The Moral Basis of Authority

Abstract

It cannot be said that Nicole expounds a complete political and social theory in his Essais, but from them can be deduced a quite coherent view of the bases and organisation of human society. Nicole was led in a number of ways to occupy himself with these matters as were his fellow Port-Royalists. Port-Royal found itself at odds with both Church and State during the controversy with the Jesuits. Moreover, the nature of political sovereignty in particular had been a subject of dispute among European thinkers from the sixteenth century. The Wars of Religion in France, the Fronde, the two Revolutions in England, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes kept the question alive, and the struggles of oppressed religious minorities led to the propounding of theories of popular sovereignty and social contract. Such theories, together with a ‘democratic’ conception of Church government, are associated in the seventeenth century notably with the Protestants, from whose positions generally the Jansenist leadership took care to distinguish its own. There were, however, more extreme spirits among the Jansenist rank and file, and a move towards ecclesiastical democracy did eventually assert itself. Within and together with seventeenth-century discussions of sovereignty and social contract, theories of natural law were prominent.