| The dissertation investigates the intellectual origins of the doctrine of popular sovereignty in early modern political thought. The chief aim of the study was to reconstruct and trace the reception and use of Roman law principles, derived from the Justinianic codebooks of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, in crafting the notion that the powers exercised by the state ultimately originated in a concessive act of delegation by the people.;In examining treatises by jurists such as Hotman, Bodin, Althusius, and Grotius, among others, I attempted to show how concepts of Roman private law, such as ownership, guardianship, and usufruct, were used to craft not only alternatives to medieval theories of princely government and regalian right, but also to offer a new way of understanding the nature, scope, and origins of all possible forms of sovereignty in the state. Applying these Civilian legal concepts to political thought, legists envisaged the people collectively to have the jural status of a legal person, which could, like other persons at civil law such as corporations or the public fisc, assert rights, own property, and demand legal remedies for injuries committed against them.;Central to the argument of the dissertation was the application of the Roman law of property to conceptualize the notion of popular sovereignty in the thought of the French Huguenot Monarchomachs, the German Reichspublizisten, and the English Civilians. Just as property was conceptualized in Roman law as the highest right over things [jus in re], popular sovereignty was derivatively conceptualized in political theory as the highest right over the public thing [jus in re publica], as compared against lesser proprietary interests such as usufructs [jus in re aliena]. The res publica was, thus, regarded an object of public property which belonged not to kings or princes, who enjoyed limited possessory or usufructuary rights, but rather to the whole people who collectively had full title and ownership over the civil state. |
