Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy
ISBN: 9780773564060
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / McGill-Queen''s University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Representative government and representation; Democracy; Constitutional law; Consent (Law); Duress (Law); Middle Ages;

The concepts of popular consent and limit, as applied to the exercise of political authority, are fundamental features of parliamentary democracy. Both these concepts played a role in medieval political theorizing, although the meaning and significance of political consent in this thought has not been well understood. In a careful, scholarly survey of the major political texts from Augustine to Ockham, Arthur Monahan analyses the contribution of medieval thought to the development of these two concepts and to the correlative concept of coercion.

Arthur P. Monahan (1930-2006) was professor emeritus, philosophy, Saint Mary's University, and the author of From Personal Duties Towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, 1300-1600 and Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Me