Law: Back to Plato and Aristotle

COMMUNITAS COMMUNITATUM

The key question in any political system is its legitimacy. -Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Basic Books Inc., NY, 1976.


It’s Plato all over again
after the acidic effects in Athens
of an excessive individualism,
after a tonic surge of new life,
after an anomic normlessness.
It’s a matter of putting everything
in the true basket again:
the good, the beautiful and the just,
in a vision of community
born in the terror of anti-community,
the soulless reality of democracy.

It’s a new age of a new Rome,
a new republic: unitary, centralized,
collectivized, resting on legally
discrete, socially free individuals
but also decentralized and local
in essence, with intimacy,
communality, pluralistic
with no marching to the sound
of one foot, with the law
set above all and the nation
set in a constellation of forces
to establish the reign of virtue
in a communitas communitatum1
in which the oneness of life
serves as the basis for
political messianism,
the religion of history.

1 this term is used by Robert Nisbet in his The Social Philosophers.

Ron Price
2 January 1997