The Road Not Taken – LewRockwell

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
–        Robert Frost

I have borrowed the title of Frost’s poem; it is also the chapter title from Gerard Casey’s book, Freedom’s Progress?, in which he discusses the political philosophy of Johannes Althusius.

A brief introduction from Casey:

Daniel Elazar notes, and I believe he is correct in this, that the Althusian view lost out to the Bodinian view of ‘reified centralized states where all powers were lodged in a divinely ordained king at the top of the power pyramid or in a sovereign center.’

Had the Althusian and not the Bodinian conception of the locus of sovereignty prevailed, the course of political history might have been very different.

Different…how?  Bodin gave us the centralized and sovereign State; Althusius offered instead a decentralized and voluntary polity.  This idea has attracted me to study the thought of Althusius more closely, given that decentralization is libertarian theory put into practice.



Freedomu2019s Progress…
Gerard Casey
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Further, Althusius is writing at a time after the Reformation, after the decentralizing benefits of a unified Christendom are lost; he is constructing a political theory that captures the decentralization of medieval Europe without the benefit of the competing governance authority of the Church.  This is even a more significant issue today as the West no longer even has the benefit of a dis-unified Christendom.

I grant up front: the lack of even a dis-unified Christendom (more specifically, the lack of faithful Christian leaders in the West) – let alone the loss of a unified Christendom – seems to me to be the issue that makes moving toward…

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