We moderns are accustomed to ascribing improbable virtues to law. We tend to believe, more often than not, that altering the legislation of a society is equivalent to reworking the underpinnings of the same: that the panacea for political or social ills lies in the writing or emending of constitutions. The American experience would seem most brilliantly to legitimate this attitude: for was it not precisely the United States which emerged from a bloody revolution, unformed yet politically, to frame a Constitution which has endured a quarter millennium already, carrying its people to historically unprecedented material well being, and to political apotheosis over all the world?
Yet — as it must be rejoined — was that not a people already disposed to yoke itself beneath the law, and to maintain that writ as if it had been God-delivered and sacrosanct? Was that not already a people whose English and indeed Romance origins had instilled in it the greatest natural respect for the validity and binding quality of legal documents, whose (albeit thinning) Teutonic blood had readied it for love of fatherland and upright observance of authority, and whose factious tendencies were therefore already bendable beneath the weight of merest paper?
We are wont to mistake cause and effect here, in a most dangerous way — as is not rare to our race. The law, when it is not imposed by a willful and dominating hand, is made in a people’s own image; and a law-abiding people, perceiving the correspondence between image and original, is like to believe that it has conformed itself to the law, that its own virtues are owed to the virtues of the law, and its own vices to the law’s defects. That is, so far as it goes, an edifying, if not entirely a proud and noble, view: for it supposes as well the possibility that a people might through its own conscious self-legislation improve itself. Nor should one deny that this is, indeed, possible — but it is possible only to such peoples as are already in their souls malleable to law.
Consider but those two nations just to the south and the north of the United States’ borders, Mexico and Canada; consider their respective destinies.
Following the liberation of their country from the Spanish, and after an initial period of political turmoil and uncertainty similar to that experienced by America in the years following the Revolution, the Mexicans framed a written constitution in 1824 which established Mexico as a Catholic Republic. This written constitution demonstrated a marked resemblance to its American counterpart, and in most principal matters of state agreed with the provisions of the American. It differed most strikingly from the American example in its explicit adoption of Roman Catholicism, a comparatively illiberal faith, as the national religion. Yet despite its similarities to the American Constitution, it lasted little better than a decade, when it was replaced with the Seven Laws, then with another written constitution in 1857, a writ which closely reflected the 1824 document, but tended decisively toward secularism. Thereafter followed a turbulent period, in which the new written constitution was cyclically recognized and suspended. It was replaced by the present deeply secular, and considerably more socially liberal written constitution, in 1917, which has been the longest-lasting written constitution of Mexican history.
It is clear on a review of the complicated and precarious history of Mexican constitutions that the legalism which the United States enjoys and presupposes has always been lacking in Mexican history. Despite Mexico’s attempts to frame a written constitution which might guarantee it achievements similar to those enjoyed by its northern neighbors, no one would dare suggest that the Mexican state has been either as materially or as politically prosperous as the United States or Canada. Mexico suffers, indeed, severe and deep troubles of order which are not reducible to malign foreign influences, nor to any internal dearth of space or poverty of natural resources. Mexico is a vast country, the fourteenth largest in the world by surface area, and owns a territory rich in precious metals, salable elements, and petroleum. Yet its economy lags behind many European and Asiatic countries, and entire regions within its jurisdiction have fallen under the de facto rule of drug lords. The political order of the country cannot alone be held accountable for these maladies, such as they are, for to say it again, the written law of Mexico does not differ so radically from many countries which have proven much less susceptible to the corruption that afflicts the Mexican nation. The only factor that can finally be implicated to explain these differences are the peculiar customs of the Mexicans and the nature of that people itself in its particular quality as undersoil or foundation.
The constitution of Canada, on the other hand, is markedly different from the American in a number of essential respects. Put in simplest terms, Canada was long a constitutional monarchy, under the radically secular (radically secular, because in Britain the putative head of the liberal state and the head of the church are one and the same) and (in these latter days) radically liberal rule of the British crown. Its balance of powers was distributed more vertically than laterally: the prime minister, following English usage, customarily has a seat in one of the two houses of the legislature, but his powers, if they grow excessive, can be checked by the ruling monarch. Notwithstanding these essential differences, which in another country might lead at once to a most eclipsing and total dictatorship, Canadian society has if anything been more pacific and stable than the United States — as is witnessed, for instance, by comparative rankings of crime rates in the two countries. Once again, it would appear that there is a hidden fundament underlying legal systems which is far more important in the life of peoples, than are their “constitutions.”
Or again — the earliest legal codes of which we have record in this or that geographical region, as for example those of Genghis Khan and Hammurabi, were insufficient in and of themselves to command human action. The idea of “law” is potent only insofar as its subjects are willing and accustomed to submit to it; the potency of law is a power invisible which governs the ready mind. As has been investigated at due length by a great man who never shrunk from the publication of such awful and barbaric insights, the task confronting the first lawgivers was that of imposing not indeed law, but lawfulness (“the right to make promises”). Merely consider those penalties instated by that code of millennial influence which the gods gave to Hammurabi: a cattle robber who cannot pay for what he has stolen in either gold or barter will pay with his life; a son who strikes his father will lose a finger; he who groundlessly slanders the reputation of a woman will have his brow slashed. On the other hand, the Great Yassa, the code created by Genghis Khan and adopted by some mere several generations after, pledged mercilessness for all criminals and liberally applied capital punishment for matters which in our day would not even be considered crimes. The code of Genghis Khan was, moreover, a secret code: a man could be punished for transgressing a law that had never been promulgated. This seems to our modern eyes the pith of injustice and arbitrary tyrannical power, and so it was. But we must recall that this code was implemented in a barbaric time, and such concepts have no right meaning in barbaric societies. The Great Yassa was not meant to establish clarion rules over human beings, but rather was meant to instill in them the very concept of rule itself. This could not be done without bending all men for as long a time as possible beneath a mysterious authority, and habituating them to the very attitude of meek and complacent obeisance.
It is impossible to say to what long travails of our forefathers we Occidentals of today owe the right to do without any such draconian measures, and it is prudent not to bring these matters too much upon the stage. Law is binding to us: but this does not mean it will be binding to an equal extent on others, nor even on our scion. It does not even mean that all law, of any kind, source, or essence, will bind us to the same extent.
Now, it is precisely the recalcitrance and inconsistency of the human heart which has so often led to a conflation of the law of man and the law of the gods over the course of human history, or perhaps even to an embedding of the law of man within the law of the gods, or vice versa. For the law of the gods speaks to each new generation of human beings without interruption, and is transmitted via writings which, as they are taken to issue from divine founts, are certain to be preserved, conveyed and interpreted with utmost care. Their punishments or sanctions are invisible, for they occur not always in this world but often in the next, or else by virtue of obscure and mysterious powers, and so they are at once humane and persuasive. They bind the soul and not the body, which is a bond of much greater strength than that of mere shackles or cords. They establish a power in the soul which is believed to emanate from superhuman sources, and thus impose hierarchy on human life and create a center of gravity in the very heavens. And because they are believed to be superhuman in origin, they are capable of overseeing custom, or of radically sculpting it. The peculiar relation of a given human law to the divine law is thus a fundamental characteristic of the human law, and radically determines its quality, intent, and effect.
A final example — one, as it were, “home-bred and prescriptive,” at least so far as the Americans are concerned: at the break of the American Civil War, the Confederacy was tasked with determining the government that would represent it. The Constitution that the Confederate government settled on was identical to that of the union from which it seceded, with a very few passages interposed with three principal purposes, to make the justice of slavery explicit and to clarify the question of states’ rights. It is likely that if secession had been permitted, the North would have continued in its tendingly democratic and industrialized ways, and the South would have maintained its aristocratic and agricultural ones. Both republics would have lived out destinies at once similar and divergent, and this despite the fact that both sides shared an almost identical set of laws. What differed between them was rather the nature or the creeds of their peoples: it was not law but ethnos or ethos which differed. Once again, we see that alterations in the legal fabric followed the usances of the land, that they were, rather than being determinants of custom, merest declarations of it. And, had secession been successful, it is moreover likely that a good number of the citizens of both of the resulting countries would have tenaciously persisted in the belief that they owed their peculiar civilizations, their peculiar blessings and misfortunes, primarily to the almost identical laws of their lands.10
As has been said, that is in some ways an edifying error — but it becomes parlous when it is wed to that democratic dogma according to which all peoples everywhere are thought to be equal and equally endeared of liberty, and so equally governable, supposing only that their governments are sufficiently liberal. For, if this equality truly exist, then it must suffice to replace bad laws with good ones, and illiberal governments with liberal ones, to make violent nations mild and restive populations restful. If ever there were a doubt about the impossibility of such chimera, we have made decisive test of the question in our recent experiments of seeding democracy in radically undemocratic climes. Only the least cautious or most bellicose observer of such attempts would claim that their failure has been due predominately to flaws in the legislation or the legal structures that we have imposed. This would be like to calling it foul of the glove maker, that for a few stitches his glove will not fit both the fat hand and the thin.
The law must be fit to the people; else it must be long made to fit. If this basic principle is neglected, the resultant legislations shall simply be ignored and scorned, rendered nugatory by the daily actions of their very constituents, while their framers sit like T.H. Lawrence after the fall of Damascus, bewildered and forlorn in abandoned tribunals and parliamentary halls.11
That is how one makes man lawful; but today, by a most curious twist, we are beset almost by the contrary problem. For today, it is precisely the most lawful of peoples in the West that risk most to succumb. These peoples, being naturally obedient and trusting, have acquiesced to their legislation and their lawmakers even unto their own undoing; and now that the law has fallen largely into the hands of vicious and mad and greedy men bent on absolute power and on the eradication of all of Europe’s past, the very law-abiding spirit of the West, once its finest treasure, becomes its most dangerous cage.
This is nothing new in the history of civilizations. It, or something like it, characterizes all the great decadent periods of which we have any knowledge, as for instance that of Egypt, or that of Rome. These peoples did not fall, they did not fail, because they grew too factious under the weight of bureaucracy or the lash of law; on the contrary, they were all too ready to bend with amazing flexibility before those threats, for they no longer had any living resilience in their souls, nor any resistant sap in their sinews, nor any reason to resist. Their adherence to law crippled them, as the law itself fossilized around them into an inescapable and super-rigid death-mask. They were ruined by precisely one of those features which had contributed fundamentally to their might. Their laws had made them great; but they, beneath their laws, had become small, and docile as pups before the wolves.
It has been remarked many times that when a people arrives at such a state, it is in need of new blood, a rekindling of its spent or waning vital force; and the likely origin for such has been located, following the hints of history, in the coming of “new barbarians.” But the problem of the barbarian is one that has not received nearly as much attention as it ought to have. The idea of barbarian renewal comes without doubt from the fall of Rome, and in particular from the observation that the northern hordes which fell upon the crumbling empire did not utterly destroy it, but rather, in the long term, brought it to new vim, and laid the ground for the coming of Europe. It would be tempting to suppose that a similar “historical dialectic” might arise then any time a people has grown senile; but certain considerations must moderate this view.
In the first place, some clarity on the idea of the barbarian is in order. There are two senses in which we Westerners in particular have historically used this word. A barbaric people is either a people with no culture (παιδεία, cultura), or it is a people with no law (lex). The first is essentially the sense in which the Greeks used the term, who were well aware of their strange superiority with respect to the entire world surrounding them. The βάρβαροι were originally those who did not speak Greek, those who in their speech babbled “bar-bar-bar”; but this audible difference was but the clearest sign of a much more fundamental distinction in spirit. Thus the Greeks could justly call even the mighty Persians barbarians, before whom we ourselves often enough seem but cringing midgets; and the Greeks meant something by this other than what they meant when they called a man “stranger” or “foreigner” (ξένος), which was a distinct concept in the Greek language, indicating as it did a fellow Greek hailing from a different region of Greece. For the barbarian to the Greek was one who, having been born to a different people, could not exist in this world as a Greek — with all the high liberty and calm superiority of the Greek.
Now, by this excellent sense of the word “barbarian,” it must be allowed that even Late Rome, at the time of its collapse, was become a barbaric nation. But then, the influx of new barbarians could do nothing to “rejuvenate” it, insofar as the addition of one cultureless people to another can result in nothing other than confusion, violence and turmoil, which might give rise to a future culture, if any number of uncontrollable conditions are met. Most essentially, one needs the right human material and the right spiritual form in both cases; and this alone is but necessary, not sufficient, for it must be met as well by the support of an absolutely ungovernable fortune.
Such is, let us say, the high and noble concept of barbarism, which is permissible only to a great people, a people with culture in the noble and pure sense. By this high view, however, we must admit that the entire world today is barbaric in the decisive respect, we Westerners not much less than the least of the tribes of the Earth; for whatever culture we have today is but the shade and memory of past culture, and surely not a living and vital cultural tradition. We can differentiate ourselves from the primitive by our splendid material wealth; but the most powerful of kings surrounded by the greatest of treasures is not the equal to the poorest of free men, if the king is slave to his treasury or his subjects. Our boast with respect to the dark continents of the world is a valid one; but at the same time it stands as an eternal reminder of how vile and pathetic we are in the face of our own past. It would be well, then, to lay aside the high sense of this word and for the nonce grasp that which is more accessible to our unhappily short reach.
The “barbarian,” then, is he who lacks law, and stands therefore in contrast with the civilized man; or put more comprehensively and adequately, a barbaric people is a cultureless people in whose spirit custom (consuetudo) is identical to law (lex). This is the fundamental reason one associates barbarism with tribal existence: only the tribe can exist in the absence of law, and only on the basis of law can societies be built of the type we have historically enjoyed in the West. This is also the reason that we associate, to a lesser extent, barbarism with tyranny; for in the figure of the tyrant, all law is abolished, and the tyrant’s own and personal “custom” or creed comes to rule in its stead. Now, it is clear that such law can arise only on a special
natural ground, for there are peoples in this world whose being makes law in any regular or higher sense impossible — as is witnessed, for instance, by the fact that anywhere certain peoples go and gain predominance, and no matter what “law” they might happen to adopt to their state or have imposed upon them, the result is nonetheless precisely the kind of chaos and violence one would expect if one were to force any tribal people into societies unfit for tribal existence. There are peoples born for the outgrowth of law, and others that are not.
The idea, then, that the barbarian per se is capable of rejuvenating an aging people is inherently suspect. The Black Continent with its dark blood should do nothing but render any true possibility of law, not to speak of culture, ultimately impossible among the European peoples. Similarly the Arabs with their tyrannical god; for religious law, though it might in the best cases be something more as well, exists on the social plane as the better part or the basis of social custom.
What then of the barbarians who invaded Rome? How is it possible that they might have brought any good to the Romans they forced to heel? It is worth mentioning that even by our lower conception of the barbarian, at least the Visigoths had both written language and law, two of the signal marks of civilized peoples. Quite beyond this, however, it must be recalled that the Germanic peoples living in the northern stretches of Europe were not so ethnically foreign to the Romans as it might be tempting to believe. The founding stock of Rome itself originated in the North; idem the Dorians in Greece, who were the ethnos, to take but the most honorable example, of Sparta. It may well be that what we see in the “barbarian rejuvenation” of an exhausted Rome was nothing but a kind of reawakening of the origins through the originating blood and ways of that people itself. As Evola says in his excellent essay on Romanness (The Bow and the Club, Arktos 2018): “Those races that burst onto the stage of history as new and still uncorrupted forces could certainly have swept away, not only whatever political power still endured, but Rome itself as a spiritual symbol, had they, as though following an obscure yet unfailing instinct, not perceived and found traces of a kindred spirit within it.” This is essentially different than an arbitrary group of racially and ethnically alien foreigners who infiltrate a people and undermine, rather than reinforcing, that which is best in it — as we are seeing happen in this very moment in the West.
This casts the specific problem of the decadence of the West into a different light. If Europe in her moments of weakness and decline has historically sought revival through her own and inner “barbarians” — from the north, in the case of Old Rome, or from the South, as happened during the Renaissance, or further back yet, from early Rome in the case of old Greece — it is equally clear that today we are experiencing a European decadence which is horrible for its universality: for it seems there are no barbarians left within Europe’s shores. This is the “biological” or ethnic side of the European crisis. The temptation arises then to look outside of Europe for “new barbarians” — to look to the Great South, to the Far East. Some might look even to the Wide (Wild?) West, to the Americas, and in particular to that vast European colony called the United States; thus one speaks, for instance, of the esculpatory “youth” of America, an idea which is in any number of ways utterly preposterous. But truly, if ever America had any “manifest destiny,” this would be it. The task of rising to such a challenge could potentially be ennobling for the best men of America today, toward the rectification of her endemic vulgarity. Yet there are grave reasons to doubt that America is up to such a world-historical task, and it would be most curious indeed, if not historically unprecedented, if this particularly weighty ethical role could be fulfilled at precisely the moment that America’s political power is in decline.
Alternately, and more promisingly, one might look to Russia — to our true “Eastern brethren,” who in certain definite respects remain the halest among us. But even Russia bears the gnawing marks of the modern spiritual syphilis; and though Russian influence in Europe, or dominion over it, is to be preferred absolutely to any contemporary American influence (supposing, that is, that America is not able to perform the nigh miracle of resurrecting her older promise), to lay one’s hopes in any foreign entity is akin to desperation. — As for the possibility of searching beyond of the West for revitalization today, the considerations we have already submitted should suffice to demonstrate the hideous absurdity and suicidal recklessness which is generally involved in any such idea.
All of this, then, demonstrates a strange, and, at first glance, impossible exigency in the West today, in all of its parts, societies, peoples, and regions: namely, to discover within the West the new barbarians. It is evident that this must be a predominately “spiritual” effort, at least at first, and it is clear that when we speak of “barbarians” here, we mean the word in the sense we have but lately been treating. The West is in need of rebirth, and, contra all liberals and libertarians, contra the conservatives themselves, this cannot arise within the structure of those very laws which are slowly strangling us or being used to engineer our demise. Yet it is equally clear that to rebel openly against these laws without due preparation and at the wrong moment is not only futile but also potentially catastrophic.
Then we must look to the underground of law, and we must lay our work there: we are in need of new customs.
It would be wrong to conclude from these reflections, as is sometimes done, that laws are nothing but a kind of epiphenomenon of the ethos of a people, a kind of spontaneous and largely redundant outgrowth of custom, which like mushrooms sprout more vigorously and thickly where the soil is rich. We may, however, lay it down as a general principle that just law will constrain a people only to the extent that the people itself is just: even as bad law will be as a conduit to whatever is bad in a people. The worst of peoples with the best of laws will find a way to bend them to its malicious and acidic will. The best of peoples might live some time in tranquility, even if it finds itself by some fey destiny ruled by the very worst of laws; but even the best of peoples will not long withstand a wholly rotten constitution, for not even the best of peoples is without its unscrupulous elements, and these are always favored by the defects in a political regime to grasp for the reins of power. The only recourse that good men will have in such a time is to fight honorably but illegally: and that is necessarily corrosive to the commonweal, and to those very customs upon which the law so decisively rests. In the worst of such times, heaven forbid, it may even be the lot of good men to seize power by force. Yet what legitimacy can the resultant government claim for itself, and by what higher right? And even if its inherent nobility should be sufficient to guarantee the fine actions of a first generation of its rulers, what will guarantee their sons to a similar path?
Revolution becomes a habit with men. A first revolution, be it ever so honorable and reasonable in intent and in means, and ever so dedicated to upright principles, will nonetheless fashion a precedent, an exemplar writ in flame, so that the second fire comes that more easily. And, unless the people in question is abnormally peaceable and unusually law-abiding, or unusually given to piety or loyalty, or most particularly meek and obsequious or else given by fate a hero, it is little to be hoped that a good regime born in the bloody froth of revolt will not drown in the same. But most if not all of the traits mentioned are incompatible with revolution. The constancy of law is the only guarantor against such an internecine cycle of civil wars and coups-d’état.12
It must therefore not be overlooked, the degree to which slow incremental changes of law might be the cinch by which a people’s character is elevated. It is one of the gravest errors of the lawmaker in the grand style to let his impatience pen his legislation, and he pays for his error by losing even those smaller gains he might have secured.
It is natural for him to be hasty: he is tyrannized by his vision. He would, as a shaper of men and of the destinies of men, arrive at his goal with a dash of blood and ink, for he knows that he is a human being and is not destined to live forever. Or perhaps the time in which he lives is threatened with great and unprecedented dangers, and he feels all the urgency of his calling. Nor can he with tranquil spirit entrust his vision to the future; for even if he can put his faith in some stolid member of the next generation, who might follow his prescriptions as he has laid them out, two generations on is already too distant for him to steadily cast the net of his hope around. Indeed, let us suppose that he manages to pass his teaching down to the generation of his great-grandchildren unadulterated — and that is difficult enough! The circumstances of his society’s mores might have altered so substantially that his mandate will seem strange and alien to them.
Thus he hastens on: he errs on the side of too much, too soon, that he might preserve his child, in despite of the simple truth that his law will be successful only insofar as the customs of the people permit it. He believes he must inscribe his ideas indelibly, to be certain that they are heeded, and the only stone that is so stable as that seems to be — the law. He does not recognize that it is almost certainly his gravestone he has so incised.
How does a man, who would build politically, cast his will beyond the meager horizon of his days? How does he legislate for the centuries? That is a dangerous question, and one which our secular democracies (if this formulation be not a pleonasm) are liable with good reason to view with suspicion. Let us then show the reasons to doubt his possibility.
Now, such a man cannot simply scribe his will into political law, save in the most fortunate of historical circumstances; and yet to do less is to promise his thought to death. He cannot entrust his thought to his pupils, for they, too, are human beings, and are prone to error, to reassessment, and to ambitions of their own. If he is radical (as what radical legislator in the grand style is not?) he cannot publish his thought, for he is liable to be punished in proportion as he is heterodox, and his epoch is intolerant. Nor can he, though he be pregnant with prophecies, foresee the exact limits on the tolerance of tomorrow’s society. May be a day will come just a hundred years on that books such as his, with thoughts such as his, will be consigned to some bonfire of the vanities by some revolutionary and tyrannical hand. Time and forgetfulness, which he would enroll as his allies, much more fluidly become his constant enemies.13
Or perhaps he goes the way of the ancient philosophers — and indeed, of all deep souls — and writes esoterically, hiding his profoundest message beneath layers of more edifying veils. His message will then be available for so long as his writings persist, to each generation of serious thinkers and crafty readers. And that would appear to be the only valid solution to his conundrum.
Yet that was a solution invented by Plato, who was also its most masterful exponent, and it is best suited to the legislators like Plato, who would seek or teach eternal verities regarding human nature and human regimes —men who were in many cases the founder of some school (ἡ σχολή, ludus; recall the connections of the one to leisure, and of the other to play). But it would seem that Plato and the philosophers of antiquity were not as ambitious as our legislator: they perceived certain limitations, at once immutable and very narrow, set around the philosopher’s shaping of human destiny. They restricted themselves to the more moderate task of preserving philosophy against hostile regimes insofar as in their power this lay. Thus Plato and philosophers like him hide their greatest thoughts beneath a conventional veneer. Plato speaks to each new generation as though he had never died, and the best men of each new generation, only supposing these are ready to be initiated, listen to his teaching as if it came direct from Plato’s own mouth, driving behind the appearances as they are able. There seems to be a kind of punctuated continuity then to Plato’s teachings — continuity, because each generation may access his thought, and punctuated, because it seems that each new generation must do so anew, “from scratch,” eternally “for the first time.”
The classical solution to the relation between philosophy and society therefore only half addresses that arrogant ambition of the grand political builder. For, suppose a man were born at the end of the cycle, and wished to spin the wheel of history back round; or suppose again that he, in a ludicrous and overweening hubris, wished to carry a grandiose political vision to fruition, but could not do so without, say, two or three centuries, or even half a millennium, at his disposal — how would he proceed? This Platonic solution, as said, seems the only valid approach, the only possibility left to him, of those here outwardly engaged. Yet precisely the Platonic solution, which seems a solution to another problem than the legislator’s, is inadequate for the grand legislator above all others. The evidently necessary rupture between each generation of initiates would compromise the progress of his project. It appears that each generation would have to learn his ideas anew, and begin again from nothing, penetrating the “veil of Isis” as if this had never been done before. And even if it could be hoped that each generation, beginning from that nothing, would perceive the point at which the previous generation had lain off, and would obediently take up the baton where it had found it, this appears to be a poor and unsteady hope. It seems much more likely that a particularly ungifted or uninspired or scholastic generation, or a generation distracted fundamentally by war or crisis or surfeit and plenty, would fail to penetrate to the core of his teachings, and thus fail to press them onward;14 or else that some more complacent generation, satiate and otiose, might come to believe that his vision had already been realized, mistaking the partial achievement of it for the full. The apparent lacunae between one true pupil’s death and the next true pupil’s initiation, the stuttering quality one hears in history, would seem to render the realization of his final goal almost certainly impossible.
In light of these particular conclusions, it thus appears that the conservative and “moderate” soul can sigh a great sigh of relief: for thanks to the dependency of law on custom, the grand style in politics, it would seem, cannot be deliberately birthed into this world.