Janet Coleman

Pre-Modern Property and Self-Ownership Before and After Locke Or, When did Common Decency Become a Private rather than a Public Virtue?

Self-ownership is a central concept not only in Anglo-American liberal/libertarian discourse but also in Marxism. This article investigates what it means to say that a person has fundamental entitlement to full property in himself. It looks at possible moments when pre-modern concepts of the self became modern ones, examining Locke’s Second Treatise and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The aim is to focus on continuities and discontinuities in the transition from pre-modern to modern concepts and practices of identity and agency and the role that attitudes to property played within this transition. It also seeks to alert historians to the pitfalls of accepting contemporary conceptions of moral and civic agency found in normative political theory when they study pre-modern contexts and the people who lived their lives within them. It also attempts to expose certain modern limits on our understanding of society and people’s obligations to one another by rejecting the laws of the oikos as currently applied to the political domain.

Scholastic treatments of maintaining one's fama ('reputation/good name') and the correction of private 'passions' for the public good and public legitimacy

This article deals with the relationship between an individuals passions and his public reputation or fama, as these were evaluated in specific public fora from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. In examining attitudes to heresy, heterodoxy and orthodoxy, the role of authoritative reason in the disciplining of unruly or harmful passions and an unchecked will provides some insight into contemporary attitudes to obedience, social conformity and the common good. The article attempts to highlight pre-modern attitudes to the community and its perspective on acceptable character formation and its legitimate, public display, without which the community was thought to be threatened if not destroyed.

The Philosophy of Law in The Writings of Augustine

The Christian theologian and bishop of Hippo, Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus), was born in A.D. 354 to a non-Christian father and a Christian mother in that part of Roman North Africa that is today Algeria. Despite his mother’s efforts Augustine initially found her religion uncongenial and intellectually unsophisticated. He received an education typical of ambitious, provincial Romans, becoming a student of Latin rhetoric in Carthage before he left for Rome in 383, whereafter he became a teacher of rhetoric in Milan. As had been the case during the last century of the Roman Republic, to be skilled in oratory with its uses in legal practice and local governance could lead to a civil service posting. During the late Roman Empire Augustine had considered such a career option. He had friends and contemporaries with whom he corresponded throughout his life who had chosen this path. As this chapter will show, Augustine’s familiarity with the intricacies of contemporary Roman law had important consequences for his own political theory where he expressed his views not only on what politics was for but also on the compatibility of Christianity and politics.