Some History on the Back of the Security Envelope

Abstract

With the unforeseen resurgence of religious terrorism directed at secular regimes, public security is once again a defining issue in politics and law. I don't know that we have entered what some ae calling a new 'age of insecurity' But something in the air is new When public officials recommend: 'We have to move from the old idea of the secret state to the idea of the protective state' ,1 it may be opportune to suspend OUI habitual anti-statism and recall the positive history of the state that protects its subjects. In recovering this history, we discover that issues relating to public security first addressed in early modernity again determine much of today's international order and civil reality. With the return of the politics of religion, ethnic cleansing and civil war, this should occasion no surprise. The basic challenge for early modern political and legal authorities - faced with an unending cycle of religious war and inter-communal terror - was to institute security of life.. In seventeenth-century Germany and England, as in sixteenth­ century France, attempts were made to end confessional conflict and to establish stable government as a bulwark against religious civil war But how was a settled order of coexistence between the 1ival faiths - Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist - to be achieved? One requirement was that clergy should lose their power of temporal jurisdiction in civil politics and law Another was that the objective finality of civil justice should supplant theological truths and ecclesiastical anathemas as the binding condition of public conduct Io undo the history of 'worldly ambition creeping by degrees into the Pastors' - as Thomas Hobbes (1991, p 455) put it in Leviathan - secular courts had to become ultimate arbiters. Relations between the religious impulse, politics and law reformed the prime historical locus of these requirements.