[ p. 105 ]
CONDITIONS prevailing today in human society ^Jl show striking parallels with conditions after the reign of Charlemagne and the Garlovingians, the era between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, when the system of political feudalism had been stabilized and was flourishing.
When the centralized rule of the known Western world collapsed with the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Church was not sufficiently strong and wellorganized to replace the Pax Rcmzana with an equally efficient centralized secular order, the lives and property of the people were stripped of the necessary protection against uprisings of the poverty-stricken, landless peasants or against sudden attacks by invaders from the neighboring lands.
From this chaotic stage of Western evolution emerged feudalism, created and set into motion as a political system by the desire of the masses for protection and security. The landless freeman and the small landowner went to the most powerful lord of the land in the neighborhood and asked for shelter and support in exchange for which they offered their services.
[ p. 106 ]
The subjects submitted themselves and their lands—if they had any—to the baron, and received from him food and shelter in peacetime and equipment in war, for which they tilled the soil, paid taxes and fought battles.
Although later the lords of the land were all vassals of the king—who became the symbol of unity—sovereign power was, for all practical purposes, vested in the individual barons. The administration of the land and of the law, of armed force and of finance were almost entirely in their hands.
Feudalism differed greatly in the various parts of Europe, but certain of its features were identical everywhere. These were:
The vassal-lord relationship.
Loyalty and mutual obligation, protection and service, binding together all the ranks of each separate feudal social unit
Contractual relations of lord and tenant, determining all individual and collective rights, forming the foundation of all law.
Financial sovereignty of the feudal lord, with the power to tax his subjects and in some cases to coin money.
The juridical sovereignty of the feudal lord. His courts were the public courts, and revenue from all fines went to him.
The military sovereignty of the feudal lord. All subjects on the lands of the lord owed him military service, were obliged to take up arms whenever he called upon them. The feudal landlord [ p. 107 ] was also the commander of the troops composed of his subjects.
Each feudal baron had his symbol, emblem, flag, etc., to which all subjects living on his lands owed obeisance and allegiance.
The relations between commoner and feudal landlord as demonstrated by these principles are almost the same as the relations existing today between nationstates and their citizens.
The foundation of feudal relationship was not only land. A great many other services and privileges were integrated in the system. The feudal lord conferred public offices, various sources of revenue, the right to collect tolls, to operate a mill, etc., to some of his subjects, in return for which the subject became a vassal of the lord. He swore an oath of fealty binding him to the obligations of service and allegiance he had assumed. With such a contract he received ceremonial investiture from his lord.
These ceremonies establishing the relations between vassal and lord were almost identical with the process of naturalization in modern nation-states.
During the centuries of political feudalism, the actual government of the kings, the central power, was most rudimentary and primitive. Little, if any, direct relation existed between individual subjects and the central government of the king. Real power was vested in the feudal baron who was the actual ruler. He alone had control and power over the individuals.
The system, however, soon began to show its in [ p. 108 ] adequacies. Within one large estate the lord of the land could provide his subjects with protection. But identical social units were developing in the same way on all sides, with corresponding power and rights vested in the neighboring barons. Hundreds, thousands of feudal lords obtained sovereign rights over their lands and over their subjects.
The relations between the lords and their subjects were established by custom and regulated by law, but the relationships between the neighboring lords of the land were unregulated except by family ties, friendships, pledges and agreements between them. Naturally, jealousies and rivalries soon flared up among the individual lords, who more and more frequently called upon their subjects to take up arms and fight the subjects of a neighboring lord to protect their own sovereignty, their lands, their influence.
As intercommunications developed and increased, as populations grew and interchange between feudal units was intensified, the conflicts between these units increased in frequency and violence. Each feudal knight looked upon the power and influence of his neighbors with fear, distrust and suspicion. There was no way to obtain security against attack other than to defeat one’s neighbor in battle, conquer his lands, incorporate his subjects, thereby raising one’s own power and widening one’s own sphere of influence.
This evolution culminated in complete chaos with almost permanent fights between the various sovereign feudal units.
It took a long time for the subjects to realize that the contracts they had entered into with the feudal [ p. 109 ] barons to obtain security and protection had brought them instead permanent wars, insecurity, misery and death. Finally, however, they found that their salvation could be achieved only by destroying the power of the feudal landlords and establishing and supporting a government to stand above the quarreling and warring barons, a government that would possess enough strength to create and enforce laws standing above feudal interests, and that would establish direct relations between the subjects and the central government, eliminating the intermediary feudal sovereignties. So they rallied around the kings, who became strong enough to impose a superior legal order.
Feudalism, a political system which dominated the world for five long centuries, finally began to disintegrate at the end of the thirteenth century, the moment better means of intercommunication and the growth of common ideas made wider centralization possible. Under the impjact of these new conditions, the subjects turned against the sovereign feudal governments and established central governments under the sovereignty of the king, ending once and for all the interminable quarrels and fights between the intermediary social units which enslaved the population in the interest and for the maintenance of the sovereign power of the lords of the land.
What does this long and painful history of medieval society have to do with our problem in the twentieth century?
Man in society is constantly seeking security and freedom. This is a fundamental instinct Both security and freedom are the products of law. Since history [ p. 110 ] began to be written, the human race has struggled for the best forms and methods to achieve a social order within which man can have both freedom and security.
The historical evolution of human society proves that these human ideals are best achieved if the individual is in direct relationship with a supreme, central, universal source of law. Twice in the history of Western civilization this truth, which seems axiomatic, has found institutional expression: in the monotheistic religions and in democracy.
The fundamental doctrine of the Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan religions is monotheism, the oneness of God—the Supreme Lawgiver—the basic belief that before God, every man is equal. This doctrine, the rock upon which modern Western civilization is built, destroyed the polytheism of primitive human society. It destroyed the many different, selfish and inimical gods who, in the early stages of history, incited mankind to war and to destroy each other for the simple reason that every minor group of men had a different god whom they worshiped and who gave them law. The establishment of a single universal God as the Supreme Being and unique source of authority over mankind, and the attribution of His direct relationship to every man on earth, revealed for the first time the only kwmaking system upon which peaceful human society can be built.
At the time this elementary thesis of society was revealed and proclaimed, technical and material conditions were far too primitive to permit its application and effective realization in the known world. In religion, [ p. 111 ] the doctrine slowly conquered the faith of man and became the dominating creed of the modern world. However, it could not assert itself as a political doctrine of a society that continued to develop along pre-Christian lines.
In the eighteenth century, political conditions at last induced the fathers of modern democracy to open a crusade to destroy the sovereignty of the many kings and rulers who oppressed and enslaved the people. This crusade led to the formulation and proclamation of the basic principle that sovereignty in human society resides in the community.
This principle, the very foundation of democracy, represents the political corollary of monotheism. Its triumph meant the acceptance by society of the thesis that there can be only one supreme sovereign source of law—the will of the community—and that, under this sovereign law guaranteeing security and freedom to man in society, every man is to be regarded as equal
It is one of the great tragedies of history that the recognition and proclamation of this principle came a century too early.
When it became the dominating doctrine, the universality of sovereignty, the universality of kw, the indivisibility of the sovereignty of the community as the supreme source of democratic kw, was not yet feasible or technically possible. The world was still too big, it could not yet be centrally controlled, it was still an exclusively agricultural planet with economic conditions scarcely different from those of antiquity. So a substitute presented itself which permitted the [ p. 112 ] new doctrine of democratic sovereignty to find immediate practical expression.
This substitute was the nation.
An intermediary between the individual and the universal conception of democratic society, the sovereignty of the community, had to be established in order to make the organization of society on a democratic basis immediately realizable. In the eighteenth century, society could not possibly be organized universally. Consequently, democracy could not be organized according to its fundamentally universal principles. It had to be organized nationally.
For a long time the problem seemed to have been satisfactorily solved and citizens and subjects of the modern democratic nation-states enjoyed a hitherto unknown degree of freedom, security and welfare. Relations between the nation-state and its citizens were stabilized, according to which the state guaranteed protection, security, law and order, in exchange for which the citizens pledged exclusive allegiance to their national state and agreed to accept its laws, to pay taxes and to go to battle when national interests required the supreme sacrifice.
The national organization of democracy worked perfectly well for a while. But soon, under the impetus of technical, scientific and economic developments, and the tremendous increase of intercommunication, interchange of ideas, populations and production, the various sovereign national units were brought into close contact with each other. Just as in the medieval age, these contacts between the sovereign national units—the relationships of which were unregulated—created frictions and conflicts.
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Today we find ourselves in the same social convulsion and political chaos that human society was passing through at the end of the thirteenth century. Far from enjoying freedom, far from obtaining the expected security and protection from their nationstates, the citizens are constantly exposed to oppression, violence and destruction. The multiplicity o the conflicting sovereign units in our society destroys every vestige of the freedom, protection and security originally promised and granted to the individual by the nation-states at their inception in the eighteenth century.
In the middle of the twentieth century, we are living in an era of absolute political feudalism in which the nation-states have assumed exactly the same roles as were assumed by the feudal barons a thousand years ago.
Feudalism created serfdom, not because the supreme source of law was an individual or a family, but because in a given territory there were many individuals and families exercising sovereign power and because these various sovereign units were not brought under a higher, all-embracing law. The fact that men were living in a society composed of a multiplicity of scattered and disintegrated sovereignties, led feudalism into a series of conflagrations which caused the utter misery and starvation of the peoples and the ultimate self-destruction of the system.
The fact that today we are not ruled by barons and counts but by institutions created by national constitutions, loses its significance when the multiplicity of such scattered sovereign institutions divides mankind into separate sovereign units. This arbitrary [ p. 114 ] and artificial segregation of human society compels nation-states to act in exactly the same way toward their subjects and toward their neighbors that feudal lords of the land acted under similar conditions to uphold their symbols and institutions, their power and influence, which were for them absolute, ultimate ends.
There is nothing kings, emperors or tyrants ever did to their subjects that nation-states are not doing today. Tyranny does not mean the rule of a king, emperor, dictator or despot. It is to live under a system of law in the creation of which the individual does not participate.
In the nation-state system, we are unable to participate in the creation of law in any part of human society beyond our own country. It is, therefore, a self-delusion to say that Americans, Englishmen or Frenchmen are "free people/’ They can be attacked by other nations and forced into war at any time. They are living in a state of fear and insecurity just as great as under tyrants who interfered with their liberties at will.
Absolute monarchy was anti-democratic and tyrannical, not because it was wicked or malevolent, but because it identified the interests of the king with the interests of the people over whom he ruled and because it acted solely to safeguard its particular interests.
This is exactly the position of the present-day nation-states. Guided exclusively by their own national interests, disregarding completely the interests of their fellow states and having sovereign power [ p. 115 ] in their respective countries, the nation-states have become anti-democratic and have re-established the absolutism our forefathers destroyed when it was personified by kings.
If we take human society as a whole—which in relation to technological reality is smaller today than the society over which the Carlovingian kings ruled—we have to admit that we are living in a society without public law. The legislation of the various nation-states dividing humanity into a number of closed and separated units has all the characteristics of the private law of the medieval dukes, counts and barons, which usurped public law for so many centuries, creating immeasurable bloodshed and misery for all who lived under this multiplicity of distinct systems of law.
This system of nation-feudalism has plunged the world into unprecedented barbarism, and destroyed almost all individual rights and human liberties secured with so much toil and blood by our forefathers. Modern nation-feudalism has erased, except in name, every moral doctrine of Christianity.
There is not the slightest hope that we can change the course into which we are rapidly being driven by the conflicting nation-states so long as we recognize them as the supreme and final expression of the sovereignty of the people. At ever-increasing speed we shall be hurled toward greater insecurity, greater destruction, greater hatred, greater barbarism, greater misery, until we resolve to destroy the political system of nation-feudalism and establish a social order based on the sovereignty of the community, as conceived [ p. 116 ] by the founders of democracy and as it applies to the realities of today.
This necessitates the realization and acceptance of the following axioms:
Individual freedom and individual security in modern society are the product of democratically created and democratically executed law.
All individuals must be directly related to the institutions expressing the sovereignty of the community.
Any intermediary organizations with attributes of sovereignty standing between individuals and the institutions of the sovereignty of the community (cities, provinces, churches, nations or any other units) destroy the rights of the individual, the sovereignty of the community and, consequently, destroy democracy itself.