The Circle of Rights Expands: Modern Political Thought after the Reformation, 1621 (Luther) to 1762 (Rosseau) (review)

This book stands as the last volume of a trilogy on the history of political thought. The trilogy as a whole examines the evolving use and interpretation of two key concepts in the medieval tradition through to the early-modern and modern periods: (1) the link between legitimate authority and some understanding of limits to power, and (2) the link between legitimate authority and some manifestation of popular consent or acceptance. As the third volume in this set, The Circle of Rights Expands covers, in broad terms and with some exceptions, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and demonstrates the distillation and indeed transformation of these core medieval concepts, in the midst of the development of new idioms. This book, then, seeks to build a more complex vision of Enlightenment political thought as an approach that reflected innovative modern tendencies, while also carrying on a conversation rooted in classic theories of the medieval age. In broad terms, the upshot of Monahan’s book is that the political thinking grounding our major concepts and normative judgments today can be regarded as a mixture of medieval inspired themes around the conditions for legitimacy with a uniquely modern fascination with the idea of sovereignty.

To make this case Monahan must cover a lot of ground, and he does, setting up both the strengths and weaknesses of his analysis. As a strength, he is able to present a clear discussion of the thematic continuities in the thought of a number of modern natural law theorists, and to provide his readers with a sense of the general significance of each of these, including Grotius, Pufendorf, Selden, as well as Hobbes and Locke, with their more tenuous links to this tradition. For readers who have a limited understanding of the distinctions among these theorists, Monahan provides a very accessible and valuable overview. For specialists, Monahan provides new insights, given his vast knowledge of the medieval precedents, as well as some perspective on current issues of debate in the scholarship. Of particular interest are those passages on Bodin, where Monahan differs from his rival Quentin Skinner in this sort of exercise.

Overall, Monahan’s treatment of this period of political thought is uneven. Despite its claim to be an authoritative statement of the main lines of political thinking into the modern period, Monahan does not address or take on dominant rival interpretations of that history, including those that stress the centrality of republicanism in this period. His treatment of the work of Hobbes and Locke is generally good, although it largely follows established interpretations, especially that of James Tully in the case of Locke. His treatment of Rousseau, dismissed as an incoherent thinker in light of medieval concepts by Monahan, is less valuable, where he even fails to cite his main rival and key scholar in these matters, Robert Derathé.

In an intellectual survey like this, a good index is crucial, because it can give certain groups, like undergraduates, access to a text that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Because of the rather general thrust of this text, and indeed its particular appropriateness for undergraduates of all levels, it is unfortunate that the index is not better. Despite its suitability for undergraduates, I also would recommend this book to scholars in the history of political thought who are looking to understand the different ways in which the study of legal theory and jurisprudence helped to inform modern traditions of political thinking.