Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1921. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... i the foundations of sovereignty i We too rarely inquire how greatly our institutions bear upon their face the marks of the environment they have inherited. Yet it is indubitable that the state, at least, is the offspring of a special set of historic circumstances. Man is, of course, a community-building animal; but it was not until the sixteenth century that the technique which surrounds the modern state came into existence. Sovereignty, in the sense of an ultimate territorial organ which knows no superior,1 was to the middle ages an unthinkable thing. The basis of medieval organization was radically different. That at which it strove was unity and the road thereto lay through a system of groups which consistently surpassed the limits of geography. The territorial fact, indeed, was then, as now, an ultimately inescapable thing. No one can read the regulations of a medieval guild without the realization that the trader, at least, was passionately local; and even where the mercantilism of pre-Reformation times was limited by the maxims of canonist ethics and the obvious sources of economic supply, it was still shot through with vaguely nationalistic notions. Yet the fact remains that the apparent simplicity of a world organized into a set of sovereign states was i Cf. Zimmern, Nationality and Government, p. 56. broadly unknown. Sovereignty, in the modern sense, is the progenitor of impalpable barriers from which the medieval thinker sought at all costs freedom. Our organization is inherited from the breakdown of that Respublica Christiana by the thought of which he was dominated. The notion therein implied was, at bottom, the great legacy of imperial Rome; and it was not until its impotence as a practical hypothesis was demonstrated that more modern ideas could m...
