Today - June 15 - has been Magna Carta Day, 798 years since King John was forced to sign a document which for the first time recognised - incredibly imperfectly - the right of people below the seat of power to have some influence over how they were to be governed:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/occupy-runnymede-six-reasons-why-british-establishment-hates-magna-carta

Eight hundred years. We don't really realise how rare it was at the time and for centuries afterwards - power invariably came from the top, from kings, emperors, popes, caliphs, sultans, princes, tsars. The notion that underlings should have any say, any say at all, was out of the question. Ideologies and religions bolstered this notion of top-down power, with the emperor/pope/tsar/caliph gaining his authority from the various gods. Thus religion was used to sanction top-down power.

All the more remarkable when the first flickers of what came to be known much later as the Enlightenment, that some of those thinkers had the audacity to suggest that power really might have to come from below, from the people - that sovereignty, a republic, democracy itself could only come into being with the will of the people, all of the people, men and women, black and white, regardless of class or ethnicity.

Perhaps we still can't get our heads around what a reversal this meant in who had the right to rule, where power rested and what was the function of ordinary people:

* from above with a ruler of whatever name, bolstered by his god of whatever name,

OR

* from below, from the people, from the masses, with NO god but with the authority of their own numbers.

[TBC]

[contd]

In a political system emanating from a king or sultan or emperor, whoever has the power dictates what can be done and what can’t, what is right and what is wrong, and debate about and development of these concepts really can barely get off the ground. Political philosophy is stunted, crippled. Characteristically of many authoritarian systems, their architecture and engineering projects are often grandiose and imposing.

But in a system freely chosen by the people, no matter how fractious or imperfect it may be, notions of right and wrong, good and bad, can be teased out and elaborated. In that sense, democratic rule, by the people, from below, allows, in fact can't stifle, a genuine flowering of notions of freedom and justice and equality.

So three cheers for de Montfort or whoever it was who forced King John to begin the long and tortuous process of recognising the right of the people to rule themselves, each other - for the people, not some one person or mythical person, to be sovereign.

I wonder when the process can begin in places like China or Islamist societies. In eight hundred years ? I hope not.

Joe

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

Yes, the Magna Carta is a document that marked a
decisive step forward in the development of
constitutional government in England. In later
centuries, much of the rest of the world also
benefited from it, because many other democratic
countries followed English law in creating their
own governments.

King John was forced to grant many rights to the
English aristocracy. The ordinary Englishman gained
little. English barons forced the king to approve
the charter in June, 1215. However, it is an error
to say that the Magna Carta guaranteed individual
liberties to all people. In later centuries, it
became a model for those who demanded democratic
government and individual rights for all.

In its own time however, the greatest value of Magna
Carta was that it placed the king under the law, and
decisively checked royal power.

Lexi, my darling,

Nobody in their right minds would suggest that "the Magna Carta guaranteed individual liberties to all people."

The point is, my dear friend, that the signing opened the door to the notion that not all power resided in the king, as sovereign, that the senior aristocrats, the chief earls and dukes of the Normans, had SOME power over their own affairs. And yes, it took many hundreds of years to slowly, slowly, through rebellions and wars and splits with the Vatican, not to mention the Civil War, for the monarch to recognise the supremacy of the parliament, and retreat back into the royal castle, as a 'constitutional' monarch.

And yes, that whole process got corrupted very quickly, but gradually, especially in the nineteenth century, the franchise -the recognition of the right of 'ordinary' people to be the sovereign of their own domain, state, nation - gradually this notion permeated through British society, imperfectly, never totally, and with many back-steps - but painfully, the notion that the people should be the sovereigns, not the kings or emperors or sultans, has become more accepted.

It's been a messy business. But I suppose we can say, in 2013, that we've made a start in some parts of the world, although the process is almost always going to be fraught with corruption, incompetence and double-dealing - but it's still better than the systems which ultimately rely on top-down authority, using the authority of the Book, the Party, some Utopian (i.e. fascist) theory or other, the Beloved Leader, 'speaking in the name of the people', etc., etc.

No, No matter how messy it may be, we have to support democratic, bottom-up, systems, as best we can, in a very compromised world.

That's life, that's society, that's us, my dear Lexi :)

Love,

Joe

Dear Joe,

An interesting topic.
Thank You.

When John became king in 1199, he abused his power.
He demanded more military service from the feudal class
than did the kings before him. He sold royal positions to
the highest bidders. He increased taxes without obtaining
the consent of the barons, which was contrary to feudal
custom. John's courts decided cases according to his wishes,
not according to the law. People who lost cases had to pay
crushing penalties.

In 1213, a group of barons and church leaders met at St Albans
near London. They called for a halt to the king's injustices
and drew up a list of rights they wanted John to grant them.
Twice King John refused to grant these rights. After the
second time, the barons raised an army to force the king
to meet their demands. John saw that he could not defeat the
army, and so he agreed to the articles on June 15, 1215.
Four days later, the articles were engrossed (written out in
legal form) as a royal charter. Copies of the charter were
distributed throughout the kingdom.

The Magna Carta contained 63 articles, most of them pledged
the king to uphold feudal law. These articles chiefly
benefited the barons and other members of the feudal class.

Some articles that in 1215 applied only to the feudal class
later became important to all the people.

Who would have thought that much
later, such articles were used to support the argument that no
law should be made or tax raised without the consent of
England's Parliament (the lawmaking body that represents all
the people).

Today in our Representative Democracies we have restraints on
government power. These restraints, expressed in widely
shared norms and values, set limits that public officials
dare not violate. These underlying assumptions about the
"rules of the game" are an invisible but vital part of any
democratic nation. Democracy as we've learned over the
many years is best served if there are institutional checks
on the power of the state.

Interesting thread, Joe. The Magna Carta was of course not an example of a "bottom up" administrative approach. It retained the existing structures in every way, as far as I understand it, but it codified the relationship between the Crown, the people and the land, which was a big step from Crown omnipotency.

It was one of the first examples of social engineering and it came from the top down. The Barons were not an oppressd labouring class after all and freemen were bourgeois in the terms of the day and even so they were only included because the Barons needed the support of the cities in their fight with the Crown.

It was certainly important and it did limit the King's authority, but mostly theoretically rather than in practice.

The French Revolution was the first real modern bottom-up social restructuring from a feudal aristocracy and it adopted an even more oppressively regulated structure than the Court of the Sun King, while the church retained it's position of social eminence.

I suspect there's more to this thread than meets the eye, Joe. I've been discussing the idea of an generalised social/economic/thermodynamic model to explain societal organisation and I think you see an implication of social control and a limit to self-determination, which is certainly possible and in a world run by process-obsessed managerialists quite likely.

On the other hand, it could also imply personal freedom unthinkable in our rigidly regulated and heavily oliced 21st century edition of the areligious Westminster free-market state. As models improve the degrees of freedom to behave unpredictably increase.

It is all down to working out what's important to most of us and how to make the important things easy and refining that understanding over time while limiting the capacity of the outliers to cause trouble.

I think that indivuality is somewhat overrated, in the sense that we really aren't all that individual for the most part. Despite having no barrier to doing something different, I'll bet that everybody here did the same sort of routine things today. Do you feel oppressed?