'Self-defence' and sovereignty: the reception and application of German political thought in England and Scotland, 1628-69

Historians of political thought have begun to discover how contemporaries attempted to argue about armed conflict within the body politic without giving licence to anyone to escape order and subjection. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the concept of 'self-defence' became of overriding importance. English and Scottish interest in German affairs grew after the battle at the White Mountain in 1620. English and Scottish pamphleteers and writers subsequently began to recognize some of the argument concerning 'self-defence' that had been elaborated in the Empire until this point. As the English 'ancient constitution' began to crumble under the mounting pressure of conflict between King and Parliament from 1642 onwards, the exhaustive philosophical and legal reasoning on the nature and basis of the body politic found within political texts emanating from Germany thus appeared increasingly attractive. However, as German ideas on self-defence were used, they underwent a significant transformation within their new English context. Because the sovereignty of the King in Parliament did not allow the integration of German ideas on self-defence based on the peculiar nature of sovereignty in the Empire, English thought gradually transformed the state of necessity in German thought into ideas of a state of nature.