Ius & Iustitium is pleased to present this guest post by Ricardo Calleja, lecturer in ethics at the University of Navarre. This is the first part in a series. The second part may be found here.
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! Sapere aude! ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.” (Kant, What is Enlightenment?).
The project of the Enlightenment can be summed up as the rejection of authority. In particular, the mediating role of authorities in conveying truths, theoretical or practical, to adult individuals is discarded. Everyone must think for themselves — must dare do think for themselves. Sapere aude! Consequently, authority no longer finds its foundation in truth and reason but can only build on consent and will, and can only justify its choices in terms of instrumental reasons. As Pierre Manent has recently underlined in a masterful new book, the modern attempt to reduce authority to the role of merely protecting individual rights — conceived as the freedom to satisfy infinite desires — ultimately has led to a debasement of all social institutions: familial, academic, ecclesiastical, and civil. The upshot is that the philosophical principle of the Enlightenment deforms the character of rulers and ruled alike, making the former irresolute and the latter undisciplined.
The modern project might have helped to open spaces for individual freedom and participation in action for the common good by transforming those social structures of the pre-modern world that were not responsive to the demands of some of the core principles of the classical legal tradition. Instead, it has eroded the individual and social capacity to exercise practical reason — particularly when acting in common — by blocking our responses to the commands of natural law. We are left with instrumental reasons at the service of purely subjective preferences, making any practical pursuit of the common good not only impossible, but unthinkable.
At the level of individual mores, the culture, social practices, and education work to shape attitudes and habits that become socially normative, making people hypersensitive to any attempt to command the good. At the level of political science, the enlightenment mindset deforms all efforts of institutional design by focusing them too narrowly on limiting power and maximizing the attainment of instrumental goods, while making institutions non-responsive to substantial common goods.
During the second half of the 20th century, this philosophy evolved into an openly anti-authoritarian, anarchistic attitude. Famously, the revolution of May 1968 held that it was “forbidden to forbid.” But as R.R. Reno has recently emphasized, it was already by 1945 that mainstream Western attitudes adopted the slogan “forbidden to command.” Of course, there is no way that this enlightened project could eradicate the rule of men over men, but it did eradicate the rule of men through reason. The modern anti-authoritarian principle simply masks the reality of raw power, canceling the possibility of rationally ordering the exercise of authority for the common good, and opening the door to totalitarian power and manipulation.
In our time, a recovery of the classical legal tradition amounts to an alternative call addressed to those in positions of authority. Not only are they not forbidden to command, they must do so: imperare aude! Dare to rule! Dare to govern! Dare to exercise the rights and fulfill the duties of legitimate authority, which in its higher form the classics called imperium. This call challenges authorities of all kinds (familial, academic, ecclesiastical, military, and civil) at every level. It is the anti-Enlightenment principle of rule by reason.
Imperium
Our mindset and legal language are deeply shaped by the voluntarism typical of modern ethics and politics. When discussing the exercise of power, we care almost exclusively about matters of formal competence or jurisdiction. Indeed, in English the phrase “to have authority” has simply come to mean “to be formally or legally competent to decide.” At best, the discussion of the material content of a decision is reduced to a question of individual rights (which are in themselves, again, questions of competence).
The very word imperium calls up a particular political form (the empire) which is by definition opposed to modern liberal thinking. Given the voluntarist philosophical groundings of the modern tradition of law, there is a clear danger of misunderstanding imperare aude, the call to exercise authority, as an invitation to various forms of lawlessness. I will discuss three: arbitrariness in the exercise of power, authoritarianism in the design of political institutions, and decisionism in political theory. Before addressing these (in Part II of this post), it will be useful first to outline the meaning of imperium in the classical tradition. This meaning is articulated in the work of Aquinas, who integrated the tradition of the Roman and canon laws with the classical political philosophy of Aristotle and the moral wisdom of the early Christian sources.
The word imperium instinctively evokes the idea of an act of untrammeled will, to which reason is an extrinsic accident. Aquinas, however, defines imperium primarily as an act of reason that moves, and therefore presupposes, an act of the will: “to command is an act of the reason presupposing, however, an act of the will” (imperare est actus rationis, praesupposito tamen actu voluntatis) (ST Iª-IIae q. 17 a. 1 co.). To understand this, we must bear in mind that practical reason is in itself prescriptive, and that reason moves to action from within by communicating some truth to a potency that is responsive to reasons. That potency is the will, which is defined as the rational appetite.
The primary sense of imperare — normally translated as “to command” — is “to order.” Imperare is thus to direct someone to an end by communicating it as a reason for action, as opposed to extrinsically imposing a movement or action with no reason. This is why Aquinas also uses the term praecepire (“to prescribe”) or other words that connotate more clearly the act of communicating or teaching, to convey the same notion. “To command [imperare] is nothing else than to direct [ordinare] someone to do something, by a certain motion of intimation. Now to direct [ordinare] is the proper act of reason. Wherefore it is impossible that irrational animals should command in any way, since they are devoid of reason” (imperare nihil aliud est quam ordinare aliquem ad aliquid agendum, cum quadam intimativa motione. Ordinare autem est proprius actus rationis. Unde impossibile est quod in brutis animalibus, in quibus non est ratio, sit aliquo modo imperium) (ST Iª-IIae q. 17 a. 2 co.).
The interaction between reason and the will is illustrated in the structure of the virtue of prudence, the perfection of which is the act of imperium, i.e., the act of effectively moving the agent in the direction of practical reason. For the tradition, prudence is both an intellectual and a moral virtue. Its object is not only to identify “the right thing to do,” but to actually act, aiming to attain the right end by adequate means. The three acts of prudence are consilium (searching for the adequate means), iuditium (evaluating the alternatives) and praeceptum or imperium, which is the final and necessary act of deciding or, more fittingly, commanding oneself into action (cf. ST IIª-IIae q. 47 a. 8 co.). This is an act of the will that moves the agent, but also, and more importantly, it is an act of reason. A person that exercises their practical reason is ultimately moved by truth, but is moved willingly. Thus, what is characteristic of the classical view of action is the emphasis, crucial in Aquinas, on the role of reason as the ultimate mover of human action (a nuance that, as mentioned above, is more evident in the word praeceptum, which has the connotation of teaching).
The parallelism between political procedures and the psychological processes of practical reason is pervasive in Aquinas, following Plato and Aristotle (cf. De Regno). This is apparent in his use of political terminology to describe the different acts of prudence described above, including the act of imperium. Following Aristotle, Aquinas distinguishes despotic and political regimes, terms that he also applies to the different ways in which reason commands the soul: “the Philosopher says (Polit. i, 2) that the reason governs the irascible and concupiscible not by a ‘despotic supremacy,’ which is that of a master over his slave; but by a ‘politic and royal supremacy,’ whereby the free are governed, who are not wholly subject to command” (philosophus dicit, in I Polit., quod ratio praeest irascibili et concupiscibili non principatu despotico, qui est domini ad servum; sed principatu politico aut regali, qui est ad liberos, qui non totaliter subduntur imperio) (ST Iª-IIae q. 17 a. 7 co).
Political authorities govern over free and intelligent citizens that are ontologically equal to the rulers. Despots, on the contrary “rule by dominating the city and make use of the citizens as slaves, that is to say, for their own benefit. This is contrary to justice, because a city is an association of free men and a slave is not a citizen, as was said earlier” (Principantur enim despotice civitati utentes civibus sicut servis, scilicet ad suam utilitatem: et hoc est contra iustitiam, quia civitas est communitas liberorum; servus enim non est civis, ut supra dictum est) (Sententia Politic., lib. 3 lect. 5 n. 7). Hence, the condition of ruler or ruled is accidental and, preferably, temporary.
The distinction between ruler and ruled remains, however, in the manner of their reciprocal relations. Human action in common always demands an authority to determine what is just whenever this does not follow necessarily from higher laws, and to choose what the best course of action is in any particular case. But it is convenient, and typical of a properly political regime, that authorities gain obedience not by force, but in a persuasive or spontaneous manner. This way of moving the ruled is more consistent with their equal rational nature, and more convenient for peace and stability, but it does not exclude coercion. Moreover, given the difficulty inherent in all practical matters, all human agents — even those in positions of authority with ample experience and wisdom — need the counsel of others, particularly those involved in the common action.
Aquinas’s well-known definition of law illustrates this. Law is an “ordinance of reason ordered to the common good” (quaedam rationis ordinatio ad bonum commune) (Iª-IIae q. 90 a. 4 co.) — a praeceptum, not a mere consilium (cf. ST, Iª-IIae q. 100 a. 2 co). Aquinas uses imperium and praeceptum almost interchangeably, but as noted above praeceptum emphasizes the intellectual, even pedagogical, content of the command and of law generally (as in praecepta legis, frequently used).
Laws and commands appeal to reason and are ordered primarily to move the will from within, rather than extrinsically through coercion. However, universal agreement or unanimity concerning laws and executive actions is only plausible in very limited contexts. In most communities it is not even desirable. It is therefore normally enough for a decision to be reasonable (not opposed to divine, natural, or positive law) and to garner enough consent so that the legal system keeps working in a sustainable fashion.
This includes accounting for the highly likely possibility of disordered behavior, intellectual dissent, and organized resistance against any particular political decision. In dealing with these negative reactions, those in positions of authority should keep acting as agents of reason. Note that reason does not exclude the possibility of cutting certain discussions off, not by a definitive, conclusory argument but by an act of authority — res iudicata, causa finita. In the same line, it is obvious that every authority is invested with the right to coerce into external obedience within the realm of its jurisdiction, and to the extent that doing so does not cause greater harm. Even when coercion adopts the appearance of force (e.g. placing someone in jail, expropriating their property, etc.), it remains an act of reason when it is just and prudent.
None of this precludes the danger of an abuse of power. But the crucial point is that the baseline presumption must not be that any form of coercion is unjustifiable, or by itself excessive or incompatible with freedom and reason. It is, in fact, the other way around: if an authority does not exert its coercive powers adequately, it fosters injustice and private violence. A recent egregious example is the phenomenon of clerical abuse of minors in the Church, made possible — according to Pope Benedict XVI both before and after his resignation — by the unwillingness of ecclesiastical authorities to use the tools of canon penal law. This reticence arises not only from a lack of personal fortitude, but also and mostly because of the typically modern ideological undermining of authority in its duty to teach and to correct.
Ricardo Calleja. University of Navarra.
