This historically embedded treatment of theoretical debates about prerogative and reason of state spans over four centuries of constitutional development. Commencing with the English Civil War and the constitutional theories of Hobbes and the Republicans, it moves through eighteenth-century arguments over jealousy of trade and commercial reason of state to early imperial concerns and the nineteenth-century debate on the legislative empire, to martial law and twentieth-century articulations of the state at the end of empire. It concludes with reflections on the contemporary post-imperial security state. The book synthesises a wealth of theoretical and empirical literature that allows a link to be made between the development of constitutional ideas and global realpolitik. It exposes the relationship between internal and external pressures and designs in the making of the modern constitutional polity and explores the relationship between law, politics and economics in a way that remains rare in constitutional scholarship.
1. The safety of the people: from prerogative to reason of state; 2. Prerogative in early modern state theory; 3. Republican principles of state and empire; 4. Jealousy of trade: reason of state and commercial empire; 5. Reason of state in the first age of global imperialism; 6. Reason of state and the legislating empire; 7. War, law, and the modern state; 8. Rights, risk, and reason of state.
Thomas Poole is Associate Professor and Reader in the Law Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
