Medieval doctors held the state to be a consequence---or wages---of original sin. A sin-proof society could sing and frisk ad lib, with everyone “crowned and mitred” as his self's emperor and pope, and the harness of collective government packed away in a museum of prehistory.
What kind of community do those modern doctors have in mind when they say that there is no world community for a World Government?
Is this city, Chicago, a community in the sense, we guess, that they mean? Do the tenants of the Negro belt drop in for tea at the mansions of the North Side? Is Cicero, on our western border, the shrine of Saint Alph Capone? Yet this city has a municipality, a government, and Cicero has too. Plenty of common causes---lighting, water, sewage, conveyances, roads, parks, hospitals, schools, churches, yes, courts, yes, jails---hold their millions together. Force, governmental, lays its decisive accent on the consent, insures the continuity of the covenant in spite of race or creed, open feud or rampant revolt.
Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Foundations of the World Republic. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 26.
No comments:
Post a Comment