The rights of the sovereign (5-22-22)

2 years ago
27

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California,_Los_Angeles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)

Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and Its Design: If Americans know one thing about their system of government, it is that they live in a democracy and that other, less fortunate people, live in dictatorships. Dictatorships are what democracies are not, the very opposite of representative government under a constitution.2

The opposition between democracy and dictatorship, however, is greatly overstated. 3 The term “dictatorship,” after all, began as a special constitutional office of the Roman Republic, granting a single person extraordinary emergency powers for a limited period of time.4 “Every man the least conversant in Roman story,” remarked Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist No. 70, “knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator” to confront emergencies caused by insurrection, sedition, and external enemies. 5 No political constitution was well designed, Hamilton believed, unless it could confront emergencies and provide for energetic executive powers to handle them.6

Under this view, dictatorship-the power of government officials to act on important matters free of accountability or timely legal checks-is not the opposite of democracy-or what our Constitution calls a “Republican Form of Government.” 7 It is an institutional feature within constitutional democracies that can and should be employed to perform valuable civic functions. From this perspective, “dictatorship” becomes-as it was in the early Roman Republic-a term of description rather than a term of opprobrium.8 It refers to institutions and powers of emergency government that constitution makers might establish to serve the public interest. Indeed, if the institutions are properly designed, “dictatorship” might even have positive connotations-think only of the praise heaped on the legendary Cincinnatus. https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130386

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