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Rights, Resistance, and Revolution in the Western Tradition: Early Protestant Foundations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

John Witte Jr.
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Extract

Over the past three decades, a veritable cottage industry of important new scholarship has emerged dedicated to the history of rights talk in the Western tradition prior to the Enlightenment.1 We now know a great deal more about classical Roman understandings of rights (iura), liberties (libertates), capacities (facultates), powers (potestates), and related concepts, and their elaboration by medieval and early modern civilians. We can now pore over an intricate latticework of arguments about individual and group rights and liberties developed by medieval Catholic canonists and moralists, and the ample expansion of this medieval handiwork by neo-scholastic writers in early modern Spain and Portugal. We now know a good deal more about classical republican theories of liberty developed in Greece and Rome, and their transformative influence on early modern common lawyers and political revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic. We now know, in brief, that the West knew ample “liberty before liberalism,” and had many fundamental rights in place before there were modern democratic revolutions fought in their name.

Type
Part II. Religious Thought in the Protestant Reformation and the American Civil War
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 26 , Issue 3: Law, War, and History: A Special Issue , Fall 2008 , pp. 545 - 570
Copyright
Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2008

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References

1. See sources in my God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006), chap. 1.Google Scholar

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18. MC, G3r, G4v, L1r.

19. MC, J4r-K1r, K2R-L1r, M1r-M2r, P2r-P3r,

20. MC, H2r, K4r.

21. MC, H4r-J2r, K1r.

22. MC, K1r, L3r, P2v.

23. MC, J3r, L1r-L4r, M4r-N1r, O3r-O4r.

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33. But cf.Zwierlein, Cornel, “The Importance of ‘Confessio’ in Magdebourg (1550) for Calvinism: A Historiographical Myth,” Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 68 (2005): 27Google Scholar, who disputes the influence of the Magdeburg Confession on Beza.

34. Beza, , Rights, 35, 37, 64, 65, 81, 85Google Scholar. Here and elsewhere Beza used the terms “covenant,” ”contract,” “compact,” and “constitution” variously and interchangeably.

35. Ibid., 41-64.

36. Excerpted in Hotman, François, “Francogallia,” in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay, ed. Franklin, Julian (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 55–70.Google Scholar

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57. Ibid., 27-28, 76.

58. Ibid., 27, 36-38, 72-74.

59. Ibid., 64-65, 72-80.

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61. Ibid., 66, 68, 74, 80.

62. Ibid., 27, 41, 72.

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