Freedom's Progress?: A History of Political Thought, by Gerard Casey
…compared with the statist, pillaging, slave-based and tax-burdened
nightmare that was fifth-century Rome, ‘the world of the so-called barbarians
was free and enlightened,’ with superior economic and personal freedoms.
Casey offers an examination of the European Middle Ages. To
summarize my view of this period: the European Middle Ages – at least for those
regions influenced by the combination of the Germanic and the Christian –
offered the most libertarian law and decentralized society that I have found in
history.
There is much in Casey’s
treatment of this period that will be familiar to those of you who have been
here awhile.
The Unfree World
Casey offers that the empire did not fall because of unstoppable
barbarian hordes (“The numbers of barbarians were always small”); it fell due
to its internal corruption and contradictions, it fell because its citizens
emigrated to the freer barbarian lands.
The late Roman Empire was,
according to Lucien Musset, a ‘totalitarian state, which was almost constantly
in a state of siege, using savage means in its attempt to ensure the survival
of a limited ruling class made up of learned senators and uncouth military
officers.’ It was, he says, ‘A regime of appalling social
inequality, a political organization which for the previous two centuries had
been based on constraint and suspicion, biased courts and laws of an absurd and
ever-increasing savagery….’
Next time you need a quick
reference to the similarities of the fall of Rome and the fall of the current
global hegemon (well, except for the “learned senators” part), come back here.
The Rise of Freedom
Until the rise of Islam,
Western Civilization continued centered in the Mediterranean; with Islam in the
south, the Vikings in the north, and the Magyars and Slavs to the east, the
center of Western Civilization moved to the center of the continent, and land
came to be the source of political power and wealth.
What followed was a civilization
built on Roman, Germanic, and Christian traditions. The “barbarians”
were indispensable to creating and developing this “Western
aristocratic-libertarian spirit.” What held these decentralized
societies together – ultimately uniting them all – was the acceptance of
Christianity and the authority of the Church.
The secular and the
spiritual. It is in the dynamic relationship of the two where the
defining elements of the liberty of the time would be
formed. According to Carlyle, “The king is subject to the bishop in
spiritual matters, the bishop to the king in temporal matters.” The
working out of and working through this relationship (with regular conflict,
tension, and testing of bounds) was to be a constant theme for one-thousand
years.
This duality of centres of
authority, of allegiance, is central to any understanding of Western
thought. Neither the spiritual power nor the secular power could
command the total allegiance of any person and the space created by the tension
between the two authorities was the breeding ground for liberty.
St. Paul offered in Romans that
the law was written in men’s hearts. Was this idea taken from the
Jews or the Greeks? Casey responds: “Who can say?” In any
case, it was through the Church that this “natural law” was integrated into the
custom of the time.
St. Hilary goes so far as to
give an idea of the content of this law. It includes forbidding a
man to injure his fellows, to take from them what is theirs, and to engage in
fraud. All these are actions that a libertarian would recognise as
falling under the zero-aggression principle.
The individual was found during this time – not later than the twelfth
century; it did not take the Renaissance to discover the value of the
individual. But it was an individual grounded in a culture and
tradition through which he could work out his freedom.
Corporations were formed, not
via permission from any “state,” but voluntarily and privately formed
organizations – formed to advance a common goal, any common
goal. Such corporations could place requirements for membership and enforce
rules on its members.
Casey examines four medieval
institutions: two concrete, and two somewhat abstract: the University, the
City, feudalism, and Law and Kingship.
https://bionicmosquito.blogspot.com/2018/08/finding-freedom-in-unfree-world.html#more