SOURCE: "The Beginnings of the Modern State," in Political Theories of the Middle Age, translated by Frederic William Maitland, 1900. Reprint by Cambridge at the University Press, 1913, pp. 87-100.

In the excerpt below, Gierke sketches the transition from the heyday of the Middle Ages to the modern era. Emphasizing concepts rather than individual thinkers, Gierke discusses the emerging sovereignties of the period—that of the state and that of the individual.

… Everywhere beside the formulation of thoughts that were properly medieval we have detected the genesis of 'antique-modern' ideas, the growth of which coincides with the destruction of the social system of the Middle Age and with the construction of 'naturerightly' theories of the State. It remains for us to set forth by way of summary this tendency of medieval doctrine to give birth to the modern idea of the State and to transform the previously accepted theory of...