This book examines the evolution of a distinctive English practice of conscience and allegiance. From the Reformation onward the English monarchy faced difficulties in policing its claim to obedience in church and state. To address this security problem, the English government promulgated oaths to assess the intensity of popular allegiance. The oath offered interesting political possibilities, both as a device sanctioned by common law and a bond of conscience. In an age increasingly preoccupied by conscience, the oath helped to crystalize a distinctively English understanding of that concept. Yet the state's attempt to foreclose the details of allegiance by oath unintentionallysucceeded in creating a countervailing pressure opposed to its use. Throughout the Tudor-Stuart period, religiously and constitutionally motivated groups objected to state oaths. Responding to their tactics, government apologists defined an official practice of conscience. By the second decade of the seventeenth century, a fully articulated state casuistry demonstrated that lawful oaths indissolubly bound the conscience of the moral subject.Significantly, those who challenged the character of the emerging confessional state, resisted it in terms of a shared vocabulary of conscience and law. In fact, the performative enactment of the oath invited a language game conducted in casuistical terms. Throughout the century and a half that the government experimented with the concept of unconditional allegiance to the person of the monarch, there existed a countervailing tradition that maintained that the crown could be lawfully opposed. The history of the state oath ultimately revealed its inability to provide the indefeasible allegiance that government craved.After 1688, the inability to negotiate an elite consensus facilitated a new moral psychology grounded in the affections and managed by a probable reason. Political practice came to reflect this. As a unitary confessionalism collapsed and the unstable multiple kingdom fused in
Rezensionen / Stimmen
[A] rewarding book for readers seeking to explore the complex relationship between politics and ideology in the seventeenth century. SIXTEENTH CENTURY JOURNAL * There is much interesting, well researched material here, and much food for thouhgt...worthwhile intellectual fruit. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW * Covers the use of state oaths from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century... intelligent and thought-provoking. HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT This is a work that is both lucid and pertinacious in working through uncharted territory...Altogether, this is a most interesting book that will repay careful attention. POLITICAL STUDIES Scholars, teachers, and general readers will find much that is fascinating in this book. * ALBION *
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Höhe: 579 mm
Breite: 386 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-58046-039-2 (9781580460392)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Introduction - oaths, conscience and the tacit dimension in early-modern English political thought; the state oath in law and conscience - a brief history of "the safest knot of civil society"; "of oaths, their object, form and bond" - the impact of common law, casuistry and character upon the state oath; "endless janglings and perplexities" - the English experience of the state oath, 1640-1660; the oath restored - the problems raised by the imposition of state oaths between 1660 and 1690; conscience, character, the prostitution of oaths and the evolution of a political disposition; appendix - the genealogy of the state oath.
