empire to a considerable degree, and this is of crucial significance for the history of political thought during the seventeenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , December 1999 , pp. 961 - 983
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I had the honour and pleasure to present earlier versions of this article at the Institute of Historical Research, London, and the Early Modern Europe Seminar, Oxford, and would like to thank all participants for the stimulating and profitable discussions which followed the presentations. I owe particular thanks to David Parrott and John Robertson (both Oxford), as well as Tim Hochstrasser (LSE) for their kind encouragement and invaluable advice. Thanks are also due to the Schmidtmann-Stiftung, which awarded me a research grant and enabled me to pursue this paper.