Sortition
Newsletter of the Campaign to Defend the Right to a Secret Ballot
(CDRSB)
March 2025 Issue No. 19
ISSN 1756-4964 (Print)
Strategy for Left Right Conflict Resolution
Pursuant to CDRSB Newsletters Nos. 17 and 18, the main tenet of this Newsletter is that global conflict is world historical in nature related to failure to maintain consistent progress along the path of development indicated by common sense realist principles of understanding and analysis in regard to political theory and constitutional order. Against this background Newsletter No.18 outlined three main insights in regard to the role of juries in the quest for optimal design of democratic government.
The first concerns recognition that sortition as a form of election customarily used in the selection of jurors serves to constrain the influence of factions, including secret factions, upon the judicial process. The second concerns the view formulated by Thomas Jefferson that ordinary citizens, as jurors, should be involved first and foremost in the execution of law since this function is more important than the making of it. The third concerns the understanding that jurors should ultimately possess higher constitutional powers than both the judiciary and legislators in order to ensure that bad law can ultimately be controlled by the people at large, not state administrators.
All three of these insights can be seen as present in the ancient Athenian city state constitution, as surviving in part within the development of the ancient English constitution, and as most clearly expressed in the US Constitution, albeit limited by failure to include jurors in the Supreme Court. It may be possible to gain recognition of the importance of these insights in regard to the formulation of international law aimed at developing a global platform for the preservation of peace within less polarised parameters of multisystemic democratic change.
A complement to these insights is the understanding that inheritance tax is the most socially just form of tax and that policy can be developed which can be implemented by means of choice, not compulsion. This point is demonstrated in detail in CDRSB Newsletter No.17 in correlation with Thomas Paine’s proposal that young workers be awarded grants in order to help fund their attempts to get a good start in life for themselves and their families. We propose that such workers be given a choice between paying no tax in early life with the understanding that their legatees would pay higher inheritance tax or paying the customary rates of tax as would their legatees. CDRSB Newsletter No.18 concentrates on examination of the history of juries, Magna Carta, the work of Edward Coke and John Lilburne.
The civil war era was the chief turning point in regard to emerging understanding of the relation between modern science and constitutional order. Thereafter though repeated failures to maintain consistent progress along the path of development indicated by common sense principles of analysis were manifest these were counterbalanced by overall improvements in constitutional understanding and order.
Modern Science
The method of the craftsman is the primary and original foundation upon which modern science developed. It consists first in clarity of understanding of what are the self evident truths of common sense of greatest relevance to the task at hand and thereafter what further truths may be derived from those first principles. Britain was the first country to formally recognise and develop this approach and in the process correspondingly pioneered the industrial revolution.
The main period of decisive development and change in social progress against this background began in the aftermath of the English reformation, continued into the civil war which followed and thereafter by increments gave way to less decisive though still highly influential periods of change during and since the Enlightenment. Leading this process was Francis Bacon, who reformulated the main principles of scientific method while examining the methods of craft industry in his work on patents. At the root of Bacon’s approach and consistent with Ockham’s razor can be found the claim by Socrates that wisdom may be defined as to know what you do not know. This is both derived from and leads to the approach of the craftsman and practical common sense - eg. if it is not broke do not fix it - as necessary and anterior to development of viable solutions deduced from abstract formulations.
Modern science is founded upon the fusion of inductive inputs yielding deductive results presupposed by understanding of self evident first principles as necessary points of departure with derivations most securely established by means of repetitive experimentation. As Elon Musk put it: “Scientific method fundamentally is about always questioning the science.” In 17th century England for the first time philosophy - led by John Locke - followed as “humble underlabourer to science” because Francis Bacon had perceived the largely impractical, speculative excesses of Aristotle’s teleological claims. Bacon instead linked the insights gained from his studies of patents to what he had deduced by theological reasoning to be an essentially spiritual duty: to gain a more immediately practical understanding of nature in order to ameliorate the difficulties of life consequent to the fall. Thereafter as Professor Arthur Holmes indicates Bacon’s approach decisively influenced Thomas Reid’s exposition of common sense realism which then, thanks chiefly to John Witherspoon, permeated the colonial universities of British North America which had been established before all other British universities excepting Oxbridge.
Ironically Bacon’s chief rival for royal favour, Edward Coke, was instrumental in providing the common law foundation to challenge the attempt by royalty to minimise the legacy of Magna Carta on issues of equity within the King’s juryless chancery courts. Supported by jury nullification practices (which had always been latent to the ancient British constitution) long since entrenched as custom John Lilburne was able in his 1649 trial to take Coke’s resistance to Royal claims right through to assertion of jury power as the ultimately supreme authority of English fundamental law. As the engraving upon the 1649 commemorative coin celebrating Lilburne’s not guilty verdict declares, juries can judge both law and fact. This found further reflection in William Penn’s not guilty verdict of 1671 and was incorporated in the constitutional development of the British American colonies.
Republican Democracy
French refusal to incorporate jury power in their 1789 Declaration of Rights coupled with their enthusiasm for Jacobin terror served to strengthen Anglo-American fears that democracy might destabilise constitutional order and end in ‘mobocracy.’ Consequently the 1791 Bill of Rights Jefferson eventually settled for heralded a significant defeat for the libertarian cause of anti-federalism, which had warned that the juryless structure of the Supreme Court would strengthen aristocratic tendencies and imperil republican democracy.
Despite such setbacks in 1794 British jurors delivered a not guilty verdict on treason charges against activists of the London Corresponding Society regarding their sympathies with the French Revolution. The Society included thousands of skilled workers and was the main founding organisation of the working class movement. Engraved condor metal tokens restating the Lilburne/Leveller claim that juries can judge both Law and Fact were produced to commemorate the 1794 verdict. This was the background to the mobilisation of working class support reaffirming the importance of Magna Carta, trial juries and grand juries along with regular parliaments, universal suffrage and the secret ballot that became known as Chartism.
This period of political change witnessed the growth of debate and social theory among radical clerics, the intelligentsia and skilled workers that accompanied the emergence of what Marx would term the first working class party. Their ideas ranged from those which emphasised the importance of constitutional progress based upon fundamental law to those which dwelt mainly upon more speculative ideas of a social and economic character. In this context Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon and Owen were theorists Marx categorised as ‘utopian’ socialists to distinguish them from his claim to have discovered scientific ‘laws’ of social development that would inevitably result in a change from capitalism to communism.
However the real situation of development in political theory within and for the working class movement was - correctly - more anchored to craft industry and common sense than Marx and Engels had tried to maintain. Reasons to explain this can be summarised as follows.
The British working class movement emerged not only from the development of the mining, iron and transport industries but also from many centuries of craft industry and jury power entrenched throughout the realm. Upon this foundation urban, trade union forms of organisation among skilled labour borne of resistance to the feudal and mercantile propertied classes had been in existence for over five centuries before the industrial revolution. This resistance had given rise to the Levellers based primarily in London during the English civil wars who rallied to Lilburne’s invocation of fundamental rights retained within the ancient Romano-Christian British constitution. Some of the roots of this legacy of fundamental law can in turn be plausibly traced to their origin in Athenian democracy. At the core of this legacy is jury power. Upon the foundation of this bottom up institution a largely elective monarchy and a uniquely national Parliament survived the resort to top down inquisitorial justice systems governed by absolutist monarchies that came to dominate mainland Europe after the Fourth Lateran Council decision to end Church support for trial by ordeal.
Upon this constitutional foundation for the next four centuries conditions in England would, not withstanding setbacks, facilitate increasing possibilities for freedom. Whereas law in France remained corrupted by arbitrary practices such as lettres du cachet, in England law and common sense, based ultimately upon jury power, became increasingly understood as impartial and egalitarian. This lead in turn to the development of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, the scientific revolution and eventually the industrial revolution.
Hegel recognised this country as the first ‘historic nation’ within his Germanic objective idealist political theology with some awareness of these traits while at the same time maintaining that the administrative bureaucracy of the Prussian state would comprise the leading force in shaping a ‘rational’ world order. When Marx and Engels settled here after the failed 1848 revolutions their atheist version of such historicism embraced the British Chartist movement as the first model of an organised proletariat that would prove to be the universalist class power that would reform the world order upon a fully egalitarian foundation.
Terror
Clearly there is a contradiction between the craft industry, bottom up common sense realist foundations of British working class organisation and internationalist understanding as against the top down more speculative perspective of the world historical role Hegel attributed to the Prussian bureaucracy. Marxist communism gives expression to this contradiction in its attempt to posit dictatorship and a chronologically monosystemic progression from one tested ‘mode of production’ (capitalism) to a hypothetical and untested such mode (communism) as categorically and exclusively necessary aims of political strategy. Similarly the Marxist claim that abolition of private property and the family should be posited as fundamentalist aims in an equally categorical manner bears little relation to the centuries old aims of the first working class movement toward government by consent founded upon trial by jury.
These contrasts reflect the fact that Marxist theory proceeds from abstract rationalist speculation concerning the meaning of world history in its entirety, whereas British working class aspirations rest first and foremost upon self evident truths of common sense presupposed by Bacon’s recognition of the methods of craft industry as the point of departure for certainty in scientific enquiry.
Much of the American revolutionary achievement met these aspirations but left some unfulfilled. The French Revolution failed to match the American achievement principally because its leadership adhered in the main to European continental rationalist philosophical tenets which were largely at odds with British empiricism and common sense realism. This became immediately apparent when French leaders refused to incorporate the right to trial by jury in their Declaration of Rights, despite Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to persuade them of its importance. Against this background Robespierre declared the guiding spirit of the French Revolution to be that of Machiavelli, whose limited respect for democratic power was presupposed by the understanding that it would be the top leadership who would decide which ends would justify which means and accordingly also that a new state religion should be established empowered to command obedience. Hence the Jacobin terror.
This contradiction and these contrasts were also expressed in the bottom up organisational preferences of the working class as against the goal of dictatorship which Marx sought to impose as the chief strategic goal of communism. These conflicting perspectives permeate Marxist theory since it is alien to the working class itself while at the same time seeks to control and lead it. Once it became clear that Marxist economic forecasts of the immiseration of the working class were wrong adjustments had to be made, leading to ever more contorted expressions of these conflicting perspectives.
Adjustments
The first adjustment was that the vision of Britain being the first country to undergo a socialist revolution was supplanted by notions that its working class had been corrupted by a ‘labour aristocracy’ that had benefited from the ‘super profits’ of imperialism. Research by Thomas Sowell has shown this claim does not match the actual flows of investment, thus demonstrating further reasons why for Sowell the usefulness of Marxist economics is ‘practically zero.’ Even so Marx invoked such fictions to justify scrapping his prediction that Ireland would follow the British on the road to socialism and instead insisted that the working class had best yield to Irish nationalism. Russia in particular became a focus of Marxist hopes that some less developed form of capitalism would prove to have revolutionary potential. Moreover such hopes shifted radically towards the third world most especially following the 7th Congress of the Second International in Stuttgart in 1907. The Congress ignored the earlier approval by Marx of the US occupation of California and the French occupation of Algeria as progressive in nature and instead decided that virtually all imperialism is solely exploitative in character with no benefits to colonised peoples. Against this background Lenin advanced the claim that the right of nations to self determination should be supported against the standpoint of Rosa Luxemburg’s retention of the older Marxist version of ‘proletarian internationalism.’
A second adjustment to the increasingly diverse range of Marxist theory was its largely undeclared but nevertheless evident alliance with the Fabian Society as supported by Eleanor Marx. The Fabian Society emblems of a wolf in sheep’s clothing and the smashing of a globe with a blacksmith’s hammer imply its real policy is not reformism but is based on deception to disguise a readiness to use violence.
Following the 1914 German invasion of Belgium Marxism divided into even more opposing factions some of which later supported the October Revolution and the establishment of the Third International. Lenin’s tactics were to take advantage of any situation that might enable a seizure of power and thereafter to hold onto it by whatever practices might best suit that objective. Effectively these tactics became an increasingly elastic, hybrid amalgam of the very democratic and the very dictatorial depending on the vagaries faced by Lenin at any given point. For our purposes here the most relevant expression of this hybridisation was his policies towards democracy within the working class movement itself which arguably also includes his policy regarding jury power.
Lenin
Lenin’s 1898 article on a ‘Retrograde Trend in Russian Social Democracy’ outlines the essential point of departure in regard to Lenin’s vision of working class organisation: first, recognition of the principle that the party paper should be aimed at the level of politically advanced workers - and in Lenin’s eyes that meant workers who had studied social theory so intensively as to have mastered its most complex points and even be able to develop such theory themselves. Along with a ‘revolutionary intelligentsia’ the organisation of revolutionaries would be very few in number, albeit surrounded by much larger numbers of politically ‘average workers’ who would not be abreast with advanced theory but could view the judgment of the advanced workers as worthy of trust.
In his 1901 work ‘What is to be Done’ Lenin quotes the Webbs in section 4.5 on ‘Conspiratorial Organisation and Democratism’ in regard to their criticism of early British working class organisation as ‘primitive democracy.’ Lenin seems to endorse the Webb’s approval of what the Athenians regarded as elective aristocracy, not democracy as the only viable form of trade union organisation. That enthusiasm for such hierarchy, incidentally, was an important factor in the eradication of UK grand juries role both in justice and in local government. Lenin implicitly uses the supposedly acceptable nature of such hierarchy to help justify a resort to near absolute secrecy for an organisation of professional revolutionaries in Russia. He tries to defend such extreme secrecy by claiming that those selected for membership would be so dedicated their disagreements with each other would be replaced by "complete, comradely, mutual confidence among revolutionaries” almost as if to say no democracy would be needed at that level.
In his 1903 ‘Letter to Iskra’ however Lenin puts this ideal in question by advocating a much more rigorously democratic form of open debate such that the maximum amount of light could be cast on the reputation of party leaders so that workers could examine their records "as if in the palm of their hands."
Although despite these apparent flaws there remains a certain logic to Lenin’s ideas in regard to party organisation by 1914 they had begun to clash increasingly with the realities of the immense struggle that the Bolsheviks had embarked upon. Lenin’s head and neck wounds in 1918 disabled his attempt to lead and consequently whatever comradely mutual confidence among party leaders that had remained by the time of the October Revolution had begun to disintegrate. This paved the way for Stalin’s takeover even in the face of Lenin’s plea that he be removed from the leadership. In the process Lenin’s support for jury power as expressed in his May 1917 program (ironically aimed at holding officials to account) was soon buried with him as was his support for freedom of criticism expressed through a ‘struggle of shades’ within the party. The rest is history.
Webbs
For our purposes here a relevant point to focus upon is Lenin’s support for the Webb’s disregard for ‘primitive democracy’ in the early British working class movement. The Webbs, Eleanor Marx and Kautsky shared much of the socialist vision formulated by Marx so it is of some significance that Lenin though in apparent agreement with the Webbs' disregard for ‘primitive democracy’ nevertheless had a different view of the relation between theory and the working class. Kautsky considered Marxism to be a science and to be accessible only by intellectuals; Lenin had more deference to working class common sense. Accordingly Kautsky had proposed to Lenin that their differences should be restricted for examination to party intellectuals; Lenin wanted them to be available to the workers of the party also. Lenin explicitly states his disapproval of Hegel’s ‘disdain for common sense.’
These differences demonstrate the complexity of the question of democracy confronting the socialist movement of the period and also that those difficulties were unresolved. It can be suggested that the major part of them lies in the failure of Marxism to properly grasp the relation between science, craft industry and the working class. This error in understanding was present in Lenin’s approach but seems be actually greater among the Webbs and Kautsky. Lenin was less willing to conceive of science as a matter purely for intellectuals and experts; both Kautsky and the Webbs were more willing to do so.
At bottom these differences were related to the distinctions between the practical orientation of British common sense realism and natural law on the one hand and on the other the highly abstract, obtuse rationalism of the German philosophical tradition. As shown above these distinctions underlay the very different outcomes of the French and American Revolutions.
Significantly these differences can also be seen in the work of Jeremy Bentham. Though Bentham tended to conflate his critique of French and American views of the rights of man under a single heading as being all ‘nonsense on stilts’ in reality natural rights and the role of conscience alike form the bedrock of constitutional theory of the American Constitution, not the French. The role of conscience understood independently of intellectual expertise is far greater in common law than in the civil code. This is very clearly demonstrated by Jefferson: ”State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules." (Jefferson to Carr August 10th 1787).
An ancestral cousin of John Lilburne, Jefferson was not inventing something new here: “Then too, we have seen that, particularly in the seventeenth century, as part of a broad political agenda, Chancery was robustly criticised. Some critics emphasised its ostensibly alien origins in civil and cannon law. The concern was intensified by the perception that Chancery was subversive of the Englishman’s (sic) “birthright”, “the true Natural and Original Law of England” - that is, the common law, with its time-proven particular rules, procedural regularity, factual determinations according to the conscience of juries, and so on.” (Dennis R. Klinck “Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England” 2016 p.270).
In France before 1789 there was no common law, no systematic use of juries, and as such no rights of man. The French Declaration of Rights without the right to trial by jury was a top down expression of the will of the new, post absolutist revolutionary regime, anterior to its construction of a new administrative state. As such it was little more than one step removed from the juryless Prussian State later praised with enthusiasm by Hegel alongside his claim that Bonaparte represented ‘the Absolute Spirit on horseback.’
These features of Hegelian theory are consistent with the long suspected ‘alien’ character of civil and canon law in their relation to the true natural and original law of England, which includes the understanding that the conscience of the common man can have a divine component ‘written in the heart’ which can be improved by expertise but is also independent of it. This flexibility is absent in Bentham’s avowedly atheist approach which explains why he goes so far as to declare there to be an obtuse mathematical formula for assessing how to calculate with exactitude the greatest good for the greatest number in his ‘utilitarianism.’ Bentham believes emphatically in the supremacy of expertise over the judgment of the common man. Unsurprisingly he is an opponent of jury power.
Dicey
Professor Albert Dicey was "receptive to Jeremy Bentham’s brand of individualist liberalism” (Wikipedia) and with the evident approval of the Webbs became one of the first Professors of Law at the Fabians’ L.S.E. Dicey’s negative attitude to jury power is quite unabashed albeit thinly disguised with sympathy for French sensibilities:
“Trial by jury is open to much criticism; a distinguished French thinker may be right in holding that the habit of submitting difficult problems of fact to the decision of twelve men of not more than average intelligence and education will in the near future be considered an absurdity as patent as ordeal by battle. Its success in England is wholly due to, and is the most extraordinary sign of, popular confidence in the judicial branch.” (The Law of the Constitution. A.V.Dicey Tenth Edition 1959, P.394).
A noteworthy feature of Dicey’s claim regarding confidence in the judicial branch is that it is false: as shown above Jefferson’s esteem for jury power (which was emulated by the early British working class movement as in the 1794 Treason Trials) can be traced back to Lilburne. It may be explained not by trust, but by distrust of the judicial branch. Jefferson spells out that it is precisely such distrust that explains why common law empowers juries to rule not only upon fact but also upon law itself (see his letter to Abbe Arnoux on 19 July 1789 shown in full in CDRSB Newsletter No.18 ).
Benthamite utilitarianism comprises a key point of departure for the development of legal positivism which marginalises natural law and conscience as a factor ultimately independent of expertise. The top down, virtually ‘command’ theory of law guided by expertise alone that emerges comprises the chief foundation upon which Dicey’s claim that parliament is the exclusively sovereign body in British law that has been insisted upon ever since. Led by Dicey as its chief academic reference source legal positivism became the dominant, atheist faction within philosophy of law throughout the twentieth century.
Unsurprisingly the evolution of this approach was quietly endorsed and approved, seemingly, by the Fabian Society. Committed to deception, stealth and force the Fabian Society has been joined at the hip to Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism alike. This mutual affinity developed consequent to the Webbs’ disdain for ‘naive’ trade union democracy along with their uncritical endorsement of efforts to replace grand juries by elective aristocracy in local government. The Fabians have consequently long since viewed the British constitution as more amenable to socialist transformation because it is more ‘flexible’ than the US Constitution whose Bill of Rights and Federal structure are more resilient to fundamental change by stealth.
Third Way
These above points outline the chief elements of constitutional structure that circumscribe leftist attempts to replace the remnants of government by consent in the West with soft and/or hard totalitarianism. The chief leftist strategy known to the public which most closely corresponds to modern historical realities in this process is that of the ‘Third Way.’ This book was supposedly written in book form by Lord Anthony Giddens, formally Director of the L.S.E. though some have traced it to a Tony Blair article in Marxism Today.
Purporting to represent a middle way between Capitalism and Socialism recent disclosures suggest it was actually ordered by the world communist movement. Whichever its original source, the Third Way ignores jury power and concentrates on control of knowledge. In essence it is a Gramscian strategy of infiltration and control of the ideological superstructure of the capitalist state: chiefly education, the media, legislature, administrative apparatus and judiciary. Gorbachev and his allies activated the Third Way as a means to exploit the destruction of the ‘enemy image’ as part and parcel of the engineered fake collapse of communism in 1989 and the chameleon like transformation of many communist parties and intelligence services in Eastern Europe into democratic parties keen to join the E.U.
Presented as the leading policy orientation of the President Clinton administration, the Third Way received a fatal blow with the election of President George Bush in 2000 following an intensely desperate but failed battle waged by the Democratic Vice President Al Gore to change the election outcome by claims of fraud. The 9/11 terrorist attack on the twin towers in New York followed. On 13th December 2001 President Bush gave the necessary six month notice that the USA would withdraw from the ABM treaty. It is plausible that the three events are linked in that some US intelligence reports cite policy led by KGB chief Andropov to treat Muslim terrorism "as a ‘Petri Dish’ which might nurture a virulent strain of anti-American hatred grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought." (Robert Buchar, 2010, p.4).
Since that withdrawal relations between Russia and the West have steadily deteriorated, accelerated to a more comprehensive scale following Brexit and the elections of US President Trump. Third Way hopes that the EU could provide a model example to promote global integration - first in regions, thereafter in the form of a directly one world form of government - have been set back decades. This brings us to the present day situation in regard to the struggle between leftist and conservative aspirations regarding future national and international relations. Is it possible that a conflict resolution strategy could be designed that would be successful in helping to maintain world peace?
Conflict Resolution
As explained in CDRSB Newsletters Nos. 17 and 18, there are four insights which can be viewed as central to a global, world historical strategy of conflict resolution. Authenticated by Lenin’s view that fully and thoroughly correcting past mistakes is the ‘mark of a serious Party’ these insights are derived from an attempt to correct the flawed methods of Marxist strategy and accordingly the errors of Russia. They are focussed on the need to ensure democratic sovereignty upon both national and international scales and at the same time to help facilitate an egalitarian distribution of wealth that does not subvert entrepreneurial initiative and is based upon openly agreed consent, not force or stealth. They can be derived from two self evident truths of common sense: first, that random selection when used in politics, justice and security force recruitment will constrain the influence of secret factions; second, that ‘the earth belongs to the living’ as formulated by Thomas Jefferson and from which can be derived the understanding that inheritance tax is the most socially just form of taxation.
As indicated, this conflict resolution strategy is world historical in nature and founded upon an attempt to correct the methods and strategy pursued by Marxism. As shown above, the root cause of conflict in political development since the American Revolution has been the failure to maintain consistent progress along the path of development indicated by common sense realist principles of understanding and analysis in regard to political theory, science, religion, law and constitutional order.
The British working class movement was probably the best placed movement to have helped maintain such progress but was unable to provide leadership adequate to the task at hand. This may be explained partly by the deleterious consequences of conservative repression most especially following the extremism of the French Revolution. Further major factors in failures of leadership arose from the complexity of choices posed by the varieties of ‘utopian socialism’ that emerged consequent to the French Revolution. This was the environment in which Marxism came to predominate within leftist thought accompanied in later times by Fabian socialism. Long before the flaws of socialist ideology became manifest in practice many activists were prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to claims that an untested change in the entire paradigm of social organisation would be necessary. Tens of millions of deaths later it is now however, tragically, very clear that such assumptions are wrong.
Unfortunately there were no clear voices from the working class movement itself that were up to the task of correcting such flaws before they became manifest. It would be a mistake however to assume that none at all existed. Primary among these has to be the approach and claims of Thomas Hodgskin, one of the very first leaders of the British working class movement. Ironically his ideas on economics were admired by Marx and the Webbs alike, though its fundamental philosophical orientation was very different to both of their approaches.
Hodgskin it seems had studied the work of Dugald Stewart, the second most important advocate of the common sense realist school led by Thomas Reid. Stewart knew and was held in high regard by Thomas Jefferson. Hodgskin’s first major work concerned jury power in the Royal Navy in which he had served since the age of 12. He advocated a systemic adaptation of jury trial for the senior service which would take account of fleet arrangements to ensure that a jury of peers of those accused could be fairly drawn and impartial in their judgement.
Hodgskin was a firm advocate of natural law and accordingly had little time for the exotically atheist ideas of utilitarianism upheld by Jeremy Bentham which he regarded as simplistic and crude. It has been claimed that Hodgskin’s approach was similar to that of Saint-Simon. However though he upheld natural law upon a systemic foundation as integral to understanding science and economics his theism was likely to have been ‘non denominational' in character, perhaps similar to that of Jefferson.
A co-founder of the Mechanics Institute Hodgskin was keen to help elevate the understanding, role and activity of skilled workers in the political process upon a scientific foundation. In that sense his ideas were similar to those of Lenin. Hodgskin however was deeply skeptical of any and all claims that ‘statist’ remedies could provide viable solutions to problems of economics, religion or government. Indeed, having travelled extensively in Germany as a journalist he was something of an expert on their culture and viewed their obsession with the rational organisation of society by rules and regulations very negatively. Attempts to correlate the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Hodgskin is therefore quite futile. He was, most seem to agree, a libertarian individualist, not a ‘socialist’ though many have considered his ideas to be leftist in character.
Nevertheless he denied being an anarchist and was very favourable to the work of Adam Smith which he considered to be founded upon the assumptions of natural law. Smith supported the view that the ‘earth belongs to the living’ and regarded as absurd attempts to perpetuate hereditary power by means of primogeniture and entail. In 'The Discouragement of Agriculture' Smith addresses the problems of primogeniture and entailment. “They are founded upon the most absurd of suppositions,” he observed, “the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died perhaps five hundred years ago.” (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1952, p.166)
Given the above it seems likely that Thomas Hodgskin would have been favourable to the insights advocated here in regard to fundamental constitutional law as useful, well founded proposals that should be pursued as part and parcel of a long term, world historical understanding of conflict resolution strategy between left and right.
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Copyright © Dr. Keith Nilsen, March 2025
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