The Ideal of Aristocratia Politiae Vicina in the Calvinist Political Tradition

This is an examination of aristocracy as an orienting principle in Calvin's own political theory and ecclesiology, which goes on to consider its place in the Calvinist political tradition. For many reasons, political and theological, the chapter argues, Calvinist political tradition assumed an autonomous existence in the course of the seventeenth century so that it progressively bore less and less resemblance to anything found in Calvin.