A Book in the Works

'The Open Book' by Juan Gris 1925


The Origins of Impersonal Rule in England 1626-1642

Current Project:

 My aim is to trace the origins of modern impersonal state governance in the evolving codes for interaction and interpenetration within and between institutions of law, administration, and political representation. In the past 2 years I found evidence of such origins earlier than most scholars, in a 30-year period preceding, during, after the ‘Personal Rule’ of Charles I, when legal battles over prerogative, predictability, partiality, were won or lost.

 My interest in British history has been the role played by seventeenth century English lawyer-politicians (Coke, Hale, et al., especially Oliver St John) in systematising ideas about legal order in governance, and their active experimentation with procedures (e.g. committees, legal dispute, enforcement innovations) which impacted on evolving prototypical separations of powers and pressure for depersonalisation of state processes.

 The hypothesis — tested through examination of key legal-constitutional case studies in both centuries — is a creation or evolution of distinct functional institutional differentiations between crown, law, political representation, and civil administration, which occur as solutions to problems of economic-political complexity. The move to higher-level complexity (and solutions) is enabled by simplified procedural norms that regulate and automatise the interactions and interpenetrations of these state institutions. Much of the ‘agency’ behind the changes appears to have lain with practical task-oriented lawyer-politicians.

 Although I criticise Niklas Luhmann's sociological theory of society and law, I usefully adapt two of his core concepts. The present proposal emerges from my own seminal work on institutional impersonality (2000-2009), which was reenergised by the popularity of compatible historical analyses subsequently undertaken by North, Weingast, Wallis (2009) and Fukuyama (2014). This study of early modern lawyer-politicians will result in a more sophisticated historical understanding of the long-run depersonalisation of governance.














Popular posts from this blog

Hellerian Capitalism II: Douglass North and Institutional Impersonality

Image
Nicholas Roerich 'Nanda Devi' 1944 By way of introduction let me say I first read Nobel prize winner  Douglass North in the early 1990s when I borrowed Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (1990) from my father who was also a social scientist. Like so many others I was immediately influenced by this extremely persuasive new economic approach to the study of institutions.  Over the years I realised that some of North’s central ideas had roots in classical economic sociology. North packaged them differently by combining them with advances in economics such as rent-seeking, game theory, path-dependence, Coaseian transaction costs. But the substance relating, for example, to appropriation of property rights and transitions from customs or convention to law could rightly be called Weberian. Sometimes North’s conceptual language and meaning is identical to Weber’s, though Weber is not mentioned. While I wrote my book on capitalism I spotted
Read more

Hellerian Capitalism I: Characteristics and Conditions

Image
Nicholas Roerich 'Everest' 1938 Why theorise capitalism? As Mallory said of Mount Everest, “because it’s there”. Today begins a new series titled The Economic Sociology of  Capitalism (2003)  which will draw on my wealth of useful material from adventuresome years as an academic when I trespassed creatively across disciplinary boundaries and wrote continuously but refused either to publish or to perish.  Below is the first of several extracts I plan to post from an unpublished chapter called Capitalism that I sent to Peter Dougherty at Princeton in October 2003. I think it is good enough to offer here more or less verbatim. Peter wrote to say he liked it and encouraged me to send more chapters, which I could not do until October 2006. Life intervened, as it does even during Everest climbs.  ______________ Chapter 4: Capitalism by Michael Heller (2003) Introduction and section 1: Definitional Characterisations “Progress toward capitalism has been th
Read more

Lazy Malay, Lazy Thinking

Image
Irma Stern's 'Portrait of a Young Malay Girl' 1939 Southeast Asians sometimes use cultural or hereditary arguments to explain their own allegedly easy-going, deferential and uncompetitive nature. In a 1970 book The Malay Dilemma Mahathir Mohamad -- the eccentric and bad mannered prime minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 -- justified giving Malays special economic and political privileges designed to help them overcome a historic ethnic-cultural disadvantage vis-à-vis the country’s more go-getting Chinese and Indian population. Mahatir argued it was simply good breeding, manners, and nobility which habitually made a Malay “stand aside and let someone else pass”.  Until the influx of Chinese and Indian migrants during British colonial rule Malaysia’s resource base allowed the indigenous population comparative comfort without the need for undue exertion or ingenuity. Malays did not have to be ‘fit to survive’. They had free time and ample food. Seeing that Chinese o
Read more