On Private Justice

I have been thinking recently about the problem of a private justice system. I've come to think that the greatest obstacle for the debate is that we tend to think inside the current paradigm, and "private justice" becomes just a different mode of the same public justice system, but this time run by private companies. This is not the only way we could have private justice. This is actualy a very posterior manifestation of it, as is the public justice system, in a way.

First of all, the idea of a "justice system" began during the inquisition in the 12th century. Far from being the ruthless and obscure mechanism to impose religion, as some who still believe in the propaganda might think, the inquisition created the legal process, as it's name sugests. Before that, there was little "due process" in law and justice, at least no widely adopted one.

Justice was, we might say, private, for no institution had the sovereignty our modern leviathans enjoy, and so, no institution had the monopoly on violence. Only if it could impose it through sheer force, a feat very hard to accomplish in the old days. The crown had a tribunal, but so did the Church, and even the universities.

Going even deeper, "private justice" does not apply only to institutional manifestations. Interpersonal relations that take place outside of the contracts enforced by institutions are private. They may be among family members, friends, or business colleagues. If the matters are settles between the parts with no exterior interference, could we not call this private justice?

This would mean that private justice, which springs from private relations, is prior and more fundamental then state justice, as the family and the friendships between families are prior and more fundamental then the state, especialy if we take "state" to mean the modern absolutist state, that is anti natural to the healthy human society.

But for this discussion to be taken seriously, liberals must abandon the idea that the individual alone is the smallest cell in society. An individual is not a society, therefore cannot form one by itself. The smallest cell in a society is the family, taken in the broad sense of the "spiritual family", that includes the distant relatives and friends, and in some cases, as in the Roman Empire, even the servants. Also the liberals must try to get out of the enlightenment propaganda that antiquity and the middle ages were tiranycal by nature and liberalism finally set us free by the 18th century. We have much to learn from the late middle ages. A peasent's mind would probably explode if we told him about institutions like the IRS or the NSA, or any other international equivalents like the Receita Federal in Brazil. He would most likely prefer to live under his king and noblemen then under the modern leviathan. He would probably think of "private justice" as a natural fact of life. Not from a "business" point of view, but from a natural and organic interpersonal one.

#Justice #PrivateJustice #Leviathan #Subsidiarity #Family #Medievalism #Sovereignty #Freedom