SOURCE: Monahan, Arthur P. “Richard Hooker: Counter-Reformation Political Thinker.” In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade, pp. 203-17. Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997.

[In the following essay, Monahan contrasts the views of Hooker to those of Martin Luther and John Calvin.]

A broad continuum of basic concepts exists across the all-too-often asserted gap between medieval and modern thought. In particular, the assumed or alleged modernity of Renaissance and Reformation political thinking, with its stress on individual freedom and rejection of absolutism, is more fiction than fact. We come closer to fact when we read texts in the context of their contemporary and earlier background rather than as containing twentieth-century political concepts read back into them; history, that is, should be read forward rather than backward. Many others have insisted on this same methodological point, of course, although too often such advice has not been followed.¹

In referring to Richard Hooker as a Counter-Reformation thinker, what I have in mind is that his thought shows a striking retention of basic concepts from medieval political thinkers which sets it apart from that of other authoritative Reformation thinkers such as Luther and Calvin. What I propose to do, briefly, is contrast the views of Hooker with those of Luther and Calvin on a number of key issues to show how Hooker's position differs from that of the continental reformers in their rejection of certain basic medieval conceptions of polity.

The first thing to be said about the concept of a Reformation theory of polity is that the great continental reformers were not interested in formulating political doctrine as such. They were religious reformers in full scale revolt against what they perceived as long-standing distortions, in both doctrine and practice, of the religion founded by Jesus Christ, distortions introduced by the Church of Rome. Yet because their revolt entailed the wholesale rejection of a centuries-old institution that itself had developed an image of a Christian community both temporal and spiritual, along with an elaborate conception of its own role in the world and its relationship to temporal powers, it was practically unavoidable that the reformers would offer reformist views on how Christians should live in society and how a “reformed” church should relate to political authorities.

These views, moreover, were in many ways specifically determined by the reformers' interest in throwing off the shackles of the Romish “whore of Babylon.” This meant, among other things, a rejection of the self-declared status accorded the institutional church and its clergy as a separate sphere with its own laws, rights, and privileges, as well as claims to political authority on its own and superiority over temporal rulers in matters determined by the ecclesiastical rulers themselves.

For purposes of this paper, then, I construe “Reformation political thought” quite narrowly. Specifically, it is the initial position adopted by Luther and Calvin and their followers concerning the nature of political authority and the obligations of a Christian toward it. In the latter connection I shall also comment on what has come to be called Protestant or Reformation resistance theory, attempting to locate it within the conception of Reformation political thought just defined.

Rejecting vehemently the medieval church's conception of itself as a spiritual polity superior to and capable of exercising authority over temporal rulers, who were often said to receive their legitimate power from the church, both Luther and Calvin maintained that political authority comes directly from God, citing Paul's Romans 13:1.² A direct entailment from this basic principle was that Christians had a seemingly unqualified obligation of obedience to their temporal rulers, even to tyrants, whose depredations were construed in Augustinian terms as punishment imposed on sinful subjects.³ Naturally enough, however, even though the internal logic of this qualification might not be very clear, Christians were not obliged to obey temporal masters when this would violate a higher obligation to obey the laws of God or nature, but in no circumstances was disobedience to be expressed through any effort to subvert established political authority. Punishment for disobeying temporal law was to be accepted, even to the extreme of martyrdom.⁴

Despite the scriptural authority alleged for this simple position, however, it could not and did not stand for long in the face of political realities that saw Lutheran reformers in Germany facing suppression by the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor and Calvinists in France experiencing harassment and massacre by their Catholic rulers. Accordingly, both Lutheran and Calvinist political thought was soon expanded to legitimize resistance to efforts at suppression of the “true” religion. Two arguments came into use by Protestant writers and legal authorities to justify active armed resistance to such repression, both based on the classical and medieval notion that the legitimacy of political power depended in the final analysis on the purpose for which it was being used: use of power outside the limits of its purpose was illegitimate and warranted action either to restrain the ruler within the limits of this legitimacy or to remove him from office. The better known of these two arguments is the Calvinist thesis, invoking the Spartan ephors as a historical example, that lesser magistrates also enjoy a measure of legitimate political authority given them directly by God and thereby have the right, even the duty, to defend the citizenry against a ruler who would tyrannize them by suppressing the “true” religion.⁵ In fact, this lesser magistrate argument was urged by Luther in the early 1530s and does not appear in Calvin's Institution of the Christian Religion until its 1559 edition.⁶ As well, Lutheran legal advisors also developed in the early 1530s a justification for resistance based on the notion that the limits of legitimate political authority were established by some form of agreement between the people to be ruled and their ruler; hence, failure on the ruler's part to restrain his power within these limits gave the people through their representatives the right to act against him. A clear and ringing expression of this position can be found in the widely circulated Magdeburg Confession of 1550.⁷ As we shall see, there is an irony involved in calling this resistance theory in either of its forms an integral part of Reformation political thought, since the essentials of both arguments derive from medieval theories of polity rather than being explicitly and exclusively Protestant. This is a good example of the continuum of political thought from the medieval to the Reformation era.

The political and ecclesiastical conditions in which Richard Hooker wrote his Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie in late sixteenth-century England were markedly different from those in which the continental reformers had written some decades earlier. The purpose of Hooker's work was also different, requiring a much fuller expression of political thought, even though, as with Luther and Calvin, it was not Hooker's intention to formulate a fully comprehensive political doctrine. In a word, Hooker was an intelligent and remarkably well-read apologist for the institutional status quo of the reformed church in England as established by the political authorities of his country. His purpose was to persuade radical English reforming elements that something more closely approximating continental Calvinism was not appropriate to the contemporary English scene.⁸

The English church as established in the sixteenth century was, arguably, that church as it might have been perceived across the medieval continuum of many centuries, with a single though momentous and striking exception: the English monarch had replaced the Roman pontiff as apex ecclesiae and ultimate authority in both church and state. The magnitude of this change as regards both ecclesiology and political theory should not be underestimated, of course, but it is not my intention to develop this point. Rather, I want to stress that Hooker's political thought involves a reaffirmation of the medieval scholastic and Counter-Reformation corporation theory of politics totally different from the originally expressed theory of the continental reformers. At the same time and in ways quite unlike other medieval and reformed theologians and legists, Hooker advanced a theory of politics that made temporal authority eo ipso the ultimate authority even in the church, a kind of Marsilianism in reverse. For where Marsilius of Padua's Defensor pacis depicted the institutional church as a department of state in order to relegate things ecclesiastical to their proper level in political society and thereby eliminate clerical claims to political authority,⁹ Hooker's intent was to attribute at least some of the spiritual functions of religion to the temporal ruler in order to guarantee them the highest level of importance.

The general structure and style of the Lawes show that Hooker was thoroughly familiar with the scholasticism of his day. His use of this intellectual frame of reference was not accidental.¹⁰ It is not my intention to attempt a general summary of Hooker's theory of polity, however, but only to indicate a number of points in which it is both medieval and “Counter-Reformation,” the latter insofar as the views in question are found in Counter-Reformation thinkers but not in the early examples of writings by continental reformers like Luther and Calvin. I want to stress three aspects of Hooker's position: (1) his emphasis on popular consent as the basis for political authority grounded in some form of social contract that brings a polity into being; (2) the element of limit as the essential qualifier of legitimate authority; (3) his use of medieval corporation theory, especially as elaborated in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century conciliarist thought.

Taking an essentially juridical approach, Hooker begins the Lawes by defining law and its several forms in a fashion quite familiar to any reader of Thomas Aquinas's treatise on law in the Summa theologiae.¹¹ With Aquinas, he stressed the fundamentally rational character of law in all its forms and made rationality the characteristic par excellence of human nature as well as the touchstone of moral and legal behavior. The element of consent, moreover, is closely associated with rationality as its measure in human dealings with one another. Humans are rational, equal, and free by nature; accordingly, no individual can exercise authority over any other except by agreement or consent (I.10.8; 1:102.21-31).

Here Hooker was much more closely aligned with the scholastic conception of humans as Aristotelian rational animals than with reformist views. For him reason was God's greatest gift to humans, enabling them to understand God's plan for reality as a whole, situate themselves within it, and specify the proper (moral) forms of human activity. Law, then, was essentially a kind of reinforcement for this basic rational insight, a guide and assistance. Hooker thus was much more in tune with the Aristotelian/Thomistic conception of human reason and law than with St Augustine, even though he acknowledged that humans were far from perfect and subscribed to the orthodox doctrine of original sin. His position and general attitude toward the fallen human condition were much less dramatically expressed, however, than those of the Lutheran and Calvinist reformers, who tended to picture humans as wallowing in sin and perverted in their natural judgments;¹² or of Hobbes, for whom law and the structures of governmental coercion were necessary to correct the strife-torn conditions of the state of nature.¹³

As just noted, consent was a fundamental feature of Hooker's theory of law, and on this score he proceeded well beyond, but in the same direction as, the explicit political doctrine of Aquinas. For Hooker, positive laws derive their authority from the consent of the people to be governed by them (I.10.8; 1:102.21-31). This idea was not new or unique to him, to be sure. It was indeed a fundamental feature of much of the then-current Protestant resistance thought and had been formulated centuries earlier by canonists and via moderna theologians attempting to place limits on papal authority in the conciliar period.¹⁴ Its most recent advocate in the kingdoms of England and Scotland was George Buchanan, whose corporation thought can be traced back through Jacques Almain and John Major to the conciliarists of the fifteenth century, such as d'Ailly, Gerson, Zabarella and Nicholas of Cusa.¹⁵ Hooker was familiar with Buchanan's work, which had been published in the 1570s.¹⁶ Though himself expressing no position on resistance theory, then, Hooker was familiar with its general arguments, as well as with the constitutionalist ideas on which it was based. Further, the notion of popular consent as a basis for political authority and law had been part of English legal and political traditions for centuries.¹⁷

This emphasis on consent was an integral and critical feature of Hooker's theory, as it had been in the Huguenot resistance tracts of Hotman and Mornay and in earlier formulations by Cajetan and Spanish neo-Thomists like Mariana and Suárez, the last almost contemporaneous with Hooker.¹⁸ This certainly carried Hooker and these others beyond the literal Aristotelian text. The point I want to stress, however, is that Hooker was expressing here an essentially medieval and Counter-Reformation (as opposed to the original Reformation protestant) view. What, for Hooker, took humans out of their original condition of individual liberty and into membership in a political society was an application of rationality which brought them to see that the conditions of strife caused by the Fall could be remedied to some extent by forming a political society or polity (I.10.3-4; 1:98.16-99.15).

Hooker's views on popular consent as the basis for political authority are first put forward in Book I of the Lawes, where he examines the nature of political society and its origins. He returns to the same subject in Book VIII. His theory is in line with Aquinas's efforts to reconcile the Aristotelian conception of society as natural with the Augustinian view that coercive temporal authority was providential compensation for the negative effects of the Fall. The same general problem of reconciling these two disparate, if not incompatible, accounts of political society had been faced by Christian political thinkers since Aristotle's Politics came into western intellectual circles in the mid-thirteenth century, and the late medieval Spanish neo-scholastic tradition had continued to grapple with it in the sixteenth. What makes Hooker's efforts of particular interest here is his attempt at reconciliation from the reformed side of the Reformation divide, after earlier Protestant political thinkers like Luther and Calvin had virtually renounced the Aristotelian position in favor of political Augustinianism.

According to Hooker, society and government are required for two reasons. First, humans have a natural need to live in society; and secondly, government is a practically necessary consequence of fallen human nature, as individuals realize the advantages of coming together to best guarantee their own good. In making the latter point, Hooker obviously placed some strain on the naturalness of the Aristotelian notion of polity, even though the Philosopher also emphasized a “need” aspect to human sociability. In this connection it might be noted that Hooker, presumably consciously, employed a distinction developed by the Spanish neo-scholastics precisely to blend the Aristotelian doctrine of humans as naturally social with the Augustinian explanation of coercive political authority as a consequence of original sin: the distinction between the social and the political.¹⁹

Hooker offered a slightly different approach to the same position in his account in Book VIII of the three ways humans can be brought under subjection to political authority, an account which can be correlated with Book I, insofar as he had offered there a general and at least quasi-historical treatment of the origins of political society, while in Book VIII he gave a more systematic account of the possible ways in which this can occur. The details of Hooker's position here illustrate again the medieval and Counter-Reformation aspects of his doctrine. Hooker identified three ways in which political authority comes about, all legitimate in the eyes of God because all divinely sanctioned. He began by distinguishing between rulers who receive their authority directly from God and those who receive it from the people, and he makes a sub-division within the former. The basic distinction itself is a traditional medieval one which is found in Aquinas, but which goes back at least to John of Salisbury.²⁰ Hooker probably employed it in direct response to the Reformation view that all rulers held their authority directly from God.

The first way a ruler holds power directly from God is by force: groups of individuals can be brought under political subjection through conquest, divine providence so disposing. It is God who gives victory in war, Hooker asserted, and he referred to the law of nations (jus gentium) as validating this mode of subjection (VIII.3.1 [Keble 2.5]; 3:334.13-22). Secondly, God can establish authority in a ruler by directly designating the person who is to rule: Hooker instanced here the traditional example of the Israelite monarchy, whose rulers held power “immediatelie from God by meer divine right” (ibid.; 3:334.22-26). Thirdly, rulers can have authority bestowed on them by the people, individuals having been left free by God to make their own choice of who shall govern them: England was an example of such a polity (VIII.3.2 [Keble 2.7]; 3:336.17-337.1). Hooker went on to accept hereditary succession as located in this category of consent-based legitimacy, rejecting categorically the requirement of Mornay in the Vindiciae and Hotman in the Francogallia of recurrent electoral acts:

Which strange untrue and unnaturall conceites sett abroad by seedsmen of rebellion, only to animate unquiet spirites, and to feed them with a possibilitie of aspiring unto thrones and scepters if they can win the hartes of the people, what hereditarie title soever any other before them may have, I say, these unjust and insolent positions I would not mention were it not thereby to make the countenance of truth more orient.²¹

Hooker would surely have known the various Calvinist, Knoxian, presbyterian, and puritan views being rejected here.

Hooker was equally clear, however, that the authority of one monarchy can vary from that of another, since its character and extent are affected by how the ruler came into office: “In power of dominion all kinges have not an equall latitude.” Kings by lawful conquest set their own terms; kings appointed directly by God have the power God assigns.

Touching Kings which were first instituted by agreement and composition made with them over whom they raigne[,] how farr their power may lawfully extende, the articles of compact between them must shewe[:] not the articles only of compact at the first beginning which for the most part are either cleane worne out of knowledge, or else knowne unto very fewe, but whatsoever hath been after in free and voluntarie manner condescended unto whither by expresse consent, whereof positive lawes are witnesses, or else by silent allowance famously notified through custome reaching beyonde the memorie of man.

(VIII.3.3 [Keble 2.11]; 3:340.2-17)

Hooker was reasonably relaxed about the form as well as the content of the consent which “naturally” or normally authorizes government. Not only could limitations on a king's power vary according to the conditions in which—and on which—it came into being, but the nature of the consent itself could vary from express to tacit, both in the beginning and throughout the life of a polity. The terms of agreement may change over time, and hence the character of laws in a polity will differ, both those of a positive form which result from explicit legislation and those of custom which bind “by silent allowance.”²² It seems, further, that Hooker's picture of the original compact between people and ruler may have been of the ruler negotiating the terms of his authority rather than simply accepting conditions dictated by the community as a whole.²³ If so, this shows a more benevolent attitude toward the sovereign than that favored by the resistance theory pamphleteers Hotman and Mornay. It was also more consistent with actual practice in England and the continental monarchies of the day.

Accepting, then, that the specifics of limited political authority are normally a matter of agreement among human individuals and not something derived deductively from the natural law or any other such source, Hooker proceeded to deal with the situation in England as an instant case of historical fact. The power of the English monarch, he maintained, was limited by law, the law of the land, in both its statutory and customary forms. Hooker implied, moreover, that limitations on royal power were involved in the positive legal authorizations of royal actions more than in express prohibitions, while the crown's own legislative power is mainly negative, one of veto.²⁴

Consistent with the foregoing, he was prepared to consider the possibility of even an absolute monarchy: whatever was agreed to would stand. And with Molina and Suárez and later English political thinkers like Selden, he expressed a straightforward natural rights position: free agents can willingly give up whatever they choose.²⁵ (Although Hooker does not say so, however, limitations from the higher law presumably could be invoked to rule out tyranny.) Also, power handed over by the people to the ruler has been alienated: government once established was to all intents and purposes irrevocably conveyed to the ruler (VIII.3.2 [Keble 2.10]; 3:339.20-29). This would have been an essential element in Hooker's case against the puritan position, given that his aim was to show that all forms of the law applied to all citizens without qualification. His brief would have been weakened by conceding any possibility of revoking the original compact.

Though perfectly intelligible in terms of the work's purpose, the absence in the Lawes of any theory of deposition or resistance has been used to dissociate Hooker's position in general from social contract theory. It has been suggested that his doctrine of consent was always stated tentatively because his requirement for consent was tacit rather than active, and that his overall position lacked the theological overtones of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century social contract statements advocating the rights of resistance and popular sovereignty: in a word, that Hooker's interest in the social compact was philosophical, not political.²⁶ Leaving aside the possibility that Hooker might have had both philosophical and political interests in view, however, it seems unlikely that he was urging only the former. And this for two reasons: (1) other, undeniably political sixteenth-century social contract theories concerning the origin of political society did not insist on a positive act of consent as a necessary condition for founding a polity, nor did either Hobbes or Locke later;²⁷ and (2) Hooker's purpose in publishing the Lawes was just as “political” as that of other Reformation era political writers.

Hooker's political theory, on the other hand, should not be confused with the more liberal social contractarianism of John Locke, an error made often enough as a result of taking at face value Locke's careful references to Hooker for the purpose of providing respectability to his own otherwise quite antithetical views.²⁸ Locke and Hooker differed on two essential points: (1) Hooker's view, taken from the late scholastic tradition found, for example, in Suárez and argued by him more deductively than by any of its earlier Spanish neo-scholastic proponents, was that the original condition of individuals in the state of nature permitted them to opt even for absolute monarchy as not in itself contrary to the natural law.²⁹ This was not Locke's position. And (2) Hooker did not articulate a theory of inalienable individual rights in the state of nature, as did Locke.³⁰

It has been suggested, too, that, in contrast with Buchanan's position, from which he seems to have taken his views on the origins of political society, Hooker's conception of the original compact between ruler and ruled was less legalistic and not, strictly speaking, enforceable: he would have been repeating here a standard but not universally held medieval view of the compact between ruler and ruled.³¹ I find this contrast a bit forced; but there is a difference between Hooker and Buchanan concerning whether the king was above the law. Buchanan was explicitly negative on this point while Hooker was not. Hooker said that the king should rule consistently with the laws of his own jurisdiction but that in the final analysis only moral suasion could be brought to bear.³² Hooker did insist, of course, that a monarch was bound by the terms of his own agreement with his subjects, and the traditional coronation oath included a promise to rule by laws chosen by the people.

Ultimately, Hooker held the conventional Tudor conception of the authority and role of the monarchy and an equally orthodox view on the inadmissibility of rebellion, but without giving great attention to this issue. One unorthodox feature of his political thought vis à vis the contemporary English scene, however, was his insistence that the royal “power of dominion” derived originally from popular consent, “conveyance” from the people (VIII.3.2 [Keble 2.9]; 3.338.21-339.4). Here Hooker sounds like Buchanan again and like Mornay; but in practice he elided popular consent with the orthodox view of monarchy accepted in English common law, and, unlike Buchanan and Mornay, he accepted hereditary succession, although he did mention popular acclamation as a feature of the royal coronation.³³

The long held conventional view of Richard Hooker as a sixteenth-century English proponent of medieval scholastic views is correct, then, at least as regards his view of the origins and character of political authority and his use of the notions of popular consent, social contract, representation for the people through members of parliament, and limitation of legitimacy construed in terms of the general purpose of authority as promoting the common good. On these counts, his views are antithetical to those of the great continental reformers such as Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and Beza, who at least in their early writings rejected the natural law and corporatist constitutionalist notions of the medieval theologians and canonists.

That this is so should not be surprising, given the distinctive character of the religion established in England in the sixteenth century that Hooker defended in the Lawes. While every instance of the reformed religion portrayed itself as, and sought validation in, the claim to represent, a return to the true religion of the early Christian church, Anglicanism retained the greatest resemblance in theology, ecclesiology, and institutional structure to the medieval church of Rome from which it was separating. In this sense Hooker's position, particularly his theory of polity, is “Counter-Reformation” in that it rejects the early Lutheran and Calvinist reaffirmation of the simple Augustinian view of political authority as directly God-given for the purpose of controlling and, where necessary, punishing the citizenry. Of course Hooker did not, nor could he, simply parrot Roman Catholic theory of polity, especially as regards church-state relations. But in terms of his general theory of the nature and origins of temporal polity, he was more “Counter-Reformation” than protestant reformer in his political thinking.

Notes

1. The most thoroughgoing advocate of this contextually linguistic approach to the history of political thought in recent years has been Quentin Skinner. See his “Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts,” Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1970): 118-38; “The Limits of Historical Explanation,” Philosophy 41 (1966): 199-215; “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 3-53; “Social Meaning and the Explanation of Social Actions,” in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy. Politics and Society, ser. 4 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972) 136-77.

   His application of this method can be seen in Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978). The Skinnerian method has come under criticism in some quarters, however, especially for its author's universalizing claims on its behalf and for the adequacy of Skinner's own application of it in Foundations. See James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989) and Arthur P. Monahan, From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, 1300-1600 (Kingston: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1994), xxii-xxiv, 5, 129.

2. “[The people must willingly] suffer everything that can happen [rather than] fight against your lord and tyrant … [established political authority rests] in the will and hand of God [hence] those who resist their rulers resist the ordinance of God.” Martin Luther, “Whether Soldiers also can be Saved,” trans. Charles M. Jacobs, in Luther's Works, ed. Helmut Lehmann and Jaroslav Pelikan, 55 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press and Fortress Press, 1953-65), 46:112-13, 126; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeill and trans. F. L. Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 4.20.25-31, pp. 1512-19; Robert Barnes, “That Men's Constitutions which are not grounded in Scripture bind not the conscience of Man,” in The Reformation Essays of Dr Robert Barnes, ed. Neelak S. Tjernagel (London: Concordia Publishing House, 1963), 81; William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1970), 173-78; Philipp Melanchthon, Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci communes: 1555, trans. and ed. Claude L. Manschreck (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), 334. Cf. Monahan, From Duties towards Rights, 195-206; 217-18.

3. St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Demetrius B. Zema and Gerald G. Walsh, 3 vols. (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1950-54), 19.14-15, 12.27.

4. Martin Luther, “Temporal Authority: to what Extent it Should be Obeyed,” trans. J. J. Schindel, in Luther's Works, ed. Walter I. Brandt (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1962), 45:75-129; Calvin, Inst., 4.20.32, 1520.

5. Calvin, Inst., 4.20.31, p. 1519. Skinner considered the standard Battles translation here “misleading” and offered his own with references to the 1559 Latin edition of the Institutes; John Calvin, Institutio christiane religionis, 1559, in Joannis Calvini opera omnia, ed. L. Baum et al., 59 vols. (Brunswick, 1863-1900), 2:1116; Skinner, Foundations, 2:232.

6. See Monahan, From Duties towards Rights, 206-13, 229-30.

7. A greatly condensed version of the Magdeburg Confession is in Roland Bainton, ed., The Age of Reformation (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1956), 172-73. The original is in Bekenntnis Unterricht und Vermanang der Pfarrhern und Prediger der christlichen Kirchen zu Magdeburgh, Anno 1550 den 13 Aprilis (Magdeburg, 1550).

8. For a fine account of the general purpose and contemporary background of Hooker's publication of the Lawes, see William P. Haugaard's Intro. to the Pref. in FLE 6:1-80. Cf. Monahan, From Duties towards Rights, 273-93.

9. Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of Peace, trans. Alan Gewirth (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1956), 2.30.45; 1.15.8; 2.4 and 8.

10. A careful and authoritative assessment of Hooker's use of sources in the Lawes can be found in Haugaard, Intro. to Pref., FLE 6:63-72: see especially the notes for bibliographical data here. See also Lee W. Gibbs's Intro. to Lawes I, 6:81-96 and notes, especially pp. 91-96.

11. Thomas Aquinas, S.T. 1a2ae.90-96. For a summary of Hooker's dependence on and use of Thomas Aquinas in the Lawes see Peter Munz, The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971; original ed. 1952), 49-67. See also W. David Neelands, “Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and ‘Tradition,’” above, pp. 75-94.

12. For Luther human reasoning powers were “carnal” and “absurd”; “[humans have all] fallen from God and been deserted by God; [we are completely] bound, wretched, captive, sick, dead [we are all so] corrupt and averse from God [that we have no hope of being able to will] things which please God or which God wills; [our actions proceed from our] averse and evil natures [completely enslaved to the Devil so that we can] do nothing but averse and evil things … through the one transgression of the one man, Adam, we are all under sin and damnation [with] no capacity to do anything but sin and be damned.” This compendium of brief citations was collected from Martin Luther, “The Bondage of the Will,” trans. Philip S. Watson and Benjamin Drewery, in Luther's Works, vol. 33, ed. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972) in Skinner, Foundations, 2:5.

13. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: 1839-45; repr. Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1962), 1.13; 3:113-16.

14. For a discussion of the views on resistance of Beza, Vermigli, Hotman and Mornay see Monahan, From Duties towards Riqhts, 239-72, passim.

15. Monahan, From Duties towards Rights, 121-26.

16. Cargill Thompson has pointed out that while Hooker never referred specifically to Buchanan's De jure regni apud Scotos, “many of the distinctive features of Hooker's theory are also to be found in Buchanan's dialogue, and the argument of Lawes I.10.1-5 in particular appears at times to follow Buchanan very closely.” W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, “The Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society’: Richard Hooker as a Political Thinker,” in S.R.H., 44-45; repr. in C. W. Dugmore, ed., Studies in the Reformation (London: Athlone Press, 1980), 169, 170.

17. The standard reference for medieval England in this connection is to the thirteenth-century Henry de Bracton's On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. George E. Woodbine, trans. and revised Samuel E. Thorne, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1968-77); cf. Arthur P. Monahan, Consent, Coercion and Limit: the Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy (Kingston: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1987), 97-111. Hooker cited Bracton in the Lawes: see below, n. 33.

18. See François Hotman, Francogallia, ed. Ralph E. Giesey, trans. J. H. M. Salmon (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972), chap. 6, p. 221; Philippe du Plessis Mornay, “Vindiciae contra tyrannos,” in Julian H. Franklin, ed. Constitutionalism and Resistance in the sixteenth Century (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 160, 161, 183; Juan de Mariana, De rege et regis institutione libri III (Toledo, 1599), 1.1, 2; pp. 112, 115; Thomas de Vio (Cardinal Cajetan), In summam theologiae sancti Thomae Aquinatis (Rome: 1571), 2a2ae.50.1 ad 5; cf. De comparatione auctoritatis papae et concilii, ed. V. M. Pollet (Rome: Institutum Angelicum, 1936), tr. 2 par. 2 c. 9; Francesco Suárez, Defensio fidei catholicae et apostolicae adversus anglicanae sectae errores, 2 vols. (Naples, 1872), 3.2.5 and 3.2 passim.

19. “Two foundations there are which beare up publique societies, the one, a naturall inclination, wherby all men desire sociable life and fellowship, the other an order expresly or secretly agreed upon, touching the manner of their union in living together. The later is that which we call the law of a common weale, the very soule of a politique body, the parts wherof are by law animated, held together, and set on worke in such actions as the common good requireth” (Lawes I.10.1; 1:96.17-23).

    The verbal distinction between “social” and “political” was made by Thomas Aquinas but not explicated: On Kingship to the King of Cyprus, trans. Gerald B. Phelan, revised I. Th. Eschmann (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949), 1.1.4; cf. Aquinas, S.T. 1a2ae, 72.4. It was developed by Spanish neo-Thomist political thinkers in order to emphasize the consensual or conventional origin of the political order: humans, they contended, are social by nature but not political by nature in the sense of being necessarily determined to live together under some form of polity. The latter condition comes about as a result of agreement and consent among free individuals. See Monahan, From Duties towards Rights, 136-37.

20. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, ed. and trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 4.1, 5.6; pp. 28-29, 69-70. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship, chap. 6, pp. 49-50.

21. Lawes VIII.3.2 (Keble 2.8); 3:338.2-9. Cf. I.10.3-4; 1:98.16-99.15.

22. VIII.3.3 (Keble 2.11); 3:340.2-17. Cf. “an order expresly or secretly agreed upon” (Lawes I.10.1; 1:96.19). Cf. VIII.3.2 (Keble 2.10); 3:339.20-27.

23. “Composition made [by the rulers themselves?] with them over whom they raigne, how farr their power may lawfully extende, the articles of compact between them must shewe” (Lawes VIII.3.3 [Keble 2.11]; 3:340.9-11).

24. Cargill Thompson, “Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’” 39.

25. Lawes I.10.5; 1:100.19-28. Cf. Luis de Molina, De justitia et jure, 2 vols. (Mainz: 1859), 1705; Francesco Suárez, De legibus, ed. Luciano Perena et al., 8 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superiore de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1971-81), 3.4.6; John Selden, Opera, ed. D. Wilkins, 3 vols. (London: 1726), 3:2024, 2041. On Selden cf. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 96-100.

26. Cargill Thompson, “Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’” 40. Cargill Thompson argues that Hooker's position stresses compact rather than contract, the latter designating the efficient causal origin of an actual polity, in order to distinguish Hooker's view from later seventeenth-century social contract thinkers like Hobbes and Locke. It does not seem to me, however, that this distinction is well grounded; Locke employed the term “compact” interchangeably with “contract”: Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), 2.8.97 (“original compact”); 2.8.99 (“And this is done by barely agreeing to unite into one political society, which is all the compact, that is, or needs, be”).

27. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.20; p. 186. Cf. Deborah Baumgold, Hobbes's Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 94-97; John Locke, Two Treatises, 2.8, pp. 119-22.

28. Cf. Locke, Two Treatises, 2.2, p.15.

29. Lawes I.10.5; 1:100.19-29; cf. Cargill Thompson, “Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’” 40-43.

30. Locke, Two Treatises, 2.7, pp. 90-94.

31. See Cargill Thompson, “Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’” 41-43. See above, n. 26.

32. Ibid.

33. For the views of Buchanan and Mornay, see Monahan, From Duties towards Rights, 124-25, 268-69. This comment applies only to Hooker's view on the ruler's exercise of temporal authority. McGrade has shown that Hooker insisted that the crown's exercise of spiritual authority was subordinate to church law as well as to God and the “body politic,” and that he specifically invoked Bracton's formula that “the king can do nothing except what he can do by law,” rendering it in terms of the ruler's discretionary authority to mean, “the King's graunt of any favour made contrary to the law is voyd.” See Intro. to Lawes VIII, FLE 6:359-60 and 364-69 and Commentary notes on VIII.9 and 3:332.19-24; also McGrade, “Richard Hooker on the Lawful Ministry of Bishops and Kings” in W. J. Sheils, ed., The Ministry, Clerical and Lay, Studies in Church History, 26 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1989), 177-84.