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Thread: The Will of the Majority.

  1. #11
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    Helena's Avatar Senior Member
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Which one?

    Rousseau was a French thinker who argued that the general will of the people as a whole could be known by the smartest people and was represented by the state. In order to free yourself from the past and from society's many ills, you had to conform to the dictates of the state and the state was justified in using force to free you. It's thinking that was pretty much accepted in the West and can be found in Bush's cry to fight in the ME for democracy and Obama's cry to fight there for humanity because we know better.
    I don't like that and I reject it. It is an affront and an assault.

    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    Law? Law is what ought to emerge from the interaction of people in a community, in a place and in a time, in their interests, customs, traditions, religion, trads, guilds, and other social institutions. In it's emergence it is discovered and even written down. The law was above everyone, even the king who was obligated to adhere to it or be dethrowned by the people. That's the way man existed up until fairly recent times. Over time, and you can trace this through the thinking of people like Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this got turned around, turned upsidedown, so the king became the law and could dictate it according to his whim, and gradually, as democracy set in, the state and its whim, er, general will of the people, which takes us back to the previous paragraph.
    Okay, what does law emerging from a community look like? How is it governed? How is it different from what we have in the US at this point in time?
    You are wrong about police.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Helena View Post
    I don't like that and I reject it. It is an affront and an assault.



    Okay, what does law emerging from a community look like? How is it governed? How is it different from what we have in the US at this point in time?

    Hmm, think of it in terms of evolution. People try different things and find what works for them. In most cases, people can't explain where the law came from, it's tacit, it's just part of their culture, what you grew up with. It's enforced by the groups you belong to. It's a simple as in a family the parents are in charge and the children listen up to a certain age. Or the church you go to might have rules for belonging to it and they enfarce those rules. In that move, "The Cathedral by the Sea," the guild required men to marry by a certain age and if they didn't kicked them out of the guild.

    The difference is that between bottom-up, local government and top-down, centralized government. The difference too is that much of that social order has been replaced by the state.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister D View Post
    I'm intrigued by de Maistre's remark that when a people's constitution is committed to writing it's no longer living.
    That's true. It freezes the law. As a people change, it will apply to them less and less. That may mark the decline of a culture into a civilization (forget who made that distinction between culture and civilization).

    As CCitzen says, it can be changed, amended, but it's not really a people changing it, but the government created by that constitution, politicians (leaders not representatives) changing it to serve their self-interests.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Quote Originally Posted by CCitizen View Post
    No -- it can change.
    That doesn't mean that it is 'living.' The concept of the living constitution means the interpretation changes with the times.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris View Post
    That's true. It freezes the law. As a people change, it will apply to them less and less. That may mark the decline of a culture into a civilization (forget who made that distinction between culture and civilization).

    As CCitzen says, it can be changed, amended, but it's not really a people changing it, but the government created by that constitution, politicians (leaders not representatives) changing it to serve their self-interests.
    I think his point was that the constitution no longer has the force of custom and ingrained behavior. A written constitution is a constitution that has ceased to exist as a moral force in men's lives. Now de Maistre was old school. "This craze for a constitution"...for him a constitution was a way of life not a legal text.
    Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.


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