Collegialism: The Rise of the State and the Redefinition of the Church

TL;DRAbstract

As Hobbes realized, rethinking the state required rethinking the church. The elaboration of a sphere of secular power in opposition to the church was an act of mutual redefinition. The rise of the state was as much an intellectual phenomenon as it was an institutional one. Earlier, we have seen how Catholic princes and their supporters altered ideas about the common good. Given the tradition of Catholic political thought, with its strong commitment to the alliance of church and state, how did absolutist princes legitimate their exertions of financial and legal pressure on the church? One of the ways in which they did this was by subsuming parts of church law under the category of public law (öffentliches Recht, ius publicum). Because of the prominence of public law literature in early modern Germany, conceptualizations of the church were shaped by legal discourse.

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