In Quest of History On Czech Statehood and Identity (Ukázka, strana 99)

succession policy of the Habsburgs in the 16th century, it’s worth recalling that, during this time, society and its political reform, including the organisation of the state, underwent root-and-branch transformation, as documented by The King’s Two Bodies, a masterpiece by one of the last century’s most influential historians, Ernst Kantorowicz. This work was originally published in 1957 and profoundly influenced whole generations of historians, philosophers, and social and political scientists. It was a major inspiration for Michel Foucault in his classic study Discipline and Punish, while the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben proclaimed it “one of the great texts of our age on the techniques of power”. In his book, Kantorowicz discussed the classical theory of the king’s two bodies by drawing on his study of legal and theological sources from Elizabethan and Jacobean England, in which the “crown-as-corporation” principle prevailed. This means that, in the person of the king, two bodies are indivisibly united – the physical body natural, vulnerable and mortal, and the symbolic body politic, which contains the “office, government and majesty royal” and, as such, is mystically eternal and immortal. In this body politic, the monarch and his subjects are also connected, with the king becoming the head and his subjects making up the rest of the body, which is enduring and, unlike the body natural, cannot die. The king’s body politic also symbolically cleanses any physical defects of the majesty royal and gives it everlasting duration, so the heirs to the throne simply physically enter the eternal body and fulfil legal doctrine stating that the monarch is a special corporation. In itself, this is nothing new, and all legal historians in Britain are familiar with this doctrine. Kantorowicz, though, proved that this English doctrine of the king’s two bodies originated in the medieval jurisprudence of civil and canon law and that, for example, the principle of “the king never dies” evolved from two parallel legal concepts, namely the rules of succession in family dynasties and the immortality of corporations, which is a classic rule of Roman law that also happens to be linked to the principle of the immortality 98 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS268797