Political Order and Political Decay Read Free Page A

surrounding society. In Europe, this problem was solved on a social rather than a political level: early in the Middle Ages, the Catholic church changed the rules of inheritance to make it much more difficult for kin groups to pass resources down to their extended families. As a result, extended kinship among the Germanic barbarian tribes dissolved within a generation or two of their conversion to Christianity. Kinship was ultimately replaced by a more modern form of social relationship based on legal contract, known as feudalism.
    THE RULE OF LAW
    The rule of law, understood as rules that are binding even on the most politically powerful actors in a given society, has its origins in religion. It is only religious authority that was capable of creating rules that warriors needed to respect. Religious institutions in many cultures were essentially legal bodies responsible for interpreting a set of sacred texts and giving them moral sanction over the rest of society. Thus in India, the Brahmin class of priests was understood to be higher in authority than the Kshatriyas, the warriors who held actual political power; a raja or king would have to seek legitimation from a Brahmin before he could rightly rule. In Islam as well, the law (sharia) was presided over by a separate hierarchy of scholars known as the ulama; a network of qadis or judges did the routine work of administering religious law. Though early caliphs united political and religious authority in the same person, in other periods of Islamic history the caliph and sultan were separate individuals, and the former could act as a constraint on the latter.
    The rule of law was most deeply institutionalized in Western Europe, due to the role of the Roman Catholic church. Only in the Western tradition did the church emerge as a centralized, hierarchical, and resource-rich political actor whose behavior could dramatically affect the political fortunes of kings and emperors. The central event marking the autonomy of the church was the investiture conflict that began in the eleventh century. This clash pitted the church against the Holy Roman Emperor, over the question of the latter’s interference in religious matters. In the end, the church won the right to appoint its own priests and bishops, and emerged as the guardian of a revived Roman law based on the sixth-century Corpus Juris Civilis or Justinian Code. England developed an equally strong but different legal tradition: the Common Law emerged after the Norman Conquest out of the law of the king’s court. There it was promoted less by the church than by early monarchs who used their ability to dispense impersonal justice as a means of cementing their legitimacy.
    Thus in Western Europe, law was the first of the three major institutions to emerge. China never developed a transcendental religion; perhaps for this reason, it never developed a true rule of law. There, the state emerged first, and up to the present day law has never existed as a fundamental constraint on political power. The sequence was reversed in Europe: law preceded the rise of the modern state. When European monarchs aspired to behave like Chinese emperors from the late sixteenth century on and create modern, centralized absolutist states, they had to do so against the backdrop of an existing legal order that limited their powers. The result was that few European monarchs ever acquired the concentrated powers of the Chinese state, despite aspirations to do so. Only in Russia, where the Eastern Church was always subordinated to the state, did such a regime emerge.
    DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY
    The last of the three sets of institutions to emerge was democratic accountability. The central mechanism of accountability, the parliament, evolved out of the feudal institution of estates, variously known as Cortes, Diet, sovereign court, zemskiy sobor , or, in England, Parliament. These institutions represented the elites in society—the upper nobility,