In his mini-treatise On the Government of a City, the great Italian lawyer-commentator Bartolus (Bartolo de Sasseferrato) begins with a fairly conventional typology of the six regime-types of classical constitutional theory. The city may be ruled by the many, the people; by the few, the optimates; or by one man. Any of these forms of rule may or may not be tyrannical. We thus have six categories, named respectively polity or regimen ad populum (good rule by the many) and democracy (bad or, in Bartolus’ preferred term, “perverse” rule by the many); aristocracy (good rule by the few) and oligarchy (bad); kingship (good rule by one) and tyranny (bad).
Continue reading “Monstrous Government”Month: January 2021
Joe Biden’s Orders and the Common Good
In his first few days in office, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. has issued thirty executive orders and other actions. This number, without context, is hard to interpret. However, Biden’s willingness to use executive orders at the very beginning of his administration is unparalleled in recent history. In Donald Trump’s first month in office, he issued four. In Barack Obama’s first month, he issued eight. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton each issued two. George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan each issued one. While conservatives—especially common-good conservatives—will object to the substantive content of many of Biden’s orders, they ought to take Biden’s first few days in office as a model for future administrations.
Continue reading “Joe Biden’s Orders and the Common Good”Magín Ferrer and the Fundamental Law of the Spanish Monarchy
Ernest Renan (author of a blasphemous Life of Jesus) once quipped that “hereditary monarchy is a political conception so profound that it is not within the reach of every intelligence to comprehend it.” Indeed, the doctrine of Christian monarchy was the crown jewel of classical public law. In order to introduce our readers to it, Ius & Iustitium presents here a translation of an excerpt from Fr. Magín Ferrer, O. de M.’s Fundamental Laws of the Spanish Monarchy (1843). It is a lucid and brief exposition of this theory from the pen of one of its great exponents.
Introduction
Magín Ferrer (1792-1853), a friar of the Royal and Military Order of Our Lady of Mercy, was one of the early writers—both doctor and pamphleteer—of the Carlist cause, the longest-living Catholic counter-revolutionary and integralist movement of the past two centuries.1 Carlism traces its origins to the break in 1833 of the Spanish royal house, when the death of Ferdinand VII pitted two lines, the agnate and the feminine, against each other. The former was centered on the late King’s brother, the infante Don Carlos María Isidro (King Charles V), whose rights were founded on the old laws of the realm, and the latter on the infanta Isabel (called Isabel II), the King’s daughter, and on her mother, María Cristina of the Two Sicilies. The followers of Don Carlos, Carlists, were the collection of anti-liberal, traditional forces of Spain, enemies of both the liberalism of the Cortes of Cádiz of 1812 and of the French-style absolutism of some reactionaries. They traced their intellectual and moral roots back to the principles of the ancient Catholic Monarchy. The followers of Isabel, the Isabelinos (or Cristinos, for her cunning mother), were their opponents: the forces of Spanish liberalism and their “conservative” enablers.
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