The Trouble With Being A Faux Intellectual

The trouble is that your eyes glaze over when you read complex texts and, in the spirit of the blogger, you reach for salient aphorisms and skip-read the whole, this latter reading quite often out of sequence as you dance around in searching said aphorisms. A little learning can go a long way. That, at least, has been my sad experience. But what the Hell, let's go for it anyway. Nobody's looking.

Sir Thomas Smith

Sir Thomas Smith was Secretary of State to King Edward VI, sometime cleric, sometime parliamentarian, sometime Cambridge Professor of Civil Law, and author in English (this is important because the language of most varsity scholarship was still Latin) of De Republica Anglorum, published in 1583, six years after his death. The subtitle to the tract (which I will render into modern spelling) tells us what to expect: 'The manner of government or policy of the realm of England'. It's good stuff. Did Shakespeare read it? Interesting.

In much the same way as my boy Walter Bagehot (you must have guessed that he was going to crop up) Smith is an erudite hedger of bets - but that's ok with me, I lean that way myself. In fact the older I get, the less I am plagued by certainty. De Republica Anglorum posits three types of commonwealth: monarchy; aristocracy; democracy. Within each of those categories lie the possibilites of either just or unjust manifestations. Thus there are six possible types of constitution. However (and here Smith is removed from the absolute designations of a theorist such as Bodin) Smith accepts that though any constitution will have a dominant inflection, it will usually have strains of the less dominant. So what did he make of his England? As I say, he hedges his bets but we can perhaps come down on the side of a monarchy infected by democracy - what later theorists might deem a constitutional (rather than an absolute) monarchy.

It is tempting to make a leap from Smith to the Boy Bagehot but we are warned off such presumption by William Maitland, Smith's Victorian editor: 'One fact, however, stands out clearly. The "constitution" does not for Smith consist of the same elements as for Walter Bagehot or his imitators ... For Smith the framework of a commonwealth consists almost entirely of its courts, its judicial system, and its methods of police.' So is that my sloppy contention (that Smith stands at the front of a queue that leads to Bagehot) blown out of the water? Not quite I think, and that is because, just as Smith (a good lawyer) was fixated on the place of the courts in exercising sovereign power, so Bagehot (a failed lawyer - he was called to the Bar but never practised) was fixated on everything but the courts. Both however had an eye for the mutability of sovereign power not possessed by more rigid commentators. And both can help us with another possessor of that discerning eye - the Boy Shakespeare. Which is the point I am making. Badly.