"All power is limited by definite boundaries and laws. No power is absolute, infinite, unbridled, arbitrary, and lawless. Every power is bound to laws, right, and equity."
Johannes Althusius was born in Diedenshausen in Westphalia
in 1557. Beyond a record of his birth, little is known about his early life.
Upon receiving his doctorate in both civil and ecclesiastical law at Basle in
1586, he accepted a position on the faculty of law at the Reformed Academy at
Herborn. The greatest achievement of his Herborn years was the publication of
the Politica in 1603. Its success was instrumental in securing for Althusius
an offer to become municipal magistrate of Emden in East Friesland, which was
among the first cities in Germany to embrace the Reformed articles of faith.
Althusius accepted the offer in 1604 and exercised an influence comparable to
that of Calvin in Geneva; he guided the city without interruption until his
death in 1638.
Much of Althusius' thought is indebted to the precepts of
Calvinism. John Calvin offers Christian political thinkers a sound theological
basis to oppose unjust governments. “We are subject to the men who rule
over us, but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against Him,
let us not pay the least regard to it,” Calvin writes in the last chapter
of his Institutes. Althusius, too, contends in his Politica that
because all power and government comes from God, civil authorities cannot use
their power to serve their own ends: “[The king] is over individuals in
order to administer rightly, to which extent he is the executor, preserver,
and minister of the law. Properly speaking, therefore, law is thus over everyone.
It is the superior above all...Therefore, if [the king] governs against the
rule of law, he becomes punishable by the law...”
For Althusius, as for other Reformational political thinkers,
government power must be limited. All human social institutions, including the
state, are gifts of God and are accountable to God for what they do; therefore,
the state can never have ultimate sovereignty. It, too, is sub Deo. Thus, Althusius
can conclude that if ever the state transgresses its divinely ordained authority,
it becomes illegitimate. In contrast, the legitimate state is that which “undertakes
all actions of its administration according to laws.” Were it not for a
code of law that exists outside the purview of state control and manipulation,
the state cannot hope to preserve justice. When a state ceases to direct its
power toward the common good and attempts to release itself from the power and
jurisdiction of God, it forfeits its authority to rule.
