Aristotle on Acquittal and the GOP cult of Trump

But we must remember that good laws, if they are not obeyed, do not constitute good government.[1]

The mere establishment of a democracy is not the only or the principal business of the legislator, or of those who wish to create a state, for any state, however badly constituted, may last one, two, or three days; a far greater difficulty is the preservation of it.  The legislator should therefore endeavor to have a firm foundation according to the principles already laid down concerning the preservation and destruction of states; he should guard against the destructive elements, and should make laws, whether written or unwritten, which contain all the preservation of states.[2]

The conclusion is evident: that governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and are therefore true forms; but those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms, for they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of freemen.[3]

Aristotle, Politics, circa 350 BC

 

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[1] Aristotle, Politics, tr. Benjamin Jowett in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, intro. C.D.C. Reeve (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p. 1217 [Book IV, Chapter 8].  See also Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace, ed. and tr. Annabel Brett (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 69,70 [Discourse 1, Chapter, Section 6].  Unfortunately not all of Marsilius’s references to Aristotle here match up with the translator’s references to Aristotle. Hence I am unable to locate in Politics the statement: “There is no profit if sentences are passed about what is just, but these are not carried through.”  Marsilius finished The Defender of the Peace in the year 1324.

[2] Aristotle, Politics in Ibid., pp. 1270,1271 [Book  IV, Chapter 5]

[3] Ibid., p. 1185 [Book III, Chapter 6]

Mitt Romney and “A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants”

Mitt Romney’s speech in the Senate on February 5, when, against the constitutional invertebracy of his fellow Republicans, he voted to impeach President Trump, draws inspiration from the classic Huguenot text in revolutionary literature, known as Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants,[1] published in 1579 during the era of the French religious wars. More particularly it appeared after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, along with other less-celebrated resistance documents.  Vindiciae was re-issued in mid-17^th century England at the height of its Civil Wars, and it later helped shape Locke’s thinking in Two Treatises of Government (1690).[2]

It is not my purpose here to discuss the text of Vindiciae at any length, portions of which can be found in a previous blog entry of mine dated January 2012 (see the link below).  Rather, I wish to point out that Romney, who (as he says) is “profoundly religious”, and who believes the American Constitution to be “inspired by Providence” shares a central assumption with this historic text, as George H. Sabine puts it in his A History of Political Theory (1971): “Every Christian must agree that his duty is to obey God rather than the king, in case the king commands anything against God’s law.”[3]  In his work Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (1969), Julian Franklin makes much the same point but in a somewhat more explicit fashion echoing Romney, his love for family and country, and his deep conscience: “The Vindiciae, finally, begins very cautiously but clearly to anticipate resistance by private individuals who have been specially inspired by the call of God.”[4]

Click here for further text and discussion of Vindiciae:

http://joergedyrkton.blogspot.com/2012/01/defence-of-liberty-against-tyrants-or.html

Click here for Mitt Romney’s speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5oPNG6HLgM

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[1] For the sake of brevity and clarity I shall refer to the text here as Vindiciae.

[2] Although the first edition of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government appeared in 1690, it was written before the events of 1688 and the Glorious Revolution of 1689.  See Peter Laslett, “‘Two Treatises of Government’ and the Revolution of 1688” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 45-66, esp. p. 65.

[3] George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 3^rd ed., revised. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 380.

[4] Julian H. Franklin in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, & Mornay, ed. and tr. Julian Franklin (New York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 43.

Trump’s Senate “Acquittal” – a tweet

Given that neo-infantilism is all the rage at the White House, it’s not surprising to see a bunch of toddler-types (bar one) play follow the leader.[1]

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[1] For more on Trump the “neo-infantilist”, etc., see Adam Shatz, “Too Important to Kill” in The London Review of Books, Vol 42, No. 2 (23 January 2020), p. 3 ff. 

Hume on Trump’s “reason”

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.[1]

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740)

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[1] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Toronto: Penguin, 1985), p. 462.

Trump, “the exercise of power”, and the assassination of Soleimani: Foucault on “law”

… power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.  Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.  Would power be accepted if it were entirely cynical?  For it, secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation.  Not only because power imposes secrecy on those whom it dominates, but because it is perhaps just as indispensable to the latter: would they accept it if they did not see it as a mere limit placed on their desire, leaving a measure of freedom – however slight – intact?  Power as a pure limit set on freedom is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptability.

There is, perhaps, a historical reason for this.  The great institutions of power that developed in the Middle Ages – monarchy, the state with its apparatus – rose up on the basis of a multiplicity of prior powers, and to a certain extent in opposition to them: dense, entangled, conflicting powers, powers tied to the direct or indirect domination over the land,, to the possession of arms, to serfdom, to bonds of suzerainty and vassalage.  If these institutions were able to implant themselves, if by profiting from a whole series of tactical alliances, they were able to gain acceptance, this was because they presented themselves as agencies of regulation, arbitration, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would temper them and distribute them according to boundaries and a fixed hierarchy. … Doubtless there was more to this development of great monarchic institutions than a pure and simple juridical edifice.  But such was the language of power, the representation it gave of itself, and the entire theory of public law that was constructed in the Middle Ages, or reconstructed from Roman law, bears witness to the fact.  Law was not simply a weapon skillfully wielded by monarchy, it was the monarchic system’s mode of manifestation and the form of its acceptability. In Western societies since the Middle Ages, the exercise of power has always been formulated in terms of law.

A tradition dating back to the eighteenth or nineteenth century has accustomed us to place absolute monarchic power on the side of the unlawful: arbitrariness, abuse, caprice, willfulness, privileges and exceptions, the traditional continuance of accomplished facts.  But this is to overlook a fundamental historical trait of Western democracies: they were constructed as systems of law, they expressed themselves through series of law, and they made their mechanisms of power work in the form of law.[1]

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[1] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 86, 87.