There remains a shade of difference in the implication, however. Because a
full assembly (as in the school example) implies thatallrelevant people are
present, calling some body an assembly implies less a meeting of representa-
tives, perhaps with freedom of action, than a direct collection of all parties. In
theUnited Nations, for example, the General Assembly contains all the
member states, in contrast to the Security Council which has only a few
members. Theauthorityof an assembly is accordingly greater than that of a
council or set of representatives. The example of the French National
Assembly is to the point: the theory of direct representation of the will of
the people, which permeates French democratic thought fromRousseau
onwards, leads to a preference for thinking that elected members somehow
stand in for the physical impossibility of collecting the whole population of
France into a true general assembly.
Association
An association is a group of people united to pursue a common cause. The
right to associate politically is fundamental tocivil libertiesbecause without it
political activity would be largely ineffective. The rights and capacities of
political associations vary considerably from one society to another (see
interest groups).
On an international level, many countries form associations to advance their
mutual interests; the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), for
example, exists to promote co-operation in that region.
Augustine
St Augustine (354–430) was the Bishop of the diocese of Hippo in North
Africa, and one of the earliest systematic Christian theologians. He was
certainly the first to grapple with the question of what should be the proper
relationship between thestateand the Christian religion. In discussing this he
was more aware of the value of pre-Christian political philosophy than any
thinker before St ThomasAquinas, and much of his doctrine, where it is not
specifically Christian, derives from classical political thought, especially from
Plato and the Roman orator-writer Cicero. Like his classical forebears,
Augustine stresses the ‘naturalness’ ofcivil society, which he regards as an
association of men united by a common set of interests and a common sense of
justice. Indeed, for Augustine, justice, which he tends to define in a rather
Platonic way as the ‘ordering’ of people in their proper station and the
regularizing of their relations, should be the cornerstone of society. Like many
later thinkers he is in fact sceptical about human nature, and believes that this
Augustine