Dominium And Libertas Done Wrong By ImperiumWhen the state power and the global market combine forces, it is private citizens who suffer the consequences.
By DAVID C. HENDRICKSON
MARCH 29, 2022
Among vast perturbations in the political-military-economic-financial world, it is not easy to detect the deep forces at play. But great events, moving rapidly, invariably pose grand questions, surging to the fore even as they struggle to gain full coherence and shape. Events and spectacle command the headlines; political philosophy comes in too, but on little cat feet. The ultimate stakes of the great controversy are usually not fully discernible at the outset. After the big breaks, such as 1618, or 1789, or 1914, the ideological conflicts rage for a generation. They define the era.
In previous essays, I have detailed the dreadful consequences likely to ensue from the Total Economic War Against Russia (TEWAR). Here, I want to explore its civilizational significance. My thesis: As a consequence of the TEWAR, the relations between Imperium and Dominium (roughly, the power-state and the market) have undergone a profound shift. The TEWAR means the collapse of some old and important distinctions governing the worlds of power and property. It also poses a growing threat to Libertas.
Imperium and Dominium are Roman legal concepts that later became incorporated into western jurisprudence. Imperium meant power over another person’s actions. Dominium meant power over one’s own things. In the late 17th century, the German scholar Samuel Pufendorf gave a profound exposition of their meaning in his Law of Nature and Nations. Pufendorf, at once the most forgotten and the most valuable thinker in the Western canon of international law, artfully discerned the nature and limits of these respective spheres of life.
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The distinction between Imperium and Dominium appears in different nomenclature in every textbook on international political economy. Though in tension with one another, they need each other. The market needs the state to enforce its contracts and set bounds to its manic and inequitable ways. The state needs the market to generate wealth. Each shows itself to best effect when they meet as countervailing forces, each guarding against the worst excesses of the other. When they gang up, watch out.
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In the miserable present, the worst part of it is that Imperium, aided and abetted by Dominium itself, has also placed Libertas in grave peril. They are wed in unholy alliance in pursuit of an enforced orthodoxy. The Republic of Letters is battered, submerged, by their suffocating insistence on only one way to understand history, only one way to understand the pandemic, only one way to understand the unfolding global conflict, only one way to understand race, class, gender. Every opinion contrary to the established consensus is held to be either misinformation or disinformation, as if covens of Putin-worshippers existed throughout the land, endlessly making stuff up.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/dominium-and-libertas-done-wrong-by-imperium/
