Ebook: Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy

The concepts of popular consent and limit, as applied to the exercise of political authority, are fundamental features of parliamentary democracy. Both these concepts played a role in medieval political theorizing, although the meaning and significance of political consent in this thought has not been well understood. In a careful, scholarly survey of the major political texts from Augustine to Ockham, Arthur Monahan analyses the contribution of medieval thought to the development of these two concepts and to the correlative concept of coercion.