Constitutional Law & Political Science: Concepts and Evolution
Constitutional Law and Political Science: Concepts and Evolution
Unit I
Right: Right action is the same. Human law has the nature of law as long as it conforms to right reason. The law is the prohibition of unfairness and the realization of justice.
Politics: Etymologically from the Greek “polis,” meaning city or state, it is the formation, organization, and maintenance of the state and human activity as it relates to public life in the city.
In the classical sense, it can be defined as the science of government of states or the study of the principles that form the government and must be led in their relations with citizens of other states. It is also the knowledge of everything that relates to the art of governing a state.
a-) Restricted meaning of the word Politics: For Aristotle, politics is all that concerns the polis or state.
b-) Wide meaning of the word policy: The social organization in a territory. However, not all state activity is political activity.
Political Law: Is the discipline which embodies as the essential content of state theory, political science, the history of ideas and political institutions, and the theory of the Constitution. It excludes positive constitutional law.
The dignity of political rights lies in the union established between the right (normative order of social life based on natural law and justice as a fundamental value) and politics, rejecting the neutrality of science and the state power.
The political right expressed a higher order of values and does not intend an absolute absence. By putting the word “right” to “politics,” it indicates that there must be a subordination of politics to the right. Modern constitutionalism demands human dignity as the supreme goal of the state organization and activity in her and around her.
Political Science
Plato and Aristotle are the founders of reflective thinking in politics. They had differentiated knowledge: clear, precise, and certain (the epistemic) generic knowledge, uncertain and fuzzy (the doxa).
Political science has as its objective the search for social regularities that are generated in the very nature of man and rational analysis, which allow the formulation of a just social and political order based on natural law. That is, political science should aim to set out the principles and values that will set up a political system tending to the common good, seeking the full development of every man.
Origin and Development of Science Policy
In classical Greece, political thought arrives, for the first time, to form a system. The ancient Eastern cultures had been highly developed social systems but never managed to make a political theory.
In fact, there had been only East theocratic and absolute monarchies. In Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, and ancient Persia, it was believed that the government was of divine origin and those who exercised it were representatives or descendants of the gods. This concept involved the despotism and contempt of the subject and the absolute devaluation of the individual.
Greek citizen’s freedom comes from the fact of having the rational capacity to convince and be convinced by treatment unhampered with their peers.
Old Age
Plato
The CP was founded by Plato in the fourth century BC. The philosopher made a proposal on how to build a perfect state, which was not subject to corruption and decay that affected the Hellenic Society.
Platonic idealism is proposing a paradigm or model of the ideal state that would be mandatory for men because that archetype exists in the mind of the Divine Being as an essence.
Plato saw the soul of man constituted by the same parties as the State. The state was a sort of giant man, a macro-anthropos. Thus, justice is the harmony that should exist between the three virtues of man and the state. These are temperance, courage, and wisdom. In this way, justice is that all parties play their role properly, and in the state, classes meet theirs.
Aristotle
He studied the social and political reality of different cities whose constitutions were compared and analyzed. Aristotle’s political science ranked among which correspond to making man and attributed empirical (material). He is the founder of the tradition of political realism, which excludes the creations and presents utopian ideal or abstract.
The current policy is considered by Aristotle to occupy the apex of the hierarchy of the sciences because its objective, the city-state, encompasses the entire social organization. The policy has a position of prominence on the other sciences because it regulates human activities.
Cicero
Cicero puts the spotlight on the legal aspect of the city: the right common to all, accepted by all, indeed obeyed by all. Thus, the particular nature of political society is clearly specified.
Platonic Utopianism resurfaces in Rome and reformist and revolutionary attitudes. In the Middle Ages, Platonic idealism is reborn, embodied in the work of St. Augustine (“De Civitas Dei”). There arises the city of God as the archetype of the perfect state, which should be the model toward which the earthly city.
The line of realism will be assumed by St. Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century), which incorporates Aristotelian thought. Later they would be: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville.
Middle Ages
St. Augustine
St. Augustine’s model provided the political model that will run until the thirteenth century. He claimed that the two major real virtues are truth and justice. The medieval sees humanity as an organism, a mystical body whose
head is Christ. His ideas were taken on the status of the republic and legibus Cicero. Unlike the latter, he put emphasis on the human element of the city, the bond that unites the people. The people are united by the common peaceful and possession of what you love and only secondarily for law and the utility.
St. Thomas Aquinas
He adheres to the doctrines of Aristotle, away from it at an important point. In politics, he lost the primacy that Aristotle had claimed. Although housed in first place among the practical arts, as all the sciences and the arts converge more toward politics, but to theology. The policy, like all other sciences, is its servant.
Dante Alighieri states that “man has to develop their full intellectual, which is what is essentially human. Only universal peace can find the means to achieve happiness and full development of our being.”
Peace is the good that is achieved by the unit. A man is only safe if there is harmony in the body and soul. This also happens with the family, the city, and the human race.
Concord is the movement of several wills in unity that will not be possible until there is a regulatory body will social. The king is for the people and not the people for the king. Immutable and eternal principles.
Modern Age
Machiavelli
Machiavelli’s extreme exaltation of politics as the art and science of government, separating it from any connection with ethics or religion. He is a realist who proclaims the autonomy of politics, whose object is the “architecture” of the state in its present sense, and the unit of power.
Jean Bodin
Coined the concept of sovereignty in its current meaning. Sovereignty as supreme power that has exclusive and excluding the State (and is not subject to supervision or control of another State or agency), within its territory. Bodin is the theorist of the centralized monarchy and one of the exhibitors of the mercantilist doctrine.
Thomas Hobbes
Maintains the necessity of despotic power (abuse of superiority to the people) of the State, facing the reality that man is a wolf to man. Hobbes is a materialist and utilitarian philosopher.
Along with the philosophers of his time, Hobbes develops the idea of politics as a science of state, stripped of all metaphysical consideration and subordination to ethics, based on the principles themselves.
This view is facing the Spanish Scholastics school and within its authors, John Locke.
The Spanish Scholastic
Sets the natural character of human society such as relationship, noting that the purpose of government is the common good.
Francisco Suarez, to explore theories about the origin of power, indicates that its source is God. The power is born of God resides in the people, who can transmit it to the elected leader or keep it for themselves. The power is limited by divine law, natural law, and the common good.
Juan de Mariana argues that power is legitimate if it rests upon the consent of the subjects.
John Locke (anti-absolutist), is the source of power in a compact. The men shed their natural freedom to form a civil society to ensure the happiness and security policy.
The state emerges with the specific purpose of ensuring the freedom of all men. The power is limited by individual rights since the purpose of political organization is freedom and not slavery.
Locke points to the coexistence of the division of powers and gives special importance to the Legislature.
Hobbes and Rousseau are also the source of power in a compact or social contract, in extreme nominalist position to the point of denying reality also natural to society. The nominal basis of the representative theory holds that men are the reality and the state convention, the product of a pact. It argues that the person is an absolute value against which the state is nothing more than a means.
ILLUSTRATION
Montesquieu (“The Spirit of Laws”), builds the archetype of the system of checks and balances of power. He argues that he who possesses the power tends to increase and end up abusing it. To halt or reduce the power required is divided into distinct and separate functions that are controlled by dynamic tension. This system favors freedom. Montesquieu applied the realistic and empirical method of Aristotle.
Rosseau
Crisis and Destruction of Political Science
- The policy replaced by economic science
Since the second half of the eighteenth century, there has been a crack in the Aristotelian politics. The “Political Economy” and emerging science marks the beginning of the replacement policy for the economy.
From the eighteenth century, the economy has gained complete autonomy of the intellectual, reaching its independence from the other sciences.
Liberalism leads to a minimalist conception of the state, which is reduced to its mere role of gendarme. The general idea that informs the individualistic liberalism lies in its conviction about the existence of a spontaneous economic order that obeys natural laws. This providential order, moved by the “invisible hand” Adam Smith alluded to, is self-regulating through automatic as the market, which sent prices through linking their prices to producers and consumers, without the intervention of political power.
In front and the government of economic laws, the state subtracts only retain the legal framework of respect for individual rights, ensure freedom of action of economic agents, and not intervene in the broad field of economics, thereby reducing the state and politics.
- The policy replaced by sociology