Authority Issues—Is There Sovereignty Beyond the State?
This essay is the first in a three-part symposium on the problem of sovereignty.
Even at this late date and with the term—like so many other words in our political lexicon – utterly corrupted, I still cling to the thought of myself as a conservative in areas other than politics. Murray Rothbard was always at pains to note that libertarianism was a political philosophy only, dealing exclusively with the proper use of violence in society, and as such had nothing to say about aesthetics, culture, sexual morality, or any other subject. That was why Rothbard rejected Frank Meyer’s “fusionism”: someone whose political philosophy is antistatist, regardless of his views on the spectrum of other issues of concern to conservatives, is a libertarian, period.
In politics, after several years in the wilderness, I am indeed a libertarian. That scandalizes some people, I know, even as it strikes me as a morally serious view. A glance at the 20th century, and at American history in particular, reveals no practical reason to be sanguine about the state—and I am referring to a state in this world, as it has come to exist in the West and around the world, and not as it exists in the pristine abstractions of those who continue to plead with me that this most destructive of institutions really can be made right.
We need government to uphold the norms of morality, I am told by people who specialize in the unintentionally funny. If the moral condition of society has reached a level at which we would look for relief to the kind of men who can succeed in a political system like ours, then the patient is terminal. On the other hand, had the churches not turned their attention these past 45 years to lettuce boycotts and excited pronouncements about the wondrous prospects of the modern world, they might have done more to arrest the moral decline for which we are now told we need the state.
Ron Paul, I need hardly add, is the honorable and unspoken exception to all the claims I make here. The Ron Paul phenomenon brought to light a great many people who are still capable of independent thought, and I think his Campaign for Liberty, with its Old Right statement of principles, holds genuine promise. Whether anything comes of political action or not, though, our goal should not be the hopeless one of erecting an improved structure on the ruins of the system. It must be to dismantle. Anything and everything, and as swiftly as possible. The more we roll back, the easier it will be for prosperity and civilized life to re-emerge.
Society has managed rather well without slavery, an institution that at one time was taken for granted by nearly everyone, and which many Christian thinkers thought could be purged of its worst abuses but probably never eradicated. I am likewise confident that individuals and communities would not only survive but flourish without being taxed and harassed by an apparatus of exploitation that does nothing but consume wealth and ruin people’s lives, here and around the world; that punishes what is excellent, productive, and decent; and that successfully propagandizes the public into blaming private scapegoats for problems government itself creates. That a supposed lack of regulation could seriously be proposed as the cause of the mortgage crisis was as predictable as it is idiotic.
A robust defense of this political position is a subject for another time. Right now, I’d like to take up a more fundamental question—who or what is sovereign?
Sovereignty, a modern notion, is a direct challenge to the decentralized political order of the Middle Ages. As proposed by Jean Bodin, sovereignty involves a social authority whose judgments and declarations necessarily override, and are immune to challenge by, those of any other sector of society. Associations below the level of the central government possess what privileges they have not by right but by the generosity of the sovereign.
We should not caricature Bodin’s views—a reading of his work reveals a strong sympathy for human associations between the individual and the state, a sympathy far less in evidence in the writing of later thinkers. Bodin also seeks to protect the household from the sovereign’s undue interference. These are important caveats.
Still, Bodin’s legal monism set the stage for the continued erosion in Western countries of competing sources of law and allegiance besides the central government. Robert Nisbet observes the clearly modern implications of Bodin’s work: “The political, rather than the religious or the economic power, is made foremost. Legal pluralism is replaced by legal monism. Only that authority is legally binding which stems from, or is countenanced by, the king.”
Nisbet’s work is of the greatest importance for conservatives and libertarians, and his book The Quest for Community, whose soporific title is most unfortunate, is on my list of the ten most important books for someone of our persuasion to read. Its argument is that “the single most decisive influence upon Western social organization has been the rise and development of the centralized territorial state.” Nisbet sets out to examine “the conflict between the central power of the political State and the whole set of functions and authorities contained in church, family, gild, and local community.” One of the book’s chapters is titled, appropriately enough, “The State as Revolution.”
Over the years I have had urged upon me, by friends and strangers alike, a great many visions of how political authority might be exercised in order best to safeguard what might loosely be described as conservative values. Each such blueprint accepts the modern notion of sovereignty, envisioning a leader (often a king) whose powers would have been unthinkable in the age of Christendom to which these armchair theorists aspire.
One such person boasted that his revived Christendom would feature a ruler endowed with the power—exercised in light of Christian principles, you understand—to redistribute “a nation’s wealth.” Even leaving aside the fact that “a nation’s wealth” is an evil, stupid, and question-begging phrase, any medieval king attempting to exercise such a power would have found himself either bloodied or on fire.
Medieval historian Norman Cantor describes the Middle Ages this way:
In the model of civil society, most good and important things take place below the level of the state: the family, the arts, learning, and science; business enterprise and technological progress. These are the work of individuals and groups, and the involvement of the state is remote and disengaged. It is the rule of law that screens out the state’s insatiable aggressiveness and corruption and gives freedom to civil society below the level of the state. It so happens that the medieval world was one in which men and women worked out their destinies with little or no involvement of the state most of the time.
It was in the Middle Ages, in fact, that the concept of federalism—which had failed to develop in the ancient world—first appeared in the West. Although he wrote in the early seventeenth century, Johannes Althusius was setting forth a medieval understanding of political organization when he wrote his book Politica Methodice Digesta, Atque Exemplis Sacris et Profanis Illustrata, or simply Politica. Its starting point is not an undifferentiated aggregate of individuals, and its ending point is not a sovereign who is logically and temporally prior to all subsidiary groups in society. Althusius defies both of these modern assumptions, which have informed the thought of so many of the political philosophers who came after Bodin (even if Bodin himself could be ambiguous on these points).
Althusius begins with the family, which he takes to be the fundamental political unit. Groups of families, he explains, may organize to form villages. Groups of villages and towns may organize to form provinces, which in turn may group together to form a kingdom or state. An empire, in turn, is composed of these various states along with free cities (which are directly answerable to the emperor). To the extent that Althusius believes in or employs the concept of sovereignty, he seems to imagine it residing in the symbiotic relation of all these lesser groups as they unite for a common purpose. The individual or group exercising political power at the highest level merely reflects this concord.
If the larger bodies are formed by the voluntary decisions of the lesser, it seems plausible that these smaller associations retain the power to withdraw from associations they freely joined. “Families, cities, and provinces existed by nature prior to realms, and gave birth to them,” Althusius writes. And if this is the case, then one could, without doing violence to the overall theory, conclude that sovereignty (to the extent we wish to make use of this concept) in the final analysis resides in the family, the primordial unit of the Althusian apparatus. Whether Althusius would have thought about the matter quite this way is not so clear, but the conceptual apparatus he uses makes such thinking plausible.
But whatever the ultimate locus of sovereignty, Althusius is quite clear about where it does not reside: in the ruling individual or group who happens to occupy the seat of power in a central government. The society he envisions is far too rich and variegated for a single power center to dominate all others.
The predatory modern state against which Althusius theorized corrupts everything it touches. Its centralization of power was directly responsible for the atrocities, domestic and international, of the twentieth century. That centralization was excused by the Left on the grounds that only a strong central authority could liberate individuals from the oppressions of lesser social authorities. It was welcomed by some on the Right who saw a convenient mechanism for overriding moral decisions it disapproved of on the part of local communities. Both sides got more than they bargained for. This Frankenstein monster, it turns out, creates far more oppressions than it liberates us from, and consistently distorts or undermines moral virtues from filial piety and thrift to personal responsibility and hard work. In the American case, its extravagance and irresponsibility have brought the country and indeed the world to the brink of economic catastrophe.
The genteel F.A. Hayek included a chapter in The Road to Serfdom (1944) called “Why the Worst Get on Top.” It helps to explain why, in a country as expansive as the United States, the two major parties can offer the American population nothing better than a choice between John McCain and Barack Obama. The incentive structure that emerges in the modern state rewards and privileges people like this. That’s a practical reason that any decent people who manage to succeed in American politics should limit their ambitions to shutting down whatever part of Leviathan they can, in order to restrict the scope of society’s worst over the rest of us.
Grandiose plans for society and the world brought into effect by the modern state – “national greatness conservatism,” in other words – have nothing to do with conservatism as historically understood. It is leftists rather than conservatives who have typically been unsatisfied with the prosaic pursuit of bourgeois life. As I wrote in a symposium for Modern Age last year, conservatives delight in and defend those finite but noble (and attainable) virtues we associate with hearth and home. That is all very mundane and uninteresting to those who would urge “greatness” upon us, but it is also much less utopian and yields far fewer corpses.
It was Don Livingston who first brought Althusius to my attention. It was also Don who shared with me the telling verse, “Who in fields Elysian would dwell, do but extend the boundaries of hell.”
Thomas E. Woods Jr. is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books, including Sacred Then and Sacred Now: The Return of the Old Latin Mass, 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask, and, most recently, Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush (with Kevin R.C. Gutzman).
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A worthwhile article. Thank you, Dr. Woods.
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Bravo, Dr Woods!
In regards to Johannes Althusius and the family as sovereign:
I put forward that sovereignty actually is actually shared among all units of society, and that the family must answer to the village in the same way the village must answer to the family. Likewise, a man must answer to his family as well as his guild, his village, and, finally, his king. The king must answer to his kingdom and, in Christendom, the Church - which is the force that holds family, village, and kingdom together.
On issues of faith and morals, the Vicar of Christ is sovereign, on everything else, among the people blessed with the Faith, sovereignty lies within the Body of Christ, the Church Militant, the clergy, the Sacraments, the Church visible and invisible - those things that hold society together.
The sovereignty of the Church isn’t just the pope crowning kings (which he SHOULD do, by the way), but also the paterfamilias being compelled to partake in the Sacrament of Confession frequently, as well as the pastor of a parish organizing a Corpus Christi Procession, as well as a local guild sponsoring a needy family, etc.
It is necessary that a strong cultural institution underly this sense of “shared sovereignty”. Without a cultural institution, society collapses in on itself and explodes in an orgy of violence. In France, the Revolution can be directly traced to the weakening of that Thing that bound the Kingdom together - as Mr Zmirak pointed out in an earlier article, the Jesuits, for example, were suppressed in France, and the Church became an arm of the State of France, and less of an independent cultural institution. Not that it was the direct cause of the Revolution, but the Gallicization of the Church was factor in it proceeding violently.
Again, thank you, Dr Woods, an excellent article!
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“The society he envisions is far too rich and variegated for a single power center to dominate all others”.
Then who is to settle disputes between two equal authorities? Oh yeah, the modern day version of the Holy Roman Emperor-the United Nations! Althusius work should be burned!
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also the paterfamilias being compelled to partake in the Sacrament of Confession frequently\
Mr. Hall “compelled” by conscience in response to promptings of the Holy Ghost or compelled by someone else?
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John Taylor of Caroline notes that for purposes of federal constitutionalism, the states are sovereign, though in fact, he says, God is sovereign. It is thus that he, and the Jeffersonian Republican Party of which he was the chief thinker, denied any government unlimited authority.
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“We need government to uphold the norms of morality, I am told by people who specialize in the unintentionally funny. If the moral condition of society has reached a level at which we would look for relief to the kind of men who can succeed in a political system like ours, then the patient is terminal.”
Complaints like this always strikes me as opportunistic. In the U.S. it was the centralized state that struck down laws enforcing moral norms, often in raw acts of judicial power. In opposing local morals legislation, Libertarians simply uphold the expansive statist status quo.
It’s also not the quality of the men running the system that especially matters, but rather the quality of the laws they can be convinced to produce. As bad men can produce good art or good science, so too can they produce good law.
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Anti-[national]sovereignty is far, far too submissive to the EU, UN and other such super-sovereignties’ expansionary ambitions. In the nature of the case, the nation-state is the one worldly grouping which can literally command loyalty. The anarcho-libertarian may hate the nation-state, but what if this means that he senses that he needs a sovereign society, which will be loyal also to him, not just leave him floating as food for sharks? Some people are more likely to be outside and at odds with those within, when the blood is in the water. Is sedition conservative? The state is at minimum, a device to command loyalty of citizens to each other, when foreigners enter via aggression. If this basic feature is resented, doesn’t that indicate a wish for freedom-FOR-aggression, and hatred aginst true freedom? That one-worlder enemies of national sovereignty and national loyalties, would have allies among permanently powerless anarcho-libertarians is to be expected. How else to appeal to the powerful, but to try and join a pincer movement against the obstacles to unlimited power-greed?
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Non Spartacus, of course, compelled by the holy Ghost.
Of course, the holy Ghost can, and does, use society as an instrument through which to work.
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Somehow there is a lot of tradition missing from the argument, one very interesting one I can recommend is “Tower of Power” - which shouts liberty though rarely using the word - by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. Jewish tradition holds that there are seven legal requirements given to Noah after the flood. One is to have courts instead of being your own judge, jury, and executioner.
God is sovereign, but thus truth and justice is. Whatever is sovereign ought to be attempting to conform itself to the natural law which often says “Such ought not be done even if it would prevent an evil”. If God himself leave so many things to the free will of men, we ought to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Originally the purpose of government was to keep the peace, including having one official standard. We all accept 2+2=4, but by ounce, do you mean weight or liquid, troy or other? Contracts are paper and good will can be fleeting. And we simply need to have standards - what the defaults in contracts are when unstated, what provisions are valid, what “ownership” is and how it is recognized.
You may be prepared to throw away a millennium of common law - yes precedent and custom, but customs which have been solidified so the rules are known and people can play fair and judges can act normally as referees instead of guessing - but what do you replace it with?
The state’s most visible form is force. Violence. But there is also a history and tradition. Often breeched but also often observed. Bush may have shredded the Magna Charta, but doesn’t the anarchist do the same thing as he won’t even accept those rules - unless he chooses, yet he may choose the opposite.
The state is evil. So it ought to be a last resort. But some people will do violence or theft in its absence. Others will become vigilantes administering punishments without justice. Habeas Corpus can only apply in principle, so when you are wronged, unless you are in immediate peril, you must go to an authority so everything is out in the open and your actions can be seen as just - or perhaps it is vengeance or something else.
Rothbard wrote a very long piece on why abortion, although it is killing an innocent being is perfectly justified. My problem with him and most libertarians is their hubris. While saying the market is so unpredictable that any attempt at socialism will fail, and forgetting what Mises said about individual humans being unpredictable, they come up with utopias or plans and explain that people will just behave in one way or another. They posit security, arbitration, and insurance agencies, but never thieve’s and assassin’s guilds.
Human beings will use their free will to do evil on occasion. Benedict XVI noted this in his encyclical noting the socialists made this mistake. Libertarians seem to make it as often. There will be people ready to harm you or your property, or steal or defraud you. If you can act with perfect justice when it happens to you then we should simply make you king and supreme court in one as you would perfectly adjudicate decisions.
If you aren’t up to the task, then we need courts, trials, discovery, (compelled) witnesses, evidence, and all that theater which is the process where the audience called a jury can possibly determine what the truth is.
And truth and justice are the goals. Insofar as a “state” provide them, it is good. Insofar as individuals can provie them they are good. And when either violate them they are evil. So before you would look at “the state” as evil, and perhaps it is, take caution you aren’t doing the equivalent of judging the Catholic church based on the Borgia Popes, the Crusades, and the Inquisition (as legend).
You recently wrote “Who Killed the Constitution?”. I haven’t read it yet, but are you celebrating the death of an oppressive evil liberty destroying document? Or mourning the death of an imperfect attempt at balance to control man’s fallen nature?
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Quote from Dr. Woods: Murray Rothbard was always at pains to note that libertarianism was a political philosophy only, dealing exclusively with the proper use of violence in society, and as such had nothing to say about aesthetics, culture, sexual morality, or any other subject.
Which is nonsense because the violence in society help form aesthetics, culture, sexual morality, and every other subject in life because life is violent. Eating is violence, hunting is violence, uprooting plants is violence etc, etc, etc… Liberalism is a master morality whether or not Rothbard disagrees.
Quote from Dr. Woods: I am likewise confident that individuals and communities would not only survive but flourish without being taxed and harassed by an apparatus of exploitation that does nothing but consume wealth and ruin people’s lives, here and around the world”
I agree we should not be taxed as such. So I guess you must then agree we must stop free trade and replace the income tax with a system of tariffs or are you suggesting that we free the world by force from governments that socialize production like neoconservatism teaches ( permanent revolution for political and economic liberalism aka libertarianism applied by force an admitted oxymoron but that doesn’t stop morons).
Quote from Dr. Woods: “That a supposed lack of regulation could seriously be proposed as the cause of the mortgage crisis was as predictable as it is idiotic. “
Why? Because you say so? Even Aristotle talks about the need for regulation. Regulation provides a context for the market and remove long standing regulations results in malinvestment because no one is certain where they stand because the rules of the system are ambiguous.
Quote from Dr. Woods: “Even leaving aside the fact that “a nation’s wealth” is an evil, stupid, and question-begging phrase, any medieval king attempting to exercise such a power would have found himself either bloodied or on fire.”
So Adam Smith was evil, stupid, and a question beggar?
Saying Nations don’t exist and have wealth is like saying families doesn’t exist and live in houses and is evil, stupid, and question begging. You have mocked the entire basis of civilization with that stupid sentence. That is in fact dumbest statement I’ve read here at Taki mag which saying a lot consider Chris Roach writes for this site.
And as for kings not redistribing wealth have you never heard of Charles of Anjou?
Quote: “Althusius begins with the family, which he takes to be the fundamental political unit. Groups of families, he explains, may organize to form villages. Groups of villages and towns may organize to form provinces, which in turn may group together to form a kingdom or state.”
Hold it right there. You are confusing terms here. Village, Town, Province are geographic oranizations of people but kingdom and state are political. The grouping together of provinces creates a COUNTRY. Understand the political organization of a king it is called a kingdom and more modern kingdom where the king was soveriegn we have a Sovereign State.
The idea of the American Republic is the Sovereignty is held in the public realm. What is in the public? The Commonweale or the “Wealth of the Nation” therefore the owners of the wealth ie the land holding families of the NATION collectively own the COUNTRY and should have sovereignty over their property. So the American system says we should in order to enforce the sovereign public will the State is formed and federally organized in a system of representation.
If you deny American sovereignty then you are denying the the fact that American people have a right to rule over the state which is argument of King George and the British system i.e the “Libertarian” Royalist System.
Because America is a Republic and therefore the owners of property rule here we have the idea the mass of the population should participate in the ownship of the Country ie. be homeowners.
But this idea is not FDRs but a long standing tradition in America. From Jefferson’s yeomen farmers to the Homestead Act. Now, with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae going under because you libertarian/neo-liberal idiots removed the market regulations on mortage speculation, Americans will now be forced (because we have a usurious central bank another gift from liberal Anglo-Dutch system of capitalism) to borrow at the full interest aka full Venetian style preditatory loans. What you libertarian fools don’t understand yes the central bank is evil but removing what protections we have from that vicious financier oligarchy isn’t going to help. The only kind of deregulation that ever happens is removing those “anti-freemarket regulations” and you shouldn’t be cheering when these gangsters remove the last of government red tape keeping them from raping and pillaging the economy.
What will happen is end of upward mobility and the development of a permanent class based society like Britian because that is the British system and libertarians/neocons have deregulated us right into it.
Quote from Dr. Woods: “An empire, in turn, is composed of these various states along with free cities (which are directly answerable to the emperor). To the extent that Althusius believes in or employs the concept of sovereignty, he seems to imagine it residing in the symbiotic relation of all these lesser groups as they unite for a common purpose.”
No, No, NO. An Empire is not various states under an emperor. An Empire is a ONE nation attempting to rule over other nations. This is wrong because God establishes the nations and each nation is to judged by itself for its works and such the independance of the nations are God-given and the attempt of one nation by its State to rule over another nation defiles this natural order corrupts all the nations.
Quote from Dr.Woods: “That is all very mundane and uninteresting to those who would urge “greatness” upon us, but it also much less utopian and yields far fewer corpses.”
It is idea of Empire i.e. that the greatness of the Nation is found in enslaving other nations and taking the wealth of other peoples that is evil. I believe in the kind of national greatness that is about creating the best inventions,the best musics, the best artwork, and things that uplift mankind. There’s nothing wrong with greatness it just doesn’t come from the State.
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Septeus7 you wrote “No, No, NO. An Empire is not various states under an emperor. An Empire is a ONE nation attempting to rule over other nations. This is wrong because God establishes the nations and each nation is to judged by itself for its works and such the independance of the nations are God-given and the attempt of one nation by its State to rule over another nation defiles this natural order corrupts all the nations.”
Septeus7 how is it that Empire is wrong? The second person of the Blessed Trinity humbly submitted Himself to the Authority of Caesar. And the Prophet King David told the world that this Pagan Roman Empire would one day bring peace and justice throughout the whole world, making it possible that Word made Flesh would dwell amongst us.
“In his days shall justice spring up, and abundance of peace, till the moon be taken sway.”
Empire is needed to settle disputes among rivals. This is nothing new. Aristotle said as much in his politics and history confirms the necessity of a Supreme ruler over all. Men can not escape this need of one Supreme mediator. Look at the current world need for such a office, with the annihilation of the Office of the Holy Roman Emperor, modern men had to fill this vacuum, and this was done with the creation of the league of nations and finally with the United Nations.
No, No, NO Empire is not wrong. It is the miss-use or abuse of the Office that is wrong.
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Dr Woods you wrote: “One such person boasted that his revived Christendom would feature a ruler endowed with the power—exercised in light of Christian principles, you understand—to redistribute “a nation’s wealth.” Even leaving aside the fact that “a nation’s wealth” is an evil, stupid, and question-begging phrase, any medieval king attempting to exercise such a power would have found himself either bloodied or on fire.”
Because of the widespread misuse of wealth, (termed by the Church-Avarice) the desire to redistribute a nation’s wealth by a Supreme Ruler is nothing new. Dante had the same desire. Avarice is a sin and still is a sin today, regardless of the opposing view taken by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, who is the vanguard in promoting avarice or cupidity as a modern day virtue.
‘But, before the Gascon can deceive the noble Henry,
sparks of his virtue shall at first shine forth
in his indifference to wealth or toil,
‘and his munificence shall one day be so widely known
even his enemies will not contrive
to keep their tongues from praising it.
‘Look to him and trust his gracious deeds
On his account many will find alteration,
rich men changing states with beggars.
‘And you shall bear this written in your memory,
but shall not tell of it’—and he foretold events
that even those who witness them shall not believe.
Then he added: ‘Son, these are the glosses
on what was told you, these are the snares
that lurk behind a few revolving years.
‘Yet I would not have you feel envious disdain
for your fellow-townsmen, since your life shall far outlast
the punishment of their treachery.
For this very reason- the promotion of Avarice by modern day men, those of the Ludwig von Mises Institute ilk will never quote Dante’s works on government, but instead will content themselves with quoting from religious heretics, therefore political heretics such as Jean Bodin & Althusis.
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Despite my regard for other of Prof. Woods’ writings (see the latest TAC on Buchanan) I’m afraid this is another of his attempts to justify political and economic liberalism based on what is admittedly, right now, a highly imperfect state of affairs.
However Catholic teaching, following the insights of Aristotle, holds that the State, in its nature, is a Perfect Society, and NECESSARY, in principle for the Common Good. One has only to consult St. Thomas’s treatise on Law, and the the Magisterium’s use of it, and explicit endorsement of St. Thomas’s thought in this capacity, to see that the State is necessary for human flourishing, authority appertains to it on the basis of that, and these cannot be denied without attacking the Magisterium.
To wit: “Moreover, since every part is ordained to the whole, as imperfect to perfect; and since one man is a part of the perfect community, the law must needs regard properly the relationship to universal happiness. Wherefore the Philosopher, in the above definition of legal matters mentions both happiness and the body politic: for he says (Ethic. v, 1) that we call those legal matters “just, which are adapted to produce and preserve happiness and its parts for the body politic”: since the state is a perfect community, as he says in Polit. i, 1. “(ST, IaIIae, q. 90, aa. 2-3)
answer that, A law, properly speaking, regards first and foremost the order to the common good. Now to order anything to the common good, belongs either to the whole people, or to someone who is the viceregent of the whole people. And therefore the making of a law belongs either to the whole people or to a public personage who has care of the whole people: since in all other matters the directing of anything to the end concerns him to whom the end belongs. “(Ibid)
Reply to Objection 2. A private person cannot lead another to virtue efficaciously: for he can only advise, and if his advice be not taken, it has no coercive power, such as the law should have, in order to prove an efficacious inducement to virtue, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. x. 9). But this coercive power is vested in the whole people or in some public personage, to whom it belongs to inflict penalties, as we shall state further on (Q. 92, A. 2 ad 3; II-II, Q. 64, A. 3). Wherefore the framing of laws belongs to him alone.
Reply to Objection 3. As one man is a part of the household, so a household is a part of the state: and the state is a perfect community, according to Polit. i. 1. And therefore, as the good of one man is not the last end, but is ordained to the common good; so too the good of one household is ordained to the good of a single state, which is a perfect community. Consequently he that governs a family, can indeed make certain commands or ordinances, but not such as to have properly the force of law. “(ibid)
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I must add my own “bravo” to the previous “bravo” raised by Patrick Hall. This is one of the most impressive and insightful pieces I have seen from Dr Woods who is generally a more impressive and insightful writer than most. Bravo again.
I too am most impressed with Robert Nisbet’s “The Quest for Community”. I wonder what the other nine books on Dr Wood’s list of ten are?
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Mr. Woods,
First rate article!
Also was great to hear your exhortation at the Revolution March Saturday: “It’s also a lot of fun to annoy these bastards.”
Speaking of which, I am somewhat surprised to see you here and not at all surprised to see so few responses to your article. The site’s regulars are elsewhere balled up in a bunch at the bottom of a well mangling each other while attempting to retrieve Der Captain’s dead cat.
So we can talk...for a minute ...maybe. Anyhow my experience entirely corresponds with your own. I think libertariansim is the course that is the most prudential, politically and morally, as well as more fun: as you say, “dismantle,” throw out, clear the ground, unity of purpose and unanimity through liberty instead of coercion, censorship, and demagoguery.
The Gospel this morning about letting the weeds grow along with the wheat endorses a libertarian ethic of tolerance and also should get the culture warriors’ panties in a snit. Their titular Christianity as well as their titular, begrudging, and often disingenuous support for Ron Paul offers less opportunity for their prolific fantasies of violence and domination.
It’s a clean, honest, faithful feeling not to be a paleo-conservatory whosis anymore and to be free of the distractions of dead cats and those dizzying dilemmas about what to wear and identity issues that bedevils the dudes.
There is a solution!
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Good to see you here, Tom Woods. Interesting to read the state-worshippers responses to you - like boot-lickers trying to justify their taste for leather. “Render to Caesar what is Caesar, and to God what is God’s”.. Daesar is a self proclaimed g*d of the false variety who used coercion to maintain and hold everthing he had so he was owed nothing. “Caesar” meaning worldly responsibilities means pay your proper debts. Caesar is owed nothing and the State is owed nothing but an over-delayed oblivion. Thanks, Taki, for hosting a Misean like T. Woods. ST
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Simon Tregarth apparently you do not know from whom you quote: “Render to Caesar what is Caesar, and to God what is God’s” Is a quote from The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Jesus Christ and all of His disciples were faithful citizens of the Roman Empire. Jesus Christ is someone libertarians know nothing about. Libertarians refuse to bend their neck to the One True Faith or the Divine Governmental authority given to men by the Blessed Trinity to best govern themselves. Instead libertarians along with the rest of modern society would rather be govern under their own godless terms, thus creating modern democratic institutions such as the United Nations to usurp the Divine Authority of the Holy Roman Emperor.
So the system you libertarians hate, the modern state, is nothing but a man made creation. A creation that none of you libertarians know how to tame, or shape into your own godless liking. Good luck with your libertarian “solutions” in keeping in check the modern man made monster. So tell me if “There is a solution!” to your misery, what is it? Roll back? Yeah good luck with that, I am sure the United Nations would be happy to have you libertarian pest out of the way.
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Michael Warning, you are another Moloch worshipper who has the temerity to tell me what my faith is, and to tell me how I should relate to God. Any entity (such as the State that you love) that pushes abortion as a securla sacrament the way the US centgov does, while attacking Christianity, deserves nothing but the pit. Yur state bootlicking would do credit to a patron of a Castro District leather lounge. Your fals g*d is dead - it’s just the potentially lethal corpse’s twitching that may yet bring us extinction. ST
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“securla sacrament”
aahhh I see, you are a hater of anything Roman. Tell me Simon Tregarth, where in The Justinian Codex or Roman law allows for abortion? What does the Government of the Holy Roman Emperor have to do with modern democracy? It doesn’t. Modern democratic institutions have replaced, or better yet have usurped the Authority of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Office of the Holy Roman Emperor is Roman Catholic, its laws are just. Its Roman laws have nothing to do with modern democratic laws.
Simon Tregarth, so as not to have you, or others miss-understand the position I have taken, I simply point out the fact that the Holy Roman Empire is a Divinely Ordained form of Government. All other forms of government, especially the modern democratic form; this includes the United Nations, The European Union, the United States of America, Russia etc.. are merely permitted and tolerated by the Blessed Trinity.
Men are allowed to change or abolish these merely permitted and tolerated forms of government without giving offense to the Blessed Trinity. However, men are never allowed to revolt against the Divinely Ordained form of Government. St Paul tells us as much in his 2nd letter to the Thessalonians. All church Fathers are in agreement that the meaning of St Paul’s words on what withholdeth the manifestation of the antichrist is The Office of the Holy Roman Emperor.
But modern men do the opposite, they revolt against in what they are prohibited from doing & refuse to abolish what is pleasing to the Blessed Trinity. Truly a diabolical disorientation.
You, Simon Tregarth, along with the vast majority of libertarians are at war with the Blessed Trinity.
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The ManGod was a faithful citizen of no temporal kingdom, so you and I have a fundamental disagreement there. As to any State calling itself Holy I find blasphemous. The only thing the State can to the Church is seduce it and corrupt it with temptations of earthly power,
or do you not believe that at times the Church behaved poorly in trying to ape the State? I don’t know what the libertarians believe, since I am a Christian free-market anarchist, but since you attempt to read Libertarians out of the Christian faith I suggest you go to some anarcho-Christian and Christian-libertarian websites to relieve your ignorance. If you can show that God gave authority to any earthy power (other than Peter the Rock) I would be intensely interested in reading it. ST
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Simon Tregarth you wrote: “If you can show that God gave authority to any earthy power (other than Peter the Rock) I would be intensely interested in reading it.”
Easy enough, done: And God made two great lights: a greater light to rule the day; and a lesser light to rule the night: and the stars. Gen 1:16 The authority of The Holy Roman Pontiff ruling supreme in spiritual matters, and the Authority of The Holy Roman Emperor ruling supreme in temporal matters.
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Exraordinary stretch, exceeding the abilities of Mr. Fantastic, to link Charles of 800 to divine provenence. Try Samuel, Book 2, on the folly and danger of relying on temporal kings rather than the Real King. Appreciate your reply to my question, though. ST
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Michael,
The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. That is the solution. There is no Holy Roman Emperor.
There are those Mauritain called “the ruminators of the Holy Alliance” but that’s a hobby.
Or even worse (and the evidence is close at hand though I no longer read that writer) a narcissistic sort
of performance art which, while insuring chastity, dangerously approaches Origen’s false solution to temptations
of the flesh. At ant rate it is not persuasive intellectually, spiritually, or otherwise.
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Dan:
The only realistic political solution to all the world’s current political and moral ills is found with the leadership of the Holy Roman Emperor. This is the Holy Right Arm of the Roman Catholic Church; it was given to men, by the Blessed Trinity to enforce the morals and laws of the Roman Catholic Church.
This Divine Temporal Office was cut off from the Body of Christ by Napoleon with his treaty of Pressburg in 1805. The Blessed Trinity did not remove the Divine Office of the Holy Roman Emperor from the Body of Christ, modern men did. By removing this Holy Right Arm of Church, the Roman Catholic Church is left unprotected. No longer does the Church have a temporal protector against the evil machinations of modern men.
The modern democratic forms of government are unable, and certainly not willing to graft itself unto the Body of Christ making it the Right Arm of the Church. Modern men want the Roman Catholic Church unprotected so as to carry out their nefarious designs in destroying all moral and civil law. You are now witness to the evil fruits of the Treaty of Pressburg. Compare our immoral modern laws with the Justinian Codex.
However, the office of the Imperial Electors still exists. This Office was a creation of the papacy in the 1100’s to insure the continual occupation of the office of the Roman Emperor. The Arch Bishop of Mainz is the one responsible for calling together the Imperial Electors for a vote. Call for a vote of the Holy Roman Emperor and all else will follow. It is really that simple. Many of you do not know what to do to correct the current political, moral and economic ills. This is your answer. High tailing it to the hills or woods is not the answer.
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To Michael Warning:
Maybe the Holy Roman Emperor will do something about the scandal that made a mockery of the church’s ethics, and which the current Pope finally apologized for after years of cover-up. The answer doesn’t lie with decadent dysfunctional Rome, buddy.
(Wisdom like this makes me miss the profundity of Sid Cundiff, well, almost.)
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M Warning: “ Call for a vote of the Holy Roman Emperor and all else will follow. It is really that simple.”
Very Interesting. And where exactly will this mythical beast hold court? Lotharingia? Barbarossa called - He’s got a can of Worms to sell you.
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To Mr. Semite & Ms. Ann
The one election that would actually change the world for the better, you mock.
And you take seriously the ridiculous modern democratic elections held year, after year, after year… where nothing changes, it only gets worse.
Tell me who is the dupe?
“For they have not rejected thee, but me, that I should not reign over them.”
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Indeed, Mr. Warning - I do not mock. Give us one good reason why something that did Not work in the 12th century should work today? Need I invoke that truly well-worn truism - absolute power corrupts absolutely? The Emperors had their shot at temporal glory (as did the Popes) and proved themselves human, all too human.
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...they battened on flesh of the innocent poor in the name of God. I’ll be praying to Saint Rose of Viterbo for your enlightenment.
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