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JA
Medieval & Early Modern
Johannes Althusius
1557–1638 · Subsidiarity
Authority rises from voluntary association, not from a throne.
In Politica, Althusius described the commonwealth as a nested series of voluntary partnerships: families, guilds, towns and provinces, each holding its own rights, with the sovereign granted power by consent and answerable to the realm's fundamental law. He is the first systematic theorist of subsidiarity and a direct ancestor of federalism and of the small-republic tradition.
Why it matters for freedom
He built the theory of a society of voluntary associations, each with its own rights, beneath and beyond the state.
Who they stood against
the absolutist claim that sovereignty descends from the crown to the people