SOURCE: "Ockham and the Birth of Individual Rights" in Authority and Power, edited by Brian Tierney and Peter Linehan, Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 149-65.

[In the following essay, McGrade examines the relationship of Ockham's philosophy to his politics, particularly concerning rights and powers.]

Perhaps the only thing more frustrating than the combination of politics and philosophy is their separation. The idea of a society dominated by philosophy epitomises rigidity, and certainly philosophy does not flourish when it is dominated by society. Yet a social order which cannot sustain deep critical examination of its institutions and values courts corruption, and a philosopher who can discuss profoundly everything in heaven and earth except the human world he lives in is alienated—he 'has problems'. The later Middle Ages afford abundant material for observing all of these frustrations, but there is no case in which they are presented more acutely than that of Ockham. And there is no point at which the classical problem of clearing up the relationship of Ockham's philosophy to his politics—a preoccupation of Ockham scholars if not of their subject—can be brought to sharper focus than that provided by Ockham's conception of individual rights. It has been argued by the French historian of the philosophy of law, Michel Villey, that Ockham's formal definitions of the legal rights of use and ownership inaugurate a veritable Copernican revolution in jurisprudence and political thought, a shift of basic orientation from an objective to a subjective view of economic, social, and even ethical legitimacy.¹ But the subjectivity of Ockham's conception of rights and the rest of his political thought can be properly appreciated, according to Professor Villey, only by reference to the radical individualism of his nominalist philosophy, a philosophy which on the surface has nothing at all to do with politics. The place to deal in detail with Ockham's conception of rights would be in a thorough study of the important legal dimension of his political writings, but I agree with Professor Villey that the significance to be attributed to Ockham's definitions will depend to a great degree on how we take them and his other political ideas in relation to his philosophy. I doubt that a global interpretation of nominalism provides a good basis for a global interpretation of Ockham's political thought, but we may still look to specific aspects of Ockham's metaphysics, epistemology or (as in this essay) his logic for at least a partial explanation of various points in his polemical works. Indeed, a more modest approach may not only shed light on the sorts of relations that properly may obtain between philosophy and politics, both in Ockham and generally, but may also help explain why more ambitious attempts run into difficulties of their own.

Power and the Individual

Here are the key definitions of rights of use and ownership (in rough translation):

right of use (ius utendi): a licit power of using an external object, the unwarranted denial of which can be prosecuted in a court of law.²

ownership (dominium): a principal power of laying claim to a thing in court and of using it in any way not prohibited by natural law.³

The putatively revolutionary feature of these definitions is their identification of a right with some kind of power of the person having it. Whereas powers of various kinds had, of course, been exercised in the world long before Ockham, Professor Villey finds that these powers were typically regarded by Greek philosophers, Roman jurists, and later commentators as pre- or extra-juridical facts, natural liberties for which it was the function of jurisprudence to determine just limits in accordance with an objectively conceived, impersonal common good. In this view, powers are not sanctified as rights. The title of right is reserved for those harmonious proportions or relations among persons and things which are just in the abstract and reflect a natural or cosmic order. A right is that which is just, a just share of the common good. The view put forward in Ockham's definitions, reflected elsewhere in his political writings, and rendered repellently intelligible, it would seem, by his philosophical nominalism, is just the opposite. In seeing rights as powers, Ockham locates every right, as it were, in the very essence of the subject whose right it is, whether that subject be God, mankind, a king or parliament, or the individual citizen; such public norms as may seem to have objective validity are merely offshoots or conventional constructions of these various subjects; and hence political thought and action is totally concerned with the conflict, balancing, acquisition, delegation, and more or less chaotic interplay of various subjective powers.

The relations among facts, powers, and rights are such basic and perennial philosophical problems that it would be strange if they did not bear somehow on the correct interpretation of a major philosopher's discussions of law and government. Ockham, however, was by no means unusual among his contemporaries in viewing power as a central topic in political thought⁴ or in often employing a concept of power which included the notion of legal or political authority.⁵ If anything truly radical is to be found in this area of his thought, it must concern not simply the political importance or the juridical nature of power but its location, the question of who has power, or better yet, the question of what sort of entity could have power. It is at this point that Ockham's nominalism seems potentially illuminating, for when we consider that the papal power exalted by such hierocractic writers as Aegidius Romanus and Augustinus Triumphus was by no means a straightforward attribute of the individual pope, but belonged rather to the papal office, and that the relation between a pope and the papal office was like the participation relation between a particular and an eternal Idea in Platonic metaphysics, we may well expect to find that Ockham's staunch nominalist rejection of Platonic Ideas or anything like, them in his earlier philosophical and theological work at Oxford had an effect on his conception of powers or rights or offices.

This sort of reflection is both traditional and plausible, but it can produce illusions. Thus, for example, if we are too quick to draw political conclusions from the exclusive reality of individuals and the unreality of universals in Ockham's academic writings, we may fail to notice that it was John XXII, not Ockham, who insisted that only individual Franciscans were true persons and that the Franciscan order was only a persona repraesentata or imaginaria.⁶ Or again, if we are overly intent on seeing Ockham's nominalism as a basis for modern doctrines of individual rights, we may fail to give due weight to the starting point of his whole involvement in political affairs, his commitment to Franciscan poverty as a basis for the highest state of Christian life, his insistence on the theological right of the Franciscans not to have legal rights or private (or even common) property.⁷ Whatever sort of individualism there may be in Ockham, it is not that of the Protestant ethic or the spirit of capitalism. I know of no infallible device for maintaining perspective when passing from Ockham's philosophy to his politics, but we seem less likely to go wrong if we begin by looking at his work in non-political disciplines in its own terms. If a neat over-all picture emerges at the end, well and good, but at least to begin with we should have the patience to try to follow Ockham through such mazes as the problem of universals as if we were as interested in them as he was, and as if we were interested in them in the same technical theological, philosophical, or logical way as he was. To do this with the problem of universals is beyond my power and would be a long and difficult task, but I can give some indication of the approach I have in mind by taking as a starting point a limited but central part of Ockham's work in logic.

Logical Individualism from 'A 'to 'O' and Beyond

The goal of much of Ockham's work in logic was the discovery of equivalences between propositions containing universals or general terms and propositions whose content is specified entirely by singular or discrete terms⁸ He was looking, that is, for propositions between which valid inferences could be made in either direction, propositions which mutually implied one another, as, for example, 'That man is Cicero' and 'Cicero is that man', may in suitable circumstances mutually imply one another (here all the terms are singular, they refer to individuals; let us call such propositions individual propositions), or 'No dogs are cats' and 'No cats are dogs' mutually imply one another (here all the terms are general; let us call such propositions general propositions). Now Ockham's project, intriguing and technically complex as it may become, is simply to find, or show how one could find, for every general proposition—for every proposition composed of general terms—an equivalent individual proposition—a proposition which contains no general terms at all.

To see how this works, let us consider his treatment of two types of proposition from the traditional Aristotelian square of opposition. We may use 'All crows are black' as an example of the universal affirmative, or A, proposition and 'Some dog is not black' as an example of the particular negative, or O, proposition. We note first that the subject terms in these propositions, 'crows' and 'dog', are both general terms. We must therefore look for propositions in which exactly what is said in our examples by using these terms can be said by using singular terms, terms designating individual crows and dogs. 'This crow', 'that crow', 'this dog', 'that dog', 'Fido', 'Lassie', and so on are the sorts of terms needed for this purpose. Let us assume, then, that there are two and only two crows—call them 'this crow' and 'that crow'. Then 'All crows are black' will be equivalent to 'This crow is black and that crow is black.' That is, the universal proposition about all crows is equivalent to a conjunction of singular propositions about individual crows. The universal proposition is true if and only if the conjunction of singular propositions is true, and this is the case if and only if each of the conjuncts—the singular propositions forming the conjunction—is true. What could be simpler? In similar fashion, if we assume that there are just two dogs, Fido and Lassie, 'Some dog is not black' will be equivalent to the disjunction of singular propositions, 'Fido is not black or Lassie is not black,' where the disjunction is true if any of the disjuncts is true.

Now 'crows' and 'dogs' are not the only general terms in our sample A and O propositions. The predicate terms as well as the subjects of A, E, I, and O propositions are universal, too. What is a logical individualist to do about this? The proper treatment of predicates and predication is among the central tasks for any adequate theory of logic or language there may be, past, present, or future, and it is an especially challenging and fascinating task for nominalists, of whatever century. Ockham's approach is characteristically bold. It consists of a reduction of predicative propositions to assertions or negations of identity between individuals. Think of 'That man is Cicero' as a model. Here 'that man' and 'Cicero' are both singular terms (a good sign), the 'is' is the 'is' of identity, and the proposition asserts that the individual referred to by 'that man' in the situation at hand is the same as the individual referred to by 'Cicero'. Ockham's approach to predicative statements is to treat them on the model of just such identity statements. It is easy to see where this leads in the case of 'All crows are black.' Let us assume again that there exist two and only two crows ('this crow' and 'that crow'), and let us, a bit more daringly, assume that there are exactly three black things in the universe. As these are individual black things, we can appropriately use singular terms to refer to them—'Blackie₁', 'Blackie₂', and 'Blackie₃'. Clearly, then, in this somewhat limited universe, 'Al1 crows are black' will be equivalent to the following conjunction of disjunctions:

This crow is Blackie₁or this crow is Blackie₂or this crow is Blackie₃

and

that crow is Blackie₁, or that crow is Blackie₂or that crow is Blackie₃.

Our O proposition, 'Some dogs are not black,' naturally enough, turns into a denial of identity (a 'negentity,' as Price puts it) with the 'ands' and 'ors' of the previous pattern trading places. (This is not surprising, since A and O are contradictories in the traditional square.) Thus, assuming again that Fido and Lassie are the only dogs and that Blackie₁ Blackie₂, and Blackie₃ are the only black things, we can say that 'Some dog is not black' is equivalent to:

Fido isn't Blackie₁and Fido isn't Blackie₂and Fido isn't Blackie₃.

or

Lassie isn't Blackie₁and Lassie isn't Blackie₂and Lassie isn't Blackie₃.

I shall argue in the next section that there are political morals to be drawn from the very complexity of Ockham's working out of individualism in logic. I trust that it begins to be apparent by now that there is much complexity in Ockham's logical project. We have been living in a small world in the last page or so: two crows, two dogs, and three black things (four or five things in all, depending on whether one of the dogs is black), but specifying the conjunctions or disjunctions of identities and negentities equivalent to a couple of simple general propositions in that world has been a moderately complicated task in itself, and in doing even this we have taken for granted a fair amount of logical machinery for which an account could very well be asked. There could be question, for example, about the notion of equivalence used in these transformations of general into individual propositions, and we have not explained what identity and negentity are—what it means for an individual referred to by one expression to be the same as, or other than, an individual referred to by another expression; nor have we made explicit the assumptions about names or name-like expressions underlying our use of such tags as 'this crow' and 'that crow' or 'Blackie₁' and 'Blackie₂' as translations for 'crows' or 'black'. On this last point, Price has achieved a significant advance in clarity and accuracy by presenting Ockham's project in terms of a semantical interpretation of quantification over sorted individuals, an approach to Aristotelian logics first suggested by the Cambridge logician, Timothy Smiley, in 1962.⁹ But getting clear what is involved in an individualistic account of our two model propositions is only the first step in carrying out Ockham's project. Although the idea of identifying universals with sets of individuals and the goal of determining what claims are being made about individuals remain dominant themes, Ockham's development of these themes has a complexity which deserves attention in its own right. But I must simply refer the reader to the good work of Price and Michael Loux for details.

Political Repercussions of Ockham's Logical Individualism?

Nothing is easier than jumping from such points as these about Ockham's logic to conclusions about how he should have proceeded in politics. Clearly, he should have proceeded by treating statements about social or political groups as statements about the individuals composing those groups, he should have emphasised the need to get clear exactly what is claimed about, or for, individuals in political discourse, and he should have shown a special awareness of how complex a task it is to go from general statements about groups to genuinely equivalent sets of statements about individuals. In this section I shall present what seem to me to be examples of Ockham doing each of these things, but I would like to begin by pointing out that there is no logical or moral necessity that there be any such examples. As Ockham remarks in a chapter of the Summa Totius Logicae on logically improper uses of terms, most terms are used improperly or equivocally in different places by highly reputable authors.¹⁰ Now he himself had urgent practical goals: the overthrow of three popes and the preservation of Ludwig of Bavaria's empire, among other things. We should not take it for granted that he took it for granted that an application of his highly technical earlier work on the Sentences of Peter Lombard or the logic of Aristotle was the best thing he could do to achieve these goals. But perhaps we will have a better basis for assessing whatever connections there may be between Ockham's logic and his politics if we get down to political cases.

To do this, we must first see that there can be political, or communal, cases for a nominalist. We must see that the individualising approach to propositions with general terms surveyed above by no means annihilates the classes of being signified by those terms. To understand 'All Franciscans wear grey' as equivalent to 'Roger Bacon wears grey and Bonaventure wears grey and Matthew of Aquasparta wears grey and Duns Scotus wears grey and Ockham wears grey and Philotheus Boehner wears grey, and so on' is not to do away with the reality of the Franciscan Order but to identify the reality of the Order in some way with the reality of the individuals constituting it. In this example, furthermore, the individual friars are not 'isolated', nor does the equivalence between general and singular propositions hold if we consider only 'the' individual or a few individuals. For the general proposition to be true, Bacon and Bonaventure and the others must all wear grey. They are all of them logically together in the proposition, and it is not clear to a nominalist that there would be more or better togetherness if we imagined the Franciscan Order to be a different sort of entity, an abstract individual or a supra-individual being over and against the individual friars composing the Order. Accordingly, we should not expect Ockham to forbear talking about communities such as religious orders, peoples, political bodies, or the Church, nor should we suppose that when he does talk about such things he does not take them seriously or literally as communities. What we should watch for instead are statements about groups that can most naturally be understood as equivalent to statements of some sort about their members and an avoidance of statements that seem to conceive of groups in terms of essences, relations, or abstract wholes having a reality over and above their members.

The clearest indication of which I am aware that Ockham did indeed regard political communities as identical with the individuals composing them is the sort of argument he typically gives in favour of one or another form of government. Especially in the secular sphere, he assesses governments instrumentally, in terms of their effectiveness in taking appropriate action for or, very often, against certain classes of individuals. A unified secular government would be best for the world, he argues, because by such a regime evildoers could be coerced more easily, beneficially, effectively, justly, and severely, and good people could live more quietly among the bad; discord among mortals would be more effectively abolished if all were subject to one secular ruler; disputes and litigations are more conveniently decided if the parties have a common judge or ruler; if all rulers were subject to an emperor, not only inferiors but superiors too could be corrected for wrongdoing.¹¹ In all of these arguments, it seems to me, we are dealing with a view of communal life as made up of interactions among concrete individuals, which can be facilitated or impeded by political action (particular action by particular rulers, one imagines), but which do not derive their essential character from anything supra-individual. And I know of no Ockhamist arguments which do call for us to assume a supra-individualistic conception of what a community is. Another sign of this aspect of political individualism in Ockham is his striking concern with personal liberty.¹²

If a community is identical with its members, a statement about the community will be equivalent to some statement or statements about the members. But what statements about individuals are implied by what statements about their communities? The most vivid illustrations of what social statements can 'mean for the individual' in Ockham's thought are to be found in his most protracted and disquieting polemical work, the first part of the Dialogus. I Dialogus is about heresy, and most especially about the problem of papal heresy. As one example of the way in which Ockham's manner of thinking could lead him to lay strong claims upon individuals, I would cite his relentless survey in I Dialogus 6 and 7 of the responsibilities of the various members of the Church or of a Christian society for resisting or punishing papal heresy. It looks very much as if he had in mind some such scheme of inference as the following: 'The Church must resist papal heresy; therefore, this Christian must resist, and that Christian must resist, and this other Christian must resist, and so on.' And it is noteworthy that although most of the discussion concerns the responsibilities which individuals have in this matter in virtue of holding one or another office or place, the obligation is eventually laid by Ockham on the individual Christian as such.¹³ As a still clearer illustration of an Ockhamist descent from general to individual, I would cite the discussion earlier in I Dialogus of the question: who can become a heretic? The discussion is largely based on Christ's promise to his disciples at the end of the Gospel of Matthew: 'I am with you to the end of the world.' Now Ockham argues that Christ was speaking to the disciples here as to the whole Church and that his promise should thus be taken to mean that the Christian faith will endure in the Church to the end of the world. But what does such a promise to the whole Church mean? Under what particular conditions should we say that it is fulfilled? The fundamental argument used by Ockham in dealing with this question is that what has been promised to the whole Church should not be attributed without some special reason to any one part of the Church, whether it be pope, cardinals, pope and cardinals together, the Roman church, the clergy, all male Christians, or even, it would seem, all baptised adults.¹⁴ It is not necessary that any one Christian be incapable of erring, for if any one should abandon the faith, God can bring it about that another one will remain in it.¹⁵ This is to say that the indefectibility promised by Christ to the Church is not to be thought of as an indefectibility of an individual or some few determinate members of the Church. But nor is this indefectibility to be thought of as an attribute of a supra-individual entity above all the members. The situation, rather, is one which can be described with a scheme of equivalence such as the following: 'Christ is with the Church' means (at any one time) 'Christ is with this Christian or Christ is with that Christian or Christ is with this other Christian, and so on.'

Although I Dialogus is an exhaustively and exhaustingly complicated work, the passage from universal to individual in the preceding examples is rather straightforward. It would be surprising, in the light of our brief look at his logical individualism, if this were always the case with Ockham's political thought. Even at the simplest stage of analysis, we found that the identification of a group or class with its members did not mean for Ockham that all statements about the group were to be taken as equivalent to the same sort of statements about the members. In some cases a statement with a collective or general subject called for a more or less lengthy conjunction of individual propositions to say the same thing, in other cases a disjunction was required, or a conjunction of disjunctions, and so on. If we had gone on to consider Ockham's treatment of other sorts of propositions or the various categories of predicates, still more complicated patterns of equivalence would have emerged. Such complexity may have its reflections in politics. Ockham argues that monarchy is regularly the best form of government both for the world and for parts of the world, both in secular affairs and in spiritual matters, but, he contends, this is not always the case. It can happen, due to the necessities of times and circumstances, that some other constitution will be more expedient for the communities of mortals or believers involved.¹⁶ Although he exalted voluntary poverty as the highest form of Christian life, he did not regard private property as an evil in itself, and he placed a high value on personal liberty; on the other hand, however, he held that the natural rights to available material resources possessed by individuals in extreme need were not abolished by prior legitimate property assignments of those resources to others; he accepted the view that the goods of the Church in some sense belonged to the poor, and he clearly thought of preserving the common good as a reasonable cause for which governments might override the legitimate rights of their subjects.¹⁷ He argued at considerable length that the government of secular and spiritual matters should normally be in separate hands but insisted that 'casually'—in special cases—the pope might be subject to the emperor or, contrariwise, the emperor be politically subordinate to the pope.¹⁸ These contrasts have sometimes proved aggravating to modern scholars, but I would like to propose that they are altogether natural reflections of the complexity Ockham was prepared to encounter in any project of reducing universal propositions to singular identities and negentities.

The idea is simply that a world of individuals is very complicated. The exercise of rights legitimately enjoyed by the individuals making up a society at one time may lead to a situation in which undeserved, unbearable, and unnecessary hardship is experienced by some individuals of the society at another time. Ockham might have been as astonished at the thought that one could infallibly avoid this by advance planning and the establishment of a perfect constitution as by the reflection that one had to put up with such situations when they arose simply because they had been, in a sense, unavoidable. So a government is needed strong enough to trample on the rights of some individuals occasionally if an acceptable approximation to the common good, to which all reasonable individuals are committed, is to be maintained. But the difficulty of coming up with a distribution of goods and powers at one time that will forever keep a community acceptably near the best situation available to it (as a group) also suggests the occasional need for revolution, for change of government. What I am suggesting is that the logical habit of understanding general propositions as equivalent to very complex sets of individual propositions makes it easier to see that the 'fit' or political equivalence between common good and private rights or between government and society is also a very complex matter. It is natural to wish that things were simpler or human beings better, so that neither strong government nor revolution was ever needed, but wishing doesn't make it so.

Conclusion

What are we to make of these affinities? What do these more or less clear political reflections of his logical nominalism show us about the subjectivity or individualism of Ockham's conception of rights? And what, if anything, does all of this in Ockham suggest about the general relations of politics and philosophy? Since we have discovered only reflections of Ockham's logic in his politics and not a political theory constructed on an explicitly nominalistic conceptual base, our first conclusion must be that Ockham himself evidently did not think it crucial that his readers accept logical individualism in order to give proper consideration to his arguments and conclusions in politics. We might suppose that this was merely a matter of tactics. After all, his early theological and philosophical work was highly controversial in academic circles during his lifetime. A prudent nominalist living in a world of philosophical realists and hoping to achieve important practical goals would perhaps not wish to grind too many axes at once. If he could find political arguments both consistent with his own principles and capable of convincing a realist, he might leave to another day the more congenial task of disputing with the realist about the correct ultimate reasons justifying their practical common front. There may be something to this supposition. It is at least a pleasant fancy to imagine Ockham, in a happier time than his career in public life gave him, commenting on Aristotle's Politics, deploying invincible arguments to show that the Philosopher held, or at least should have held, a distinctively nominalistic conception of the polis and the common good. It would be a great mistake, however, to let this fancy carry us to a starkly factional view of the political positions implicit in different schools of medieval philosophy and theology. On the one hand, not every logical individualist would necessarily agree with Ockham's concrete political conclusions, for some might argue that he came up with the wrong equivalences between general and individual propositions in politics. Nor, on the other philosophical hand, would a Platonic realist necessarily disagree with Ockham on every matter of practical concern. Just as Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomical theories agree in most of their observational consequences, so a realist and a nominalist might sincerely agree in some of their practical political positions (for example, in supporting one form of government over another—monarchy, say, over direct democracy). So we should not think of nominalism as rigidly determining a programme or moral content for politics. The most that we are entitled to say, on the basis of the present study at any rate, is that Ockham's political works resulted partly from a way of looking at things which came quite naturally to a logician whose preferred response to general propositions was to search for adequate individual equivalents to them.¹⁹

These considerations about the general political import of Ockham's logical individualism throw light on the 'subjectivity' of his conception of individual rights. We noted earlier that Ockham became involved in political affairs in the first place because of the need he saw to defend the Franciscan ideal of a life without property or legal involvements as the highest state of Christian perfection. The model Ockhamist individual, then, is one who virtually ceases to be an individual in the acquisitive, right-possessing, power-claiming senses of individualism central to modern secular thought. Furthermore, both Ockham's defence of Franciscan poverty and the positions he developed later in his career as a political writer were based to a large extent on appeals to universally accepted Christian principles or to rationality and natural law.²⁰ These features of Ockham's thought are inexplicable if we think of nominalism as entailing a substitution of human agreement for cosmic order and private opinion for objective knowledge. From what we have seen above, however, it appears that the main point of Ockham's individualism is not so much to give individuals political power or to celebrate the fact that individuals naturally have powers of various other kinds before anyone gives them political power. There is some of the former and a good deal of the latter in Ockham, but the main point is, rather, that it matters in politics how things stand with individuals—with all the individuals involved in human communities. This is not to say that the truth or falsity of propositions in legal and political theory is to be determined by individuals, but that such propositions are to be understood and judged as being about individuals. The proper object of political argument, we might say, is a statement putting together in an objectively correct way all the individuals of which our practical human world is composed. Such a reduction of political discourse to sets of individual propositions may, of course, be impossible, even in principle, for anything we have seen to the contrary. The philosophical realist or holist may be right. It may be impossible, indeed, to make sense of even one individual proposition without presupposing an ontology of Forms or essences or social wholes. But the search for such equivalences is something even a realist may wish to encourage, for when such searching is carried on with an appreciation of the complexities it involves, it does not give subjective, arbitrary, and chaotic power to 'the' individual but concrete effectiveness to the universal and ideal.

As to the general relations of philosophy and politics, the moral to be drawn from this brief investigation of Ockham would seem to be that philosophy is and ought to be a cause, but only a partial cause, of reasonable activity in politics. Anything worth asserting in philosophy is, after all, also worth disputing. When either realism or nominalism becomes a dogma, it loses all philosophical value (including the value of making a philosophical contribution to politics), and hence, although a prudent philosopher will demand of himself that his participation in communal affairs comport well with his philosophical principles, he will not demand allegiance to those principles from others as the sole legitimate basis for their co-operation. From either the standpoint of a detached observer of human affairs or that of a participant in them, it may be equally misleading to regard a constitution, culture, or movement as properly the implementation of a single set of ideas as it is to treat such things as disconnected from any serious ideas at all. In Western political thought and action, one does encounter imprudent philosophers and thoughtless politicians, frequently, but both our understanding and our action might improve if we did not so often take these types as the norm. The frustrations of combining or separating politics and philosophy can be treated best by doing both.

Notes

I am much indebted to Professor Leonard Boyle of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of Toronto, and to my colleagues in philosophy at the University of Connecticut for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

¹ Michel Villey, 'La Genèse du droit subjectif chez Guillaume d'Occam', Archives de Philosophie du Droit, IX (1964), pp. 97-127. Also see L. Vereecke, 'Individu et communaute selon Guillaume d'Ockham', Studia Moralia, III (1965), pp. 150-77. Both of these essays depend on Georges de Lagarde's extensive, brilliant, and much debated study of Ockham and his times, La Naissance de l'esprit laïque au délin du moyen-âge, Ist edn, 6 vols (Paris, 1934-46); new edn, 5 vols (Paris, 1956-70).

² Ockham, Opus Nonaginta Dierum, ed. R. F. Bennett and J. G. Sikes, ch. 2; OP [Guillelmi de Ockham Opera Politica, I-III (Manchester, 1940- )], I (Manchester, 1940), p. 304.

³Ibid., p. 310. Ockham recognises that there are other important senses of dominium besides this one. It is in this sense of the term, however, that dominium seemed to him to be an issue in the controversy over Franciscan poverty, use, and property with which the Opus Nonaginta Dierum is concerned. For a slightly earlier use of a similar conception of ownership in an important political work also influenced by the Franciscan concern with poverty, see Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, II.12.13 (trans. Alan Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of Peace, II (New York, 1956), p. 192). On the philosophical significance of sharply distinguishing various senses of such terms as dominium or, on the other hand, of using broad analogical concepts regarding similarities among the various forms of mastery (e.g. of an owner over his property, a lord over his servant or vassal, soul over body, or God over creation), see R. P. McKeon, 'The development of the concept of property in political philosophy: a study of the background of the constitution', Ethics, XLVIII (1938), pp. 297-366.

⁴ On the pervasiveness of power in the titles and contents of fourteenth century political writings, see Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua, I (New York, 1951), pp. 7-9. As Gewirth notes, indeed, it was the claims and arguments in behalf of papal power which 'brought the whole conception of political power to an unparalleled degree of development… a detailed consideration of almost every conceivable question bearing upon political power: its nature, kinds, sources, locus, justification, conditions, limits' (pp. 7-8). On power (sovereignty) and knowledge (infallibility) as alternative principles of papal authority in the period, see Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility: 1150-1350 (Leiden, 1972). Of course, 'power' is not a simple idea. In some sense, it was held by an idealist like Plato to be a mark of real things or, as Jowett has it, a definition of being (Sophist, 247e). F. M. Comford (Plato's Theory of Knowledge (New York, 1957), pp. v-vi) objects to Jowett's rendering and to the interpretation of Plato that Whitehead drew from it, but the issue goes beyond accuracy of translation to philosophical adequacy of conception. Plato may well have thought that power as he conceived of it (in the Gorgias, for example) was indeed definitive of true reality. Care is also needed in determining the place of power in Aristotle. Aristotle discusses the virtue of justice in detail in the Nicomachean Ethics and points to the occasional effectiveness of appeals to natural law in the Rhetoric, but his Politics allows for a considerable relativity of justice to the existing distribution of power in a community and includes an astute analysis of revolution which is sometimes cited as an important source for the concentrated attention to power in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. A profound discussion of these themes, full of insights into classical, early medieval, and Renaissance culture and political thought, is R. D. Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought, 2 vols (Chicago, 1969).

⁵ Aegidius Romanus, for example, clearly regarded the pope's plenitudo potestatis as something which legitimated virtually any action the papacy might wish to take. The pope's power, like God's, gave weight, measure, and number to all other authority without itself being weighed measured, or numbered; De Ecclet siastica Potestate, ed. R. Scholz (Weimar, 1929), p. 206. In philosophy Aegidius was a speculative metaphysician of the type Ockham most disliked.

⁶ Ockham contended, against this view, that if the Franciscan order was only an imaginary person, then so was the Church, but this would imply the blasphemous conclusion that the Church could not exercise real power: Opus Nonaginta Dierum, c. 6: OP, I, pp. 372-3; and c. 62; OP, II (Manchester, 1963), p. 568. Cf. Ockham's rejection in chs. 67-73 of John's denial of reality to actions.

⁷ More specifically, Ockham insisted that the friars' exercise of natural rights to use material things not be made to depend on positive legal 'civil' rights but be left to depend on freely given 'licenses' revocable at the will of the grantor.

⁸ My discussion of this aspect of Ockham's logic largely follows Robert Price, 'William of Ockham and suppositio personalis,' Franciscan Studies, XXX (1970), pp. 131-40; and Michael J. Loux, trans. and ed., Ockham's Theory of Terms: Part I of the Summa Logicae (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1974). Also see John Swiniarski, 'A new presentation of Ockham's theory of supposition with an evaluation of some contemporary criticisms', Franciscan Studies, XXX (1970), pp. 181-217, and Gordon Leff, William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester, 1975), pp. 135-9. Leff is surely right in emphasising in his massive study both the thoroughness of Ockham's epistemological and ontological individualism and its objective, non-sceptical character. On Ockham's notion of logical equivalence, see Marilyn McCord Adams, 'Did Ockham know of material and strict implication?' Franciscan Studies, XXXIII (1973), pp. 5-37.

⁹ Timothy Smiley, 'Syllogism and quantification', Journal of Symbolic Logic, XXVII (1962), pp. 58-62. Price points out ('William of Ockham and suppositio personalis', p. 132) that the treatment of general terms as equivalents to lists of singular terms presupposes that the lists are 'long enough' to do the jobs traditionally done by the associated general terms. I think he must be right in assuming here that the lists needed are denumerably infinite in length. Loux, on the other hand, seems to think Ockham's project of reducing the general to the singular works only for general terms with finite domains (Ockham's Theory of Terms, p. 31). This is awkward, since, as Loux himself points out (p. 46, n. 13 (to p. 31)), Ockham surely would have accepted the Aristotelian principle that the individuals of a species are (or at least could be) infinite.

¹⁰ Loux, Ockham's Theory of Terms, p. 220.

¹¹ These arguments from the first book of the second tractate of Part III of Ockham's Dialogus are presented and discussed in my The Political Thought of William of Ockham (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 110-11 and 116-17. For a similar treatment of ecclesiastical government, see pp. 154-67.

¹²Ibid., pp. 119-21, 140-49. In contrast with writers who regard freedom as something to be found through participation in a supra-individualistic corporate whole, Ockham clearly regarded it as a matter of individual freedom of action, thus suggesting, it seems to me, that corporate wholes are the individuals composing them and that a free society is one composed of free individuals.

¹³Ibid., pp. 68-73. A good impression of the shape of Book 7 is given by the student's list of topics I have cited on p. 48, n. 9.

¹⁴ See, for example, I Dialogus, Book 5, vii (fo.38rb in the Gregg Press facsimile (London, 1962) of vol. I (Lyon, 1494) of J. Trechsel's edition of Ockham's Opera Plurima): 'De una sola ecclesia militante dicitur quod non potest errare contra fidem, collegium autem cardinalium non est ista ecclesia: licet sit pars huius ecclesie sicut etiam ecclesia parisiensis est pars istius ecclesie, igitur congregatio cardinalium potest errare contra fidem. Confirmatur haec ratio, quia quod competit toti ecclesie non est attribuendum parti ecclesie: etiam principali nisi hoc possit per rationem necessariam vel auctoritatem apertam ostendi: collegium autem cardinalium est pars ecclesie quae errare non potest contra fidem, ergo non posse errare contra fidem non debet attribui collegio cardinalium, cum nec per rationem necessariam: nec per auctoritatem apertam possit ostendi.' The una sola ecclesia militans Ockham has in mind is the whole congregation of believers: 'Ad probandum ecclesiam romanam contra fidem posse errare: nonnulli plures rationes adducunt. Quorundam autem ratio fundamentalis est quidam ratio saepe tacta superius ad alias assertiones ostendendas: quae talis est. Illud quod promittitur toti et nulli parti non debuit alicui parti attribui: etiam principaliori. Sed numquam errare contra fidem toti congregationi fidelium promissum fuit a christo et nulli parti fuit hoc promissum a christo, igitur non debet hoc alicui particulari ecclesie catholicorum attribui, cum ergo romana ecclesia sit pars ecclesie et non sit tota ecclesia non posse errare contra fidem non est attribuendum romane ecclesia.' I Dialogus 5, xxii, fo. 43va. For other applications of this distinction between whole and part, see I Dialogus 5, xxv, fo. 46ra (Prima ratio); xxix, fo. 48ra (Prima ratio); xxxii, fo. 50rb (Prima ratio); xxxv, fo. 51rb-va (Quinta ratio). On 'ecclesia' as designating the collection of (individual) believers, see I Dialogus 5, xxxi, fo. 49va: 'Secundo modo accipitur hoc nomen ecclesia pro congregatione christianorum fidelium generali vel particulari: quae tam viros quam mulieres comprehendere potest.' Ecclesia is used in this sense and in the sense of a material house in Scripture, according to Ockham, but in canon law the term has other significations. The question of the inerrancy of the Roman church is affected by the ambiguity of the term romana ecclesia. 'Nonnumquam tota congregatio fidelium nomine romane ecclesie importatur. Et de ecclesia romana illo ultimo modo dicta dicunt quod non potest errare, de papa autem et cardinalibus, de tota romana diocesi quae est distincta ab aliis diodesibus in provinciis aliis constitutis, concedunt quod potest errare contra fidem.' I Dialogus 5, xi, fo. 49va.

¹⁵ Ockham develops this line of thought in response to an argument for papal inerrancy based on the Church's need for certain judgment about matters of faith. The passages are interesting in several ways. 'In illa communitate non potest esse iudicium certum sine vacillatione de dubiis quae emergunt circa quae dubia et fundamenta eorum quilibet in illa communitate exist-ens potest errare, sed in ecclesia militante est iudicium certum absque vacillatione de dubiis quae circa fidem emergunt, aliter eis nulli determinationi diffinitioni seu declarationi ecclesie militantis circa ea quae fidei sunt esset firmiter adherendum, quia illi qui potest errare non est indubitata fide credendum, igitur non quilibet in ecclesia militante potest errare, igitur est aliquis in ecclesia militante qui errare non potest et non alius quam papa, igitur papa circa ea quae fidei sunt non potest errare.' I Dialogus 5, iv, fos. 35vb-36ra. Ockham's response to this argument: 'In illa communitate quae non est sibi ipsi relicta, sed est preservata ab eo qui errare non potest, potest esse iudicium certum de dubiis, licet quilibet de illa communitate sigillatim possit errare: et hoc, quia nullus eorum specialiter preservatur quin possit errare sicut communitas preservatur, sic est de ecclesia militante, quia quilibet in ecclesia militante in manu consilii sui relinquitur ut secundum sue voluntatis arbitrium manere possit in fide gratia affinitate divina vel a fide catholica deviare, communitas autem christianorum sic preservatur a deo quod si unus a fide exorbitaverit alius firmus in fide divino munere permanebit, unde si papa contra fidem erraverit alius christianus vir vel mulier minime a fide recedet. Disc. Nonne talis modus arguendi valet, quilibet christianus potest errare contra fidem, igitur tota christianorum communitas potest errare contra fidem. Mag. Talis modus arguendi (ut multi dicunt) non valet sed est fallacia figure dictionis quia saepe a nomine quod non est collectivum ad nomen collectivum est fallacia figure dictionis sicut hoc, quilibetde populo potest sustentari de uno pane in die, igitur populus potest sustentari de uno pane in die. Et sicut hic utraque pars contradictionis potest esse vera, igitur contradictoria possunt esse vera. Disc. Non placet mihi: quod circa rationalem scientiam te diffundas, ideo refer quomodo ad alias rationes respondetur.' I Dialogus 5, v, fo. 36va. The same logical point comes up in a political context at III Dialogus 1, 2, xvii, fos. 196vb-197ra, where Ockham gives an unusually detailed logic lesson about it (on this passage, see my The Political Thought of William of Ockham, p. 183, n. 32).

¹⁶ On the variability of expedient constitutional forms in Ockham's thought, see The Political Thought of William of Ockham, pp. 122-7, 161-7. It is certainly correct to speak of contingency here, in the sense that the best form of government is contingent on existing circumstances. We should hesitate, however, to regard an emphasis on this sort of contingency as a break with the rationalism of earlier scholastics. In so far as Ockham had a sense of history, he may well have been struck by the changes and chances of human affairs, but he did not simply acquiesce in them. A whole branch of natural law, as he saw it, was concerned with determining objectively correct, rationally evident responses to arbitrarily given circumstances. On this branch of natural law, see The Political Thought of William of Ockham, pp. 182-4. On the rationally constructive character of his political thought in general, see pp. 214-20. H. S. Offler has edited a key natural law passage in 'The three modes of natural law in Ockham: a revision of the text', Franciscan Studies, XXXVII (1977), pp. 207-18.

¹⁷ On the rights of those in extreme need to the property of others, see Opus Nonaginta Dierum, c. 65: OP, II, pp. 577-8. On the sense in which the superflua of the rich and the goods of the Church belong to the poor, ibid., p. 576. On the pope's power in special cases to transfer empires and kingdoms, to deprive any layman of his temporal rights and goods, or to do 'all things' in spiritual matters, see III Dialogus I, 1, xvi, fo. 188vab. On the emperor's 'plenitude of power' in secular affairs (limited by divine and natural law and respect for the common good), III Dialogus II, 2, xxv-xxvi, fos. 257va-258va.

¹⁸ On the pope's casual temporal power, see preceding note. On the supreme secular ruler's casual power over the pope, Octo Quaestiones, ed. J. G. Sikes, III, p. 12; OP, I, pp. 121-2.

¹⁹ The monarchy supported by a nominalist might, of course, differ in important ways from that desired by a realist (on this and many other points concerning the relations between philosophy and politics, see Alan Gewirth's illuminating essay, 'Philosophy and political thought in the fourteenth century', in F. L. Utley, ed., The Forward Movement of the Fourteenth Century (Columbus, Ohio, 1961), pp. 125-164, especially pp. 125-7, 130-3, and 151-4), but it would be wrong to assume a priori that such differences must be irreconcilable in practice.

²⁰The Political Thought of William of Ockham, pp. 173-96. See now Kevin McDonnell, 'Does William of Ockham have a theory of natural law?', Franciscan Studies, XXXIV (1974), pp. 383-92. Ockham's ethics continues to be a challenging subject but one which now receives subtler treatment than used to be accorded it. See especially Linwood Urban, 'William of Ockham's theological ethics', Franciscan Studies, XXXIII (1973), pp. 310-50; David W. Clark, 'Voluntarism and rationalism in the ethics of Ockham', Franciscan Studies, XXXI (1971), pp. 72-87, and 'William of Ockham on right reason', Speculum, XLVIII (1973), pp. 13-36; and Gordon Leff, William of Ockham, pp. 476-92.