Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel (review)

Cary J. Nederman is one of the leading political theorists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, whose work on John of Salisbury and Machiavelli, among others, has helped to define the modern understanding of the medieval political mind. This collection of essays, many of them revised and updated versions of book chapters and journal articles published over the last twenty years, is a distillation of Nederman's most recent thinking about medieval political theory and what it might teach us about modern political structures.

The essays are arranged in five sections, whose titles impose some internal coherence on disparate material. In the first part, 'Historiographies of the Early European Tradition: Continuity and Change', Nederman dissects, with forensic skill, the work of modern and contemporary theorists who argue for a more or less unbroken continuity between medieval and modern political thinking. Starting with Walter Ullmann, Nederman moves on to Quentin Skinner and the 'neo-Figgisites', including Brian Tierney, Francis Oakley and Antony Black, pulling at the seams of their arguments to expose what he sees as flaws in the fabric of their logic.

In his 'Introduction', Nederman calls for 'balance' and asks us to 'split the difference' between the two polarities of continuity and change, arguing that, while there clearly is a significant divide between the Middle Ages and modernity, the past inevitably influences future generations in ways that signify a kind of intellectual continuity (p. xx). Yet, without directly showing his own hand, he tends to favour the argument, 'captured by Marcia Colish in her splendid set of reflections' (p. xvii) and expounded by John Pocock 'in his magisterial opus' (p. xviii), that there are in fact manifest discontinuities and ruptures between medieval and modern political thought. His robust critique of the work of the 'continuity' school, including a lengthy essay on Skinner, reveals his profound disagreement with many of its methodologies and conclusions.

Nederman returns to this adversarial approach in the last section of the book, 'Modern Receptions of Medieval Ideas', where case studies of individual writers from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries - John Fortescue, Machiavelli, Henry de Bracton, Hegel - are used to demonstrate that early thinkers were acknowledging the contribution of the Middle Ages to the formation of modern political structures long before the likes of Joseph Strayer, Ullmann, Skinner and the rest. Although Nederman regularly cites the work of his competitors and does not dismiss it all out of hand, it is hard to avoid a sense that old scores are being settled here.

The central sections of the book are perhaps the most satisfying, displaying Nederman's extensive knowledge and expertise to best effect while regularly revisiting the book's central concern with the connections between medieval and modern ideas. In Part 2, 'Dissenting Voices and the Limits of Power', a number of medieval concepts and practices are analysed: liberty, the king's will (representing the will of God), political representation, and the function of 'mirrors of princes' as a weapon against popular revolt. Nederman's ability to identify all aspects of an issue and its context never fails to impress. Regarding political representation, for example, Nederman argues persuasively that, despite a discourse of representation circulating in the Middle Ages, there was no clearly developed theory of representation to sustain it. He goes on to develop his own illuminating model of what he terms 'spiritual representation' and 'practical representation' (p. 102) as characteristic of medieval practice.

Part 3, 'Republican Self-Governance and Universal Empire', immerses us in one of the most interesting and contested areas of medieval political theory, the competing claims of republic and empire. Referring particularly to the work of Brunetto Latini and Marsiglio of Padua, Nederman demonstrates conclusively that a binary oppostion between these two concepts is not an adequate model for the late medieval debates about...