Law and Violence COUNTRY SQUIRE MAGAZINE

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BY IAN MITCHELL

In the course of a long and thoughtful review of my book Russia and the Rule of Law, Dom Wightman wrote in Country Squire Magazine: “This is a monumental, eccentric, often maddening, and utterly indispensable work of historical synthesis that dares to ask the largest possible question: how does law deal with violence?” That question is key. How do peaceable folk deal with criminals, gangsters, thugs, plundering invaders or even bullying bureaucrats with a plotloot police force at their back? The same problem faces nations and other state formations. Violence is the enemy of any rules-based international order.

Status is the basis of all primitive “law”. The prehistorical paterfamilias ruled his roost by fist and club. Law amounted to the memory of past practice as carried in the memory of the head of the tribe. Decisions or commands going beyond tradition represented pure power, which was therefore not law in any acceptable modern sense. That was the ancient version of autocracy, or traditional kingship.

Whereas status depends on fist and club, contract depends on the voluntary agreement of two or more parties who, at the moment of signature, are juridical equals. That is a functional legal fiction which works because there is a greater power, the state, which will enforce the law which makes agreement possible in the first place. The principle behind all that is engraved above the entrance to the US Supreme Court: “Equal justice under law”.

Status imposes hierarchy; contract is based on voluntary agreement. The two principles represent, respectively, the vertical and the horizontal axes on the graph of all human power relations.

Though status is the basis of all physical power, even in the animal kingdom, contract has other sources of strength. Since the invention of writing, and the ability to store agreed texts (on clay tablets to begin with), legally enforceable agreements have been the insurgent power in human affairs. At first this was largely private, but soon the principle was applied to public affairs too.

From the point of view of Western political culture today, the effective starting point of organised resistance to status unbound was the sealing of the Magna Carta in 1215. That was closely followed, in the late 1230s, by the arrival of the Mongols in Russia (to use the modern name for the area). That represented the ultimate in status power. Magna Carta tried to put the law above the king, whereas the Mongols put the Great Khan above all law.

The Mongol principle was adopted by the Grand Princes of Muscovy. It continued to be the backbone of all Kremlin authority, right up to the present. The founder of the modern Russian security apparatus, Count Alexander Benckendorf, famously said (as is discussed at length in Russia and the Rule of Law): “Laws are written for subordinates, not for the leadership.” That is the basis of all status government, which is another way of saying imperial government, even at home.

On the other hand, government by consent assumes that all laws are written for everyone, including the king. “No one is above the law” is the assumption of genuine contract government. The rule of law is a form of constitutional structure in which those who make the laws are appointed, and can be dismissed, by those who have to obey them. This gives the whole society agency to some extent, unlike status which explicitly denies significant public agency to any person or group other than the status holder and his “divan” (to use the Mongol term for it).

A history of Russia and the English-speaking world from earliest times till today. It is based on the new idea that the world is dividing into two warring camps. The first comprises countries that were once ruled by the Mongols, like Russia, China, Iran and Korea. The second consists of those which draw their constitutional inspiration from the spirit of Magna Carta. The latter implies contractual government, while the former have authoritarian systems which depend on national and personal status. Between them there can be no compromise. The only future is to live and let live. But that is a contract idea. Status does not negotiate.

Today, the original idea is an interconnected world; territorial status is becoming obsolete. Free contract is the wave of the future as it encourages individualism and variety. This book describes the battle between status (Russia) and contract (the rule of law) as two sides in an eternal conflict.

The future of civilisation depends on the outcome of that struggle.

The principle of “reciprocity” is fundamental to all contract government. Today it operates through democracy, though that is not the only possibility. But the essence of the rule of law is the ability of the state to work together with the people for the same goal (freedom under law). On the other hand, status is proud of its ability to act independently and to be able to threaten contract society with destruction.

Russia and the Rule of Law tells the story of the struggle for supremacy between the two principles of law and violence. Since the arrival of the digital age, that struggle has divided the world into two camps: those which subscribe to the principle of reciprocity and equal justice under law, and those which feel free to use violence against those who do not accept hierarchy as any given status holder chooses to define it.

This distinction is not the same as that between “East” and “West” as understood during the Cold War; neither has it much to do with economic ideas. It is purely a question of how power is acquired, exercised and disposed of. It is a curious fact that the “axis of status” today—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—are all countries which were once occupied by the Mongols. The contract countries are those which rely on democracy as the practical application of reciprocity in a system in which those who make the laws have a permanent, interactive relationship with those who have to obey them. That is the opposite of empire, whether external or, as in the post-Mongol cases, internal. Almost everything in geopolitics flows from this distinction.

See also this film: Russia & The Rule of Law (2026) Ian Mitchell – YouTube