Excerpts on the Middle Ages, Law, Sovereignty
Speaking of Robert Nisbet, here are a few excerpted passages from Twilight of Authority you might find somewhat interesting...
The concept of a public order, like the concept of a public law, was almost completely foreign to the medieval legal mind. Order, like liberty, rights, and membership in society generally, was conceived of as a tissue or network of "private" relationships in the Middle Ages. Law, to be sure, was held to transcend everything, including the king and his claimed powers; in medieval political theory everyone, the prince included, was "under the law," in the common phrasing at that moment. So far as security and protecting were involved in individual lives, associations like the kindred, guild, church, and monastery accounted for more than did anything properly called the political state.
"From the beginning the state was nothing more, basically, than an institutionalization of war-making power." This is because, he said, the modern, political state came into being with the "strains imposed by warfare" on kinship and other associations. A "Romanist idea of power" took over and the concept of sovereignty prevailed.
This is why "It is entirely plausible to argue," says Thomas Woods in The Church and the Market, "that the authentically conservative position is not to embrace but rather to reject the modern idea of sovereignty altogether.
Sovereignty is a thoroughly modern notion, and thus if anyone has made concession to "modernity" it is those who ardently embrace a political philosophy that is not only at variance with, but which also helped to undermine and subvert, that of medieval Europe. It is they, rather than those of us skeptical of the state, who have the explaining to do.
"In a very real sense," wrote Nisbet,
the modern notion of public order is an evolution of the medieval idea of the King's Peace: a claim that the normal state of things shall be peaceful, with the military power of the king available if need be in enforcement of this peace. Not until the nineteenth century would the idea of a standing, visible police force with the primary function of protection rather than harassment of individuals become an increasingly common one in the West.
Nisbet continued:
Not very old, the idea of public order has already become the object of derision. We observe on a constantly rising scale the use of techniques of "private order" which range from bodyguards and complex electronic systems down to twenty-four-hour security personnel and triple locks in apartment houses that as recently as a quarter of a century ago were immune to such necessity. One reads too of increasingly recourse to neighborhood associations . . . Police forces rise incessantly in size, but crime rates rise faster. . .
