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such thing as a perfect society exists in the world or ever will.
But the Good Society can and does emerge from time to time, and is
far more likely to exist within the orbit of the Western system than
in any other. Why is this?
To begin with,
consider the historic blend of two valuable but imperfect and distinct
moral/legal systems — the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian
— which together are much more than the sum of their parts.
All of us desire moral order. All of us wish for justice. The chief
problem that faces a civilization is how to translate morality and
justice into a workable system of law. The Greeks took legal concepts
from numerous ancient societies, notably the Medes and Persians,
but they brought to the science of law the spirit of philosophic
inquiry, their own unique gift to humanity. They probed the nature
of justice and the validity of morals, and thus infused law-making
with a new dynamic: the endless quest for truth, viability, and
endurance.
The Romans,
in turn, built on this method, evolving a code that worked effectively
over the world's largest and longest-lasting empire, enduring in
one form or another for two millennia. What the Romans struggled
towards was the notion of rule by law, rather than by mere men,
and this involved the supremacy of a political constitution, which
men, however powerful, were obliged to obey. The attempt ultimately
failed, Rome became an oriental dictatorship of god-emperors, the
rule of law collapsed, and, in due course, so did Roman civilization
itself, in both its Western and Byzantine forms.
However, from
the 5th and 6th centuries onwards, Roman notions of law and its
rule were reinforced and transformed by Judeo-Christianity. The
Jews were as devoted to law as the Romans. They saw the law as God-made,
and under its rule all, from kings and high priests to shepherds,
were equal: That is why the great 1st-century Jewish philosopher,
Philo of Alexandria, called Judaism a "theocratic democracy."
The Christians took over the principle of equality under the moral
law and applied it to both the law codes of the Germanic north,
based upon tribal consultations, and those of the Romance south,
based upon Roman digests. The clergy evolved their own canon law
and, between the 11th and the 16th centuries, there was a struggle
between secular and clerical systems. The result was a felicitous
compromise: neither theocratic law (as in Islamic states), nor wholly
secular law, since the codes recognized natural law (as interpreted
by Christianity) as the basis of all justice.
The rule of
law was not established in the West without conflict. The constitutional
struggle that produced in 1215 the Magna Carta, the first English
Statute of the Realm (still in force), the English Civil War of
1640-60, and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, the American
Revolution of the 1770s and 1780s, producing the first modern written
constitution, and the French Revolution of 1789, leading to the
creation of the Napoleonic law code (both these last, as amended,
still in force) are all episodes in the successful effort to make
even kings and governments subject to the rule of law. The process
continues, the latest salient event being the collapse of the supra-legal
Communist dictatorship in Russia in 1991 and subsequent attempts,
as yet incomplete, to establish the rule of law for the first time
in Russia and its devolved territories.
From this long
history, it has become evident that equality in law cannot be finally
ensured without the mass participation of the public. But it is
important to understand that the rule of law must be established
first before democracy can successfully evolve. That is the great
political lesson of Western civilization. It explains why democracy
has quickly collapsed in all those (mainly Third World) countries
where the rule of law was weak or nonexistent. A notable exception
has been India, which — with all its weaknesses — still
maintains democracy because the rule of law, thanks to the genius
of Macaulay, took root there under British rule.
Where the rule
of law exists, continually reinforced by an evolving democracy,
liberty too takes root. The point was succinctly made by Thomas
Hobbes, who, together with his follower John Locke, was the determining
political philosopher in the evolution of both the British and the
U.S. constitutions. "The silence of the laws is the freedom
of the subject," wrote Hobbes: Where the law does not specifically
prohibit, the citizen is free to do as he pleases. In unfree or
Oriental societies, the assumption is reversed, and the freedom
to do any individual action depends on favor, tradition (as interpreted
by the absolute ruler or his agents), or corruption.
The freedom
enjoyed in Western society under the rule of law and constitutional
government explains both the quality of its civilization and its
wealth. In the early Middle Ages, Islamic societies enjoyed some
freedom in transmuting the Greeks' knowledge and spirit of inquiry,
but this came to an end in the 13th century, which was precisely
the point when the Western university system took off. Where the
quest for knowledge is relatively, and now almost absolutely, unrestrained,
the public benefit will be great, especially where the certainty
of the law ensures that knowledge is rewarded. This is exactly the
combination that is the foundation of wealth-creation.
Society in
the West was establishing a consistent pattern of wealth-making
even in the Middle Ages. From the 15th century, two factors —
the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and of printing from movable
type — were joined by six others, all consequences of the rule
of law and of (virtual) equality under the law. These were the invention
of the legal corporation (later including the limited-liability
company and the trust); the development of a clear legal doctrine
of marriage and inheritance; the invention of freehold in real estate
and of banks operating as sure deposits for liquid wealth (both
serving as the basis for lending and investment in mercantile and
industrial enterprise); the development of copyright law; the inability
of government to confiscate or tax individual property except by
due process; and, finally, the invention of an immense range of
legal devices, from commercial and personal insurance to stock exchanges
(to promote, protect, maximize, and employ savings efficiently).
From these
dozen or so advantages and their interaction, capitalism evolved.
It is not, strictly speaking, an "ism," but a process
of nature, which at a certain state of human development —
the rule of law and a measure of personal freedom being the most
important ingredients — occurs spontaneously, as millions of
ordinary people go about their business in as efficient a manner
as they know how. It is, then, a force of nature, which explains
its extraordinary fecundity, adaptability, and protean diversity.
It is as much a product of Western civilization as the university
and the library, the laboratory and the cinema, relativity theory
and psychotherapy. Coca-Cola and McDonald's are not alternatives
to the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Public Library: They
are all four products of a wealth-creating and knowledge-producing
process based on freedom and legal certainty.
Moreover, because
capitalism is based on human nature, not dogma, it is self-correcting.
The freedom of the market enables these corrections to be made all
the time, to short- and long-term problems. The expression "the
crisis of capitalism" is therefore misleading. Capitalism moves
through continual crises, major and minor, absorbing their lessons
and so continually increasing productivity and living standards
in the long run.
Indeed it is
the protean ability of Western civilization to be self-critical
and self-correcting — not only in producing wealth but over
the whole range of human activities — that constitutes its
most decisive superiority over any of its rivals. And it is protean
not least in its ability to detect what other societies do better,
and incorporate such methods into its own armory. All the other
systems in the world, notably the Japanese, the Chinese, and the
Indian, have learned much from the West in turn, and benefited thereby.
The Islamic world has been the least willing to adopt the West's
fundamental excellences. That is why it remains poor (despite its
wealth of raw materials), unfree, and unhappy. Its states are likely
to have uneasy relations with the West until Islam reforms itself,
embraces the rule of law, introduces its own form of democracy,
and so becomes a protean player in the modern world.
For more Paul Johnson on NRO, see “Relentlessly
and Thoroughly.”
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