Ius & Iustitium welcomes submissions from academics, practicing lawyers, and students interested in the classical legal tradition. The following essay was submitted by Julian G. Waller, Professorial Lecturer in Political Science at George Washington University, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, and a Non-Resident Fellow at Elliott School of International Affairs’ Illiberalism Studies Program. All views are his own and do not represent his employers or affiliated organizations.
Interest in the classical legal tradition and the classical philosophies on political regime and political order from which it emerged have grown significantly, as this very publication outlet can attest. This revival is particularly interesting because until recently the categories and frames of reference central to the classical tradition have been largely outside the mainstream of scholarly work across an array of academic genres, from legal theory to political science and beyond.
Given this, I wanted to invite the readers of I&I’s attention to a recent attempt at melding older understandings of political regime with modern scholarship – thus far still a rare occasion. This summary is an encouragement for those interested in classical political concepts and their relevance to the classical legal tradition to engage with both the promise and pitfalls of this approach to the scholarly study of political order and political regime. Most scholarship today does not consciously rely on classical frameworks for these topics. It is therefore important to understand the difficulty of translating old and new ways of typifying regime, and to take interest whenever such a mixing, or an attempt at application, is undertaken.
Continue reading “Classical Political Forms, the Mixed Regime, and the State of Emergency—Roman, Byzantine, Muscovite?”
