In the Western world, theories of sovereignty were set out by
political theorists at roughly the same time as the rise of the
national state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was
also when Copernicus published his revolutionary suggestion
that the sun was the center of the solar system and not the earth.
The theoretical concepts and devices they used were Natural
Law and original contract, ideas inherited from the Middle Ages
and derived from Roman law, but now modified in accordance
with the paradigm of Renaissance science. The assumption was
generally made that, prior to the civil condition, people lived
in a state of nature and emerged from it by contracting to give
up their natural rights and to live under a common law. But
these concepts were not used by all thinkers to produce the
same conclusions.

There were two main types of theory, one (which was es-
poused by the royalists in the English Civil War) was inspired
by the Catholic tradition of Divine Right and embraced by the
inheritors of the Holy Roman Empire; the other was inspired

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