Hi, I'm Peter Adverson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at historyofilosophy.net.

Today's episode, Constitutional Conventions, the Huguenose.

Political life is full of clichés that are so familiar as to escape our notice, but would benefit from closer inspection.

We already touched on the phrase, let's agree to disagree, which distills the issues we looked at over the last couple of episodes into four innocuous words.

Another phrase, the body politic, is now basically a dead metaphor, but it was originally intended to convey that a political community is an organic whole, with different parts or organs playing different roles.

Or take the phrase, public servant, which we routinely apply to our politicians, and which they hasten to apply to themselves.

If you think about it, that phrase has deep implications.

It suggests that the leader serves at the pleasure of the people, and ultimately has to do what they say rather than vice versa.

Indeed, if the people are the master and the political leader, the servant, then the people should be able to get rid of the leader if they are minded to.

The 16th century may have been the first time that anyone in European intellectual history started to take this idea seriously.

Certainly, the notion that the ruler should look to the good of the ruled was a very old one.

In the first book of his republic, Plato said that a ruler is like a shepherd who needs to tend to the welfare of his flock, and that analogy was repeated many times thereafter.

But for the most part, this was advice given to autocratic rulers, and they might choose to take the advice or not.

If you want to be a good ruler, you should be looking after our advantage and not your own, so be a good ruler.

There were few institutions and few political theories that would actually force or require the ruler to do so, or threaten him, it was usually a hymn, with dire consequences if he failed.

Medieval and Renaissance political thought was dominated by that metaphor of the body politic.

The ruler is the head of the body, its best part, and the one that steers the rest from above.

As for why one man should occupy that privileged place, the usual explanation was one that was hard to argue with, God put him there.

Of course, if this podcast series has taught us anything, it's that such sweeping historical claims are at best only partially true.

So here, too, one can think of exceptions like the Magna Carta in England, or Marcilius of Padua, who argued in the 14th century, that rulers acquired their authority through popular consent.

But Marcilius was a man ahead of his time, and that time would turn out to be the 16th century.

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