First and Second Samuel narrate Israel’s transition from a tribal confederation to a dynastic monarchy, beginning with the leadership of the prophet Samuel. Saul is anointed Israel’s first king, and although eventually rejected, his reign functions to define kingship under Yahweh, including submission to Torah and to the authority of Yahweh’s prophets. David becomes Israel’s second king and eventually the “ideal” for all kings in the Old Testament. We will also observe during David’s leadership an emerging understanding of Yahweh as “God of Israel.”

Since early Israel was a theocracy under Yahweh, we will explore the issues surrounding Israel’s need for and the legitimacy of a human king, the person and role of a suitable king, and finally, the importance of the prophet in assessing the king. Although Israel’s transition to statehood is somewhat difficult to reconstruct historically (ca. 1050–970 bce), we will examine evidence for similar transitions in other cultures. Archaeological evidence from Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer suggests the notion of a state and its correlating centralized administration.

Chapter 3 focuses on liberty and servitude, and the way in which these conditions – defined in Roman law in terms of the status of individual persons – are predicated of collective bodies described as civitates and populi in Roman political philosophy. Machiavelli’s relationship to this particular conception of liberty has been at the centre of much recent literature on classical, early modern, and contemporary republicanism, but his theory of freedom requires closer scrutiny, not least because of its relationship to a line of thinking about popular self-government which had been used by humanists to articulate a theory of popular sovereignty from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century in Renaissance Florence. This chapter shows how the key concepts of this thesis come from Cicero’s philosophy, which conveys to the humanists an influential account of how to constitute the entity which he calls the populus as the ultimate bearer of public authority. Cicero’s view of ‘the people’ as the master of its own affairs informs his definition of the res publica as res populi – literally, a ‘thing of the people’ – and this chapter shows how it informs the very basis of the classical republican tradition which Machiavelli inherits and reworks.

This chapter explores how the Declaration of Independence was drafted and ratified. Congress created and assigned the task of drafting a declaration of independence to a committee of lawyers. When the draft went to the Congress, lawyers like Edward Rutledge had their chance to weigh in. The draft document and the final version was a legal document designed to place rebellion on a legal foundation. Jefferson later recalled that his draft of the Declaration of Independence merely recombined ideas that had long been discussed, and terminology long adopted, by Congress. The Declaration assumed independence, otherwise it would have had no foundation. Following this logic, as the members did, surely Jefferson among them, the Declaration was simply stating the reasons – a justification like the Declaratory Act of 1766, by which Parliament explained its authority over the colonies – for an event already transpired. The ringing elaboration of the rights of mankind, various borrowings from John Locke, echoes of natural law, and the language of prior resolves and declarations were not really pertinent to a declaration for the independence of a continent, but make sense in the more limited framework of Virginia constitutional change.

The expression ‘divine right’ might sound obsolete to modern ears; indeed, it might recall images of an archaic and irrational society. In early modern Europe, things were far from it. As we shall see, divine right represented a systematically argued philosophical theory at the centre of which stood the justification for strong, earthly, power. Divine right is here understood in a specific political sense since it mainly concerns the authority of monarchs (not of bishops and not of republican governors). Such theory argued that God had given power ‘directly and immediately’ to kings, not to the people. Hence the ruler was accountable to none but God; had always to be obeyed; and held unlimited power (consequently, no form of resistance was legitimate). Divine right theory had at its core the idea, and the practice, of the individuality of kingly right, not of people’s individual rights. It expounded a subjective right, not an individual one.

This chapter focuses on some representations of the people in some of the literary productions of the 1640s, the decade of the English Civil Wars. The people were seen by some writers as dangerous, unruly, and driven by passions rather than reason. But they were thought by others to be essential to the politics of the country. The chapter traces the tensions between these contrary representations of the people across courtly dramatic performances, political pamphlets, and in poetry and prose connected to the execution of Charles I.

The British monarchy has withstood numerous crises in its long history, including American independence. Loyal for most of the eighteenth century, many British North American colonists turned against monarchy from 1774 to 1776. The formation of extralegal organizations combined with the diffusion of print media created a Revolutionary infrastructure that advanced the transformation from monarchy to independent nation. Independence spurred not only iconoclasm but also the resurgence of popular Loyalism on both sides of the Atlantic. It inspired enslaved men and women to issue their own embodied declarations of independence by running away as well as other marginalized groups such as women and working-class men to assert their rights. Independence forced Indigenous nations to weigh whether an alliance with European monarchical powers or the new American republic would best secure their interests. By the late 1780s, some elite Americans turned to British and monarchical models to reassert a hierarchical social and political order.

For the last fifty years, scholars have accepted that the political philosophies associated with the Enlightenment and British country ideology played a central role in provoking the American Revolution. This chapter moves away from this approach to consider the broad spectrum of political thought in colonial America in the decades immediately before independence. The bulk of this thought was neither as secularized, nor as hostile to imperial authority, nor as egalitarian, nor as American as scholars have assumed. This broader perspective makes it evident that the Revolutionary breach did not grow in any meaningful way from the Enlightenment or British country thought. I argue instead that it was political thought normalized within the empire – indeed central to imperial authority’s proper functioning – and familiar to British Americans that served as the primary intellectual basis for resistance to the London authorities as the imperial crisis intensified. Colonists used Protestant political idioms that warned of the continuing dangers of popery and tyranny to indict the imperial ministry’s actions, formed arguments about the nature of the British constitution drawn from mainstream imperial political theory to undermine the London government’s authority, and invoked episodes from Britain’s tortured seventeenth-century history to legitimate their acts of resistance. This appropriation ultimately destroyed the logic of empire in British America. argue in stead that it was the colonists’ understanding of the British constitution, their use of mainstream imperial Protestant political idioms that denounced popery and Catholicism to indict the imperial

There was no inevitability about the tumults between Britain and the thirteen colonies that eventually led to the American Revolution. North American colonists had little intention of escaping the British empire – they loved it so much that they were willing in 1756 to fight for its survival. They had little interest in their disparate colonies joining together into a larger federation. White Americans and West Indians – though not the large and growing enslaved population of British America – were happy with the status quo and were proud of their many achievements as settlers in a new world, especially in the dynamic period of the first half of the eighteenth century. They were a happy, contented and prosperous people, as numerous writings of the time insisted. Secure in their loyalty to the British monarch, to British laws, and to the majesty of a growing British Atlantic empire, Revolution was not in contemplation.

In 1636, a set of nine paintings was installed on the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall Palace. Three central and six side panels. The set had arrived from the studio of Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp, and had been commissioned by King Charles I in honour of his father James. They were intended to summate three aspirations which defined James’s reign. The three central panels were entitled The Apotheosis of King James, The Peaceful Reign of King James, and The Union of Crowns. Each spoke to a matter of constitutional urgency, then and now; respectively, the nature of monarchy, relations with the rest of Europe, and the possibility of forging a union between England and Scotland. The purpose of this chapter is to revisit the reign of King James I and see if we can spot some resonances.

This chapter explores the sacral aspects of Achaemenid Persian kingship. It attempts to precisely illuminate the ruler’s relationship with the divine and to demonstrate that the assumption of priestly prerogatives was an important aspect of his office. To better appreciate the political function of religion, this study provides cultural and historical contexts for the royal appropriation of sacral attributes. It further contributes to the recent field of study regarding a possible soteriological dimension to Achaemenid ideology by assessing and synthesising new and previously cited evidence for the existence of such an element, as well as its possible applications.

Monarchy has been a universal form of government in earlier centuries, though it involves the structural problem of all decision-making stemming from one individual. Qiu Jun did not challenge the legitimacy of monarchy, but he constructed advice that would encourage his monarch to be alert to change, cautious about his decisons, and attentive to the advice of his best ministers. This chapter also considers the critique of monarchy in Europe at this time, where the Jesuits presented Ming China as an ideal monarchy, and the growing challenge to the divine right of kings, which would eventually lead to the delegitimization of this form of government.

This chapter argues that Augustine preaches on the Trinity both in sermons devoted particularly to particular trinitarian questions, and throughout his homiletic corpus insofar as Augustine’s understanding of creation and salvation as a whole is founded on his understanding of the inseparability and co-equality of Father, Son and Spirit. Through these different types of sermons Augustine also consistently emphasizes both the importance of accepting in faith knowledge handed on to us, but which we cannot yet comprehend, and the importance of struggling to think of God in terms beyond the material and the temporal. It is also noticeable that Augustine makes little use of the language of persona and natura in his preaching, preferring to define his belief through a series of Nicene principles (such as the inseparability of the divine three in their acts), and through presenting Nicene exegeses of key verses as hermeneutical keys.

No single garment attracted more attention in the late 1940s than the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth, who married Philip Mountbatten in November 1947. This chapter places royal bridal attire at the centre of its analysis of postwar marriage and transatlantic conjugal connections. The Royal Wedding occurred against a backdrop of acute austerity, sparking debate on the ethics of regal pageantry during a severe cost of living crisis. Mass Observation exposed Britons’ conflicted responses to the wedding and the myth of royal ordinariness in terms of rationing and coupons constructed by the Palace. Austerity and monarchy proved difficult to reconcile. American observers took especial interest in Britain’s royal wedding, which underscored how relations between the wartime allies had been reconfigured by tens of thousands of marriages between GIs and British women. The chapter concludes by exploring the experiences of ‘GI brides’ and Americans’ preoccupation with what they wore, first as brides, then as newly arrived migrants. Judgements about dowdy, threadbare British women underscored altered power dynamics between two great powers following different postwar trajectories.

Johnson’s political views were complex, partly because they were based on a deeper philosophy of the individual and society. Placed here by divine providence, each person has something to do for the good of others; and legislators, too, can play their part in preserving human relationships from individual malice. Crucially, governments must also keep order, and ward off the possibility of social breakdown – the Civil War was within living memory when Johnson was growing up. Thus he praised hierarchy and state-enforced religious unity, inasmuch as it mean harmony and security. Johnson’s political writings are often combative and bluntly phrased: in his early work as an Opposition journalist, outraged at censorship and creeping tyranny; in his fierce critiques of imperial exploitation and slavery; and in his contempt for the radicals who appealed to ‘liberty’ – a slogan Johnson regarded with some suspicion. In his journey to the Scottish Highlands, meanwhile, Johnson praised traditional authority while showing no nostalgia for feudalism.

When the Israelite leadership ask for a king like all the other nations, it introduces a new sequence of powerful characters into the storyline.

How was the British imperial state transformed from an ancien régime in 1819 to a liberal one that depended upon a new science of government?

How did an English state torn apart by sectarian conflict, civil war and a revolution in the late seventeenth century become the most powerful in the world by 1819?

This chapter explores Schopenhauer’s views of the political systems in North America, Europe, and China. Schopenhauer understood the United States as a modern republic geared toward maximum individual freedom. He also took note of its high levels of interpersonal violence. Importantly, he repeatedly returned to US slavery as the most egregious example of institutionalized exploitation and brutality. In his treatment of the United States, he then connected republicanism to slavery and concluded that they were tightly associated. Schopenhauer’s argument against American republicanism does not, however, suggest that he endorsed traditional European monarchies. Against both North America and Europe, Schopenhauer instead held up the example of China as an advanced state that was hierarchical and imperial and yet resolutely nontheist. For Schopenhauer, China combined political stability and peacefulness with a philosophically sound atheism and thus demonstrated the realization of his political and his philosophical ideals.

In June 2020, the largest democracy movement in a generation emerged in Thailand. The movement began with three demands: the current PM must resign, a new constitution must be drafted, and the state must stop threatening dissidents. In August 2020, a fourth demand was added: the monarchy must be reformed. This demand is where the transformative power of the movement came from, but also led to a swift crackdown in the form of police violence and prosecutions. This may appear to be a particularly egregious illustration of the rule-by-law regimes favored by autocrats, but close examination indicates that the law is being used to criminalize peaceful dissent and the mere questioning of how power is exercised. By examining several key cases, this chapter shows how the Thai regime aims to reshape both the rule of law and the polity through the arbitrary exercise of repressive power.