Dissent
While dissent obviously means disagreement, its political usage usually means a
strongly held opposition on moral grounds by a forceful minority against an
important law, or influential idea, equally strongly supported by the majority.
Dissent is often applied to issues like a state’s foreign or military policy, or to
issues traditionally seen as evoking moral outrage such asabortion, capital
punishment or interference with religious freedom. Alternatively dissent may
be towards the entire basis of a state and how it operates, in which case
dissenters do not accept the basiclegitimacyof the state. The noun ‘dissenter’
has a long history in political theory, probably originally meaning someone
who opposes a religious orthodoxy, and came to be applied to, among others,
opponents of the regime in totalitarian societies such as the former Soviet
Union.
Divine Right
The divine right of kings to rule their realms was a vital political and
theological doctrine in medieval Europe, and political theorists as late as Bodin
(1530–96) and Hooker (1554–1600) were more or less committed to the
doctrine. To some extent it lay behind the Royalist position during the English
Civil War, and was finally killed off largely because of the victory of the
Parliamentary forces in that war. The argument, which was useful both to the
churches and tomonarchies, developed as a result of the mutual need of the
spiritual forces in European society and the monarchial dynasties for a con-
cordat on their relative positions. In return for the ideological defence given
them by the Church’s imprimatur, kings were expected to defend and support
the Roman Catholic Church and its doctrine with physical force, and to leave
the regulation of religion and morals entirely to the Pope and his bishops.
The doctrine derived from various theological sources and political occa-
sions, but it is not particularly unusual, in as much as some connection between
the right to political power and a religious role is anthropologically common.
Indeed, the precedent for the medieval European version stems originally from
the dual rule of the early Roman emperors as both gods and rulers, while the
combination of tribal chief with archpriesthood is a more general example of
this political need for a spiritual backing. Only after defeat in the Second World
War did the Japanese emperor abdicate his status as a god. The problem is
simply that there is a very restricted number of ways in which one can justify
the right of one person to rule over others, and in entirely non-secular
societies, with a united and powerful church wielding vital symbols of eternal
life or damnation, no ideological claim exists other than one tied to God’s
Dissent