RE LAW MORALS LAW RELIGION RACE AND CIVILIZATION

Thursday, April 13, 2017

RE LAW MORALS LAW RELIGION RACE AND CIVILIZATION

See prior post: THE RULE OF LAW AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Also this prior post, excerpt:

"Let's look at an example from the time of the Congress of Vienna, and look at Talleyrand, the most outspoken opponent of Russia and Prussia, and the first of his three arguments there: "...this era could only be ended and peace established by restoring law as the basis of international life; that the balance of Europe could not rest solely or mainly on power, but depended on mutual trust among states and nations arising from mutual respect for everyone's rights; and that all rights and titles to all kinds of possession and good, including those of individuals, nations, and states, were vitally connected with the rights of rulers to their thrones....", Schroeder, p. 530. 

 

Thus the rule of law was finally counterposed to the divine right of kings, on the one hand, and to Jacobinism on the other.

 

But that is not the only point I want to make regarding this development." (end excerpt, prior post)

 

One gets the impression, nowadays, that the concept of the rule of law is, among Western intellectuals, a concept intellectually isolable, like a chemical element, and then fungibly distributable, or imposable, across and into all civilizations.

 

I am skeptical that that is the case. My skepticism relates to the relationships I have been discussing between law and other features of societies, such as customs, language, racial characteristics, traditions of various kinds, class structures, religious institutions and practices, and other things.

Certainly what Talleyrand had meant, in the squib above, at Vienna, by 'the rule of law' was not a concept which might be exported anywhere else but within Western Europe, and perhaps Russia, around 1815.