Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today. Scott GordonEmpire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800-1800. James Muldoon
Scott Gordon, Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. x + 395 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-674-16987-5. James Muldoon, Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800-1800 New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. viii + 208 pp. $65. ISBN: 0-312-22226-2. The two books considered in this review have much in common. Contrary to the repeated complaint that most academic work is narrow and antiquarian, both books tackle big subjects over vast expanses of time. Both combine political history with the history of political thought, and display an impressive range of reading. Both are clearly and sometimes aggressively written. And, both have contemporary relevance. The power of empires and the possibility of governmental tyranny remain prominent topics in public discourse. The collapse of the "evil empire," and the familiar mantras of conservative thought, such as "the state is bloated and unmanageable," or "government is not the solution; it's the problem," are recent enough to resonate with most readers. But while these books possess similar virtues, both, unfortunately, have similar problems. James Muldoon s Empire and Order considers the concept of empire in Europe from roughly 800 to 1800. Muldoon begins with an assessment of earlier work on the concept of empire and finds it inadequate. Most scholars, according to Muldoon, regard medieval monarchies as polyglot conglomerations of lands, privileges, and rights competing with the church and great nobilities for power. At the same time, Muldoon thinks that most scholars incorrectly view the work of Machiavelli and Bodin in the sixteenth century and the statebuilding of Henry VIII and Francis I as the critical stage in the passage from the ramshackle medieval state to a more efficient early modern sovereign state. For conventional scholarship, the state emerges at the same time that Europe begins to develop overseas empires. Hence, according to Muldoon, the medieval antecedents of state and empire have received insufficient attention from scholars. To remedy this defect, Muldoon devotes considerable attention to analysis of the medieval state and to medieval concepts of empire, also contending that earlier writers have focused too much on writers and theorists, rather than on the lawyers who often had more profound and learned things to say. Muldoon locates and explicates eight different concepts of empire that flourished in the Middle Ages. These concepts include Charlemagne's ideas about the Carolingian empire, the revival of Roman law in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the imperial ideas of the medieval German emperors, the Roman notion of imperium, Pope Innocent Ill's ideas of sovereignty, Dante's challenge to the papacy in De Monarchia, the series of empires referred to by the prophet Daniel as part of God's providential plan for humankind, and to the tyrannical governments that destroyed the Roman republic. Muldoon's discussion of the various medieval ideas of empire is interesting and valuable, but the choice of a medieval versus modern theoretical framework for the