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THIS web site presents a new kind of conservatism,
actually only a new-seeming kind; it is rather the legacy
of the Christian West: Common Law Studies is dedicated
to the proposition that true conservatism lies "Beyond
Whig and Marxist." This brand of conservatism
is dedicated to preserving and carrying forward the legacy
of Western civilization as it really stands, rather than in
either the denatured form of classical liberalism or the perverse
organicism of socialism, social democracy, fascism, communism....
The true nature of Western civilization, which both liberalism
and socialism have striven mightily to abolish, is Christian
and classical, and it is legal: the legacy of citizenship
and liberty under law. Western civilization for centuries grew under the
aegis of church and empire, incorporating the trusts of Israel,
Greece, and Rome, forming a new social order among the Germanic
tribes which had been assimilated into the Roman West, generating
a new way of life incorporating both liberty and authority,
community and society, the importance of the group and the
freedom of the individual, the symbiosis of commutative and
distributive justice. That legacy culminated in the tradition of the Ius
Commune, the Common Law, which ruled the minds of those
across the West involved in the university, the courtroom,
city hall, princely or kingly courts, and anywhere else matters
of law and order and justice were treated. This Common Law
was decentralized, unlegislated, evolved under the influence
of both Roman and Canon Law along with the other legal orders
of the West: feudal law, manorial law, the law Merchant, and
the like. All were brought together in terms of the theological
and philosophical, Christian and classical, ways of thinking
that had been developed by Augustine, Boetius, Isidore of
Seville, Anselm and Aquinas, fleshed out by the Roman lawyers
like Irnerius, Azo, Accursius, and the Canon lawyers like
Gratian. The tradition was consolidated by the great Bartolus
of Saxoferrato and his followers. It reached further heights
and new application in the work of the All of this work was characterized by fidelity to
the church, submission to lawful authority, and a commitment
to expanding the rights of the citizenry, not by revolution
but by amelioration, a progress in virtue which was the only
source of durable freedom. The remembrance of this is now of course lost in
the hazy past of culpable forgetfulness. What we now understand
as the roots of Western freedom is a story of free thinking
triumphing over bigoted superstition, of individual liberty
triumphing over the tyranny of king and priest, of autonomous
values triumphing over repressive restraint. This is the Whig Interpretation of History, and it
is the fundamental legitimating myth of the modern age. Its
basic juridical postulate is natural rights, which provide
the political blank check to do away with everything derived
from the Christian inheritance of liberty under law. The result,
apparently paradoxical but actually rigorously logical, is
the imposition of a tyranny of the political process in which
the winner takes all and the will of the evanescent majority
smashes everything about it of enduring value. This is not just a problem for domestic politics.
It is a universal problem. For history is seamless, and the
progress of the liberal tyranny is of global dimension. Liberalism
has become Globalism, and the fight is now to establish the
principles of the Common Law in the face of the Globalist
Alternative. The
Common Law makes possible a truly transnational world-order
without the threat of a global super-state. The Common Law
establishes the primacy of private law, and the strict subordination
of the state and national sovereignty to the universal law
establishing a private-sector continuum across the globe.
States and nations erect and establish boundaries within this
continuum, but those boundaries remain permeable, they do
not eradicate this continuum. The
Common Law, then, is not just a law order regulating internal
civil affairs; it is a law order inscribed in the fabric of
the creation, a law order which sovereigns are to uphold but
cannot supersede. The Common Law cuts across all internal
legal orders established by sovereign states. It conditions
them and determines them. It may be ignored or consciously
opposed, but it is never eliminated. It
is therefore short-sighted, and, in the current globalist-interventionist
climate, downright dangerous to neglect the transnational
dimension of public affairs and focus only on the domestic
level. For there is taking place massive behind-the-scenes
coordination and cooperation, to direct the affairs of nations
in a specific direction, a civil-law
[note 1] as opposed
to a common-law direction, and this trend needs to be combated.
This web site is one effort to accomplish just that. |
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