ABSTRACT
Ideas about the working of the organized community, and about the duties of rulers and ruled, had always been an important part of European philosophy. The Politics was one of the most familiar books of Aristotle. Augustine and Aquinas had both regarded questions of justice and government as part of their theology. To early seventeenth-century writers who ranged, more or less selectively, over the whole expanse of human understanding, it was natural to treat political questions in the traditional way. They asked how the state originated, and answered the question with little regard to historical evidence. They defined, as Aristotle had, the various possible forms of the state; and the descriptions of them were usually remote from reality. The men they envisaged as its subjects were remarkably free from poverty, greed, and stupidity. To some extent this was a conventional pose, concealing a strong concern with current conflicts; but it was one that tended to keep the influence of the theorists on events small. While men were dying and destroying through the blunders and follies of the state, those who studied it seemed to devote themselves largely to such notions as the fictitious contract that justified political power and the ill-defined Natural Law that might limit it.
