From Personal Duties Towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, 1300-1600

This volume is the second in a series by Monahan chronicling the history of political thought in western Europe.Although the subtide indicates that this is supposed to be a broad history of political thought covering the period, 1 300-1600, that is not the case.This is a group of thematic approaches to Renaissance and Reformation intellectual history that, while having some interesting aspects, is not a comprehensive study.To understand the problems of From Personal Duties Towards Personal Rights, you must put it into the context of Monahan' s overall series.According to the introduction, there is at least one further volume planned in the series that began with Consent, Coercion and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy (1987).This first work examined the medieval poHtical tradition, with special emphasis on the twelfth through fourteenth centuries.Monahan' s theme, as stated in the subtitle, was to trace the development of parliamentary democracy, not to survey the entire medieval political tradition.Consent, Coercion and Limit covered a considerable amount of material that might reasonably be expected to appear in the second book, so scholars who are not aware of Monahan's first volume would find some disturbing lacunae if the second volume is read alone.(For instance, Marsilius of Padua, who appears as a marginal figure in From Personal Duties Towards Personal Rights, is featured prominently along with other fourteenth- century thinkers in the penultimate section of Consent, Coercion and Limit).Similarly, as Monahan intends to continue this series in a third volume "whose primary focus will be theories of policy that are recognizably 'scientific'" (p. 1 1) the cut-off date of 1600 is deceptive.Some important figures from the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin among them, are absent from this study.While the author's justification for doing so seems sound, their absence is unexpected given the tide's promise.From Personal Duties Towards Personal Rights also lacks the sharp focus of the first volume.Where earlier Monahan kept to the history of parliamentary democracy, in this volume he attempts to cover a number of approaches.He has abandoned the chronological approach of Consent, Coercion and Limit, where he treated the parliamentary thinkers century by century.From Personal Duties Towards Personal Rights favours a multi-thematic treatment of the material.Topics including civic republicanism, constitutionalism and the Reformation are useful organizing principles for the chapters, though, as Monahan admits, there are awkward gaps left to fill, as evinced by the separate section devoted to the Spanish neo-scholasdcs such as Vitoria and Suarez while also attempting to integrate humanist Juan Luis Vives into the same analysisa less-than-successful proposition.Discussion of a few individual thinkers and their works constitutes the bulk of each section, after Monahan provides a broad context for that school of political thought.By arranging his material in thematic sections, Monahan categorizes the political thinkers into pigeonholes which are not

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