Standouts

1. Schuyler, ed., Maitland: Historian (2 Jan)

by kurto

Frederic Maitland renovated understanding of the medieval common law, perhaps the most distinctive of English institutions. Resisting generalization in fidelity to the era’s documents, his scrutinous work also established methodological standards for the historical profession. Legal history was to be distinguished from antiquarianism, and not to blandly accept Whiggish constitutional narratives.

The medieval law was fairly criticized by humanists. Written in bad Latin and worse French, its weaknesses might have opened the door for Continental Roman law – a ‘reception’. Under Henry VIII, the Parliamentary act Lex Regia gave force of statute to the king’s proclamations. There were new courts grown out of the king’s council and using a summary procedure devised by legists. Scotland was contemporaneously establishing a Roman Court of Justice under James V. In 1535 More was executed and the Year Books ceased publication. Maitland quotes Burke: ‘To put an end to reports is to put an end to the law of England’.
‘Might not the council and the Star Chamber and the Court of Requests do the romanizing work that was done in Germany by the Imperial Chamber Court, the Reichskammergericht?’

After Henry VIII passed in 1547, the common lawyers pushed back; civil law was preeminent in Mary’s reign; but the common law afterward recovered its former status. Maitland’s opinion that the common law was in danger in the second quarter of the 16th century had not been sustained by mid-20th century historians, Schuyler observes.

The Inns of Court and also the Year Books are characteristically English. No other institution could have preserved common law in the Renaissance era. Not so Parliament, nor trial by jury, which existed in France. England’s schools of the national law had no parallel on the Continent, whose universities (e.g., Bologna) had faculty of Roman civil law and ecclesiastical canon law. The Year Books are further notable in as much as printed books did not yet exist; lawyers advanced their skills and practice by taking notes and sharing works. Every lawyer had to read them, every prominent lawyer had to give lectures of them. This hardened the cohort of the common-law tradition. They are medieval England’s distinctive intellectual product, vernacular reports or oral debate, written by lawyers for lawyers. They show the dynamics of economic and moral currents in which the logic of law elicits the settled views of contemporary society.

Bracton’s main debt to Roman law is spirit and method but not principle, contra Sir Henry Maine, who wrongly asserted one-third of his work was Roman. Much less so, it was ‘a method of reasoning, of interdependence of rules and place in hierarchy. He assumed Roman law was complementary to distinct English law and borrowed to fill in the gaps, there being nothing like copyright.

Why was there little or no historiography of medieval English law? English lawyers, intimidated by the record of French and German law, have exaggerated the latter’s earlier development. Second, the lawyer wants authority – precedent – the newer the better. Third, those who understand the topic want to build their practice, not to write an account.

Much of this work’s excerpts are set in the reigns of Edward I and II (1272-1307 and 1307-27, respectively). Examining the Parliament of 1305’s concerns with affairs of state (especially ‘foreign policy’), legislation, taxation or supply, petitions of the crown (in three courts), and judicial matters (criminal and civil), Maitland showed there were yet no hard lines between petition for royal justice and grace, and wide scope for discretion. Further, petitions of the lords and commoners assembled were indistinct. It was also not yet established that representatives of the shires or towns could put their grievances and interests to the king in council. He concludes: it’s easy to fall into anachronism, and to dismiss institutions and techniques that seemed to contemporaries to work well enough, however flawed or frail they may appear to successors.

A separate essay on law prior to Edward I examines the varying meaning of words used in contemporary documents, showing they do not map to latter-day understandings. For example, a serf is not a chattel slave. On the manor, even the lowliest were rarely working for the lord, and even Bracton discusses the ‘relativity’ of status.

Studying Anglo-Saxon land books and charters, Maitland concluded historians had underestimated the king’s extent of rights over the land of freeholders. He might be entitled to a large, yearly quantum of produce while he was in situ. If in England the duty of feeding the king became a tax or rent, it was comparable to Scandinavia, German tribes and even Romans. Such derived practices – down to tenancy – did not appear as an abuse during feudal times when kingship devolved to landlordship, office to property, tax to rent. The early land books evidence that the king’s giving land is more the giving of certain privileges that are yet some ways from ownership; the Anglo-Saxon land book (i.e., the charter) never really ceased to be an ecclesiastical instrument. The king gave privileges of land for the benefit of his soul. It was land held by royal grant under Church sanction.

Feudalism, various services owed to superiors for protection and used of land, was a natural stage of English history. He insists: there is no way to reach from the 8th to the 16th century without its features. Feudalism was a civilizing sequence: separation of employment (division of labor); possibility of national defense, of art and science; the cathedral and the library. The growth of peasants subject to seignorial justice (i.e., the manor and its villeins) in place of free village / open fields is explicable and demonstrable in law. Civilizational progress is often cruel, especially in hindsight.

On county courts: there were many small freeholders on estates of lay lords, and many other residents with defined rights. When Henry I revived the duty to attend courts, it was incumbent of freeholders whose overlords had no immunity to attend; no one attended who didn’t have to. The ‘right’ to do what no one wants to do is no right.

The difficulty of historiography is in erasing clear views and returning to obscure, yet-undefined concepts – in a systematic fashion. For example, by overpopulating towns and villages. In previous centuries, the ‘corporate one’ held sway over common lands. The ‘plural many’ is a latter development. Where were the powers of the nebulous majority? ‘The law sees differences of kind where nature has made differences of degree’.

Maitland noted the Celtic language faded from use, though historiography suggested the Celts were the balance of the population: why? The victors established themselves: ‘true English villages with open fields are not Celtic, not Roman, but German’.
On the Mirror of Justices: in 1289 the English legal regime had sunk to a low level through corruption, a unique event of the late medieval era. Maitland exposed the document as the work of an amateur: even then trained jurists did not speak of law as being for the purposes of religious redemption. Written between 1285-90, it is a jumble playing on the known loss of public confidence in tribunals.

On criticizing text: Maitland rationally concludes that divergent copies of the same event may have been made simultaneously; he shows that a supposed statute could not have been so. All is in attention to detail.

In a final extract, Schuyler culminates by showing even careful scholarship could prove erroneous or in need of correction, as when Maitland surmised Elizabeth had adopted ‘etc’ in her title in order to sidestep controversy over the English crown doubling as head of the Church. Subsequently scholars shared Mary had previously done the same, for the converse reason of wishing not to offend the Pope.

NB: ‘Simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety; it is the goal not the starting point.’ Moreover, the further back one goes ‘instead of the simple we find the indefinite’.

9. Dudley, Hegel, Nietzsche and Philosophy (10 May 2021)

by kurto

Conjoining Hegel and Nietzsche comprehends German idealism’s view of freedom as established by philosophy. Hegel sees philosophy as articulating self-determining, rational categories that complete themselves and structure ordered liberty. Nietzsche sees philosophy – especially genealogy – as disrupting and overcoming convention, as compelling the subject to live in a perpetually unfinished state.
Anglo-American liberalism – Berlin’s negative liberty – is necessary but deficient in lacking a force of moral self-determination or personal responsibility. Moreover, Hegel and Nietzsche go beyond Kant in requiring philosophical practice to create understanding of what it is to be free.
Hegel: freedom results from transfiguring the subject’s finitude into the infinite, which occurs as the external is internalized. Humans are liberated through reconciliation, renouncing abstract independence. Socially this means recognizing Geist (Spirit), the current phase of the philosophy of history. In the slang, objective Geist considers spiritual beings to be willing beings: its components are abstract right, morality, and ethical life (which are external). Judgment is the act of dividing a concept between subject and predicate. It is both logical and ontological, reflecting how the word passes reality and how self-consciousness understands itself and the world.
In abstract right, the individual will identifies its freedom as something external. Its development toward freedom amounts to a progression of relationships among universal, particular, individual. The relation of will to will is the highest progression – true freedom. Should one commit a crime, punishment is for the sake of justice and freedom. The moral will thus divides itself as to individual and universal interests. Choosing may occur on the basis of the subjective (for its own will) or the objective (existing in the world, in accordance with freedom, in accordance with universal subjectivity): choosing universal interests of one’s own volition is the triumph of the moral over the abstract.
All that the moral will has is conscience. It depends on something else for judgment, for rationality. It is also capable of evil: both stem from self-certainty, since will cannot objectively know good. But the voluntarist corporation transforms the individual such that he has honor in the estate, provided the corporation seeks freedom and protects individuals from themselves; more formally, the corporate objectives embody freedom through documents, laws, etc.). The less self- control, the more external control is needed: the ethical subject knows itself as an objectification of will. This resonates of Rousseau’s general will? But where is the defense against tyranny of the majority or thumos? Can Spirit effectively say who should run the corporations, who should rule?
Purposive relations may be reconceived as a syllogism where subject equals major premise and object the minor, as a teleological outcome, a reuniting that overcomes finitude. This is the cunning of reason, its example par excellence is God’s will (i.e., the subject) acting via humans (the object). Dudley makes an analogy of swimming-pool chlorine (p.78). It is a finite structure, depending on logic of object, because genuine realization of subjective purpose is dependent on the objective. The natural world does not have as its purpose a rational state, but the subject may so impose. Hence the animating spirit remains subjective: willing good is subjective and so ‘in need of reconceptualization in the absolute idea’. For the willing subject does not comprehend ethical life required by freedom (lack of finitude). In ethical life, the willing subject experiences the community’s customs – the content of the universal will – as necessary and so free but cannot know if these customs are required by freedom. It lacks adequate understanding.
The solution to finitude borne of the subject – externality amounts to a syllogism of necessity (not formality), requiring integration of thought and being. Knowing that the objective world of nature is not forever external to the spiritual subject does not lessen the subject’s dependency but does show it’s bound to the self (via willing integration) and so is free. ‘To know one’s limitation means to know of one’s unlimitedness’. The externality is eliminated.
Hegel identified three activities of the absolute spirit (art, religion, and philosophy), all of them surmounting the subjectivity of the willing, of which finitude is the primary hurdle, that is, the presupposition that spirit and nature, subject and object are fundamentally alien. (Such a construction does not appear to encompass personal responsibility – how are we to distinguish between license and overcoming? And since change in immanent, how are we to separate progress from error? Hegel himself says progress is intelligible only retrospectively – the owl of Minerva.)
At any rate, the three activities cannot be the replacements for sociopolitical struggle to be free but only the guides to freedom. In order to be free, man must know he is free, to recognize the absolute spirit; no one is free unless all are free. Hegel does not believe political freedom requires philosophic justification: Dudley analogizes of a doctor who commands ‘don’t smoke’ but cannot not smoke for the patient. Yet it’s necessary interdependent categories of understanding conditions of freedom as well as actually existing socioeconomics.
Nietzsche, as unsystematic as Hegel is structured, presented the stages of freedom as decadent, noble, and tragic. Like Hegel, the subject’s ability to choose (the liberal definition of freedom) does not guarantee willing is autonomous: forces external may remain determinative.
‘Revenge and hatred as metaphysical concepts insist the strong are free to be weak, thus dragging themselves down, thereby suggesting the essence of weakness is a voluntary choice’. Subjection of will to reason is seen by decadents as self-denial of evil instincts and therefore virtue. Then morality justifies caring for others more than oneself. The highest value of the decadent reality is lack of suffering. Faith in the metaphysics of weakness is guaranteed by prohibiting thinking – but what happens to excoriating rationalism? Nonetheless it allows the weak to will. Morality is a symptom of weakness because one cannot organize one’s thoughts and instincts for achievement. The ‘ban’ on knowledge and doubt makes faith the only ground for purposeful action. Submitting to faith is equivalent to submitting to a common law – which is herd morality because there is no evidence of individual will. The weak can will but it’s not their own choice. Herd morality uses all the experience of some established categories, and gets the same outcomes – too quickly. Hence to be educated is to learn to defer judgment. Knowledge and thus freedom require losing oneself, one’s conventional will, one’s perspective. He echoes Rousseau in seeing social convention, institutions are inherently corrupting of will to be free, are for the week.
Reason and language shore up metaphysical belief: ‘philosophical mythology lies concealed in language’. For humans to become free they must will the ascension of the will. Science also rests of belief, in rationalism. Wagner evidenced simplification of one’s drives. Genius improves humanity for the future. (But what if it’s a false path?) A genius can strike the balance between memory and forgetting; the weaker have the greater need to forget external stimuli. Will should vary by person (which is disastrous as a policy prescription). The noble will remains unfree because it’s still subject to external compulsion: indeed it requires a tyranny to organize disintegrated instructions into a unified will. They are invented from personal needs: one must be selfish but constituted by fixed categories, which is limited by the very success of escaping the herd. Independence cannot be outside of the other bust must be enmeshed in it. Hence ‘sickness’ is necessary to become healthy. The free spirits must cycle through the range of possibilities, no sacrifice being too great.
The coming century (i.e., the 20th) could be dangerous: there is no morality with an exclusive monopoly on the moral (p. 187). As an individual prescription, many will not return from license; as communities, the tyrant or social engineer will force us to be free. (So close to Rousseau, so far from Burke.)
Freedom’s requirements establish distinction between scientists and scholars, who are merely skeptics, and philosophers, whose skepticism is in service of constructing the larger whole with new values – true creators. The will to power wills overcoming the other, willing its incorporation, and refuses to engage with what it cannot so incorporate. This is ‘great health’.
The eternal return is both metaphysical and psychological. The tragic journey creates nothing unless something is destroyed, and the creation too must pass. But re-creation doesn’t have to repeat itself precisely in sequence, though it could be over and again. This is a test of affirmation. Only great health of the tragic will love sickness-and-restoration. Is this a kind of Stoicism? – no says Nietzsche. Nihilist ennui is the fate of those who think the permanent is valuable (i.e.. natural law); these do not have a free future. The tragic sees impermanence as virtuous. (Nietzsche’s becoming seems to preclude recourse to what has happened.)
There are three challenges for the tragic: determining the extent of the unalterable, improving the alterable, and not acting in ways that make the present worse. (At last, responsibility!) To see the abyss is to know there’s no firm ground for taking one’s bearings: the past must always be justified by the present, and every such justification is impermanent.
The death of God celebrates the shedding of herd morality, of permanence. It is man’s responsibility to redeem himself. To be original is to be misunderstood; for the paradox of avoiding convention must mean not wanting to be comprehended.
But Nietzsche cannot tell us of conditions hostile to freedom because of his hostility to particularity. He cannot ground norms, Dudley says.
Every word contains prejudice toward that which is to be surmounted by the tragic will. Freedom requires understanding the current hegemony is supported by words, is unfree. Philosophy is a primary source of linguistic exposition and transformation, and so a primary source of freedom. Discovering these prejudices is genealogy. Transforming one’s will and one’s language are two side of the same coin. Freedom depends on successfully a) disrupting conceptual structures through genealogical research and b) transforming those structures through linguistic experimentation, the two intertwined.
For both Hegel and Nietzsche, liberalism fails to require freedom that entails individual willing to produce the world’s content. For Hegel, formal freedom is the freedom to choose and act without rational guidance. Absolute knowing is reason determining (revealing) itself, generating and justifying its own categories. We must know what we ought to will, and then we ought to act on it because it is right not because we are compelled. (External categories are revelation, empirical science, social convention, given consciousness, even nature). Reconciliation with nature (i.e., the other) is superior because it’s not one-sided. Alienation between subject-object is overcome. Philosophy is the rational bond (as well as art, religion, the other activities of the absolute spirit).
For Nietzsche, rationality is no guide to an impermanent world. Where Hegel sets the course of Spirit, Nietzsche says there is no course but only eternal return. Where Hegel, sees philosophy as self-deterministic of thought, the subject becoming free by following the laws and mores reason has produced, Nietzsche understands philosophy as disruption of received thought (convention), pursued by genealogy. Freedom is perpetually incomplete.
Yet they are complementary is the sense that one sets the bounds of order, and the other calls for constant challenge of the bounds. Both ask how thought can be free, avoiding dependency or convention. What is the relationship of thought and the world? Hegel says rational completion, Nietzsche says perpetual becoming. What for Hegel is attractive about systemic autonomy is for Nietzsche the danger of ossification. The two schools should take each other’s warnings more seriously, Dudley says.
In Hegel, metaphysical progress leads to the individual’s ethical reconciliation with nature. In Nietzsche, metaphysical recurrence creates the need for psychological affirmation; otherwise ones falls into nihilism (!) and ressentiment (i.e., envy and hatred which cannot be acted on). The free subject is reconciled with the world in that free subjects and communities must develop symbiotically because they share language. Hence they ought to be ‘open to transgression and reorganization’ (p242), within the general limits of freedom. Eternal return is metaphysical, a cosmological hypothesis, in that the Nietzsche suggests the universe is finite but time infinite, therefore all configurations recur infinitely. This is to reject Hegelian teleology. Dudley therefore argues against French interpretations which endow the doctrine with psychological flavor, of willingness to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Though a psychological element is present, it’s inferior to cosmology.
German idealism’s view of freedom is overly rational, underestimating what Burke or Berlin would see as necessary or immanent tension. The idealists, replacing moral limits with reason, required an objective reconciliation that Nietzsche himself showed was never compete and final. Freedom lost its character of principled refusal or resistance: at the intersection of freedom and thumos, the power of the institution grew. Necessitating a philosophic understanding privileged an elite, downgrading ordinary agency and leaving the people to Rousseau’s coercion.

23. Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea (25 Nov 2024)

by kurto

Following 1,000 years of naval development, England was the first European state to achieve the political and administrative sophistication necessary to operate an advanced navy and merchant marine. Precisely because the navy is more costly than a standing army, it required public support, not merely the backing of a consolidated, monarchical government, which explains why Spain in the 16th century, France in the 18th, and Germany and Russia in the 20th failed. Organizing evidence in the categories of policy, strategy and operations, finance, and administration and logistics, Rodger powerfully contradicts the consensus that modern states emerged to support armies; indeed, the new naval powers of England and the Netherlands retained their medieval constitutions.

Prior to circa 1000, English rulers saw the island as confronting three seas – the North, the Narrow (i.e., the English channel), and the Irish – which could not all be mastered, though the public thought they should be. Viking raids had preceded 865, but the Great Army was the first invasion for conquest rather than simple plunder. The invaders were highly mobile, the English based in London. Nonetheless, the resistance of Alfred (r. 871-99) was mainly fought on land: in this era, ships mainly moved troops. To take the helm (steerage) was to take command. Landowners generally provided the military.

The Norman revolution replaced unitary Anglo-Saxon England with an unstable feudal baronage, meaning independent military power. The ship-muster system fell into disuse, and Harold’s fleet withered, creating a vacuum in the Irish Sea filled by Dublin-based Vikings that lasted through the 12th century. Most medieval navigation was English coastal pilotage.

Henry II’s 1171 conquest of Dublin owes less to naval prowess than England’s growing economic/demographic advantage. Its overlordship could easily have been disrupted by
an Irish sea power. Over 1200-40 France drove for the sea, acquiring Normandy on the channel, Poitou on the Atlantic, and a Mediterranean presence, often at the expense of Angevin England whose remnants in Gascony were exposed. The Bordeaux wine trade (‘claret’) accelerated after the 1293 loss of Poitou, coming to serve as the foundation for England’s merchant marine and later naval strength. Viking fleets had receded during the 12th century, absorbed by Scandinavian wars, before returning in the 1180s and persisting as an Irish sea power through the 1260s. England’s defeat by Alexander III of Scotland led to the latter claiming the isles of Man and Hebrides. but the need to be active in western waters threatened Welsh independence, and following a pair of Welsh campaigns, England gained ascendancy in the west. Still, her lack of sea power was evident, and doctrine not yet advanced much past convoys, though ship designs were showing increased scale and other adaptions.

Medieval England was a reputable military power with a modest navy. Only Richard I (a Plantagenet, the Lionheart, 1189-99) and Henry V (a Lancaster, author of Agincourt, 1413-22) understood sea power. Edward I’s loss at Bannockburn in 1314 is normally seen to mark the rise of infantry and archers, but decisive failings were evident at sea. England could not provision Perth or Stirling and was so weak that its troops and shipping both required convoys. In 1340 Edward III defeated the French at Sluys in the Spanish Netherlands: nonetheless the continental balance of power was unchanged. Naval failure – the lack of good government at seas – contributed to popular discontent evident in the 1381 peasants’ revolt and the 1399 murder of Richard II.

All subjects were bound to support the king in wartime; there was no distinction between knights who provided horses and swords, and merchants who offered ships. But the latter rarely received compensation for losses or even usage. By the late 14th century voluntarist service was evidently failing: cash compensation was necessary. This opened the door for the Commons. Already in the prior century, the crown had summoned representatives of seaports, which group was quasi-Parliamentarian.
In the 15th century, single mast ships were replaced by three. Spanish and French ships began to carry larger artillery, an order of difference from heavy-grade crossbows, terrifying to sailors. The English ships of Henry V were smallish and dispersed: it was time-consuming to muster and provision. Though patrol and scouting were common and certain confined spaces could be dominated, the open seas were impossible to interdict. In the 1480s, convoys to Iceland were the first example of open-ocean navigation. ‘Safeguard’ or ‘safekeeping’ of the seas was the state’s protection of commercial interests. Weak kings were obliged to tolerate domestic piracy despite the diplomatic drawbacks. Admirals exercised not only disciplinary matters but disposition of piracy prizes (especially involving foreign claims). Cases were civil suits for damages, and because lucrative, were eventually divided from naval matters proper.

English ambitions on the continent effectively ended in October 1523 when Suffolk’s army abandoned its march on Paris: Henry VIII was the last to pursue the Hundred Years War. Henceforth her military goals would be naval. Henry is sometimes seen as architect of the modern navy, but in fact he was conventional, using ships for convoy escort, local patrols, and coastal raids. Strategy amounted to invading France (in conjunction with the Low Countries). Operations were limited to the East coast to the Firth of Forth, the Channel to Brest, and the southern Irish seas. Administration and provisioning was haphazard, and there was no agency for foreign trade.
By midcentury, Henry VIII’s new foreign policy became evident in naval matters: England was forced to follow Scotland in assuming it was a weak power whose enemies could only come by sea. Breaking with Rome had weakened England; he had to sell monastic lands to fund the navy, and also to encourage piracy. During Lady Jane Grey’s interregnum, Northumberland’s policies established the link between Protestantism, piracy, naval service, and foreign trade amid the Spanish and Portuguese monopolies, which position Elizabeth inherited. But her navy was premised on defending England by dominating the Channel and North Sea. In the 1540s, shipbuilding scaled to match the Spanish galleon, and accommodate forward firing, thereby merging seaworthiness and armament. Whereas turn-of-the-century Spanish warships were really armed merchantmen, English galleons were closer to pure men of war, lacking storage for long distance, were thus defensive. The country came late to carrying heavy guns, naval warfare, and oceanic voyaging, following in the wake of Scotland, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Genoa, the Dutch, and France. Rodger asserts they were not laying the basis of empire or even Nelson’s navy (e.g., establishing lines of battle), for the immediate challenge was ship design and tactics to defeat peninsular galleys. Henry VIII’s reforms commenced lasting administrative and logistical structures, unique to England (save Portugal), providing an institutional memory across reigns that proved both resilient and adaptive. the most important factor in 18th-century open-water gains stem from 16th-century advances in provisioning of foodstuffs and water.

The duel with Spain commenced prior to 1588 and extended beyond. Phillip II’s inflexible orders to make no independent landing of the Armada but to first link with the Duka of Parma in Flanders for conveyance to the Downs condemned the mission to fail. Spain hadn’t shallow-draft ships to fend off Dutch raiders. Medinia Sidonia was forced to anchor at Calais for nearly a week, with the English to windward, waiting for Parma. England attacked, eventually driving Spain into the North sea and dissolution. In 1594 Spain sought to build a fort near Brest, Brittany, which would command approaches to the channel. England and France (the latter content to ally as the converted Henry IV was enthroned) attacked and defeated Spain in a battle equally important as 1588. The Spanish war produced seasoned navigators using math and charts.

By end of century, English ministers had decided the best defense was offensive operations against the Spanish coastline or shipping. Ireland had been pacified (i.e., was not a potential enemy base), Dutch strength was growing, France unified under Henry IV, and privateering established as reliable for the crown in the east Atlantic as well as the Caribbean. The latter transformed the merchant marine and its London owners into political players. Elizabeth consciously sought to employ sea power to stave off European powers, and consequently depended on a small number of merchants, shipowners, investors, and naval officers whose interests had congealed since her father’s era, and whose privateering was difficult to separate from the crown. Men of rank (aristocrats) were now seeking to men their name at seas, somewhat at the expense of ‘professionals’.

It takes much longer to build a squadron than raise an army, though shipbuilding itself is rapid as against routinizing operations and training. The dockyards are the most complex part of administration, but the real premium is on planning. (16th century armies expend to lose one-third of strength every campaign year.) From 1577 John Hawkins dominated the Navy Board, making it relatively free of corruption. (Rodger several times says historians overuse or conflate corruption with weakness of complex, premodern systems.)

From 1600 Barbary Coast (Algerian) pirates pushed into the Atlantic: with more than 100 warships, most with 25-plus guns, they stood as Europe’s largest fleet, taking more than 400 English ships over 1609-16 alone. The business amounting to capturing men for slavery, the West country and Newfoundland fisheries suffered most.

One fragility of Charles I’s reign can be found in the competing needs to deter European rivals and to protect fishermen, traders, and coastal residents: there was no agreement of the navy’s strategic purpose, yet it was very expensive, requiring public input. Thus the weighty matters of ship money. During the Civil War, the ‘new merchants’ were independent traders and privateers, not the great chartered firms like the East India Company; were Presbyterian; and were dominant in naval administration such that the army and the navy were on opposite sides. The latter lost out during the Interregnum, and country’s naval tradition looked to be faltering.
The trajectory of the British Isles to 1650 was very much shaped by sea power or lack thereof. England, via her navy, had been ascendant until 1066, then fell back as military (land) power grew in importance. The sea is a highway as much as a barrier. English governments were overthrown by naval invasion nine times to 1688, not counting unsuccessful attempts.

18. Biggar, Colonialism (23 August 2024)

by kurto

The British empire evidenced both good and evil, defying the simplistic judgements of leftist critics. Imperialism, so far from being an ideological ‘project’, was more a race to catch up with trading and settlement. After the American Revolution, British society converted to antislavery: the Colonial Office’s intentions were Christian and humanitarian, above all dedicated to eradicating slavery and instilling such characteristic institutions as parliamentary accountability, a free press, and independent courts. Though detractors frequently compare the empire with Nazism, the ultimate proof of British aims are evident in its spending the last of its resources to oppose Germany in the world wars.

Social hierarchy is not itself immoral. Any large society will arrange a division of labor; the challenge is preventing functional hierarchy. There are countless examples of colonial administrators insisting on British rule of law applied in harmony with local customer, such Governor of Madras Thomas Muro writing in the 1820s to the East India Company directors: ‘You are not here to turn India into England or Scotland. Work through, not in spite of, native systems and native ways, with a prejudice in the favour rather than against them; and when in the fullness of time your subject can frame and maintain a worthy government for themselves, get out and take the glory of the achievement and the sense of having done your duty as the chief reward for your exertions’.

Because slavery had not existed in England for many centuries, the common law was silent. Parliament abolished slavery in British colonies in 1806, during the Napoleonic wars, subverting its economy. In 1819 the Foreign Office established an (anti) Slave Trade Department, its largest precinct during the 1820s and 30s. In contrast, Muslim slavery persisted to 1920. An estimated 17 million Africans were sold east over second millennium (?) versus 11 million across the Atlantic.
Colonial governments, especially in the dominions, unilaterally bound themselves to respecting native property law, as an extension of (western) natural law. Modern claims that treaties were made by uncomprehending natives do not falsify the intention, but do indicate partisanship. Further, the oral histories often cited as evidence are often framed, anthropology has shown, to make sense of the present rather than to demonstrate the past. Those in the 21st century who believe the West should cease ‘oppressing the global south’ largely align with 19th-century Christian missionaries, whom they pejoratively label imperialist. Whereas Nigerian national Chinua Achebe exemplifies those who recognize imperialism both harmed and helped: no culture has a right to isolation.

In Australasia and Africa, policies for detaining aboriginals were limited measures to preclude violent resistance to settlement, not ipso facto racism. Other times segregation was meant to protect natives. In North America as well, British government was borne of Christian, Enlightenment views of human equality and cultural advancement not the competition of social Darwinism. Economic exploitation is hardly unique to colonialism, see Stalinist or Maoist industrialization. Famines are not attributable to policy: they persisted in the postwar era. The novelty of welfare policies, as well as penurious colonial governmental, makes their absence an anachronism. There is no evidence of racism in India’s partition, but perhaps overcaution after failing to prevent Irish civil war. Comparisons with Nazism (but never Soviet communism) are polemical.

That India’s economic output, measured in a global framework, collapsed over the 19th century does not prove imperial exploitation, since independent China fell equally dramatically; the neo-Marxist theory of appropriating surplus does not account for the Industrial Revolution. To the contrary, free trade opened the English market to the UK’s disadvantage. In west Africa, the worst excesses of agricultural boards (commissariats) came from the hands of postcolonials exploiting dated systems. Between 1870-1945, three quarters of foreign capital invested into sub-Saharan Africa was British.

Contemporary historians fairly point to examples of racism, economic exploitation, cultural repression, and wanton violence. But these are not essential only wrongful. They overlook British suppression of slavery, efforts to moderate the impacts on traditional societies, the seeding of modern agriculture, the opportunity of free trade, and the provision of civil services and judiciary to pre-democratic societies. The dominions as well as Israel and the United States are some of the world’s most advanced countries.

Detractors cannot distinguish between just war and Fanon’s and Satre’s cathartic violence. Biggar, an ethicist rather than a historian, declares himself a Burkean conservative. Moral (Christian) understanding of human frailties should promote tolerance of past and even present shortcomings. He points out it’s banal to say Milner wanted power; of course he did, pressing the Cabinet into the second Boer for the purpose of securing English institutions including equal treatment of blacks, whereas Kruger sought legal subordination. In this and other instance, historians have got culpability wrong. Discussing the possibility of reparations, he notes what is just smaller or earlier societies may not be in larger or later countries. Compensation requires demonstration of current harm caused by past wrongs, not merely current disadvantage.

3. O’Brien, Great Melody (21 Feb 2021)

by kurto

3. O’Brien, Great Melody (21 Feb)
Shunning understandings of Burke as the father of conservatism or primarily an exponent of natural law, O’Brien contends the guiding theme of the Anglo-Irishman’s political career is opposing tyranny and the abuse of power:

American colonies, Ireland, France, and India
Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it
– WB Yeats, the Sevens Sages

He agrees Burke changed his stance but not his ground: ‘One should distinguish between inconstancy and variation under circumstance. Liberty must work in conjunction with order’, Burke says in a detailed statement of political views (p. 441). Whenever there is an ‘obvious’ silence it’s traceable to his Irish liabilities; identification with Catholics emerges only very late, in the published letter to Hercules Langrishe.

Whiggish views of the late Georgian era remain prevalent, even if the methodology is suspect. Burke’s role in British and international politics was more significant than usually held, notably his analysis of George III’s court being more accurate than Namierites allow. Indeed, he ‘founded’ the Whig school of history with Thoughts on Present Discontents; O’Brien’s view is consistent with Mansfield’s finding that Burke established political parties. Namier saw Burke as the lead representative of the Whig tradition, which is better represented by Macaulay, Morley, and Trevelyan. Morley thought no one surpassed Burke in bringing philosophy to bear on statesmanship, ironic given his reputation for hysteria, and Namier’s mistake is believing the historian who sees the most recent / the latest has the best perspective: this may be so but does not entail authority to refute contemporary statements and records. To find Burke guilty of authoritarianism, as does Namier, one must ignore everything he ever said.

O’Brien treats Burke thematically, rather than chronologically.

    Ireland

: Grattan represented the Protestant Ascendancy, Burke surreptitiously the underground Catholic gentry, displaying lifelong interest in its culture. ‘Will no one stop this madman Grattan?’ (p. 243) – Burke was alarmed by independence for the Ascendancy, the Volunteers seeming to Catholics to represent mob violence. His father’s conversion was a wound that never healed; to his mother he owed a debt of honor that was never expatiated. He accepted Rome as a legitimate Christian institution, and closely identified with Trinity College Dublin. The Ascendancy correctly perceived Burke as a threat but couldn’t produce a smoking gun to alienate British Whigs. He shaped the Catholic Relief Bill of 1778, though did not advocate it; he lost Bristol because of evident sympathies which characterized every other important field of pursuit.

    America

: conciliation meant extending liberty throughout the empire. Once the fighting broke out, he fully sided with the colonists. As with the other three themes, the enemy is abuse of power. He likely drove the Rockingham administration’s repeal of the Stamp Act. Burke was concerned with American affairs by 1767, contra Namier, but the fragile alliance between Rockingham and Grenville (whom Burke disliked) effectively silenced him; when Grenville died in 1770, Burke (the driving force behind repeal of the Stamp Act) was no longer hostage to its author. Subsequently Fox was won over to the Rockinghams by Burke, who was prepared to follow him in the Commons. His major pronouncements on the Colonies comprise speeches on the Declaratory Act (1766), American taxation (1774), Conciliation with America (1775), and the address to the sheriffs of Bristol (1777). Those who were most anti-Catholic in Ireland and America were also most opposed to George III’s America policy, paradoxically for Burke. Further, Irish Volunteers were pro-American but anti-French, a problem once France swung behind the colonists. Burke spoke to English Whig towns, but not to the Ascendancy since he was a closet Jacobite. The Irish ferment around free trade in 1779 demonstrated the gulf between Grattan, unconcerned with Catholics, and Burke. Between Saratoga and Yorktown, Westminster’s struggles were essentially George III versus Burke, via the struggle for economic reform and the push for a second Rockingham ministry. In the course of negotiating the possibility of a North-Rockingham coalition, George III saw Burke a real advantage, ergo Burke didn’t need to prove his bona fides; from 1782 (Yorktown), George moves toward the character of a Whiggish constitutional monarch (contra Roberts).

    India

: In 1773 Burke turned down an opportunity to lead an inquiry into general amnesty for the East India Company – to whitewash, which would have produced personal benefits. However, he soon after gave a speech seeming to absolve Hastings and others in furtherance of the Rockingham line. He could not yet set the party’s tone. His real interests emerge in 1781, his fury demonstrating the injury of prior restraint. O’Brien allows for some defense of Hastings’ administration, while concluding Burke’s opposition to be principled. In supporting Fox’s India bill, Burke reveals his mind: ‘obloquy is a necessary ingredient in the composition of all true glory’; ‘It is by bribing, not so often being bribed, that wicked politicians bring ruin on mankind’ (p. 348). George III ultimately saw the validity of Burke’s view; Pitt trapped the Foxite Whigs of public identification w opposition to East India, Burke didn’t care. Cornwallis, succeeding Hastings, concluded the project Burke commenced in 1781.

    France

: Price’s Revolutionary Society, established to celebrate 1688, emphasized the anti-Catholic aspects of the Revolution. Price was further an acolyte of Lord Shelburne, whom Burke thought had fomented the Gordon riots. Fox precipitated and insisted on the Whigs’ public split over France; Burke was trying not to run too far ahead of Portland and Fitzwilliam. When Pitt coopted the latter, Burke became superfluous. Burke understood fear of Jacobinism spreading to Ireland was paradoxically helpful to Catholic emancipation. Pitt calculated he would continue to support the government despite Fitzwilliams’ recall from Dublin, to have no choice but to support continued repression.
The French Revolution and Russian Revolution preceded Hitler in recasting society on the basis of theory. The exact nature of ideas is unimportant – the possibility of the mob seizing power is the essence; victims of the Terror were victims of rationalism. In an appendix of correspondence with the author, Irving Berlin is wrong to suggest Burke attacked the Enlightenment, or was reactionary (in Crooked Timber). Opposing the French Revolution as utopiam is far from reactionary, which Berlin concedes in correspondence. Nor was Burke a theoretical advocate of aristocracy, but more a defending of actually existing society.

NB: ‘Too much immersion in one’s profession, not enough in learning, relegates concentration to forms of business – not substance – because forms deal with ordinary matters’.
‘I cannot go that way to work. I feel an insuperable reluctance in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of government, upon a theory, however plausible it may be’. (p. 321
‘Men must have a certain fund of natural moderation to qualify them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves and a perfect nuisance to everybody else’. (p. 387)
‘To innovate is not to reform’ (p.537)

7. Scruton, England: An Elegy (2 March 2024)

by kurto

England’s 20th-century decline owes to abandoning the wisdom of culture and custom derived from the countryside, common law, and the softening of power into authority. Classical Albion was a society of people desiring of privacy who could nonetheless be relied upon to act benevolently – strangers but never foes. Governed not from above (i.e., by class) but within (self-regulating order but around shared experience and compromise), it collapsed after World II not through antiquated education and honor but because English politics and law work only in English society, through reason not rationality and compromise. Urban development, homogeneity, and Continental rationality (e.g., Roman law and EU promulgations) broke the spell of enchantment.

Law and government:
Common law developed along the lines of Kant’s view that the moral law known to all rational beings, even if not all could explain it. The point was to do justice in the individual case, regardless of interests of power or cohesive rationality. Legal proceedings were primarily discovery, not invention: what was to be discovered is the solution to the case, not the law of the land. The object was not to exercise power over people but to give people relief from abusive power.
Rights were ancient prerogatives of the people, effected by custom not granted by government. Individuals possessed rights only because they were also burdened by duties, in contrast with European positive rights granted by government. Trusteeship in law (Burke’s partnership), along with trial by jury (of peers) and the common law itself, were characteristic features enabling disinterested husbandry of shared assets particularly over time.

The English cared less for the origins of the monarch than monarch’s commitment to upholding the law of the country; Protestantism was merely an exponent of lawfulness and custom. Whereas the Local Government act of 1888 eroded local interests and identity, while centralizing and corrupting authority.

When confronting power, the English questioned whatever and whenever no authority was evident, for possessing power does not entitle or recommend its exercise. England had never suffered Weber’s transition from traditional to legal-rational forms of authority. The attitude toward officialdom was: it it’s needs doing, you yourself should. So long as government service is an honor, it will attract the best minds; but it is merely a well-paid lifestyle, it degrades to power.
Imperialism’s worst crimes were committed against the Irish, during the Interregnum when politics was self-righteous, not compromising. But though the English emerged from World War II morally exhausted, no longer willing to cultivate its inheritance – to bear duties as well as rights – and to stave off its enervating critics, it didn’t think to compare its record with its Continental peers or previous empires. As Tocqueville observed, revolutionary sentiment is not borne of oppression but weakness of the old order.

The harmonization of law discovered not promulgated, the monarch as a corporation sole representing the people, and a religion tenuous but uniting was a settlement, an enchantment – Burke’s making the country lovely to its inhabitants. The key to government is not democracy but representation of the people’s interests, which requires compromise as well as solutions across generations; the political system must intend to amplify authority while restricting power.

Society and culture:
Hume thought the mind comprised of sensations, and the soul an illusion. If so, then a propos of Thatcher, so too must society be a collection of individuals.
English honor could be extended throughout society because the trust of behaving rightly did not require intimacy – it worked among strangers – and the test of virtue was in moments of real difficulty or danger, or when no one was looking. England did not turn on Mediterranean honor and kinship but honesty, fair play, and rule of law. The primary objective in morality is to act rightly in the circumstance, not to expound the principles which color one’s view of right, even / especially when principles are elusive or obscure. This was Austen’s genius to show. The gentleman was defined by manners, culture, virtue, aloofness but independent of lineage and wealth; and could be trusted to behave rightly without reducing the distance between him and you. Class worked to advance the body politic’s social objectives and aspirations. Amongst the working class, society was not a prison but a maze potentially leading to the way out. Disquiet over immigration is not ipso facto racism but the loss of a sense of home, disrupted to what end? When your primary loyalty is locality, EU or global sovereignty acts to create a crisis of identity.
Shakespeare presented England as enchanted by ethics, justice, law, authority; and always the ideal was presented as the possibility of restoration. England simultaneously believed the sacred to be a human construct, and that some things really are sacred.

The Anglican Church was a settlement, an attempt at peace, molding Christian belief to English idiosyncrasies, thereby enabling the binding of strangers. Once synthesis was achieved, doctrine became a social benefit, a transmitter of shared ethics. The people became a corporate person. Religion was a close ally of law, government, and social institutions. Contra Linda Colley, the English understood Protestantism in terms of nationality, not nationality in terms of Protestantism.
English art and literature were premised on place, demonstrating internalization of mystified (sacralized) topography. Burke in Sublime: nature is mysterious, is internalized by imagination (not rationally deducted). (Hedges were not total enclosures but permitted continuance of footpaths.) Where the French were more concerned with rural privations than fulfillments and contentments, the English gentlemen sought not to spend their money in London but in their country seats. The countryside’s decline reduced his stature, as did the abolition of hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

English money was not rational and meant to be added, but traditional and meant to be divided, shared. Imperial and metric diction is evidence of reasonable versus rational; the English system was the product of what works in life.

English empiricism rejected the need to rationalize everything – reason can never explain morality, politics, religion, and so on a priori. Negotiation, compromise, deference to tradition are valid, helpful contributors, the latter often likely to contain the essence of things. Empiricist philosophy, allied to common law reasoning (discovery of the ancient and the essential) and parliamentary government, were expressed in the ‘concrete vocabulary and compromising syntax’ of the language.
(Relevance in education is chimerical: who can guess the student’s interests in 10, 20, 40 years? So the standard is excellent and extent of current knowledge.)

What was the apex of Scruton’s England? Were its core elements synchronized or did they separately peak? Probably he would have chosen somewhere between the Georgian and early mid Victorian eras; although Brexit would likely have been welcome. Corelli Barnett emerges as Scruton’s principal opponent for misdiagnosing the cause of England’s decline.

22. Mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government (7 November)

by kurto

The philosophic import of political parties was established in 18th-century England, when Burke’s realism bested Bolingbroke’s ‘patriotism’, downgrading statesmanship to a conservative prudence.
In the classic era, philosophers solved the fundamental problem of rich versus poor by mixed government, not party government. The Glorious Revolution settled the contemporary problems of religion and divine right by reconciling warring elements of the ruling class, vindicating not Shaftesbury’s raison d’etre but something between Macaulay’s Whiggism (as represented by William of Orange) and Trevelyan’s prudence (seen in the trimmer Halifax). Burke’s

    Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents

then gave the first justification for party as the best use of talents, harnessing statesmanship to honest conduct by compromising the individual’s discretion and requiring the party’s action to be both defensible and practical. As against Bolingbroke’s disinterested statesmanship, which reached its apex in the 1760s, he sought to remedy the possibility of tyranny: he didn’t actually believe George’s court to be a cabal, but needed to illustrate the defect for which party is the remedy.
Bolingbroke saw James I’s divine right as formerly preempting the country party’s split into Tories and Whigs. Men can know the works of God but not his nature; they can reason a posteriori as to God’s will, but not a priori; they can have knowledge of knowledge which they can’t fully possess. Nature is beneficent because it’s intelligible; but its essence is not understandable, so there must be a God who means well. Bolingbroke straddled ancient and medieval thinkers who supposed beneficence, and modern ones who saw a hostile nature to be conquered. Natural law is obvious in God’s work because men appreciate the benefits of society irrespective of without its contrasts with the state of nature. Averring man’s natural sociability marked his great break with Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes is to Bolingbroke in religion as Bolingbroke to Burke in party: Hobbes had not foreseen the resolution of religious conflict, but Bolingbroke, seeing religion had been solved, thought parties were consequently superfluous. He presumed a society based on truth (i.e., first principles) which expresses intolerance of not truth, and results in lack of partisanship. But politics are not (cannot) be nonpartisan, and parties can be helpful. Bolingbroke saw that parties are groups associated for purposes which are not those of the entire community, and become factions when personal or private interests predominate communal good; whereas Burke followed Plato and Aristotle in praising prejudice (‘noble truth’). Commerce is the foremost example of nonpartisan association; government is nonpartisan when its ends are not happiness but the means of happiness. For example, military policy might serve commerce.
The king and a court of the most able patriots were to be the most virtuous; corruption was the risk. The patriot king required not aristocrats but men of ability, resistance to corruption, the preferment of peace over military glory, and the fostering of commerce. Such a program reduces reliance on statesmanship-cum-virtue: it is the ambition of party beyond tyranny. Bolingbroke and Jefferson firstly sought to replace absolutist / aristocratic statesmanship with party; Burke sought for multiple parties, thinking a group of super-able men of ability, supernaturally virtuous – however unlikely – conferred undue advantage.
Burke thought parties possible in Britain because the great parties of religious conflict and divine right were bygone; only the quotidien remained. Open, established opposition was not a requisite for party government but instead evidence of attenuated great parties, that politics no longer culminated in civil war. (In founding political parties in America, Jefferson capitalized on the success of republican principles, yielding productive, legitimate partisanship.) Yet simultaneously he opposed fomenting general discontent with present good (e.g., pamphlets criticising the constitution) while suggestively promising improvement that might in fact fail. This was nearly Aristotle’s opposition to innovation: since virtue is a product of habitation and innovation disrupts habit, innovation disrupts virtue, even if the outcome is otherwise good.
Burke understood the constitution after 1688 to be mature, no longer needing improvement, and the monarch now being head of state but sharing leadership of government. The king, whose powers rested more on the normative than the statutory, retained the discretion necessarily vested in the executive, provided these were prudentially used – Aristotle’s phronesis. The ‘political school’ (i.e., Bolingbroke’s supporters) were implicitly required to support the king’s ministers because they were appointed by these rulers, whereas Burke saw the Commons as a check on the monarch and his ministers, and so the chief worry was abuse of prerogative. All uncontrolled power will inevitably be abused. Burke’s theory of popular government straddles Bolingbroke, American federalism (the Federalist saw legislators as subject to the Constitution, and so Congress), and modern British constitutionalism as described by Bagehot (responsible to the people).
Burke thought prescription embodies heritage (or tradition), and ‘establishments’ are the artefacts of heritage. Then, British government was to be ruled by gentlemen who defended the establishments and their prejudice: ‘Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. For my part, I find it impossible to conceive that anyone believes in his own politics, or thinks them to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice. It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of government. It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect. Therefore, every honourable connection will avow it as their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common plans into execution, with all the power and authority of the State.’
Burke considered that the patriot king increased the likelihood of tyranny, and sought to redefine party in British politics. His Thoughts disguised counterrevolution against Bolingbroke’s party: ‘When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle’. Bad describes those corrupted by executive (monarchical) prerogative. Party for the sake of liberty doesn’t manifest the true practice of politics. The program of a party is in its history, its rationale for past judgment of public measures, not its plans for the future. Deference goes to the party’s self-understanding, rather than the individual executive. The people are not to be included in government, but to be restrained by government, restraints aiming to preserve equal rights in civil society (as opposed to majority rule, which is arbitrary and likely to forget historic rights amid contemporary events). He opposed ‘responsible’ or opposition criticism as bound to flatter the people, and ‘independent’ criticism as lacking ambition to rule. Party did not require far-seeing statesmanship: there is a tension between prudence and consistency. It is a matter of leaders and led, not Aristotle’s rulers and ruled; though the leaders are of the people and mingle, the better to represent (but not to be delegated). The leaders’ property is a result not of public duty, but duty as a consequent of property. Their role is the cause of what they do, not what they do the cause of their role. Honor is the negation of the false pride of one who tends toward tyranny. It facilitates the association of good men, whereas Aristotle tended to isolate them.
Theories of natural law, being accessible to common sense, tend to elide the Aristotelian distinction between moral (or political) virtue and intellectual (or philosophic) virtue. Burke thought the laws we live by should be obvious at least to gentlemen, because there are natural penalties for their failure, and this makes the Aristotelian legislator unnecessary. He opposed viewing politics as a matter of first principles, but instead prioritized began Roma law treatment of prescription (whereby land was effectively titled when longstanding use could be shown). People remain in society to benefit from civilized liberties. The good for Aristotle is the discovery of reason: in politics, it is the product of the legislator. For Burke, civil liberty is based on natural feeling protected by prescriptive right. Prejudice can be effective only if not subject to first principles. His prudence avoids the legislator’s appeal to first principles. (Bolingbroke sided with Plato and Aristotle in that prejudice does admit of first principles.) The 19th century demonstrated economic progress sparked hunger for political innovation at the expense of establishments.
Mansfield suggests Burke was a deist but did not accept Christian revelation, professing its virtue for political benefit. This deity commanded the laws of nature; human nature trumped determinism and established the bases of moral action, of equality before the law. Natural feeling is love of one’s own. Natural law follows Hobbes, is disciplined by honesty, and is not a final, inevitable point as in Aquinas. Consequently when elites forget their obligations they risk not only their own place but the entire social order. Principled behavior in a statesman is not following first principles but defending establishments and prescription. Great men should recognize that honest men of great families (i.e., aristocrats) ordinarily have first call on ruling, because first principles normally fail in politics. It is natural law that is intended to perfect human nature, the standard from which men draw progress.
The conflict between Bolingbroke and Burke is tantamount to rationalism versus empiricism. Rationalism holds liberty (or the basis of natural law) can be discovered in first principles, in freedom from prejudice. It teaches the necessity of seeking security in society, and seeking truth as the path to peace. Empiricism proceeds directly to prejudice and preservation, until the truth can be known; prescriptive right is an inalienable right. Bolingbroke’s patriot party established a new means of statesmanship; Burke instead substituted prudence, or non-principled conservatism, which admits of multiple parties. He did not succeed in substituting prudence for Bolingbroke’s patriotism: he engendered respectable parties but not the party system, for the modern system tolerates fanatics such as Jacobins and Nazis. Nonetheless, modern statesmanship discards the legislator and thus political thought, and accepts popular guidance (as refracted by popular sovereignty). In demoting statesmanship to guarding against theoretical claims which might destroy the establishments, he made party inherently conservative.
Coda: Contemporary political scientists must focus on action and therefore its limits, whereas historians may be tempted by hindsight. Burke, had he known of class and racial parties, would not have advanced party (p. 23).
Machiavelli: ‘To preserve liberty by new laws and new schemes of government, whilst the corruption of a people continues and grows, is absolutely impossible: but to restore and preserve it under old laws, and an old constitution, by reinfusing into the minds of men the spirit of this constitution, is not only possible, but is, in a particular manner, easy to a king’ (p. 73 footnote: Discourses I)

23. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (23 November 2023)

by kurto

Sectarian and socioeconomic matters have forced compromises in the aspirations of Irish nationalism: ‘Irishness’, heavily influenced by its neighbors, is a scaled rather than a territorial or residential characteristic.

At the period’s outset, there were Old Irish (Gaels), old English (Elizabethan but Catholic colonists), and New English (Protestants). Newcomers, who saw the country as already loyal (i.e., not conquered), contended with a society premised on tuath, an extended practice of family and foster family, of temporary clan alignment. Neither common nor Roman law prevailed, social organization was parallel to but not congruent with English feudalism. Towns exhibited a more Viking / Norman / English character than the Gaelic countryside. The Catholic Church was split between Francophile Jesuits and residents of Old English towns, and pro-Spanish clerisy in the country. The Old English might have turned but Protestant but for the Counterreformation’s success combined with heavy-handed Westminster policy (as represented by Thomas Wentworth). Was the 1609-10 English settlement to be gradual Anglicization or sharply anti-Gael colonization? 1613’s parliament favored the newly settled provinces of Ulster (then the poorest region) and Connaught. For the new English, Anti-Catholicism was a civilizing mission; settlers were not to reside among Catholics. But the skilled artisans needed for settlement didn’t leave England, save those in the West country who went to Munster, and the important demographic trend was Scottish Presbyterian migration to Ulster, later accelerating in the 1640s. Hugh O’Neill was not the source of 19th- and 20th-century Ulster separatism, nor a nationalist, but only an icon of tuath era.

During the English Civil War, the Old English took the Old Irish (i.e., Catholic) view of education, land, and law; but split over foreign Catholic presence. Parliament raised £1 million on security of 2.5 million acres of Irish lands. Cromwell cowed surrender to the Cavalier army. Appropriate displaced Catholic landowners but not all residents. Because lands were quickly re-sold, settlement was hard to disentangle. Meanwhile spoken Gaelic began receding more quickly than in Scotland, Wales, or Breton France.

William invaded England for European not English purposes: James’ 1689 stand on the Boyne was Louis XIV’s aim not the Stuart goal. Nonetheless, the militarily inconclusive outcome shaped almost three centuries of Irish government and politics. The Treaty of Limerick settled military matters by facilitating the flight of Jacobite wild geese, but altered or ignored guarantees of security for Catholic landowners and to a lesser degree Catholic religious freedom. ‘Patriot’ politics originated herein, not the later 18th century, its aims crystallizing as the repeal of Poynings Law, the establishment of habeus corpus, and public policy made domestically. (Though the Woolen Act of 1699 was not so much Westminster’s doing as economic interests refracted through MPs.) The Declaratory Act of 1719 abolished the Irish House of Lords’ right to appellancy, making Ireland finally dependent. Consequently, nationalism in the context of the Protestant Ascendancy couldn’t rely on natural law, since that would include Catholics. Though the settlers asserted primacy in Irish territory, that they represented the true Irish nation, they were indeed colonizers, for their authority was divorced from the real power in London. Foster describes this as the decisive milestone in Ireland to 1972.

In the 18th century, agriculture drove increasing Anglo-Irish trade, counterbalanced by the incipient English Industrial Revolution. Wool went to Liverpool and Bristol. Beef and butter were traded for sugar, tea, and coal. Middle-class, town Catholics began trading with English co-religionists, and began prospering from the1750s. Supply of specie grew in the 1770s. Thus complaints of restricted trade were more political than real. Irish rents were low in relation to the capital value of land, especially during the Ascendancy, so little capital was invested on improvement. But absenteeism was also explained by such pursuits as military or diplomatic assignment. The Ascendants patronized (Georgian) memorials for land, family, and residencies rather than (Anglican) churches or sculpture. Penal laws were little used, though an effective barrier to Ascendancy politics (Burke: ‘connivance in relaxation of slavery is not the definition of liberty’.) Ulster was already distinctive because of its unique linen trade, dominated by Protestant families. Adding cotton, it became a manufacturing center. Yet 40% of contemporary Irish emigration of 250,000 was Ulster ‘Scotch Irish’. Economic growth then faltered, extending in the next century: the population came to outrun the land, and secretive rural violence (‘the boys’) took root.

By the end of England’s Seven Years War with France, Ireland was more troublesome than North America. Ascendants, thinking themselves Irish with English-style civil rights, were elitist but not nationalists, for whom politics was a badge of status. Showing new responsiveness to public opinion, parliamentarians claimed budgetary control and other powers, though somewhat contrary to O’Brien’s Anglo-Irish Politics in the Age of Grattan and Pitt, external pressures (renewed French warfare, the formation of Irish Volunteers – the start of Ireland’s paramilitary tradition – and general public discontent) prompted 1779’s trading concessions and 1882’s panicked yielding of legislative right (technically the repeal of portions of Declaratory Act). Clientelism persisted and Grattan was friends with Catholic interests only so far as they didn’t conflict with the Ascendancy. It was more the French Revolution that drove affairs leading to the Act of Union. In Ulster, now-established traditions of Presbyterian, libertarian republicanism predated the Gaelic nationalism now taking root, spurred by French egalitarianism.
The Ascendants, unwilling to ally with Catholics, were subsequently absorbed into the metropole, and Ireland precluded from 19th-century dominion status of Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Underground loyalties and protest groups began to influence electoral politics. O’Connell rose off the back of low-cost subscriptions. 1828 marked the Ascendancy’s first electoral reverse, 1829’s Roman Catholic Relief Act the acknowledgement of the Lords, Wellington, and Peel that Irish public opinion was not entirely sectarian: Catholic liberation coincided with reduced voting rolls.

Meanwhile, population had been growing unsustainably, such that emigration was on its way to becoming the main feature of 19th-century society, the Catholics joining Protestants. Many went to Liverpool, which became 25% Irish; London; or America. Most were under age 25, and emigration per capita was double England’s rate. In consequence, residual population became more conservative, particularly the countryside. Remittances and fatalism took their place. The Church’s social authority increased, since the clerisy rose in numbers. The lower classes were decimated, the bourgeois already exhibiting latter marriages and childbirths. The decisive precursor to the Famine was economic collapse after the Napoleonic wars, when agricultural demand collapsed. Recovery was slow and weak, the ecosystem turned to the potato monocrop. Would the Famine have happened anyway? Contemporary Irish poverty is not well understood.

Post Repeal, high politics came to be divided between Whiggish Irish liberals and Tory-minded Protestant scions of the Ascendancy. In the 1870s, the instinctive political deference of middle-class farmers lapsed. The Irish Republican Brother (the Fenians) merged with the rural Ribbon societies, making respectable republican separatism (independence). Agrarian violence became political violence as evictions swelled. The Land League introduced women to political activism and more important established nationalism among Catholics; the opposite side of the Land War was pro-English, Protestant, urban exemplified by Ulster and Trinity College. Land purchase rights, working to the favor of tenants, was the crucible of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which Parnell shaped into a disciplined Westminster party. Home Rule then surpassed Irish Whiggery, the Tories becoming unionists. Moderates who saw law depended on force not opinion deserted Gladstone in the 1886 and 1893 failures of Home Rule; the 1912 bill was very close to the latter, but stalled by World War I.

The Boer War crystallized separatism as a Catholic political aim (and kicked off international decolonization), while Protestant Ulster became irrevocably unionist as 250,000 (of 1.6 million) signed a declaration of loyalty (though Fermanagh, Tyrone, and Derry city exhibited doubts). The Gaelic League, Yeats, and others pointed to the literary revival as preeminent, even more important, a trend underpinned by the Gaelic Athletic Association’s rise. At the start of the war, the Irish Volunteers, which had foolishly been pledged to support Britain with concomitant implementation of Home Rule, were infiltrated by the IRB, and many soon joined Sinn Fein, especially after the return of Easter Rising prisoners. Sinn Fein supplanted the Parliamentary party after Lloyd George’s failed effort to boost conscription in exchange for restating Home Rule transition. Irish guerillas were confident English liberals would flinch; shadow Dail courts trimmed the excesses of Sein Fein’s cattle driving and land seizures. Indeed, public and political opinion broke the UK government’s nerve while the IRA was still in the field. As Anglicization and modernization had enabled the spread of 19th-century nationalism, so 19th-century socioeconomic development had created the social classes which fueled the 20th-century guerillas. Meanwhile, the population hit its nadir, falling to 4.4 million in 1911 from 8.2 in 1840.

The Treaty of 1921 did not enable partition; partition in the form of 1920’s Government of Ireland Act, the successor to 1912 Home Rule bill, made the Treaty possible by creating two devolved parliaments linked by a council of Ireland. The UK tried for a 9-county Ulster but unionists insisted on 6 in the interest of heavier Protestant representation. Southern Ireland’s boycott left Lloyd George to govern the 26 as a crown colony under military law, so he countered by offering Dominion status. The Irreconcilables rejected the treaty because it failed to deliver a republic, rather than all 32 counties (which wasn’t on offer since Ulster was loyal), the Oath of Allegiance being entirely unacceptable. Sheer outlawry was also averse to settlement, but most of the countryside favored resolution. Ironically de Valera and Collins took opposite sides of common expectation, the latter being more pragmatic; the IRB split 11-4 in favor. If the result of the Anglo-Irish war was predictable, the civil war’s denouement was not. The 20th century’s main fault line ran through constitutionalism and the IRA, rather than class (labourism) or emigration.

In the Free State era, gaps between the riven IRA and Dail were rife, de Valera having withdrawn until 1932. The government sought to assert cultural identity of the new country through compulsory study of Gaelic in schools and other means. Ulster was uncompromising in opposing Catholic political interests, driven by middle-class Protestant opinion (including ex-WWI soldiers). During the depression, the north saw heavy emigration to the UK.

De Valera’s Fianna Fail came to stand not only for small farmers and shopkeepers of rural Ireland but also the bourgeois. Quashing the neo-fascist blue shirts demonstrated article 2A of 1937’s constitution would apply to the dissident IRA. He had preferred ‘external association’ with the Commonwealth, rather than 32-country republicanism (though the revised constitution claimed to legislate for Ulster and sought to appeal to northerners); but saw the repudiation of the governor-general; disavowal of annuity payments to English landowners, which sparked a trade war; and subsequent recovery of the ‘Treaty ports’ as his crowning nationalist achievement. Unintentionally, the outcome bound Ulster into British shipbuilding and broader economy; Ulster was raided in World War II while southern Ireland enjoyed a ‘pro British’ neutrality.

In the postwar era, Finance department planners were all-powerful in seeking for development, leading (among other things) to the arrival of foreign corporations in the 1960s. In the same decade, Church authority began receding while Fianna Fail retained hegemony and population resumed growing. Though a Peronist, rural ideology pervaded government doings, it was a decade of exposure to the winder world. In Ulster, the crisis within Protestant unionism as much as radical political Catholicism instigated the Troubles. The IRA resurfaced as fighting the UK’s military might in the form of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, rather the Protestant majority.

Foster would say attempts to remake society as if a tabula rasa end badly, and that as with so many revolutions, the decisive factor is suitably defining the enemy (rather than agreeing final objectives). Ireland and India each chose to fight following partition – which is not the UK’s responsibility – and both became one-party states rather than the pluralities of colonial era.
However magisterial, the push for EEC membership only succeeding in 1972, the study has necessarily been surpassed by Ireland’s gains from European Union membership and consequent socioeconomic change.

9. DeSoto, The Mystery of Capital (2005)

by kurto

Identifies why market economies do not function in post communist and Third World countries as they do in the developed world. Most have more than enough capital. But it is dead because it cannot be transformed into liquidity; assets cannot be measured as standardized units; and laws do not work to protect assets, but instead to force owners into the underground economy. The leading example of successful transition to from informal to formal economy is the 19th-century United States. Present-day failures threaten the credibility of capitalism. A bit repetitious toward the middle, yet through and penetrating.

10. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (25 July 2006)

by kurto

The true nature of the Enlightenment is best demonstrated by 18th-century Britain, where such concepts as nature, liberty, reason, rights and truth were most fully adumbrated in the concern for the ‘moral sense’. The thesis is revisionist, for the French philosophes have been considered to embody the paradigm, and only the Scottish (but not Burke!) have been understood as members of the canon. But British writers from Shaftesbury through Smith and on to the great Anglo-Irishman, along with the practical example of John Wesley’s Methodists, demonstrate the fundamental predilection to see dignity in all men. Not so the philosophes, preoccupied with the ‘ideology of reason’, as were the British Dissenters, or the Americans, focused on the politics of liberty. So Britain’s ‘sociology of virtue’ makes the strongest claim to the Enlightenment’s essence; however, each country’s subsequently development bears something of the others. A bibliography worth exploring, and worth revisiting for its brilliance and clarity.