Kings as Judges: Power, Justice, and the Origins of Parliaments
Cambridge University Press
Edition: New, 7/15/2021
EAN 9781107162792, ISBN10: 1107162793
Hardcover, 400 pages, 24.1 x 16.5 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
How did representative institutions become the central organs of governance in Western Europe? What enabled this distinctive form of political organization and collective action that has proved so durable and influential? The answer has typically been sought either in the realm of ideas, in the Western tradition of individual rights, or in material change, especially the complex interaction of war, taxes, and economic growth. Common to these strands is the belief that representation resulted from weak ruling powers needing to concede rights to powerful social groups. Boucoyannis argues instead that representative institutions were a product of state strength, specifically the capacity to deliver justice across social groups. Enduring and inclusive representative parliaments formed when rulers could exercise power over the most powerful actors in the land and compel them to serve and, especially, to tax them. The language of rights deemed distinctive to the West emerged in response to more effectively imposed collective obligations, especially on those with most power.
Preface and acknowledgments
Part I. The origins of Representative Institutions
Power, Land, and Courts
1. Introduction
2. A theory of institutional emergence
regularity, functional fusion, and the origins of parliament
3. Explaining institutional layering and functional fusion
the role of power
Part II. Origins of Representative Rractice
Power, Obligation, and Taxation
4. Taxation and representative practice
bargaining vs compellence
5. Variations in representative practice
'absolutist' France and Castile
6. No taxation of elites, no representative institutions
Part III. Trade, Towns, and the Political Economy of Representation
7. Courts, institutions, and cities
Low Countries and Italy
8. Courts, institutions, and territory
Catalonia
9. The endogeneity of trade
the English wool trade and the Castilian mesta
Part IV. Land, Conditionality, and Property Rights
10. Power, land, and second-best constitutionalism
Central and Northern Europe
11. Conditional land law, property rights, and 'Sultanism'
premodern English and Ottoman land regimes
12. Land, tenure, and assemblies
Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Part V. Why Representation in the West
Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Supra-Local Organization
13. Petitions, collective responsibility, and representative practice
England, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.