30 March 2011

An administrative authority

Tribe, creed, state: the family, the belief community, the national sovereignity of law and power: these are the historical variations of political order. 
On the other side of the equation are the present-day European societies attempting a non-religious creed where the sovereign has lost the authority to administer the law because the law has become self-administrative. The Europeans are heading into a version of rabbinic Judaism where society is governed by judges and not executives or legislatures. Judges can exercise authority but it is an administrative and not an executive authority and so it cannot do what society needs most for authority to do – to effect change in the social system. Judges can represent the will of the people but they cannot express the people's ever-shifting genius. 
So the Middle East has too much executive power and not enough legislative and judicial; Europe has too much judicial and administrative power and not enough legislative and executive. In either case, the legislative voice of the people's will is under-expressed, and that under-expression manifests in a too-strong tilt in favor of the executive or the judicial. 
In either case the legislative will does not maintain the balance of powers and under-represents, in the Middle East, the judicial function, and, in Europe, the executive. 

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