This extraordinary work of scholarship reinterprets central questions in early modern political thought through an analysis of the vocabulary, concepts, and debates the early moderns inherited from the medieval and Renaissance Roman legal tradition. To most readers I suspect that this project may sound obscure, but to a few it will be immediately apparent both how valuable and how difficult it is. The normative materials out of which early modern European political ideas were built were primarily juridical: rights, contract, property, jurisdiction, trust, and so on. With the partial and exaggerated exception of England, in western Europe that meant that the materials were those of the Roman law as it had been expounded, developed, and glossed from about 1100 CE onward. The importance of this civil law tradition for medieval and early modern legal and political thought is hard to overstate; it is also famously hard to grasp. Although Justinian’s compilation of Roman legal materials and arguments, whose medieval recovery inaugurated the tradition, is available in modern languages, much of the medieval commentary and gloss remains available only in Latin. It is moreover deeply difficult material, presented not in treatises but in marginalia and scholarly apparatuses to the Roman materials, with arguments that unfold over generations. This leaves readers of early modern political and legal theory at a serious disadvantage: we read texts that draw on centuries of legal argument we do not recognize or understand.

The reinterpretation of early modern political thought in light of the recovered Roman law is the book’s method, not its topic. Its topic is the complex emergence of the idea of permanent popular sovereignty, sometimes meaning an attribute of the people that passively underlies and justifies all public authority and other times meaning that the people themselves must be involved in governing in some fundamental way. Daniel Lee reinterprets Grotius, Bodin, the monarchomachs, and Althusius—and to a lesser degree Hobbes and Rousseau—in light of the legal materials and arguments they drew on, to show how they shaped the idea (or rival ideas) of authority that ultimately vests in the people. The research contribution of the book is provided in a substantial introduction, three chapters on the Roman law tradition, and six chapters on early modern theory.

This combination of method and topic has the particular merit, and challenge, of putting Bodin and Grotius in the central place that they probably deserve in early modern political thought, but never seem to be accorded because of their major works’ forbidding length and density. Grotius was a civil lawyer, and any but the shallowest reading of his political works quickly gets drawn into juridical questions that the modern reader finds utterly mysterious. But Lee is even more interested in Bodin, the only author to be the subject of two chapters. He argues that, when we get past the slivers of Bodin’s writing that are readily available in English and read his work with an understanding of the legal debates in which they are situated, a thoroughly different Bodin emerges: not the familiar absolutist, but an important theorist of popular sovereignty and delegated authority.

The medieval legal disputes over sovereignty surveyed by Lee centered on such questions as whether the ostensible shift of sovereign authority from the Roman people to the emperor had been a revocable concession or an irrevocable transfer; whether the emperor could be understood to be an office with law-governed delegated authority instead of himself being the source of all legal authority; whether the Senate retained some legislative authority even under the emperors or all power to make laws had been transferred; and whether sovereignty was a kind of property, such that the people as the original sovereign could retain a right of reversion even while allowing usufruct to the emperor. In each of those pairs, the former choice tended to favor the possibility of ongoing, possibly perpetual, popular sovereignty. An important subsequent debate about how to reconcile Roman law with the pluralistic social order of the Middle Ages concerned whether intermediate powers such as feudal lords or cities held authority that was delegated from the emperor or could govern in their own right. All of these debates shaped not only the vocabulary but also the concepts available to early moderns who sought to understand the legitimate foundations and limits of political authority, the idea of officeholding, and the place of “the people” who might have given authority to emperors and might do likewise with modern kings.

Lee carefully and clearly explains such problems as the interwoven meanings of imperium, juisdictio, and dominium in medieval legal thought, allowing the reader both to understand what such concepts had meant in ancient Rome and what they came to mean to civilians a millennium later. He shows how the significance of the Roman example shifted from one argument to the next. Was the Roman people’s transfer of authority foundational for the whole European order? Was it of only antiquarian interest? Or was it—most importantly for his account—an example that might show the rightful relationship of peoples to their rulers in all the kingdoms and states of the world?

Although the book is deeply impressive, its conclusions are of course not final. The interpretations Lee offers of the early moderns are striking and provocative, and competing accounts will have to contend with them, but contention remains possible. It seems to me, for example, that he overstates the commitment of Althusius and the sixteenth-century French school of Calvinist constitutionalist resistance theorists known as monarchomachs to a holistic popular foundation for legitimate authority. Juridical arguments that Lee develops in his earlier chapters about the independent authority of intermediate governing bodies tend to fall out in the later ones, as his attention shifts decisively to “the people.” But I would argue that Althusius and the monarchomachs emphasized institutional pluralism as much as and sometimes more than those popular foundations. They are not straightforwardly forbears of the modern idea of a unified sovereign people parceling out governing authority; the concept of “the people” is more pluralistic from the outset. But Lee offers valuable evidence for his account, and those who, like me, want to push back on one point or another will still likely draw on his own account of the legal ideas those theorists used.

Lee shows mastery of materials from across centuries, languages, and disciplines. He combines them in a way that is powerful and convincing, animated by clear theoretical questions as much as by historiographic ones. This book would be a major accomplishment from a scholar who had been working on these questions for decades. For a first book, it is astonishing.

Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought ought to shift the historical sensibility of political theorists and philosophers in at least two crucial ways. With respect to the Middle Ages, it should lead to a rebalancing of the recovery of Aristotle and the recovery of the Roman law. The former was intellectually crucial, but it tends to be wildly overemphasized compared to the latter in, say, the teaching of medieval political thought. Aristotle and Aristotelians gave the medievals an intellectual structure for thinking about the moral status of politics and law. But the Roman law and its interpreters provided the resources for thinking about rightful authority, institutional design, and the rules of justice—as no less an Aristotelian than Aquinas freely recognized. We do a disservice to our students when we let the law disappear from the Middle Ages, and the disservice tends to perpetuate itself as successive generations grow less familiar with Roman than with Greek inheritances.

With respect to early modernity, a different rebalancing is called for: between contract and all the other legal concepts that enter into the foundations of political thought. Metaphors of contracts are not absent from Lee’s history, but neither are they central compared with, say, the relationship between property ownership and authority. Is sovereignty owned? Is jurisdiction or office owned? For example, the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, a major text of the monarchomachs, is often glossed as an offshoot of social contract theory. There are contract metaphors at work in it, but as Lee emphasizes, the title deliberately invokes the legal action of a vindicatio, a procedure of property law whereby ultimate owners could vindicate their claim against others with lesser rights over the land. The Vindiciae is one of the works that treats authority as subject to a kind of ownership, and it portrays the people as having the right to reassert its status as its owner. Lee shows a rare ability to trace such movements back and forth between private law and public law concepts over these centuries. Without saying so—maybe without intending so—he demonstrates the gross inadequacy of political theorists’ habit of ignoring private law except in the case of the contract that supposedly founds public law. We cannot understand early modern political thought, or the ideas we have inherited from it, without understanding the mix of jurisprudential materials out of which it was built.