中世纪英国宪政史研究的新理路

中国人民大学孟广林教授与英国约克大学M.阿莫诺教授就如何研究中世纪英国宪政史进行了学术对话,在不少重要问题上达成了基本共识:应当肯定斯塔布斯及其“牛津学派”的杰出学术贡献,但也须克服其“宪政主义”历史观的局限性;要重视依据“政治社会”这一新概念,来深化对政治群体与政治冲突的研究;“王在法下”的确是当时流行的政治观念,但国王是否受到法律和议会的限制,则是由王权与王国政治群体之间的力量对比所决定的,所谓的“兰加斯特宪政主义”并不存在;在这一研究领域,新历史主义、中西历史比较等新方法都有重要的学术价值。

New Line of Reasoning about Researches on English Consititutional History in the Middle Ages

Not long ago,with Professor.M.Ormrod in York University,the author made an academic dialogue about the study of Medieval English constitutional history,and both sides gained basic common viewpoints on many important questions.According our ideas,we should affirm the great contributions made by Stubbs and his Oxford Schools in this field,but must eliminate the limitations of their historical idea of "Constitutionalism";We should pay attention to using of the conception of "political society",in order to deepen the study about the political groups and political conflicts;It is true that the idea of "the king below the law" was popular in that period,but whether the monarchy was limited by the law or by the parliament,at root,depending on the real balance of the power between the monarchy and the political groups of the kingdom, and so called Lancastrian Constitutionalism did not actually exist;Some new methods,such as New Historicism and comparative historical study between China and the West,have important acacdemic values in this field.