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Entre o Leviatã e o Beemote: soberania, constituição e excepcionalidade no debate político dos séculos XVII e XVIII

2010; UNIVERSIDADE DO ESTADO DO RIO DE JANEIRO; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1590/s0011-52582010000100003

1678-4588

Christian Edward Cyril Lynch,

European Political History Analysis

The article seeks to retrace the theoretical approaches to the problem of exceptionality of power, i.e., the manifestation of sovereign power within a limited government with shared power - as in the tradition of mixed Constitution (longstanding in political thinking) - in the 17th and 18th centuries. Already present in authors like Machiavelli, Harrington, and Locke, the debate bifurcated between England and France in the early 18th century. The specificities of English politics led it to consecrate a tradition of mixed Constitutionalism in which the discretionary element lost relevance in the political system as a whole. In France, on the other hand, the unpopularity of the nobility and the centrality of sovereignty as a concept disaccredited formulas that compromised with the discretionary nature of power. This bifurcation contributed to the formation of two distinct patterns of Constitutional government: the Anglo-Saxon and the French/Continental.