ABSTRACT
One of the big issues in the history of political science is whether—and if so, how—pre-modern medieval governance and political rule resembled modern government in its theory and practice. This chapter explores one aspect of this, namely understandings by Cary J. Nederman and others of communal versus individual rights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It begins by setting out the debates on conciliarism that engaged Nederman and Brian Tierney, and how this controversy centred on the differences between individual and communal or corporate understandings of entitlement or rights. It then compares these views to my own analogous study of medieval rights, namely a Hohfeldian claim-rights analysis on the provisions of Magna Carta. The chapter turns to Nederman’s more recent thoughts on “Rights” in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy (2012) to assess its contribution to an understanding of these concepts before concluding with some comments on methods of analysing rights in pre-modern contexts.
