Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century England and the Making of the Modern Political Imaginary

Abstract

This stimulating, ambitious interdisciplinary study, as its subtitle indicates, links seventeenth-century and modern concerns: a relationship between Milton and modernity is indicated in the titles of two earlier books by or edited by Feisal Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present and Milton’s Modernities . Though two major figures from the seventeenth century, Marvell and Milton, have a substantial chapter devoted to each, the author from this period who dominates the book is Hobbes, treated as primarily a political thinker. Hobbes, like the other figures treated in the book, is seen as a product of his times, yet asking questions which are as relevant today as in their original historical context. The modern theorist of sovereignty brought into dialogue with such diverse figures, familiar and unfamiliar, as John Selden, Lord Saye and Sele, John Barclay, and the anonymous author of the romance Cloris and Narcissus (1653), along with Marvell, Milton, and Hobbes, is Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), an advocate of absolute submission to the will of the all-powerful ruler, above the law or any restraints upon his power to decide. Notoriously, Schmitt, an active member of the Nazi party, attributed such an absolute power to Adolf Hitler, just as Samuel Parker, satirized by Marvell in The Rehearsal Transpros’d , chose Nero and Caligula as examples of rulers who must be obeyed without question, to secure the imperatives of order and discipline within the state. In this wide-ranging study, Mohamed sees the idea of sovereignty, as set forth by Hobbes and Schmitt, as problematical, and yet as a central concept for understanding the nature of political authority and providing a fresh perspective on the writings of Milton and Marvell. In his