"Public Authority and the State in the Western Tradition: A Thousand Years of Growth, A.D. 976 - 1976"

          The communities, of course, from which Classical Antiquity came, were clans, i.e., kinship groups.  The communities from which Western Civilization came were local villages and manors.  And, indeed, the communities always are either one or the other.  And lucky civilizations, such as Chinese Civilization over the last 1500 years or more, have generally communities which are both kinship and local.  If a society has just kinship communities, like Islamic Civilization, it is in a very, very bad position.  It never, for example, can understand the meaning of the word "state".  For Islam[ic] there is no Arabic word for the state.  And you may reach the point that the Arabs tended to reach, which was that you trusted no one except your close relatives  The preferred marriage would be your parallel first cousins, i.e., your father's brother's daughter is the one you must marry.  Because no one else....  And even then you don't trust her.  All right.

0:22:28

          Now, of the four civilizations which came out of Classical Antiquity's wreckage, two of them clearly are a different kind of a civilization from ours, and I think Russia is too.  What I am saying is that I think those three, Islamic, Byzantine (and this I'm certain), and probably Russia also, are Class B Civilizations, i.e., they continue to work for communities.  I will take back about the Russia.  Let's forget the Russia.  It's very, much too complicated.   Just look at the Islamic and the Byzantine.  On the other hand, Western Civilization was different.  The civilizations and the governments which appeared in Class B Civilizations, those which preserved communities, were governments of limited power.  The chief powers that they had were raising money and recruiting soldiers.  And they made no effort to deal with interpersonal relations or anything else.  They were a kind of a, empire.  The finest example of that is the empire of Jenghiz Khan [about A. D. 1250].  But a very good example of it would be the Ottoman Empire, which is the final empire of Islamic Civilization and which was destroyed in 1922.  Where you did not attempt to deal with the relationships of individuals.  You left that to their local or their kinship communities.

 0:24:10

          Now before I get deeply into West Civilization, I want to say one more thing about Classical Antiquity.  A moment ago I said there would be difficulty talking to historians about this subject.  The difficulties would be just as great in talking about Classical history, or Classical Civilization, if I spoke to classicists.  Classical Civilization began with clans as the basic community.  So where this group at the beginning of Classical Civilization were kinship groups of clans, and the beginning of our Western Civilization were little self-sufficient villages across Europe, in deep forests mostly, where these were of that isolated and different nations, natures.

 0:25:14

          Such communities are totalitarian.  That is to say, everything that you get, which makes you a human being, you get from your community.  But since in Classical Civilization they gradually built up a state, and eventually a totalitarian state (One of the reasons they built up a totalitarian state is this:  Classicists for centuries could not see that there was a difference between a society and a state).  When Aristotle says the polis (I won't translate it:  the polis, p-o-l-i-s) is a koinonia XXXX or community found in a community, he means the totalitarian group which gives you everything.  He says a man cut off from the polis is not a man.  He just looks like a man.  He's like a thumb cut off from a hand.  It looks like a thumb.  But it isn't.  It's just a piece of meat.  So the word polis in Aristotle, and in Plato, and there it's just as late, this is the Fourth Century (the society is already at least six centuries old).  Now eventually the polis, of which there were many, was replaced by the imperium, of which there was one.  But they continued to find it utterly impossible to see the distinction between the society in which you live, which gives you everything which makes you a man, rather than some kind of a, animal, and the state, which has the monopoly, or the large part, of the political power in that society.

0:27:25

          So the polis, we say, was a city-state  It was community, but it was also a state.  And, when they came to the imperium hundreds of years later, it's the same way.  The imperial community.  Now, in order for this, [to] clarify this, I have to point out a few things:  first, no other communities were approved of; and, in many cases in Roman history, no other communities were permitted.  Every society has, what we might call, the orthodox theory of the state for that society.  And every society has the suppressed heresy of the state in that society.  In the society of Classical Antiquity the orthodoxy was that the state is the community, and no one should desire any else.  No one should desire a quiet life.  Everybody's life should be public.  Everyone should be prepared to give up anything, including his life, for the state, because the state was his community.  And, if he said "I'm going to go off and found my own commune", he, by that statement, becomes a traitor.  One of the first ones to do that was Epicurus, who was Fourth Century B.C.  And Epicurus said all he wanted to do was to sit down in a quiet garden with his friends and talk.  And ignore politics.  But that would be the ultimate act in our society to-day.  We haven't reached the point yet, but we're about to.  Because we are like Classical Antiquity.  We're trying to, in our society, to grind down individuals into identical atoms in a mass culture, in which all communities are dis-approved.  And, if any community wishes to stand apart, we will go in by force, and bus them out, or bus them in, or do anything that is necessary, to make them become the kind of red-blooded Americans that all should want to be.

0:30:05

          Now, then the state in Classical Antiquity was totalitarian, because it was regarded as a community.  Now, once the Classical Civilization was gone, the whole configuration of civilized and cultural society in the West (that's the west of Eurasia) was transformed.  Where the Mediterranean Sea had been the site of Classical Civilization, it became instead, by the year 700, the barrier between Arabic Civilization (I'll draw it from your point of view on this, the Mediterranean Sea) Arabic Civilization to the south, Byzantine Civilization to the northeast, Western Civilization to the northwest.  And the Mediterranean, instead of being an area of communication, became an area of frontier for the different societies.

0:31:14

          A community is not easy to define; but I would define it, approximately, this way:  if you trust everyone you meet, automatically, until they prove to be unworthy of trust, then you are in your community.  On the other hand, if you mis-trust everyone you meet, until they prove worthy of trust, then you are in an alien community.  You're in Moscow, or some place like that.  This is the, a workable definition, it seems to me, of the two.  Now, if I go back to the history of Western Civilization, which began around 600 [A.D.], what we see is an effort being made, after the civilization got started, to establish the kind of totalitarian state structure which was, been successfully established just about 600 in Byzantium, or which was established shortly after this, 1650, in the caliphate of Islamic Civilization, or which was established at least by 6 or 700 B.C. in Sinic Civilization, that is to say....   

0:32:56

          Now, my mind block would be here.  Oh, a, a kind of monarchy, which I will give you now as a paradigm.  It's called Providential Monarchy.  And it is associated with the idea of a Providential Deity.  So [for] us to-day, who shove religion off into a corner somewhere, and insist that religion mustn't have anything to do with communities or, certainly nothing to do with politics, or business, or many, many other things, it's hard for us to grasp that one of the most potent things in the establishment of the structure of the state, in any civilization, have always been men's ideas of the nature of Deity. 

0:33:58

          And I will not give you my paradigm for that.  I will simply point out to you something that is obvi---, must be obvious to you.  The Deity, God, has many different attributes:  He's creator.  He's masculine.  He's up [there].  He's transcendental, i.e., He's outside of the world of space and time.  (That was established by 500 B.C.)   Eventually, He's one (That's what the, Mohammed insisted on: "God is One")  And then, that He is omnipotent.  All-powerful.  Now, I stop at this point.  Providential empires never got further than this.

0:34:56

          Now, the next thing to develop in our ideas of Deity in Western Civilization were:  that God is good.  That was established by the prophets of the desert, certainly by the Fifth Century B.C.  And then came the Christian message that God is love.  And then came the scholastic inference that God is pure reason.  By the year 1250 A.D. 

0:35:28

          Now, what you believe is in the nature of God, in many civilizations, including our own, has helped to determine the structure of the society.  And the crucial one I want to point out here is this:  by 500 B.C. in western Asia it was pretty well established that God is omnipotent.  He could do anything.  And there is nothing He cannot do.  Thus He is pure will.  And, at almost the same time, came the other idea, which you find in Job, that God is good.  But if God is good, He cannot do anything.  He can only do things that are good.  And if He can only do things that are good, and cannot do things that are evil, then there is something higher than God: the rules of ethics.  Thus the great contribution, even before Christ, moving toward the Western idea of Deity, was the idea of Transcendental Ethical Monotheism, in which part of that is that God is love, and so forth, and the other kinds of things 

0:36:58

          Now, if God is one, and God is all powerful, and He can do anything, and He is providential, which means He interferes in the world, then whatever happens in the world is because He permitted it.  And whatever He permitted, who the Hell is any ordinary human being to question it?  (Now, if you read the, Job, you will see that this begins to come into that contradiction, that conversation, where Job is saying:  "God, you're running the world all wrong. You're letting bad people be elected President...", and so forth.) XXXX Apparently.  This gave Providential Monarchy.  Let me read  what I wrote here about it.  In Providential Monarchy, Deity is (and it's Asiatic) Heaven.  The Chinese word is "tien", which means Heaven.  The idea, in the original language, Indo-European, was something like "dyess".   "Dyess", from which XXXX was came, and what XXXX was, which is Zeus came, and so forth.  It meant bright, brilliant sky.  That was the Deity.  And this was a being of willful and arbitrary omnipotence; and, if there is a ruler on Earth, that ruler was picked by the Deity.  This means you must accept whatever happens:  it leads, of course, as you see, to fatalism, even though they don't accept that in their actions, frequently.  And the ruler is the vicar of omnipotent will on Earth.

0:39:25

          Now, this lead to a number of results.  There is no rule of law; there is the rule of God's will.  This is the heresy of the West.  Part of the heresy of the West.  When the Crusaders went to capture Jerusalem, and their war cry was "God wills it!",  they should have been rejected.  This is not Western, because the Western idea is that God gives man, man free will, and, if he does evil things, he's responsible.  And so forth.  A totally different kind of thing.  In the West you get, accordingly, the rule of law.  In Providential Monarchy you do not get, you get the rule of will.  And the slogan very quickly became:  "one God in Heaven; one ruler on Earth," which meant that Providential Monarchs consistently tried to conquer the world.  And these were the great world conquerors, and I have already said Jenghiz Khan was the greatest of them.   And further XXXX studies, his government, his army, his whole attitude was a magnificent machine for world conquest and world rule as the vicar of Heaven on Earth. 

0:41:10

          There are no constitutional rules of political succession in a Providential Monarchy. There are no constitutional rules of succession in Islamic Civilization, in Byzantine Civilization, or in Russian Civilization -- ever.  And to talk about constitutional law in Russia is to talk nonsense.  Even right up to the end, there was no constitutional rule of succession.  Alexander I left a note in his desk saying that he wanted his second or third son, I forget which one it was, his second son, I believe, to be his successor, and that settled it.  That was an act of will, it's not an act of constitutional law.  And this is to-day, of course,in Russia to-day.  Notice it's true of China.  It always was true of China.  China was a Providential Monarchy.  But in the West, where we have the rule of law, where even God is under rules, the rules of ethics, you have a totally  different situation, and you expect to have constitutional rules of political action, including the rules of political succession.

0:42:40

          Now, the Carolingian Empire, whose dates you, it was built up in the course of two hundred years, approximately, let's say 687 to 887, approximately, two hundred years, was an attempt to impose in the West a Providential Monarchy, which was a heresy, not in terms of the Western beliefs of the time, but in terms of the belief[s] which were intrinsic in the nature of Western thought, including our belief in Christ and in both of the Testaments.  And while everyone is, that I read, is full of praise about Charlemagne, Charlemagne was that kind of a willful man trying to do something that was impossible  to do, which was to conquer practically the whole world.  And he failed.  The reason he failed was that he was doing it in a period of constantly deepening economic depression.  And as a result of this constantly deepening economic depression, it became less and less possible even to conquer all of the provinces in his own empire, and totally impossible to rule the provinces of his own empire.  Because, as the depression become worse and worse, transportation broke down, all bridges collapsed. (I have read a magnificent account of somebody trying to go from Chartres to Paris.  To drive this would [take about] half an hour, I guess, I don't know, depends on the traffic.  And it took him something like eleven days: when he got there, the horse died of exhaustion.  And they had to do such things as try to patch holes in bridges by placing the shield, so the horse wouldn't fall through, and so forth).  All right, all commerce disappeared; everybody was reduced to living off the piece of land they were on.  And this became the community which are the root organizational pattern of the West, the local community, call it the parish, the village, or the manor, whatever you want.  It's local.  It is self-sufficient.

0:45:24

          And one of the chief reasons that you could not, and Charlemagne could not, conquer great distance was it became economically impossible to capture any fortified building, because you couldn't stay there long enough -- you couldn't take enough men and enough food there -- to starve out the people inside, because anybody inside would have more food on hand than you could carry.  And if they carried a smaller amount of food, and had to take a smaller number of men, in that case they would come out and chase you away. 

0:46:17

          So we got then, after Charlemagne and the last Carolingian is 887.  He was removed for not fighting the Vikings sufficiently vigorously.  And for a hundred years there was no ruler.  Instead the whole society....And we call this a Dark Age.  There is nothing wrong with a Dark Age.  Dark Ages are in many cases the most productive periods in the history of any civilization.  And certainly in Western Civilization they were  Any of though, you who have read Lynn White's book on the technological advances of the Dark Ages, such as the plough and so forth, and harnessing and so forth, so forth, know that we got a great deal [from it].  But out of the Dark Age that followed the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, we got the most magnificent thing which we have in our society:  the recognition that people can have a  society without having a state.  In other words, the recognition that people can have a  society without having a state.  In other words, this wiped away -- by experience -- the assumption that is found all through Classical Antiquity, except by unorthodox and heretical thinkers, that the state and the society are identical, and the state, such as the imperium, must be a society.   Therefore you can desire nothing more than to be a citizen.  And, if you want to go down in a ghetto or catacomb, and be with your co-sig, co-believers, and so forth and so forth, then you are an enemy.  Because you are violating the fundamental assumption.

0:48:16

          Now, again, to get to the structure. After this Dark Age.  The Mediterranean had become a barrier.  In the north, much neglected in our history books, but of vital importance -- the Vikings were pouring outward.  Before 750 they were pouring outward.  Raiders, slavers, pirates, men of violence and virility.  And, as you know, they occupied Iceland in 870, Greenland and Newfoundland. And so forth.  And they went eastward too, into Russia and started the beginning of Russian Civilization.  Now I call this Northern Monarchy.  It started as individual groups of pirate leaders.  But it ended up, and that would be from 750 or so to 930.  Then there was a  brief lull.  From 980, for a thousand [actually, a hundred] years, til about 1080, they were coming out as monarchies, i.e., organized state structures.  We call call this Northern Monarchy.  I invented the title and it has certain definite ideas.  Where those ideas came from, I do not know.  And it hasn't been discussed.  It's possible that they got some of them from Byzantium, because the Vikings went across Russia all the way to the Black Sea and Bysantine [Empire].  It's possible that they got it from the Carolingians, some memory of the Carolingians.  But the extraordinary thing about the Vikings -- I cannot spend too much time on that -- [is] that they went so far that they surrounded Europe.  That is to say, the Vikings did not just get, go to Newfoundland and places like that.  They conquered Normandy in 911.  They had conquered England several times, most recently in 1066.  They had gone down and conquered southern Italy and Sicily.  They had gone into Russia and opened up the trade across Russia, from the north down to the south.  They had even attacked Constantinople and eventually had become the hired mercenaries.   And the extraordinary thing is this:  in a battle in 1018 in southern Italy, Normans -- of Viking descent -- fighting on the side of the pope, were in battle with so-called Varangians -- of Viking descent -- fighting in behalf of the Byzantine Empire.  So there they had gone all the way around and were fighting [each other].

0:51:53

          That Northern Monarchy is of very great significance and had things which seem very precocious.  For example, it raised a military force and it raised taxes on the basis of assessments on plots of land, [which] in England we call hides, but they had different names.  They are found in Russia too. They had standing armies.  Archaeologists recently, that is to say, in the last twenty-five years, they found three large camps in Denmark, built about the year 1000 by the king Sven Forked Beard, where his standing army was ready at any moment to embark in the ships and go off.  The success of the Vikings, like the success of the raiders of the steppes of Asia, was in its mobility.  But where the steppes of Asia mobility was based on horseback riding with an excellent weapon, the composite bow, the threat of the Vikings was their mobility on water.  And they also had missile weapons.  But by the year 1000 in Western Europe you had a two class society:  peasants, who produced food, and then a small percentage of fighters, who fought on horseback with shock weapons.  In Europe they, that is with a spear, and if they were lucky had fortified a house in which to live.  That's all they needed.

0:53:51

          So you have a two-class society.  Now, eventually, that two-class society began to develop.  And when we come to the year 1150 we find that there, a new class has appeared, a separate class, the clergy  (I won't tell, say how this happened.)  So what you have is a monarch, at the top.  You have the nobility, who have weapons.  You have the clergy.  And you have the peasants at the bottom.  So, as I say, by the middle of the 12th Century, you also have the beginnings of commerce, the rise of towns, the appearance of a middle class of commercial traders.   So we have commercial traders.

0:54:41

          What the king did.  At the top.  Was build up a bureaucracy, i.e., a group of people who could write, keep records, to handle cases of justice in his court, to keep track of the money he could raise in his treasury.  And he built up these.  Now, here's the king, there's the feudal lords, L., there were the clergy, there are the bourgeoisie, the middle class, and there are the peasants, who are out of it.  All through this, they're out of it  They never paid, they never could play any major political role.  At first the king used the clergy to gradually take away from the lords (the fighting men) powers that would make him stronger and stronger, they build up the bureaucracy by doing it, but doing it so you can't trust the clergy.  They are frequently much too loyal to the bishops or even to the Pope.  By that time, according to XXXX the king built up his bureaucracy out of the bourgeoisie, he took the sons of the middle class, towns-dwelling, commercial people who could read and write and count, and put them in his bureaucracy.  And this meant that you had the king and the bureaucracy recruiting and, to some extent, obtaining financial support from the bureaucracy, from the bourgeoisie; and it meant that the feudal lords and at least the upper clergy tended to come together and cooperate in resistance to this.  

0:56:44