postmodern putin’s Reviews > The Roots of American Order > Status Update

For political and civil laws are not abstractly ordained or agreed upon at any one moment in history: instead, laws slowly grow out of men's experience with one another--out of social customs and habits--as, one may add, the common law of England developed.

As Montesquieu points out, 'When a people have pure and regular manners, their laws become simple and natural.'

Man is rational; but also man is rebellious and depraved, and his evil impulses cannot be controlled by the Law Rational alone. If men are to live in society, there must be provided checks upon their wills and appetites. Therefore men have developed the Law Positive, that is, law enforced by the commonwealth. To set aside that positive law would be to ruin all civil social order.

Christianity prescribes no especial form of politics. The Church has coexisted with monarchies, autocracies, aristocracies, oligarchies, republics, and democracies. Yet if Christian belief be general among a people, then any political domination is affected by Christian teachings about the moral order. That moral order works upon the political order.

Like Solon, Plato intended to write a long fable about legendary Atlantis; like Solon, he never did write it. Yet there existed beyond the Atlantic an unvisited land, after all, and it is more strange than any of Plato's myths that Plato's apprehension of order and justice should be a living influence among the people of that land, 24 centuries after the mystical philosopher's soul departed from Athens.