Page 57 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes thought in terms of the ideal state of a superman and Aristotle in terms of a best practicable state
under the super-science of law, both failed to look beyond the horizon of a city-state with the
result that Greek constitutionalism failed to move with the pace of the changing conditions of
history. As Barker says: “Neither the enlightened monarchy which Plato had suggested, nor the
mediating middle class on which Aristotle set his hopes could avail to set the city-state; and to be
rescued from itself it had to lose its cherished independence.”

The Greeks occupy the first place in this direction who had ‘political separatism’
as a marked characteristic of their life.

Roman Constitutionalism: A great change occurred after the eclipse of the city-state system and
the establishment of a great empire under the Romans. The intellectual life became more diffuse
and driven into different channels. Men retreated with themselves; ethics became independent of
politics; society and state ceased to be equivalent terms and the individual, apart from the state,
became the chief object of contemplation. C.H. Mcllwain, thus, observes that there “was gradually
emerging an individual who was something more than a citizen, a society that was wider than any
possible political unit and a humanity more extended than any single race; individualism and
cosmopolitanism are the most marked of the newer aspects of political philosophy.” The imperial
rulers of Rome evolved their constitution as a determinate instrument of government—”a mass of
precedents, carried in men’s memories or recorded in writing, of dicta of lawyers or statesmen, of
customs, of usages, understandings and beliefs, upon the methods of government, together with
a number of statutes.” With the termination of monarchy about 500 B.C., there emerged the
Republic that had a ‘mixed,’ constitution. The offices of the Consuls (of whom two were elected
annually each with a right to veto another) represented the monarchical element of the terminated
system; the Senate (a small body with vast legislative powers) represented the aristocratic element;
the democratic element existed in the meetings of the people in three sorts of conventions according
to the division of land or people (curies, centuries or tribes). It is a different thing that, in course
of time, the era of irresponsible autocracy came to prevail in Rome when the office of the Emperor
was revived. Despite this, Roman constitutionalism made certain important contributions to the
development of this concept. They codified their law and laid down the principle of representative
government that came to be the most celebrated principles of constitutionalism. The two-pronged
conception of the legal sovereignty of the Emperor—that his pleasure had the force of law and that
his powers were ultimately derived from the people—persisted for many centuries and influenced
throughout the medieval period the views on the relations between the rulers and the ruled.
Medieval Constitutionalism: A great change took place after disintegration of the Roman Empire
in the fifth century A.D. and its substitution by the establishment of a number of feudal states. The
Teutons brought with them certain new ideas as the personality of law based on the force of folk
customs that bound the authority of the king. The invasions of the barbarians caused the emergence
of a haphazard political and economic set up in which the old nomadic relationship informed the
formation and character of the society and political institutions. The state of incessant warfare
finally gave way to innumerable scattered political and economic ‘sovereignties’ not on a national
and territorial but on local levels due to which Europe “became a dismal swamp of individual
feudal allegiances.” The era of feudalism represented a phase of transition, decentralisation, and
disintegration. From the political point of view, it exhibited an age of ‘statelessness’ since every
lord could conduct warfares or regulate commerce, or coin currency, or discharge judicial
responsibilities. From an economic point of view, it “meant a state of society in which all or a great
part of public rights and duties are inextricably interwoven with the tenure of land, in which the
whole governmental system—financial, military, judicial—is part of the law of private property.”
Curiously, universalism came to be the keynote of this era of transition, decentralisation and
disintegration as a result of the spread of the religion of Christianity. With the conversion of more
and more people to the new religion, ‘Christendom’ came into being and Biblical law took the

52 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY