A Pause at 800 Years

Today marks a momentous occasion in the history of government, law, and of the world at large, when, on June 15, 1215, King John gave his assent to the Magna Carta at Runnymede, after having been forced to do so by a group of English nobles.

It's a good opportunity for us to pause and reflect on the nature of law and government. I think back to my Justice class in Christ College during the first semester of my senior year at Valparaiso University. In my final essay, I reflected a little on how government came into existence. Drawing from John Locke's Second Treatise on Government, I wrote that, "God gave all humans land in the state of nature, but in order to make use of the land, humans had to apply labor to it, from which emanates private possessions.  But then conflicts arise when private interests compete.  To better preserve themselves, people band together, and hand the authority of protection of their personal possessions to a government.  The society then leaves the state of nature that God ordained". (As an aside, I also quoted from Rod Blagojevich's book The Governor in this essay.)

I see that government originally formed when people banded together for their own well-being. But as societies developed, the power shared by all eventually consolidated into a single figure, namely a king, which was the case by the time of the Magna Carta. And the idea of the divine right of kings, that God ordained kings to sit on the throne, would continue for centuries after the Magna Carta.

But here, a group of nobles challenged the authority of a king who they felt had wielded too much power, and used this document to restrain him, while asserting their rights. There would be other instances in British history when this happened, and then, in a similar spirit came the American Revolution, which was all about dissolving all connections with a King who wielded power to inflict injustices on his subjects.

And in this spirit of the American Revolution came other movements of people to reassert their authority to wield their own governmental powers. Today, few absolute monarchies exist in the world, especially in comparison to democratic governments.

It says something about our desire as humans to want to rule ourselves. Yet we find ourselves needing to strike a balance between delegating authority to certain individuals for logistical reasons, and not letting any of those people have too much authority over us.

That's why I think it's so important to be involved in our government, at all levels, especially in a democratic system like we have in the United States, because it's our government, and we might as well act like it is.