Dominium in Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Political Thought and its Seventeenth-Century Heirs: John of Paris and Locke

Abstract

Dominium, the notion of lordship, underwent important changes during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. An examination of the de potestate regia et papali genre, especially the tract by the Dominican John of Paris (1302), illustrates not only a radical attitude to property rights, private ownership and the defence of one's own in theory, but reflects important evolutions in contemporary property law and its consequences for secular sovereignty. John of Paris's analysis of the origins of property prior to government, based on natural law, is directly related to early fourteenth-century justifications of the profit economy, reflecting the passage of dominium from being a relative, interdependent, feudal thing, to independent property. Other theorists also justified the proliferation of active rights to property, responding not only to theory but also to current economic and legal practices. Such arguments were known and used by seventeenth-century writers, especially Locke, whose library holdings and own tract ‘on civil and ecclesiastical power’ as well as his Second Treatise, express a debt to the de potestate regia et papali genre of the late scholastics.

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