We mentioned John of Salisbury's "Policraticus". It was an effort to
map political functions and interactions into their human physiological
equivalents. The king, for instance, was the brain of the body politic.
Merchants and bankers were the insatiable stomach. But this apparently
simplistic analogy masked a schismatic debate. Should a person's
position in life be determined by his political affiliation and
"natural" place in the order of things - or should it be the result of
his capacities and their exercise (merit)? Do the ever changing
contents of the economic "stomach", its kaleidoscopic innovativeness,
its "permanent revolution" and its propensity to assume "irrational"
risks - adversely affect this natural order which, after all, is based
on tradition and routine? In short: is there an inherent
incompatibility between the order of the world (read: the church
doctrine) and meritocratic (democratic) capitalism? Could Thomas
Aquinas' "Summa Theologica" (the world as the body of Christ) be
reconciled with "Stadt Luft Macht Frei" ("city air liberates" - the
sign above the gates of the cities of the Hanseatic League)?
This is the eternal tension between the individual and the group.
Individualism and communism are not new to history and they have always
been in conflict.
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