Sphere Sovereignty?

In response to the Donatists, with whom he had a variety of theological disagreements, Augustine developed his 'just war' theory and his understanding of the role of civil government. I found the following quote in one of Augustine's letters to Boniface (Letter 185):

But as to the enactment of those men who are unwilling that their impious deeds should be checked by the enactment of righteous laws, when they say that the apostles never sought such measures from the kings of the earth, they do not consider the different character of that age, and that everything comes in its own season. For what emperor had as yet believed in Christ, so as to serve Him in the cause of piety by enacting laws against impiety...?

How then are kings to serve the Lord with fear, except by preventing and chastising with religious severity all those acts which are done in opposition to the commandments of the Lord? For man serves God in one way in that he is man, in another way that he is also king. In that he is man, he serves Him by living faithfully; but in that he is also king, he serves Him by enforcing with suitable rigor such laws as ordain what is righteous, and punish what is the reverse.

Just War...

But for the framework to have the desired restraining effect on statesmen and warmakers, it has to marry practicality to idealism, and strike enough of a balance between the two to make it seem applicable to real-world crises. And if it's important not to stretch the theory to justify any goal or end you seek, it's also important not to narrow it to the point where it seems so unrealistic and disconnected from the realities of war that policymakers will feel comfortable ignoring it.

From a fascinating debate happening on the Atlantic blogs (this a post by Ross Douthat) and elsewhere. See also Andrew Sullivan's discussion of the same issue. I'll post my thoughts on this matter more, later, maybe after some riveting discussion following Adunare's paper.

"If we can’t even insult one another for god’s sake, how are we ever going to manage the more serious stuff?"

A unique and insightful article by Andrew Potter (at Maclean's) here.

The Millman Chart and Policy Making

Religious circuits tend to suggest that what a person believes is fundamentally determinative of how that person acts - perhaps even exclusively determinative at times. Policy folk like to burst this bubble - a bit uncharitably at times - when they talk about what is called the structure/agency problem (a problem which, btw, I have found no better answer for than Dooyeweerdian social philosophy). This begs the question: where are the sources of policy?

David Brooks argues that the new architecture of global politics isn't being developed by high minded theory. Some theoreticians, he writes

may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the US and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond. Global strategies may imagine a new global architecture built at high-level summits, but the real global architecture of the future will emerge organically from these day-to-day nation-building operations.

Ross Douthat paints a similar picture - I think - when he argues that foreign policy can't really be camped out theoretically, but is divided more in terms of personality. Thus we can think Jackson and Hamilton as "realists" perhaps, but different kinds expressing what may be congruent ideas through very different psychologies and processes. A neat little graph to sum up some of these ideas: