The Misrables revisted

A point I made in passing last week deserves a second look. Responding to my nephew's consternation over the ending to the musical Les Miserable. I took a brief look into the history underlying Victor Hugo's work. I saw that the July Revolution ended with the people of France barricading and defending the streets of Paris against the reactionary forces of Charles X. They turned and peaceful negotiation with other French political forces established a new regime with a people's king to rule over them as constitutional monarch. A victory for the people, I thought, and a self evident successful outcome.

I still feel that way. But I question how quickly I got there. A peoples triumph, and a legal and ordered government overthrown by a mob can be similar things. The circumstances involved often a difficult knot to unravel.The people triumphed over tyranny, it's said. The previous regime de-legitimized itself. The American heart warms to the call to arms that the religious persecution, censured free press and dissolved elected legislature of the previous regime evoke. The regime Hugo's students and the Paris mob overturned; though, was put in place by the democratic British to restore order to a defeated France set against the family of nations by the aggressive and war-making Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon himself rose to power restoring peace to a nation transfixed by a reign of terror following the revolution. The trail of noble intentions grows indistinct when followed.

Since the time of the Greek tyrants there has been a tension between aristocrats and the people over those one would call "dictator" and the other "champion against despotic oligarchy". The discussion of legitimacy of a regime often turns on the matter and mix of order, reaction, suppression, and subjugation; against liberty, resentment, demonstration and revolution, in politics and the law. A state is not easily de-legitimized by the ordinary enforcement of a regime of laws unless to the point of complete oppression of the people and by that time the easier trigger of contravention of religious precepts or grundnorms has likely occurred and stripped the state's absolutism bare.

The Law (and any regimes legitimacy) evolved in the west as a human and rationally based institution. A primary view of it is to see the people governed as the ultimate source of all political power, that all true and existing power and wealth of a state flows from the accruing value of the labor of an organized and cooperating people. The laws circumscribe and channel behavior to this end. Whether of positive mandate or natural origin, divine or innate to man's nature, the laws are seen as having this comprehensible end.

The states of the west tend to equate good government with the particular institutions of democracy they have evolved. The answer to any nation's problems: a constitution (validating individual property rights). A legislature, an executive, and an independent judiciary. All in separate jurisdictions of power. Elections- voting- by secret ballot and universal suffrage (though the west is by no means wedded to that last concept). Not least a body of statute and contract law protecting those property rights and their rules of transfer . All called forth by the nature and natural state of man. The power and efficacy of the latter and sheer earthiness of the former lead some regimes to try to pick what they want from the industrial west. Arguments are made that differentiate the supposed well-being of the people to unnecessary devotion to the express[ed] will of the people. The multivariate democratic institutions of the west it is said, with some evidence, are the direct manifestations of the culture conditions, urbanism and history of the west.

A distilling of the human experience of western culture is called for. A calling out of the solutions to mankind's problems involving simply ground, weather, and community. The little d democracy that lives inside big D democracy.

A regime is a system of laws. The laws order the people and their relations among themselves. The laws encompass a normative strand of a people's sense of ethical behavior and justice. The agreement of a people at this establishment phase of the law can be said to have a moral quality. It extends to the administration of a body of laws and to the perception of the ultimate aims of ordering a state and people. A view of many post classical neo-platonists describe the central responsibility of the virtuous ruler as the ultimate happiness of the people. This goal of a viable and sustaining mass state marks the emergence of communities centered on traditions of revealed religion positing an ultimate truth towards which all individual and communal behavior is directed.

Legitimacy is best pursued by process and the habit of process. The law must speak and what it says ought to be open to rational interpretation. Until the law has spoken it cannot act and it cannot act on what has gone before it spoke. It must act in a co-respondent manner to what called it to act on, the sanction ought to match the transgression in a manner not out of keeping with the contravention of the norm. The law should act similarly between occurrences and individuals, there should be one law for all. If the law cannot meet these conditions it is not a system of law it is merely despotism.

The conventions of due process emerge from this: published laws in the language of the people, the point counter-point positivist nature of the trial. The primacy of facts giving rise to rules for testimony, evidence, and presentation. Similarly, wise rulers understand the the power of state at their hand is the aggregated power of the people - it does not matter that it appears so much as a thing in itself. A mechanism for gaining the opinion of the people is needed something that will neither insulate the ruling class from the people or reflect their own opinions, prejudices and desires back to them. Without it they will fail.

Beyond this the rulers and the ruled lead separate existences. The ruled desire nothing as much as a dependable law to keep them apart. A history of people told from the point of view of their own concerns would rarely intersect with the grand history of kings and generals; their retinues, intrigues and adventures . Often it is only war and only the mobilization of resources that accompanies war that join the two. War is endlessly attractive to the rulers of men for the increased reach it gives them into the real life of the world. At most times in the evolution of human civilization, until the very recent past, the average person would have been hard pressed to give the name and account of which king, or khan purported to be their leader. Most of human history has revolved in small cycles of weather and weddings, which crops will come in, and who is willing to buy them. The seasonal liturgys of their creed. These things are closer to the natural life of man than the book of laws, which occupy a different plane of mans existence. It is not the responsibility or right of rulers to push their power from the law to the calendar.

© Copyright 2003 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 2/07/03; 18:42:20.