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In his 1986 Cyril Foster Lecture at Oxford University, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar argued that in discharging his responsibilities the Secretary-General must be aware that the “idealism and hope of which the Charter is a luminous expression have to confront the narrow dictates of national policies”. The Secretary-General must walk a fine line between effective cooperation and apparent collusion with the Security Council in particular. Past incumbents have all learned – the hard way – when they have either crossed the limits of tolerance of one of the permanent members of the Council, or cleaved so close that they have sacrificed legitimacy in the eyes of their broader constituency among the member states. This requires the Secretary-General to come to terms with the geopolitical realities of the day – even as he or she attempts to reshape them. In the absence of such realism, the independent authority the Secretary-General wields may be perceived by member states as a threat, rather than as a resource, inevitably producing attacks, resistance, and even vilification – while putting at risk the effectiveness and credibility of the organization as a whole. The seeds of tension in relations between the Secretary-General and the Security Council lie in Articles 98 and 99 of the UN Charter. As other chapters explore in more detail, these Charter provisions establish an independent political role for the Secretary-General, alongside his or her role as chief administrative officer of the organization. Article 99 is particularly significant, giving the Secretary-General a right of notice that has been parlayed over the years into the basis for initiative independent of the Security Council. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1632 James Spottiswoode was rowed out into the middle of Lough Derg in Co. Donegal. He was a Scot, ordained in the Church of England, who had become Church of Ireland bishop of Clogher in 1621. He bore a mandate issued by the lords justices and privy council of Ireland which permitted him to break down, deface and utterly demolish ‘the chapel and all the Irish houses now situate in that island called St Patrick's purgatory, all the buildings, pavements, walls, works, foundations, circles, caves, cells and vaults … called St Patrick's bed’. Spottiswoode had a miserable time. The secular arm, in the form of the high sheriff of Donegal, failed to turn up and a pilot could not be found. When one was eventually located, the bishop and his companions were nearly sunk and then narrowly avoided being marooned by a storm. Meanwhile onlookers, the ‘country people’, stood by and waited for a divine thunderbolt while Spottiswoode dashed about toppling hostels, chapels and other devotional structures erected by the Franciscans only a few years earlier. All of this took place just four years short of the first centenary of the passing of the Act of Supremacy by the Irish parliament. By that date, 1636, Lough Derg was once again open for business as Catholic Ireland's leading pilgrimage site. James Spottiswoode wasted his time and risked the lives of his servants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In dealing with the antinomy of reason and fiat, the main effort of the various schools of legal philosophy has been to obliterate one of its branches. [T]he historical study of legal institutions may have more to offer to … [the] … solution [of the problems of legal theory] than has yet been appreciated. The common law tradition claims not only that the law is reason but also that the reason of the law is morally good. Judges' reasons for decision, their judgments, are considered within this tradition to be evidence for this claim, for the way in which the common law “works itself pure.” Philosophers of law who work in common law jurisdictions have taken one of three approaches to this claim. First, there are philosophers who have tried to make sense of the common law through an argument that in attending to the way that judges interpret the law, we will not only best understand law but also discern the connection between law and morality. We will call such philosophers, without any pejorative intent, common law romantics. Most notable among them is Ronald Dworkin. Second, philosophers have argued that the common law is a mess – in Jeremy Bentham's words, a “shapeless heap of odds and ends.” Such a mess, Bentham argued, leads to uncertainty about the law that not only is contrary to the demands of utility but permits “Judge & Co.” to arrogate power that properly belongs to the legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hobbes's work had been associated with many features of political and cultural life in the early 1670s; atheism, libertinism, authoritarian churchmen and seditious dissenters. But as the crown appeared to drift towards what critics like Marvell would characterise as popery and arbitrary government, Charles's policies began to look more like the Hobbism condemned by Harrington and Lawson. Although Hobbes's absolutism had always been condemned, this feature of Hobbes's argument had drawn less attention in the early Restoration period. Partly this was because Hobbes had been successfully recast by Royalist propaganda as a seditious contract theorist, but a connected reason was that most parties had good reasons to magnify royal authority in a manner sometimes not unlike that described in Leviathan. Parliamentarians, Anglican churchmen and dissenters, for example, all sought royal support for their causes; if Eachard found nothing exceptional in chapters 18–20 of Leviathan, Marvell, as we have seen, could also appeal to Charles's absolute authority in a Hobbesian fashion as a possible means of bringing about a more moderate approach to dissent. As the decade wore on, however, the king's absolute authority started to seem less benign. The increasing (and to a large extent justified) suspicion that the court favoured popery and absolutist France began to motivate political opposition. The court's attachment to foreign arbitrary absolutism took centre-stage as a danger to law, property and religion. In this context, Leviathan's earlier reputation as the textbook of despotic absolutism could be fitted into more general anxieties about the court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James II undoubtedly benefited at first from both the Hobbesian anxieties and attitudes generated in the first half of the 1680s. At the level of propaganda, the Tory view of Hobbes as the patron of sedition could be wheeled out to condemn opposition. In the thanksgiving sermons for the defeat of Monmouth at Sedgemoor in July 1685, Henry Hesketh, preaching before the king, alluded to Leviathan as part and parcel of the republican consent theories that had motivated the rebels. More common were allusions to Hobbes's de factoism as a theory that had encouraged individuals to believe that they could seize the throne. John Goodricke preached to the lawyers at Lincoln's Inn that Mr Hobbes's state of nature ‘would justify all Wars, Rebellions, and unjust Invasions upon the Rights of Others’ and that his theory had been designed in the first place ‘to support an Olivarian Usurpation’. Thomas Wagstaffe similarly assaulted the thought ‘That every Man should enjoy the Benefit of Laws, and Society, and the King … should be in Hobs's State of Nature, and every Man had a Right to everything of His. And if a Man can but get together Men and Arms … he may lay Claim to the King's Crown and Dignity.’ But the condemnations again went hand in hand with the thought that the beckoning Hobbesian anarchy, however unnatural its genesis, required an authoritarian solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disasters of plague, fire and war that affected England between 1665 and 1667 ushered in a new and potentially very dangerous period for Hobbes. They would also herald a new phase in the reception of Hobbes's work, one that would see an explosion of allusion to Hobbes and his works within popular culture, as well as the creation of the popular image of Hobbes as the archetypal atheist philosopher and Leviathan as the handbook of irreligion and amorality. If discussion of Hobbes and Hobbism had seemed to go into abeyance after the philosopher's struggles with his academic critics in the 1650s, the later 1660s undoubtedly saw a renaissance in critical discussion of Hobbes's work and a popular reconstitution of his public image in many different contexts. There were many connected reasons for the rise of Hobbesian discourse in the later 1660s, but there can be little doubt that it had an important relationship to the increasingly turbulent politics of the period. As earlier chapters have shown, the reception of Hobbes's work was often conditioned by the relationship between his ideas and the prevailing politics, and the situation in the later 1660s offers a complex example of this phenomenon. One factor central to the upsurge in Hobbesian discussion was the shift in the politics of the period. In the early Restoration period the basic alignment between crown, church and Parliament, fostered particularly by Clarendon and Sheldon, had allowed the suppression of the traditional centrifugal pressures that had traditionally plagued the Stuart polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 1658–1660: COVERT HOBBISM AND ANTI-HOBBISM IN THE SETTLEMENT CRISIS Cromwell's death in September 1658 led to a period of political instability that provoked an outpouring of discussion about the political and religious direction of the state. Richard Cromwell, mistrusted by both the army and the republicans found it difficult to hold together the various interest groups on which the stability of the regime depended. Beset by debt he was forced to call the third Protectorate Parliament in January 1659, but its attempts to reduce the powers of the army led to its dissolution in April and the recall of the Rump, re-establishing the Commonwealth until the army again dissolved it in October. The army's Committee of Safety in turn dissolved itself in December, leaving England ungoverned until troops restored the Rump and, in February, General Monck restored the Long Parliament, paving the way for the Restoration of Charles II. This difficult period proved to be remarkably fertile in terms of political theory; between the ending of the Protectorate and the re-establishment of the monarchy there was a window of political opportunity and the chance to lobby for a new political order. There was also the danger of anarchy, and a need to provide some sort of political and religious stability. In these circumstances Hobbes occupied an unusual position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HOBBES AND THE PROTECTORATE Thus far Leviathan had attracted suprisingly little public comment. The Royalists had attacked Hobbes after his defection, and the Presbyterians and Episcopalians had launched minor attacks on his theology and ecclesiology from the autumn of 1652 onwards, but this hardly amounted to a major campaign. The relative silence was such that in 1654 John Davies commented that ‘On this side of the sea, besides the dirt and slander cast on him in Sermons & private meetings, none hath put any thing in Print against him, but Mr Rosse.’ However all of this would soon change, and the reasons were political. One of the most decisive political changes to affect the reception of Leviathan during the 1650s was the establishment of the Protectorate after the Nominated Assembly dissolved itself in December 1653. John Lambert's Instrument of Government envisaged the restitution of a triadic constitutional structure, with a Lord Protector, Council of State and Parliament. Cromwell's installation as Head of State was soon followed in the spring by implementation of religious reforms which created a tolerant national church along the lines proposed by John Owen's Humble proposals. If Hobbes's political and ecclesiastical vision was a rather uncomfortable fit with the republican and tolerationist agendas of the Commonwealth, Leviathan's absolutism and Erastianism were now highly relevant to the new political situation where Cromwell's authority was now publicly recognised and identified with a new settlement in the established church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE ELEMENTS OF LAW Before 1640, Hobbes, secretary to the Earls of Devonshire, was known to the literate public as humanist scholar, a poet and a translator. Hobbes had been responsible for the standard English version of Thucydides' Eight bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre (1629), and he was also the author of De mirabilibus pecci (1627), an occasionally obscene country house poem that Hobbes ultimately despised, but which remained popular throughout the century. To a smaller circle of scientists associated with Hobbes's Cavendish patrons, the Earls of Devonshire and Newcastle, Hobbes was a respected natural philosopher, a former amanuensis to Francis Bacon who, although he had come late to the study of mathematics and natural philosophy, nevertheless promised much. Hobbes got his first taste of direct involvement in the politics of the 1640s as a politician rather than a political theorist, being proposed as prospective Member of Parliament for Derbyshire for the Short Parliament of 1640. The Derbymen were resolved, however, ‘to give no way to the election of Mr Hobs’, according to one contemporary, a rejection that invites the thought that the Derbyshire constituents were passing one of the earliest verdicts upon Hobbes's political outlook. But as so often when looking at contemporary reactions to Hobbes, one has to be careful to look at the context before assuming that any personal notoriety was at issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CONTEXT In several accounts Hobbes gives the impression that he had been composing the English version of his political theory from the middle of 1646, but the bulk of the evidence suggests that he was actually working on De Corpore between 1646 and 1649. Hobbes appears to have started work on Leviathan in late 1649, putting aside the manuscript of De Corpore, which was nearly ready for publication. Hobbes's reasons for doing this are not entirely clear, but circumstantial evidence suggests that the reason might have been both political and controversial. Quentin Skinner's original thought that the new work was a contribution to the allegiance controversy fits chronologically with the debate over the engagement and theoretically with Hobbes's sharpened emphasis in Leviathan upon the conditional quality of obedience (specifically its relationship to protection). The problem comes in characterising Hobbes's relationship to this debate, particularly because the arguments speaking most directly to the question of allegiance are to be found in the short ‘Review and Conclusion’ that Hobbes added to the end of the work. Commentators have noted tensions between the argument in the body of the text and the political message contained in the ‘Review’, and this has generated considerable debate as to the extent to which Leviathan itself was genuinely a pièce d'occasion, and a contribution to the engagement controversy. It is a testimony to the open quality of Hobbes's work that the textual evidence has been used to support almost diametrically opposed but nevertheless plausible interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of all the avant-garde groups on the English scene in the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury Group seems, at first glance, to be anomalous. Bloomsbury has many of the same internal features as other bohemias, yet its peculiar position in English society leaves it less socially marginal or cut off than other groups. Its principal members and associates enjoyed closer ties with the social and political elites in London. This contrasts with the social divide that separates avant-garde groups in continental Europe from the native upper classes. Their more distinct separation is probably best explained by the greater degree of active political radicalism of continental avant-gardes as opposed to their English counterparts. In London, avant-garde groups that numbered foreigners, young men and women from the provinces, and the sons and daughters of recent migrants to England – as in the case of writers and painters from the Jewish community in Whitechapel – did not enjoy Bloomsbury's relatively easy and continuous access to the elites. Mark Gertler's personal difficulties leading to his suicide in 1939 cannot be put down entirely to the class system, but his origins, his “foreignness” as a poor Jew in what was still an insular and anti-Semitic society did not help. His unremitting poverty, his egotism, his social gaffes, and his clinical depression, as Sarah MacDougall has shown, were mainly to blame for his situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the poetics and sociology of the pure relationship and the noetic community let's move on to another terrain of purity. I speak of the much misunderstood innocence of the child. Childhood has a long history as a marginalized and displaced zone lodged in self-absorbed societies that have paid very little heed to the inner culture and sensibility of the community of children. For all intents and purposes, this is a silent, unrecorded history. And to try to delve into its existential reality is to indulge not only in speculation but in presumption as well. How can we really know what the community of children exactly consists of? We might draw on our own memories, but even they are not reliable, as childhood quickly dissolves into adult consciousness as the purest of arbitrary fictions. In fact, for an adult, childhood is the surest domain of fictive invention and aesthetic effects. Often the quality of an adult's imagination is best measured by listening to his or her recollections of childhood. Childhood, unfortunately, is always locked away as the children's unconscious secret forever. And this is true even for children we may think we know well. Only the psychic affinities of animals are more thoroughly hidden from us. First of all, childhood participates in the adult flows as a resistant element. It cannot be grasped by adult consciousness in its interiority. Adult consciousness can only document its visible episodes and events, what children say and do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Act of Six Articles came into force on 12 July 1539. Henry VIII died on 27 January 1547. BURNED FOR HERESY After 18 March 1540: Valentine Freez. A Dutch evangelical of long standing, resident in York. He was convicted of sacramentarian heresy by the Council in the North shortly before 18 March 1540, and was burned out-side York soon afterwards, together with his wife. PRO SP 1/158 fo. 72r (LP XV 362); AM, 1027; Dickens, Lollards and Protestants, 30–2. After 18 March 1540: Mrs Freez. Wife of Valentine Freez (above) and burned with him as a sacramentary. 3 May 1540: John. An Italian painter, and one of three burned at Southwark for ‘heresie against the sacrament of the aulter’. Presumably also one of the three who Richard Hilles states were burned in Southwark after Easter 1540 for denying transubstantiation. Foxe dates the burning to ‘about’ 1539 and places it in St Giles in the Fields. Wriothesley, 118; Bale, Epistle exhortatorye, fos. 14v–15r; ET, 133 (OL, 200); AM, 1279. 3 May 1540: Giles Germaine. A joiner burned with John the painter. Wriothesley, 118; Bale, Epistle exhortatorye, fos. 14v–15r; AM, 1279. 3 May 1540: Maundevild or Lancelot. A French groom to the queen, burned with John the Italian painter. Foxe claims he was a royal servant present at the examination of John and Germaine, who ‘seemed by his countenaunce & gesture to fauour both the cause & the poore men his frends’. He was arrested and condemned with them. Wriothesley, 118; Bale, Epistle exhortatorye, fos. 14v–15v; AM, 1279. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the Jewes requyre a sygne, and the Grekes seke after wysdome. But we preache Christ crucifyed, vnto the Jewes an occasyon of fallynge, and vnto the Grekes foolysshnes. GODLINESS AND GOOD LEARNING The Reformation was perceived by those who made it, and by those who were made by it, as an intellectual event. Nowadays we are interested in ‘popular religion’ and the religious culture of the unlearned, but this preoccupation would have bemused most of the religious reformers of the sixteenth century – including many outside the elites. It is worth emphasising the extent to which, in the early sixteenth century, learning was next to godliness. A Lutheran catechetical dialogue which was translated into English in 1545 provides a typical example. One of the characters, the ‘unlearned man’, begins with a soliloquy in praise of the learning he lacks: Whan I do considre with my selfe (ryght gentle neyghbours) how many greate, learned, wyse, and connynge men there be in the worlde, vnto whome the knowledge of the truthe is so plentuously opened, so that they knowe at large what is neadfull & necessary to theyr saluacyon: I can not otherwyse thynke but that all suche learned men muste neades haue here vpon earth an heauenly treasure, & an ouerflowinge fownteyne, out of the whiche they may at all tymes featche all suche thinges as theyr hartes can desyre, beynge neadefull and necessary to theyr soules healthe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]