Misc

An opinion on why commerce and civilization grew up in Europe instead of somewhere else.

"Although geographical factors played a role, the key to western development is to be found in the fact that, while Europe constituted a single civilization — Latin Christendom — it was at the same time radically decentralized.[7]  In contrast to other cultures — especially China, India, and the Islamic world — Europe comprised a system of divided and, hence, competing powers and jurisdictions."

Makes sense to me.

"After the fall of Rome, no universal empire was able to arise on the Continent. This was of the greatest significance. Drawing on Montesquieu's dictum, Jean Baechler points out that "every political power tends to reduce everything that is external to it, and powerful objective obstacles are needed to prevent it from succeeding" (Baechler 1975, 79). In Europe, the "objective obstacles" were provided first of all by the competing political authorities. Instead of experiencing the hegemony of a universal empire, Europe developed into a mosaic of kingdoms, principalities, city-states, ecclesiastical domains, and other political entities."

This dovetails in with the recent article on the Middle Ages. While historians generally celebrate the centralization of power as a good thing, the opposite is true.

"In a major synthesis, Law and Revolution, Berman has highlighted the legal facets of the development whose economic, political, and ideological aspects other scholars have examined (Berman 1983): "Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the Western legal tradition is the coexistence and competition within the same community of diverse legal systems. It is this plurality of jurisdictions and legal systems that makes the supremacy of law both necessary and possible" (Ibid., 10)[12] "

Compare that to the US where laws have been centralized by the feds.

"In the model of civil society, most good and important things take place below the universal level of the state: the family, the arts, learning, and science; business enterprise and technological process. These are the work of individuals and groups, and the involvement of the state is remote and disengaged. It is the rule of law that screens out the state's insatiable aggressiveness and corruption and gives freedom to civil society below the level of the state. It so happens that the medieval world was one in which men and women worked out their destinies with little or no involvement of the state most of the time."

By comparison, our government-run society is barbaric.

"The nobility in Russia was a state-service nobility, lacking any independent base. As White observes: "Russia was never truly feudal in the west European sense of the term" (White 1987, 10). In contrast to Europe and America, the towns, as well, were "simply another arm of the state" (Ibid., 137–38)."

The US today sounds like Russia then.