Amazing how few political scientists responded to the last 5 years of revelations about torture by the U.S. government. <\/p>\n
But perhaps this merely continues that profession’s perennial habit of ignoring the dark side of Leviathan.<\/p>\n
British historian Thomas Macaulay noted in his 1837 essay on Francis Bacon that “he who first treated legislation as a science was among the last Englishmen who used the rack.” When Bacon was serving as legal henchman for King James, Bacon had an aged clergyman tortured in the Tower of London to coerce a confession that he had publicly given a sermon discovered in his study. (The sermon had a few passages Bacon considered treasonous). But the geezer refused to confess.<\/p>\n
Macaulay notes that, in the early 1600s England, “the practice of torturing prisoners was then generally acknowledged by lawyers to be illegal, and was execrated by the public as barbarous.” Though Bacon was a great writer and a great philosopher, “he was employed in perverting the law to the vilest purposes of tyranny.”<\/p>\n
I first read and annotated this essay in the early 1980s. I did not pay much attention to the discussion of Bacon and torture – since I considered that a medieval relic of little concern to modern times. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Amazing how few political scientists responded to the last 5 years of revelations about torture by the U.S. government. But perhaps this merely continues that profession’s perennial habit of ignoring the dark side of Leviathan. British historian Thomas Macaulay noted in his 1837 essay on Francis Bacon that “he who first treated legislation as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[656,7,12],"class_list":{"0":"post-1078","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"tag-dictatorship","8":"tag-torture"},"yoast_head":"\n