I am reading Richard II for the next installment of the USC Bedrosian Center Book Club, and I think my leader (Raphael Bostic) is dubious that Richard II is important to today’s governance discussions. All of Shakespeare’s plays about kings tend to embody rather timeless themes about the sources of political authority, and what sovereignty means. These are some writings that have in them big thinky-thoughts about political authority:
Sophocles. Antigone
Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito.
Paul. The Book of Romans Book 13 (in Greek) and KJV
St. Augustine’s City of God (pdf)
Erasmus, Diderus On the Education of a Christian Prince.
Machiavelli. The Prince
Francisco Suárez De Virtute et Statu Religiois (1608-09) and Defensio Fidei Catholicae
(There has to be an English translation of this somewheres online. Any of you young digital natives find it for me?)
King James 1. The Basilikon Doron
Defense of the Divine Right of Kings.
Vindicate Contra Tyrannos (1600)
Robert Filmar. (1630) Patriarcha or the Natural Power of Kings.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
John Milton. 1692. A Defense of the People of England.
John Locke.1679–1680. Two Treatises on Government.
Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne (~1679) Politics drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture.
Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
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Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776) or a free version
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James Madison, Federalist No. 10, 51 (1787-1788)
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Burke, E. (1790) Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Pateman, Carol. The Sexual Contract.
Mills, Charles. 1997, The Racial Contract, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Huemer, M. (2012) The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Obligation to Obey.