The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c14.s3.5

c14.s3.5

The discrepancy between theory and practice, paradoxical though at first sight, is today almost a postulate in the history of European political speculation. Marsiglio of Padua in his *Defensor Pacis* (1324) is known to have anticipated Martin Luther and Machiavelli in the thorough-going secularization of politics. According to this writer, as Bluntschli explains it in the *Geschichte der neueren Staatswissenschaft*, the supreme institution is the state, the Pope has no right to the election of prince or emperor, and the *plenitudo potestatis* or omnipotence of the Pope is a myth. But this anti-theocratic theorizing was, as Sullivan remarks in his essay on *Marsiglio and Ockam*, the exact antipodes of the facts of the political world.