DoisPontos (Oct 2008)
Do comissariado de Deus à vontade do princeps’: lei, autoridade e soberania no pensamento político medieval tardio
Abstract
Questions related to law and to authority have strongly marked the Western political medieval thought, and especially the development of the notion of sovereignty, which can be seen as a point of convergence of the great conflicts of jurisdiction during the period. The debate on the distribution of jurisdictions constituted one of the important moments for the making of the modern idea of sovereignty. Initially, as the law was taken as given, the meaning of the authority had to be necessarily tied to the idea of commission. Authority was an attribute of who could enforce the law on behalf of the divine legislator. Another important moment was that of the emergence of the problem of the legislative power, as it is modernly conceived. Jurisdiction, from now on, included also the right to create and to impose the valid norms for the whole community formulated now by a human legislator. By and by the will of the princeps, which was no longer limited by reason and morality, should be understood as the creative, transforming and revoking source of the law. To show the general lines of this process is the foremost objective of this article.
