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Anglosphere

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发表于 11-23-2013 14:08:23 | 只看该作者 回帖奖励 |倒序浏览 |阅读模式
Daniel Hannan, Keep Free and Carry on; It’s no accident that the English-speaking nations are the ones most devoted to law and individual rights. Wall Street Journal, Nov 16, 2013.
http://online.wsj.com/news/artic ... 4579195922823363280

(a) Excerpt in the windows of print:

‘The American,’ wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘is the Englishman left to himself.’

Churchill saw deep roots in US ties to other English-speaking states.

(b) Quote:

“Many of them [observers], including Tocqueville and Montesquieu, connected the liberty that English-speakers took for granted to geography. Outside North America, most of the Anglosphere is an extended archipelago: Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, the more democratic Caribbean states[, as well as] North America

“Outside the Anglosphere, people have traditionally expected—indeed, demanded—far more state intervention. They look to the government to solve their problems, and when the government fails, they become petulant.


(c) Note:
(i) American exceptionalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
(section 1 Etymology)
(ii) "Most Brits do indeed believe in British exceptionalism. But here's the thing: They define it in almost exactly the same way that Americans do. British exceptionalism, like its American cousin, has traditionally been held to reside in a series of values and institutions: personal liberty, free contract, jury trials, uncensored newspapers, regular elections, habeas corpus, open competition, secure property, religious pluralism."

(A) A brief history of habeas corpus. BBC, Mar 9, 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4329839.stm
(“The Habeas Corpus Act passed by [Britain] Parliament in 1679 guaranteed this right in law, although its origins go back much further, probably to Anglo-Saxon times. Sir William Blackstone, who wrote his famous Commentaries on the Laws of England in the 18th Century, recorded the first use of habeas corpus in 1305 [Edward I (1239-1308; reign 1272-1307)]. But other writs with the same effect were used in the 12th Century [HenryII (1133-1189; reign 1154-1189)], so it appears to have preceded Magna Carta in 1215 [John (1166-1216; reign 1199-1216; youngest of five sons of King Henry II)]”)

* “Michael Zander QC, Emeritus Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, says: ‘Habeas corpus has a mythical status in the country's psyche.’”

QC = Queen’s Counsel

(B) Origins and History of the Jury. Vermont Judiciary, undated.
https://www.vermontjudiciary.org ... iginsandhistory.pdf
(“It is well established that William the Conqueror brought to England from Normandy a system of having witnesses who knew about a matter to tell a court of law what they knew (to ‘swear’ under oath). The

English word juror comes from the Old French jurer which means to swear”)

(iii) "The sailors listened as a chaplain read from Joshua 1 in the language of the King James Bible, revered in both nations: 'As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong and of a good courage.'"

That is Joshua 1:5. See Book of Joshua
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Joshua
(God's commission to Joshua (1:1–9))

So in Joshua 1:5,  I  = God; thee = Joshua.

(iv) "I realize that all this might seem strange to American readers. Am I not diluting the uniqueness of the US, the world's only propositional state, by lumping it in with the rest of the Anglosphere? * * * Freedom under the law is a portable commodity, passed on through intellectual exchange rather than gene flow. Anyone can benefit from constitutional liberty simply by adopting the right institutions and the cultural assumptions that go with them. * * * As the distinguished Indian writer Madhav Das Nalapat, holder of the Unesco Peace Chair, puts it, the Anglosphere is defined not by racial affinity but ‘by the blood of the mind.’ At a time when most countries defined citizenship by ancestry, Britain was unusual in developing a civil rather than an ethnic nationality. The US, as so often, distilled and intensified a tendency that had been present in Great Britain, explicitly defining itself as a creedal polity: Anyone can become American simply by signing up to the values inherent in the Constitution. There is, of course, a flip-side. If the US abandons its political structures, it will lose its identity more thoroughly than states that define nationality by blood or territory."

The adjective “propositional” has “proposition” as a noun. Basically a propositional state means a nation built on creeds, rather than bloodline or homogeneity of race.

(v) In the view of Alexis de Tocqueville: “Just as French America exaggerated the autocracy and seigneurialism of Louis XIV's France, and Spanish America the ramshackle obscurantism of Philip IV's Spain, so English America (as he called it) exaggerated the localism, the libertarianism and the mercantilism of the mother country: ‘The American is the Englishman left to himself.’"
(A) For seigneurialism, see manorialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism
(Reference 1: “‘Feudal Society,’ in its modern sense was coined in Marc Bloch's 1939–40 books of the same name. Bloch (Feudal Society tr. L.A. Masnyon, 1965, vol. II p. 442) emphasised the distinction between economic manorialism which preceded feudalism and survived it, and political and social feudalism, or seigneurialism”)

The book notation signifies translator LA Manyon (LA are initials of first and middle names; Wiki has a typo: There is no “s”).  Mr Bloch was French.
(B) seigneur (n; Middle French, from Medieval Latin senior)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/seigneur
(C) obscurantism
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/obscurantism

(vi) Foreign visitors to US "wondered at the stubborn elevation of private property over raison d'état, of personal freedom over collective need."

national interest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_interest
(French expression raison d'État (English: reason of the State))
But India has long since passed its moment of maximum orbital distance from the other Anglophone democracies. The traits that continue to set it apart from most of its neighbors are, for want of a better shorthand, Anglosphere characteristics.

(vii) "Isolation meant that there was no need for a standing army in peacetime, which in turn meant that the government had no mechanism for internal repression. When rulers wanted something, usually revenue, they had to ask nicely, by summoning people's representatives in an assembly. It is no coincidence that the world's oldest parliaments—England, Iceland, the Faroes, the Isle of Man—are on islands."
(A) parliament
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament
(The use of the term 'parliament' to designate such a body first occurred amongst the French-speaking nobility in England in 1236 [Henry III (1207-1272; reign 1216-1272; son of King John and father of Edward I)]. The word “parliament” comes from the French [verb, whose corresponding noun masculine was/is parlement] “parler,” which means “to talk” or “to discuss”)

(B) History of Parliamentarism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Parliamentarism

two consecutive paragraphs:

“The origins of the modern concept of prime ministerial government go back to the Kingdom of Great Britain (1707–1800) and The Parliamentary System in Sweden 1721 - 1772, that coincided with each other.

“In theory, power resided in the monarch, who chaired cabinet and chose ministers. In reality, King George I's inability to speak English led the responsibility for chairing cabinet to go to the leading minister, literally the prime or first minister.

(C) Althing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Althing
(literally: "[the] all-thing,” or general assembly; “The Althingi is the oldest extant parliamentary institution in the world. Its establishment, as an outdoor assembly held on the plains of Þingvellir [a field 45 km east of what later became the country's capital, Reykjavík] from about the year 930 AD, laid the foundation for an independent national existence in Iceland [Icelandic Commonwealth, 930-1262]”)
(D) Løgting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B8gting
(The name literally means "Law Thing"—that is, a law assembly—and derives from Old Norse; The Faroese ting is the first time mentioned in the Færeyinga saga [written in Iceland shortly after 1200] as the assembly, where chieftain Sigmundur Brestisson in 999 introduced Christianity at the ting)
(E) Tynwald
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tynwald
(Manx: Tinvaal; section 1 Etymology; section 5 History of Tynwald)

(viii) “The owl of Minerva, wrote Hegel, spreads its wings only with the gathering of the dusk.”

Minerva
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minerva
(owl of Minerva)

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