Mansfield, Harvey, Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: The Free Press, 1989).
Excerpt:
“With Marsilius of Padua’s great work, Defender of the Peace (1324) we come almost to the point of departure for the modern doctrine of executive power. For the first time “execution” and the “executive” became a theme of political science. Marsilius is one of the greatest of political philosophers, and I propose to treat him as such – which means, as a political scientist. Usually he is treated historically, either for his many tantalizing anticipations of modern idea or for his influence on Church reformers, including later Protestants. His thought on the executive is surely one of the anticipations. But it can be properly appreciated only if it is examined for its value as political science. Unexamined, such an anticipation may appear to be no more than a lucky, unwitting stroke of invention, fundamentally uninteresting and likely to flatter us in the belief that our predecessors were children. This interest rises, however, when a great thinker, like Marsilius, gives us pause by his very failure to carry through his anticipations. We are impressed by the hesitations, or rather rejections, that confine the anticipations. In that case we learn something about what is essential to our modern idea, and concurrently, about the historical age in whcih other ideas prevailed. In current terms, one could say that the text leads us to the context. Why, then, did Marsilius almost come to the modern executive?”
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