Gubernaculum
The Greek word κυβερνάω (kubernaō) means rudder, in Latin, the k was swapped for a g and the word became gubernaculum (it also has a medical meaning, but we won’t worry about that). This word is the root of ‘government’ in English.
In Medieval Europe, Gubernaculum came to mean one of the two modes that ‘the state’ (to be a little anachronistic) could operate in.1 The other was Jurisdictio. Jurisdictio was employed for routine matters; it relied on the customs of the people which were built up from years of experience. If something was typical, you could be sure that the people were able to deal with it because their traditions had been built up over the centuries (or longer) to deal with such matters. In this area, what contribution could the King possibly make? One man can never experience so much that he judge better than the experience accumulated by an entire country over hundreds or thousands of years. Jurisdictio was therefore an area where the King was tightly constrained, it would be wrong for him to intervene in such customs.
However, not everything fits the mould of experience and custom. Sometimes unique events happen that the experience of generations cannot meet. If the country is invaded, or a new disease rips though its population, experience can do little to meet the challenge. Instead, the King must take the reins and act in the interests of the country.
In these situations, the King’s God given authority is enough to override any law or custom. He would speak “as the roaring of a lion” and sweep aside whatever law or interests or custom he needed to.
When Commodore Perry went to Japan and made it clear that the traditional way of life in that country would not stand up to the challenges of the modern world, the Emperor Meji seized the tiller and undid a great deal of custom.
Because the Gubernaculum is outside of the realm of experience, for medieval thinkers it seemed the populace could have no say in the matter. The common people were not capable of understanding the quasi divine authority of their monarchs because they were creatures of custom and experience. This meant that the people had no place in questioning the wisdom of the actions of their monarch, because the best thing to do in a situation outside of experience could not be known by the people. The obvious problem with this is that the King might do a bad thing, luckily this was not really a problem; Kings were put there by God, bad Kings and conquerors were the scourges of God, sent to punish you or set you right. “I am the punishment of God...If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
For the most part, events existed somewhere on a spectrum between Jurisdictio and Gubernaculum. Few things are really new, and few are really exactly the same.
One of the most important things that has changed is that we no longer see the masses as simply a repository of experience and custom. The People are now sovereign in most of the world, few Proper Countries have retained the monarchical ideal of one man whose wisdom cannot be questioned by the masses (France and the United States are the best examples of surviving monarchies). Why did this happen? I don’t know the answer, but let us consider one possibility - at least of what came to replace it. The civic republican tradition emerged in Florence. At the centre of this tradition is the opposition of Fortuna and Virtú.
Fortuna was a Roman goddess who made unpredictable stuff happen, 15th and 16th century Florentines didn’t believe in the actual goddess, but unpredictability could still reign supreme. Virtú was the capacity to control Fortuna. This could be analogous with our concept of virtue, personal qualities that made it easier to control events, but it could also be more literal, sometimes it was used to refer to the resources of the ruler, so a strong army could be a form of Virtú.
For Machiavelli2 and other civic republican thinkers, the people were an important source of Virtú. Machiavelli is particularly concerned with the importance of the militia as a source of Virtú, it trained the citizenry to be disciplined and averse to luxury while also preventing the Republic from employing mercenaries, who were wont to continue wars past the point that they served the good of the Republic. The implication was that the people were more than simply a repository of experience, they became a source of Virtú which actually kept the country stable. There’s a lot of thinking on the theme that an oligarchy or a monarchy is actually more chaotic than a properly balanced republic, in other words, Fortuna is supreme in such states partly because, unless they have a particularly good ruler, they do not take advantage of all the reserves of Virtú available to them.
Most of the facts, and a good number of the opinions, in this post come from the first part of The Machiavellian Moment by J G A Pocock.
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