...is the upshot of Pettit's paper. His Powerpoint presentation is available on Trinity College's Philosophy Department's website (pdf).

Excellent lecture, very interesting. As with all the brilliant philosophers I've heard speak, Pettit is a spectacularly clear speaker. Leif Wenar's response was also engrossing. I'll type my notes up at some stage then might comment at great length. In the meanwhile, while I think that the Powerpoint was clear enough to get a sense of what Pettit was on about, at a first glance this paper (pdf) might also explain some of the issues.

The title, by the way, comes from the Jurist Bartolo de Sassoferrato. 12^th Century Perugia, a city republic, was at risk from the arbitrary rule of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Emperor, it was felt, could not intervene where local princes reigned, on the convention that the prince was entirely sovereign in his own lands. Since republics didn't have princes, though, the Emperor had - on occasion - taken it upon himself to ravage them on the grounds that, since there was no sovereign and he was the über-sovereign, he could do what he liked. Describing how this might break the conventions and laws of Italy at the time was an urgent concern for Perugia's jurists.

Anyway, it was Bartolo who came up with the lovely formulation that, in Perugia, the citizenry was the prince.

I'm sure Hobbes read Bartolo too, but the traces through that are for another day...