I am currently reading The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance by Bernd Roeck (transl. Patrick Baker, 2025). At 949 pages and 49 chapters, I’ll complete the task in a month at 1-2 chapters per evening. I hope. We are still only just past Magna Carta (1215) in Chapter 12: “Vertical Power, Horizontal Power.” Both axes of power are essential in any society larger than a small group of hunter gatherers. Here is Professor Bernd on institutions:
Institutions – that dry term, which we have already encountered in the discussion of universities and in other contexts, denotes something very big and important. Institutions are what first allow the state to become perpetual; without them, it dies. If advisers appear as the mind and memory of the body politic, and the military its muscles, it is law and institutions that provide a skeleton for the state. They alone are capable of establishing justice over the long term. Only they can set limits to power and arbitrary will. They preserve knowledge of how to achieve success, as well as reminders of mistakes to be avoided in the future. No one knew this better than Cicero, who emphasized the Roman Republic’s special ability to gather experience and make decisions based on it. Before the advent of modernity, no section of the globe created institutions as robust and effective as those that developed in medieval Latin Europe. Moreover, these institutions were highly inclusive. The guaranteed protection under the law and the right to private property, provided education, and were relatively pluralistic (i.e., horizontally structured).This is not the place to quibble about details. But those who want to destroy our political, cultural, social, and educational institutions rather than improve them or refocus them along lines upon which reasonable people will agree? These unreasonable people are not to be respected:
Indeed, Rome owed its success to its institutions. They then provided the states consolidating during the Middle Ages with models of compelling rationality.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought (Russell Vought, OMB Director) said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”Well, it is working and the lack of imagination and humanity here is striking. These “bureaucrats” are the scientists who make sure our food is safe and that the chemical plant on the waterfront is not dumping its waste into the tidal creek. They are the scientists who hunt down the causes of emerging diseases. They are the meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center who have gotten so very good at predicting the paths of cyclones. They are the men and women who sign up Vought’s parents for Social Security and Medicare. They are the people of the IRS who sent me a substantial tax refund because I overpaid, something pleasant I did not ask for nor expect. They are also the professors who teach engineers how to build bridges that will bear the load and teach medical students the basics of health and disease. And yes, they are the professors who teach us there is No Politics But Class Politics. The key here is that all of this is debatable by reasonable men and women of good will.
To paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the institutions funded by our taxes are the cost of civilization. Perhaps we will remember this ancient wisdom before it is too late? Probably not. The urge to burn it all down, instead of rewiring the building and replacing the roof, is strong.
by KLG, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
