h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's significant that the founding statement of the British Conservative Party is still as pertinent today as it was in 1790. Of course, events such as the execution of King Charles and the Terror following the French Revolution inevitably produce long-lasting ripples in history but Burke's ability to articulate the significance of the events in Paris almost parallels the way Shakespeare provided the language to express the change from medieval to modern social structures.

And, of course, the problem of how to allow change in a democratic society is still with us. It will be extremely interesting to see how the US Constitution with its carefully crafted balance of powers copes with a transition to a Trump presidency in comparison to the chaotic, unwritten British system coping with the results of the EU referendum by depending on the weight of tradition and history.

Well put. I agree: I think the US Constitution is a brilliant piece of work (yay, Roger Sherman), and provides us with the best chance of surviving the current crisis. It was the greatest advantage the colonies had over poor France when it came to looking for a way to implement the goal of 'liberty, equality, and fraternity' without a bloodbath. And it may help us out of this mess.

At least, that's what I'm hoping for.

I’d like to keep this conversation live as it should remain relevant for the next two years at least, so here’s part of an essay (minus the references, to make it easier to read) written for a class on 17th century English political thought at the time when the Maastricht conference was taking place in 1991/2:

Henry Parker’s defence of Parliament and its influence on modern politics.

Henry Parker was born in 1604, the younger son of a Sussex knight, and was educated at Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn. During the Civil War he was secretary to Essex’s army and between 1646 and 1649 he was secretary to the Merchant Adventurer’s Company in Hamburg. He died in Ireland in 1652 while serving as secretary to the English army. Throughout the period that began with the calling of the Long Parliament in November 1640 and ended with the coming to power of Oliver Cromwell following the execution of Charles I in January 1649 Parker published a constant stream of pamphlets supporting the Parliamentary cause. In so doing, according to Margaret Atwood Judson, he “advanced for the first time in English history a theory of Parliamentary sovereignty.”

However, Parker was not a political theorist as we would understand it today but a lawyer formulating a defence for specific events during a period of extreme political crises and so, although his ideas “lived on in the realm of thought and eventually became the accepted theory of the British government”, they can be seen to contain serious logical defects in the light of the present debate about Parliamentary sovereignty in connection with the European Community.

With hindsight it is possible to see that the harmonious or balanced medieval constitution was already beginning to breakdown by the 17th century. This particularly revealed itself in two key areas: the relationship between Church and Government and the centralization of power, especially in the question of the king and his control of Parliament and the courts. The first of these areas became important because the independence of the English church from Rome inevitably resulted in the king becoming the temporal head of the church, a situation for which there was no precedent. The urgency of ecclesiastical questions such as this and the growing independence of the new middle class began to throw the constitution out of its medieval balance.

Prior to this there had been no need to examine the constitution critically although there had been some attempts to describe it analytically such as Sir Thomas Smith’s De republica Anglorum of 1583 (sub-titled The maner of government or policie of the Realme of Englande, compiled by the honourable man Thomas Smyth, Doctor of the civil lawes, Knight, and Principall Secretarie unto the two most worthie Princes, King Edwarde the sixt, and Queene Elizabeth) in which he failed to recognise any difference between making and interpreting law, and never contemplated any conflict between parliament and monarchy. For Smith, as G.H. Sabine points out, supremacy resides in the realm, and its law, which assigns to the king and his various courts their proper powers, and the harmonious co-operation of all these powers was everywhere assumed.

This view was understandable as part of orthodox medieval thought that, since Aristotelianism had been absorbed into the Dogma through Aquinas, saw the individual as functional, defined by his place in the social structure. This structure was informed by a teleological conception of God derived from Aristotle’s notion of entelechy and it was this notion that provided the main target for those who followed in the wake of Luther’s Reformation. As Descartes reasoned, “For since I now know that my own nature is very weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge. And for this reason alone I consider the customary search for final causes to be totally useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating the impenetrable purposes of God.”

Similarly, Parker also dismisses the idea of a final cause. In the Observations upon some of his Majesties late Answers and Expresses of July 2nd 1642, he writes that he is going to consider both the efficient and the final causes of Regal and Parliamentary power. However, he argues “thus we see that power is but secondary and derivative in Princes, the fountain and efficient cause is the people… As for the final cause of Regal Authority, I did not find anything in the King’s papers denying, that the same people is the final, which is the efficient cause of it.” For Parker, as for Descartes and Hobbes, there is only efficient, that is, mechanical, causation whether they are considering physical, social or psychological phenomena.

Inextricably linked with this view is the idea that if the individual is not defined by the cosmic order, then the social structure must be defined in terms of the individual, a view that is the basis for the idea of a social contract. Thus Parker argues, in a similar fashion to Hobbes, that “Man being depraved by the fall of Adam grew so untame and uncivil a creature, that the Law of God written in his breast was not sufficient to restrain him from mischief, or to make him sociable, and therefore without some magistracy to provide new orders, and to judge of old, and to execute according to justice, no society could be upheld.”

The outcome of this view is that, if this cosmic order is merely an ethical fiction or is permanently beyond the reach of human knowledge, then there needs to be something overseeing society that is accessible to reason and can provide answers to moral and political questions. To begin with Parker found this “something” in the notion of a supreme law; in his first pamphlet, The Case of Shipmoney briefly discoursed published November 3rd 1640, he argues that the King’s prerogative must be derived from law rather than the other way round and this law is salus populi, the “supreame of all human laws… God dispences with many of his lawes, rather than salus populi shall bee endangered, and that iron law which wee call necessity itselfe, is but subservient to this law: for rather than a Nation shall perish, anything shall be held necessary, and legal by necessity.” However, after the failure to resolve the political battle for control of the militia during the winter of 1641-2, it had become clear, as Judson argues, that “with the breakdown of the constitution there came also in the realm of thought the dissolution of those ideas and basic assumptions so inextricably associated with that constitution. The lack of outward unity between King and Parliament was only a manifestation that trust and mutual confidence among the parts of the body politic had disappeared. For over a year Parliament had attacked the King by talking of the validity and sanctity of law. Now, those same laws, which had been effective because of mutual trust, seemed hollow and lifeless.” Thus it became clear to Parker that there had to be some final power to interpret the law and maintain order. As Sabine notes, “It was only slowly and under the stress of circumstances that anyone abandoned the familiar idea of harmony and adopted the novel idea of supremacy.”

Parker argued that only Parliament could fulfil this role. In the Observations he investigated the sources of power of both the King and Parliament and discovered that, for both, it came from the people. However, for Parker this gives two entirely different results; the King, as a separate estate of the realm, was capable of misusing this power. Using an almost Lockean argument against absolute monarchy, Parker believed that although the King could provide the order needed for society, absolute monarchy was incompatible with both the freedom and the safety of his subjects and was, therefore, inconceivable as a form of government. At the same time he saw Parliament being not only capable of providing order but also being synonymous with the freedom of the people. As with most parliamentarians at the time, Parker did not recognize any difference between Parliament and People, perhaps because of the extremely limited franchise of the time, so that in the pamphlet Some Few Observations upon his Majesties late Answers to the Declaration or Remonstrance of the Lords and Commons, published May 23rd 1642, he writes, “The judgement of the major part in Parliament is the sence of the whole Parliament, and that which is the sence of the whole Parliament is the judgement of the whole Kingdom; and that which is the judgement of the whole Kingdome, is more vigorous, and sacred, and unquestionable; and further beyond all appeal, than that which is the judgement of the King alone, or of the King, with any other inferior Clandestine Councell.”

This does not make Parker a champion of the sort of democracy that most people would recognise today; going back to the Observations of July 2nd 1642, he argues that “Parliaments have the same efficient cause as monarchies, if not higher, for in truth, the whole Kingdom is not so properly the Author as the essence itself of Parliaments.” This leads Parker to conclude that Parliamentary power, although necessarily an arbitrary power, cannot be dangerous because “every State has an Arbitrary power over itself… if the State intrusts this to one man or to a few there may be danger in it, but the Parliament is neither one nor few, it is indeed the State itself.”

It seems, then, that Parker came to understand that the conflict and violence of the 1640s arose because law and authority had become separated and that law could only exist in an ordered state. In the Contra Replicant, his Complaint to His Majestie, published January 31st 1643, Parker writes of Parliament as securing the “being” of the common-wealth before it could apply itself to the “well-being” of the common-wealth; that “reason of State” is “something more sublime and imperiall than Law: it may be rightly said, that the Statesman begins where the Lawyer ceaseth, for when warre has silenced Law, as it often does; policy is to be observed as the only true Law, a kind of dictatorial power is to be allowed to her; whatsoever has any right to defend itself in time of danger is to resort to policy instead of Law.”

By 1647 he had articulated this view to the point where he could write, in one of his rejoinders to the Cordial of Judge David Jenkins, “It is not generally lawful for me to judge my neighbour unheard, or to execute my neighbour unjudged, yet if I find my neighbour engaged in Treason as “Fawkes” was, and ready with his match to give fire to such a train of powder as he had laid, and have no other means to prevent him, I may run upon him with my sword and make myself both his Judge and Executioner. Now if Master Jenkins will say that such extraordinary acts as these are warranted by law, I shall comply with him, yet I conceive ‘tis not upon any particular law, but upon the general law of public safety that these warrants are grounded upon, and if I am not mistaken ‘tis rather policy than law that admits of such strange deviations from the common practice and rule of Law.”

Towards the end of the Long Parliament Parker seemed to be anticipating the transition from ascending theory arguments to the idea of Providence which became prominent during the Engagement controversy when, in January 1650 the Rump Parliament decided all men over the age of eighteen would take an Engagement promising to be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England as established without a King or House of Lords. He concluded the same rejoinder by asserting that, “Treason ever produces fatal and final destruction to the offender, and never attains to its desired ends and wish that all men for this cause would serve God, honour the King and have no company with the seditious. Yet let me add this, we have neighbours now in the Netherlands that lately have revolted from their Master, and yet prosper and flourish beyond all in Europe. The justice of their revolt may be questioned by some, but I, for divers reasons, do not question it, and one amongst the rest is this, of the Lord Coke’s, because I think an act merely treasonable cannot prosper.”

However, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, the “majority of the Members of Parliament, who at first accidentally launched the revolutionary movement and were afterwards borne along or consumed by it, were not clear-headed thinkers…they were not thinkers or even dreamers, but plain, conservative, untravelled, country gentlemen whose passion came not from radical thought or systematic doctrine but from indignation…indignation which the electioneering ability of a few great lords…had contrived to turn into a political force, and which no later leaders were able wholly either to harness or to contain.”

Their views, largely derived from the protestant Reformation, point to the later development of liberal democracy; Parker’s idea of Providence is a close relative of the consequentialism found in the nineteenth century utilitarians, the notion of government as a neutral umpire is essential to pluralism and the idea of a necessarily arbitrary power can be seen as a political expression of modern scientific reason. Given these likenesses it is easy to oversimplify political developments through history; as Trevor-Roper points out, “Those who see the Calvinists, or the Puritans, as “the Moderns” insensibly find themselves arguing that it was Calvinism, or Puritanism, which fathered modern science and led to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The ideas of the Enlightenment, they sometimes seem to say, were the secularization of the ideas of Calvinism or “radical Protestantism.” This view is commonly expressed by Marxist historians, but it finds favour with some Scottish writers who see it realised in their own country. But the relationship of intellectual movements to religious systems is, I believe, more complex and more variable than this.”

Thus, as Judson has argued, Parker’s conception of Parliamentary sovereignty developed as a response to a particular period of crisis and, so its influence on later views and different crises has created contradictions leading to problems that, for example, allowed Lord Hailsham to describe the government of Jim Callaghan between 1976 and 1979 as an “elective dictatorship”. The situation now is that Westminster is attempting to maintain a façade of sovereignty, since the European Communities Act (1972) specifies that Community laws take precedence over existing British laws and, consequently, the Maastricht debate must result in the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty being examined more closely and either formalised in a written constitution or dispensed with completely.

Having just watched Joe Biden's inspirational acceptance speech, I think the Constitution looks like it's maintained enough order to make sure the USA recovers its balance after the temporary wobble of the past four years.

Thanks, that's what we all hope, as well.