Richard Storey
The Uniqueness
of Western Law
A Reactionary Manifesto
Arktos
London 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Arktos Media Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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ISBN
978-1-912975-03-7 (Softcover)
978-1-912975-04-4 (Ebook)
Editing, cover and layout
John Bruce Leonard
Introduction
The following manifesto is presented as a collection of articles, both popular and academic in style. These were published between 2016 and 2017 — a time of significant political change across the Western world. With the rise of nationalism, especially Christian nationalism, in the Visegrád Four and in Austria; with Brexit and the Catalonian struggle for peaceful secession in the EU; and with the election of nationalistic bombast in the form of Donald Trump in the US, etc., this has been a time for reflection on the history of the West, and consideration for its future.
During this time, my own journey has led me to study and reflect on my libertarian beliefs regarding law/politics and their exclusively Western character and point of origin. My greatest influences in producing these articles have been Ricardo Duchesne, professor of historical sociology at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, and Professor Frank van Dun, a natural law theorist associated with the University of Ghent in Belgium.
Prof. Duchesne has produced monumental work on the origins of Western civilisation in the culture of the Indo-European peoples who came to dominate and populate Europe. I find his theory to be superior and, as such, I shamelessly quote from his work throughout my articles. What’s more, his writing sheds invaluable light on my research regarding the origins of Western law, libertarian values and institutions. His influence gave me a newfound respect for the Middle Ages and the world and order from which Western civilisation was built, as well as a guilt-free respect for both genetic and environmental factors in the development of unique cultures.
Prof. van Dun in turn helped me to understand the importance of Christendom in preserving and developing the libertarian system of natural law and social values, on the wealth of which we are still dependent today. Moreover, he was crucial in teaching me the nemesis of this order — modernism, specifically in the form of hyper- or Lutheran individualism.
Naturally, my concerns about the future of Western civilisation were not limited to historic causes of decline. The reason for the contemporary rise of nationalism in Western countries has been mass immigration from Third World countries into the West, and I have similarly been moved by my realisation that such political decisions would be absolutely destructive of Western civilisation for numerous socio-biological reasons. Moreover these are not simply missteps on the part of benevolent public servants (or at least of public servants who wish to seem benevolent), who have been misguided by the status quo of civic (rather than ethnic) nationalism or other liberal democratic values. Rather, these are deliberate acts, motivated by leftist ideologies which are dead set against the principles of natural law and justice and the hierarchical natural order — everything I have come to love about my dying civilisation.
The summary of my conclusions is that European civilisations have developed unique cultures and systems of law, and that to be preserved, they require: a return to the stateless, natural orders of the past; a respect for the importance of ethnic and cultural homogeneity in producing high-trust societies; and the powerful, personalistic cultural technology of Christianity. All alternatives are systems of disorder which, I argue, have not and cannot benefit or sustain the West as a civilisation.
What do I mean when I call this book a ‘reactionary manifesto’? Am I referring to some sort of neo-reactionary traditionalism? Not exactly. Simply put, it is my hope that this book will help inspire restorative and secessionist movements, and the formation of self-governing communities across the West, especially those which strive to preserve Christendom. The audience I wish to inspire with this goal is perfectly identified by Prof. Hans-Hermann Hoppe:
White married Christian couples with children, in particular if they belong also to the class of tax-payers (rather than tax-consumers), and everyone most closely resembling or aspiring to this standard form of social order and organization can be realistically expected to be the most receptive audience of the libertarian message. 1
I believe the most sensible option for the preservation of Western civilisation is the establishment of such bright ‘cities on a hill’ — shining examples or, at least, beacons of the core, historic values of our civilisation; and I believe the above group is the only one which can realistically accomplish this task. I hope this short book will convince you, the reader, of the same.
Part One
Natural Law
Chapter 1
Libertarianism Is Only a Theory of Law
I am tired of both libertarians and their critics misrepresenting my beloved libertarianism by insisting that I am party to some sort of cult which teaches that some unspecified deity has written the non-aggression principle on tablets of stone. I have lost count of the number of times I have had to parrot the most notable libertarian scholars: libertarianism is just a theory of law; it is not an entire ethical system, complete with cultural mores, which must be imposed on everyone. As Lew Rockwell put it, ‘Libertarianism is concerned with the use of violence in society. That is all. It is not anything else. It is not feminism. It is not egalitarianism… It has nothing to say about aesthetics. It has nothing to say about religion or race or nationality or sexual orientation.’
So when people dismiss libertarianism because certain libertarians are cultural Marxists, they do so out of ignorance. Libertarianism has a deontological attitude towards law; that is, in order for there to be certainty and security of private property rights, there must be the rule of law rather than the rule of legislators, and no man must be above the law. The only sense in which libertarians are egalitarian is that they think the law should apply equally to everyone in a given group — but this is equity and not egalitarianism.
This is the great Western heritage. It does not originate with the Anglo-Saxons or the ancient Greeks per se, but rather with the libertarian and egalitarian aristocracies of the Indo-Europeans from whom all the European civilisations are descended. Of course we recognise that not every civilisation had to establish the rule of law or the NAP (non-aggression principle) to function or to avoid a plague of locusts. Rather, libertarianism is part and parcel with the uniqueness of Western law and, therefore, the uniqueness of Western civilisation. But what is that law?
The unique Western attitude to law and its overwhelming success, according to Sinha, make it the fundamental and central trait of the West. The reason for making the law the king of kings lay in the higher degree of rationalism in the West with respect to other parts of the globe; if a law has to apply to all people in all situations, what social norms do just that? The only such ‘right’ we can determine is the negative right to be left alone in your person and property — private property rights. The nature of law, then, demands that it rule, lest we must submit to the unreliable whim of an individual or group which is legislated and imposed on us as if by divine power.
Naturally, the libertarian and egalitarian aristocracies of the Indo-Europeans produced civilisations which already acknowledged this, as the king could
not violate the private property rights of another free man for fear of retribution from other powerful lords on the one hand, and the loss of honour, glory and respect from one’s kinsmen on the other. Therefore, this rational and ruling law was not just discovered, but was studied and refined in its natural environment — the West.
So, the next time you think of dismissing libertarianism because you are repulsed by some open-borders supporter, some cucked feminist or someone who insists the world must fall before the NAP, remember that you can simply dismiss these people as ignorant without perforce dismissing libertarianism. What’s more, if you understand that there is a difference between law and morality (the customs of a culture), and if you love Western civilisation and the rule of law, you are a libertarian!
Chapter 2
The Uniqueness of Western Law
When accordingly it is inquired, whence is evil, it must first be inquired, what is evil, which is nothing else than corruption, either of the measure, or the form, or the order, that belong to nature.
— St. Augustine
The study of Western Civilisation has been all but eradicated. This was no accident, but rather an aggressive policy of leftist academe which has used exclusionary tactics to dominate and pervert the culture and purpose of our universities since the 1960s and 70s.2 But for us students, driven underground, Western history is the greatest treasure trove of almost every faculty. Not the least part of this treasure is natural law.
This unique philosophy of law so encapsulated the spirit of the West that the late Prof. Surya P. Sinha could describe law as ‘the most central principle of [the] social organization’ of Western civilisation alone. ‘This fact explains that most…theories about law have issued from the Western culture’.3 Prof. Sinha even declared law itself to be a non-universal phenomenon of the West, other civilisations developing little more than ‘principles of moral life which are not law’.4
The story of natural law is a fascinating one; Prof. Ricardo Duchesne draws from decades of definitive scholarship on the uniqueness of the West to crystallise the ‘essential message’ from across the social sciences: ‘the rise of the West is the story of the realization of humans who think of themselves as self-determining and therefore accept as authoritative only those norms and institutions that can be seen to be congenial with their awareness of themselves as free and rational agents.’5 The origins of this law lie at the heart of Western civilisation, yet they are lost to history and shrouded in confusion. I would therefore like to clarify the environment in which natural law developed and the consequences of its loss.
I will discuss:
The Indo-European, cultural origins of natural law;
The Roman, statist confusion of natural law; and
The Church’s rightful title as successor in this tradition.
The Origins of Natural Law
I propose that natural law concepts germinated in the aristocratic culture of the Indo-European environment of ancient Greece and were nurtured by Christianity (a thoroughly Hellenistic religion); this explains why the Church found many similar concepts of kingship in the medieval Indo-European tribes of Northern Europe, particularly the rule of law and the right of resistance against tyrants. This allowed for the transition to and development of natural law, as well as the Church’s creation of the first proper system of law in the world.
The classical natural law school of jurisprudence was concerned with the use of reason to discover the natural order of the world, particularly the world of men. This involved discovering universal rights which, by definition, cannot be alienated from anyone by anyone, thus rendering everyone subject to this natural justice. Thus, the natural law rules as king of kings, rather than governing coercively as the legislated whim of a despot. But natural law was no accidental discovery; Prof. Sinha noted,
the inquiring mind of the Greeks…failed to find an agreement among the priestly experts of the Middle East on fundamental questions [and so] they, in Ionia, began thinking about these questions themselves…. Instead, they used natural law to explain the phenomena.6
The universe then was considered ordered, perhaps even controllable — not the incomprehensible and whimsical sum of actions of untouchable gods. Natural phenomena had natural causes, according to pre-Socratic Thales of Miletus, and the same philosophy which saw the cosmos as a natural order applied to human societies too. This created environments less hospitable to those who would set themselves up as the sole source of social order; indeed, some of the Greek poleis were governed by the rule of law.7
Sinha concludes that the ancient Greek’s desire to live ‘for his own sake… marks the emergence of individualism.’ However, he asserts that this individualistic rejection of oriental despots and unquestionable sage wisdom originates merely in the environmental factors of the Greek archipelago, in the shadow of the collapsed Mycenaean Kingdom.8 Whilst such thinking is typical in today’s academe, Prof. Duchesne’s theory is more thorough:
[T]he individualism of the Homeric heroes came originally from the Indo-European chieftains who took over the Greek mainland in the second millennium, and founded Mycenaean culture. [Thus] the primordial roots of Western uniqueness must be traced back to the aristocratic warlike culture of the Indo-European speakers who spread throughout Europe during the 4th and 3rd millennium [B.C.].9
The uniqueness of the Indo-European egalitarian aristocracy was the freedom (and even encouragement) of individuals to strive for personal recognition — a Nietzschean ‘restless ethos’ in which berserkers flaunted their fearlessness in combat to earn respect and nobility.10 The aristocracy (from the Greek word for excellent or virtuous being — ‘aristos’) were thus the nobles of a society whose virtues were martial and masculine, as evidenced by the brotherhoods/war-bands of free men. The individualistic nature of these ‘free aristocrats’ was not that of ‘an autocrat who treats the upper classes as unequal servants but as “peers” who exist in a spirit of equality as warriors of noble birth.’11
Naturally, the mainspring of Western Civilisation’s concern for liberty was the Indo-European culture of self-asserting, audacious individuals who continually competed against whomever would create a territorial monopoly of judicial power, thereby keeping not just despotic rule but any state-creating activity at bay. It was the inheritance of this ethos which caused the ancient Greeks to see the Oriental practice of prostration before the ‘Great King’ as ‘symbolic confirmation of the great divergence between Eastern and Hellenic notions of individualism and political authority.’12 Most significant, however, was the recounting of the individual heroic deeds of the aristos by the priestly class.
In depicting heroic deeds, the Indo-European spirit was internalised by the intellectual class of priests. This produced a highly competitive philosophical environment — ‘the miracle of Greece’ — which drove the aristos to greater feats of rational self-mastery, as Prof. Duchesne expounds:
From Homer on, new standards of arête [virtue] began to evolve away from a strictly martial conception. Odysseus, the central character of the Odyssey, is seen to create meaning in his life not by risking his life in battles, but in his roles of spouse, parent, and joyful companion to his friends….
The ultimate basis of Greek civic and cultural life was the aristocratic ethos of individualism and competitive conflict which pervaded IE culture. Ionian literature was far from the world of berserkers but it was nonetheless just as intensively competitive. New works of drama, philosophy, and music were expounded in the first-person form as an adversarial or athletic contest in the pursuit of truth… The search for the truth was a free-for-all with each philosopher competing for intellectual prestige in a polemical tone that sought to discredit the theories of others while promoting one’s own.13
So, the Western concept of virtue (from virtus, the Roman, aristocratic concept of manliness) evolved from attributes associated with martial valour to those of the rational and civil man. In contrast to the violent
hubris of Achilles, a new virtue emerged — ‘Sophrosyne, referring to moderation or self-restraint’.
This virtue of moderation, it is argued, was suitable to the life of democratic discussion in the polis, which required self-control and ‘sound mind.’ This new virtue challenged the elitist view of the heroic age as a time when the social order was under the spell of mighty and turbulent aristocrats thirsting for glory and plunder without consideration for the pain and hardship they brought onto the world.14
Basically, the Greeks internalised the restless, conquering Indo-European spirit; philosophy and poetry began to depict their inner battles as well as outer. High competition in understanding the complexity of human reason, the psyche and society had begun. Rather than simply overpowering the world around them, and even the gods, man turned inward to conquer himself, producing the self-civilising, trustworthy proto-gentleman who pursued Plato’s four cardinal virtues — prudence, justice, temperance and courage.
The Roman Confusion of Natural Law
Natural law was famously developed further by the Roman lawyer, Cicero, but, whilst Roman civil law was mostly privately developed, the various Roman systems of government were not consistent examples of natural law in practice. Roman law developed primarily between the first century B.C. and the third century A.D. and comprised private and public law. Rothbard describes the difference between the two: ‘Private law developed the theory of the absolute right of private property and of freedom of trade and contract. While Roman public law theoretically allowed state interference in the life of the citizen, there was little such interference in the late republic and early empire.’ Since, as Prof. Jenõ Szmodis notes, this ‘duality of legal positivism versus natural law... is not known so sharply in other legal cultures,’ the question arises: how did these two conflicting systems of governance develop together, as one legal system, in Rome, but not elsewhere in Europe?
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