December 29, 2002
ONE RING TO RULE THEM ALL:
-REVIEW: of The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit by A.J. Conyers (David Gordon, The Mises Review)A supporter of the absolute state might defend his cause with many slogans, but freedom of religious opinion, one would think, could hardly find a place among them. Professor Conyers disagrees: he maintains that in the history of modern Europe, toleration has had a distinctly illiberal outcome. [...]The substance of our author's argument is this: Kings who, starting in the sixteenth century, wished to centralize power faced formidable obstacles. In the Middle Ages, they found themselves everywhere hemmed in by competing centers of power and local customs. "The habitual contours of society-one might say its natural arrangement within the ebb and flow of informal authority-is a function of the family, the village, the locale, the trade association, and of religion. These sometimes smaller and always subtler arrangements of customary authority were always potentially in competition with the comprehensive political arrangements of the modern state. They were seen as natural obstacles in the project of erecting large-scale central administration, remote from local arrangements".
In particular, aspiring absolutists had to do something about religion. The Roman Catholic Church, a formidable international power, blocked the way of any king who claimed total authority. And the Reformation churches, though often instruments of national consolidation, by no means always aided the growth of central authority. All the major Christian churches taught that a body of divine or natural law limited the government's power.
Given this structure of society, the course of action for a potential absolutist was apparent: He must endeavor to reduce the power of all institutions that limit his power, the church foremost among them. If individuals had to confront the ruler without the benefit of intermediate institutions, they would find resistance to his will a difficult if not impossible task. [...]
Professor Conyers's thesis suffers from a glaring weakness that I fear is fatal. He has identified with perfect accuracy a real issue: Institutions that shield individuals from powerful centralized states have lost much of their authority. No longer can the church bring a ruler to his knees in repentance. But it does not follow from these undoubted facts that theorists of religious toleration aimed to bring about an absolute state and an impotent church. Conyers fails to show that the major writers he discusses favored toleration for these purposes.
Conyers's treatment of the greatest of the theorists of tolerance, John Locke, provides an excellent test case for his thesis. If he wants to claim that Locke's policy of religious tolerance promoted absolutism, he confronts a formidable obstacle: Locke defended individual rights and a strictly limited state. How, then, can one possibly argue that Locke's defense of toleration aimed to promote state power?
One wonders if, in the long run, it really matters what the intent of John Locke was, if the result of his theory was, in fact, to centralize power in the hands of the State, to destroy a vitally important intermediary institution, and so to lead to a net loss of human freedom?
Paul Cella has been thinking about the problem of the State aggrandizing all power to itself too. And, if you've a bit of time, here's one of those things that makes the Internet a wonder: an e-text of Our Enemy, the State (Albert Jay Nock).
MORE:
-ESSAY: John Locke: From Absolutism to Toleration (Robert P. Kraynak, March 1980, The American Political Science Review) (may only be accessible to folks on .edu servers--but I have a pdf if you want it.)
For Conyers' argument to work, then the losers,
the church and local institutions, have to be
benign. This was not the case, however.
S.B. Chrimes, in "English Constitutional History,"
(a slender but meaty text of the Open U.)
treated law as a commodity and pointed out
that in England, given a choice between royal
and manorial courts, people chose royal. (Adam
Smith be praised.)
And the history of witchcraft, including periods
well before the Reformation, shows that the
Church was willing to massacre innocents in
hecatombs, with no appeal. That the various
chuch massacres were eventually controlled
was due entirely to secular lords who became
irritated at losing all their revenues because
the taxpayers were being burned at the stake.
Yet such was the power of the church that for
hundreds of years it was a capital offense not
only to practice witchcraft but to inquire whether
witches existed.
Of course, if Conyers, like many Christians of
my acquaintance, believes that witches exist
and need to be battled to the death, then
my objections lose much of their force.
Witchcraft existed, if not magic, and it's hard to see why those who practiced it shouldn't have been persecuted.
Posted by: oj at December 29, 2002 8:37 PMMr. Judd;
I would say that you're wrong on two counts.
1) It's hard to see why people practicing witchcraft should
prosecuted. Are you claiming that witchcraft is actually effective, that it works? Otherwise, it's simply self-delusion that doesn't harm anyone else.
2) Very few of those prosecuted were in fact practicing witchcraft. It's clear from the records of the Salem trials that few (if any) of those prosecuted had any involvement in witchcraft, despite what modern day Wiccans claim. It's really no different than the charges of "collaboration" used among the Palestinians to dispose of inconvenient people.
Even if they were trying to, say, dry up cows
-- one of the more frequent charges -- and
were really able to do it, death seems an
excessive penalty.
But most were just friendless old women,
and that shouldn't be a crime. Others were
rich and were burnt so their property could
come to church -- which is how those Borgias
(who were, by the way, Spaniards not Italians)
that Orrin admires so much got their loot.
The few who actually were attempting to
practice the black arts were either fools or
delusional.
If we prosecuted people for delusions, Ronald
Reagan would have burned at the stake.
I fail to see what interest a society has in tolerating anti-social delusion.
Posted by: oj at December 30, 2002 7:21 PMI agree, but almost all the delusion was on the part of the churchmen. And the Catholics, at least, have not yet given it up. They still exorcise.
Ecrasez l'infame!
Harry, theologically witchcraft and sorcery are completely different from possession by spirits (which is the subject of exorcism), despite the same spirits being possibly the agents supernaturally at hand.
Posted by: Tom Roberts at December 31, 2002 4:08 PM