Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.Martin Luther and Critical Perspectives on Global Public Policy
Joerg Friedrichs and other scholars have been using the term “new medievalism” to offer an alternative framework to think the global in today’s world. He analyzes in his article, the meaning of new medievalism (EJIR 2001)
(..) the apparent contradictions between globalization, fragmentation and sovereign statehood (…). Neither conventional International Relations theory nor the discourse about globalization seem able to account for these contradictions. As a conceptual alternative, the notion of `new medievalism’ is introduced. For the present purpose, medievalism is defined as a system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty, held together by a duality of competing universalistic claims. Thus, the Middle Ages were characterized by a highly fragmented and decentralized network of sociopolitical relationships, held together by the competing universalistic claims of the Empire and the Church. In an analogous way, the post-international world is characterized by a complicated web of societal identities, held together by the antagonistic organizational claims of the nation-state system and the transnational market economy. New medievalism provides a conceptual synthesis which hopefully transcends some of the current deadlocks of IR theory and, at the same time, goes beyond the fundamental limitations of the globalization discourse.
As persons interested in global public policy making, we then need to ask what radical strategi(e)s(ts) were successful in medieval public policy making, in order to develop and reflect ways of creating public value in the contemporary world. The first that comes to mind is Martin Luther, probably the most succesful policy maker ever. Martin Luther was born in 1483 and studied at the University of Erfurt where he was mainly influenced by the writing of Aristotle and Willam Occam from 1501 to 1505.
He entered a closed Augustinian friary in Erfurt on July 17, 1505. In 1507, he was ordained to the priesthood, and in 1508 began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg. On October 19, 1512, he was awarded his Doctor of Theology and, on October 21, 1512, was received into the senate of the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg, having been called to the position of Doctor in Bible.
On October 31, 1517, Luther wrote to Albert, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, protesting the sale of indulgences. He enclosed in his letter a copy of his “Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,” which came to be known as The 95 Theses.
The 95 Theses, their distribution by the emerging practice of print-capitalism, and Martin Luther’s writing and politics, transformed the medieval world.
The story gives us a lot of homework if we want to understand and shape policy making in today’s newly medieval world.
