What is the most signicant political text ever written?

[mswas]

Hammurabi’s Code of Laws.

[Sage_Rat]

@Lakai

If we are going to talk about something that works, then the Declaration of Independence is highly significant. It is the first time people got away with saying that a government could be overthrown if the people didn’t approve of it. That’s not to say it wasn’t highly influenced by Locke and others.

I’d rather go for something thorough and descriptive. The Declaration of Independence doesn’t lay the foundation for a new government nor a new system of economics. It states that there are certain basic rights that anyone should have, but doesn’t say why or describe how one can give those rights while still maintaining law and order. For the sake of being able to recreate the most successful format of living as yet invented by man, the Declaration of Independence is severely lacking.

[The_Flying_Dutchman]

What is the most significant political text ever written? Gee, by what yard stick do we measure that?

Seeking for the text with the broadest impact on on modern constitutional democracy I leaned towards the genesis, The Magna Carta Libertatum. 1215 which is still on the books today. Limits on government and rights and freedoms for the people. Quite radical considering kings were supposedly appointed by God. Who would have thought ? Well God’s spokesperson Archbishop Langton actually. He remembered The Charter of Liberties voluntarily proclaimed by Henry I way back in 1100 and informed the ignorant and disgruntled barons that they had rights under the law. The barons subsequently updated the English Constitution with the Magna Carta.

Thus The Charter of Liberties of 1100 by King Henry I

[Deeg]

@Freddy the Pig

As members of the English-speaking world, we tend to over-estimate the importance of Anglo-American constitutional evolution in the history of free thought. The British (and even more so, the rebellious Americans) were outliers, and aroused little emulation, in the Eighteenth Century. It was the French Revolution that brought freedom into the mainstream of European thought (and, via European military domination, into the mainstream of world thought).

I disagree. The American Revolution was greatly admired by the actors of the French Revolution and they modeled much of their political thought after the American ideals. Thomas Paine was elected to their National Convention in 1792 and was a strong influence.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Freddy the Pig

The [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen]As members of the English-speaking world, we tend to over-estimate the importance of Anglo-American constitutional evolution in the history of free thought. The British (and even more so, the rebellious Americans) were outliers, and aroused little emulation, in the Eighteenth Century. It was the French Revolution that brought freedom into the mainstream of European thought (and, via European military domination, into the mainstream of world thought).

July 14, 1789 (the Fall of the Bastille) is generally considered the beginning of the first French Revolution, which ultimately failed as the despotic Napoleon Bonaparte grabbed control in a coup d’etat, installing himself as First Consul and later crowning himself Napoleon I, Emperor of the First French Empire (and his wife Empress Josephine), later succeeded by a reestablishment of the Bourbons in 1814. The wave of democracy that was embraced by Europe came during the Revolutions of 1848, almost sixty years after the original French revolution. And there was little about the results of the earlier revolution that was democratic, certainly not “via European military domination,” which had Napoleon running roughshod over nations and peoples without any care for the institutions of democracy.

What is true is that the Europeans embraced a somewhat different form of democratic institutions, in particular the parliamentary form of government which encouraged consensus building among smaller political factions with common interests versus the American system which was built largely on the premise of having only two or three major parties with any significant control. It is also the case that most European powers do not have the kind of graduation of powers–specifically, the influence of autonomous subdivisions–found in the states of the United States, instead having a somewhat more homogenous distribution. (There are, of course, exceptions to this, the cantons of Switzerland in particular.) And the peculiar power-sharing arrangement of the United Kingdom, with its individual regions of sovereignty, united under one crown, is unique in all of history (save, perhaps, for the Roman empire in some of its broad range of configurations). To that extent, Continental democracy can be said to be unique from the institutions of the United States and Great Britain, but also unlike the government envisioned by the original instigators of the French Revolution of 1789.

As for the Magna Carta Libertatum, Declaration of Independence, United States Constitution, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, et cetera: these are political instruments, not texts or treatise, and their fundamental rationales are often not stated explicitly therein, hence the frequent confusion regarding the interpretation of their commandments. While they may have been of great influence on succeeding instruments as a template, their influence on fundamental thought regarding democracy (or communism, fascism, whathaveyou) is predicated on an exterior knowledge of the value of these systems, and none of them are what one would call an exemplar of clarity in the hind-seeing eye of history.

Stranger

[Freddy_the_Pig]

@Stranger On A Train

July 14, 1789 (the Fall of the Bastille) is generally considered the beginning of the first French Revolution, which ultimately failed as the despotic Napoleon Bonaparte grabbed control in a coup d’etat, installing himself as First Consul and later crowning himself Napoleon I, Emperor of the First French Empire (and his wife Empress Josephine), later succeeded by a reestablishment of the Bourbons in 1814. The wave of democracy that was embraced by Europe came during the Revolutions of 1848, almost sixty years after the original French revolution. And there was little about the results of the earlier revolution that was democratic, certainly not “via European military domination,” which had Napoleon running roughshod over nations and peoples without any care for the institutions of democracy.

Of course the transition from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy wasn’t seamless, nor immediate.

But the Declaration addressed a great deal more than the conduct of elections. It addressed equality before the law, the abolition of noble privilege, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from arbitrary arrest, innocence until proven guilty, the sanctity of private property, and sovereignty residing in the nation rather than the monarch.

These are the bedrock principles separating the semi-feudal world of the Eighteenth Century from the world of today, at least in free countries. And the Declaration, more than any other text, brought those principles to the attention of the non-English-speaking world.

[clairobscur]

@Stranger On A Train

J The wave of democracy that was embraced by Europe came during the Revolutions of 1848,

That’s true, but nevertheless, the French revolution ideals met quite a bit of enthusiastic support in many European countries especially amongst the educated and the idealist youth. And it lasted even after Bonaparte’s coup, even after French armies invaded neighbouring countries. IMHO, it took him crowning himself emperor and a number of abuses for this original enthusiasm to stall. In any case, I think the shock wave caused by the French revolution and its aftermath, added to the apparition of early “socialist” ideas and the development of nationalism paved the way for the 1848 movements.