The legitimacy of power and its exercise. Comparative elements in the fourteenth-century Franciscan political textuality

Abstract

The medieval experience of the Franciscans is marked by the decision of acting in different societies. In this context the awareness of their presence bring them to focus on the requirements that, by themselves, can legitimize the political authority.If in Scoto legitimacy is exclusively founding by the consensus of the people who voluntarily choose to confer its power to an authority, if in Ockham the legitimacy of power is conditioned by the double principle of circumnstantiality and functional efficency, in Eiximenis the basis of the authority is submit to a double temperament. First of all the authority can never be considered as an exercise of plenitudo potestatis due to a constitutional principle: the ruler of a community derives his power not only from the consensus but from an agreed pact in which is clearly fixed circles and ends of his action. The second one regards the co-essential condition of the legitimacy: the power of the ruler has a strictly functional justification. This kind of authority must ensure not only the classicals peace and justice, it has to become an engine of the process looking for the “millor estament de la cosa pública”, for the economic emprovement of the subjects belonging to the political communitiy, but also of those who could enter in it by a specific and very well circunscribed pathways of integration.