Imperium and Libertas

   We know the day the disaster happened.  Romulus killed his twin brother Remus and founded Rome on April 21, 753 BC. Imperium does not allow power to be shared ever. Imperium is total power to do anything at all to anyone and anything. Imperium gave Romulus the power to kill anyone who threatened his new community and since every other community eventually threatened it, he killed with his army anyone who took up arms against him exercising for the defense of a community an enemy imperium. He then allowed conquered communities to live without libertas in peace as long as they accepted that Rome possessed imperium over them. The Roman father had imperium over his family. He could kill anyone within it at will legally without punishment. Peoples before Rome lived with libertas in tribes all over what later became Europe as well as in North Africa and the Near East. Under Rome they lived in a huge community where no one had a separate community with local imperium. One universal community now existed and the Senate in Rome plus the Roman people, SPQR, ( senatus populusque romanus)  alone had imperium.

   It is incorrect to describe Rome as an empire even though the word “empire” derives semantically from imperium. It was a huge nation governed at the top in Rome by a group of men, the Senate, and later by one man, the emperor. European nations developed as did Rome. A strong tribe conquered neighboring tribes and expanded the imperium of a king until a large community of conquered tribes emerged behind fixed borders. Rome united its gigantic nation (which was not as large as the present nations of Brazil, Canada, Russia) by spreading the use of Latin as well as Greek as the national languages although only Latin was official. European nations did the same. They united tribes in their domain speaking many languages by making one language common and official. Rome could have expanded further but it restrained itself and built walls and fortifications at what it called the limes which gives us the word “limit”. European nations were smaller nations than was Rome and they were congregated beside one another or near one another, all with  governments with full imperium. Another disaster. Not just the disaster of a large community with one government at Rome with imperium over all its peoples. Several communities, nations jumbled together with the power in a central government to do anything at all to any of its citizens and always ready with a national army to make war on enemy neighboring nations. A disastrous state of affairs. The disaster that Romulus created expanded and split into several warring parts. A universal disaster.

   The disaster was well known in the late 18th century when Americans and some Europeans met in Philadelphia to create the government of a union of states. The British like the Romans were out to have imperium over as much of the globe as possible. British imperium imposing taxes on Americans by a tax on tea caused the Tea Party in Boston in 1773. The British tea chests Bostonians dumped in their harbor were, so to speak, the British imperium. But how to get rid of not only British imperium, but all imperium? How could imperium once and for all, so to speak, be dumped overboard and be forever gone from the American part of the North American continent, dumped once and for all in the ocean, defeated, expelled legally from all American governments, gone forever with its disastrous warlike corpus bloated with exclusive power? They had to create a central government with some sovereign powers and at the same time strip it forever legally of full sovereign power. They had to assure a human face, devoted not to imperium but to libertas, on the new central government that history’s so many disasters based on imperium was amazingly now allowing them to bring to life by a Constitution.

   Most of the people in the more than 200  nations on the globe, formed in the same disastrous mode as Rome and the nations of Europe, do not believe that the government in Washington in the District of Columbia, which unites 50 American states and tries to promote with its great military and financial power peace and democracy for all the nations of the globe, is the only central government in the world that legally under the Constitution does not have imperium. But it is true. The founding fathers of America took away from Washington imperium and gave it only enough power to create for its citizens libertas.

Daniel McNeill
Daniel McNeill's books are at: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall
Read his writings including a complete novel and a two act play at: usoftheworld.com