It is always tempting to look for our roots in ancient Athens … tempting, but wrong. The ancient Athenian “democracy” in the agora was, to be charitable, just mob rule, and the mob was incited, most often bought and paid for, by a series of loud mouthed bullies and celebrities ~ so, I can hear some of you saying, not much different from Canada and the USA in the 21st century, right? Now and again, Thucydides, for example, the loud mouth bully also had some brains and good ideas, but, more often than not they were just unqualified pretty boys and clowns.
The Romans gave us something a wee, tiny bit better: rule by law. But the Romans are, rightfully, often best remembered as engineers and they “engineered”, rigged, their political system to ensure that while there were, indeed, laws, to protect and serve the interests of the common people, the plebeians, the system ensured that no law could stand if it ever threatened the privileges of the patricians ~ Rome’s equivalent of our Laurentian elites.
The first time we find something that I think we can properly claim as a “root” of our, modern, liberal democracy is in Anglo Saxon England where, somewhat haphazardly to be sure, a council, called the Witan, advised and constrained and sometimes even elected the monarch for about 400 years, until the Norman conquest. The Witan (members of the Witenaġemot ~ the “meeting of wise men”) were the first privy council, the prototype of modern, Australian, British and Canadian cabinet government.
Next, in Norman times, came Magna Carta, echoes of which can still be heard in our great common law. Magna Carta itself was not as important as two men who, in their turn, gave it life. King John had no difficulty in persuading the Pope to disallow Magna Carta but the British barons actually went into open revolt and, first, William Marshal, acting as Earl Marshal of England and regent for the boy King Henry III, traded Magna Carta for an independent exchequer, and then Simon de Montfort, acting for the barons against the grown King Henry III, forced Magna Carta and parliamentary supremacy on to England.
Ted Campbell, “Our Conservative Roots”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-03-05.
January 22, 2019
QotD: From Athenian democracy to the Magna Carta
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