return to top page

Introduction	Planets & Populations	Tribes & Nations
One Earth & Seven Seas	Full Text	People &Subsidiarity
Kingship & Peacecraft	Culture & Divinity	Diasporas & Jigsaws

HUMAN SCALE GOVERNANCE

Kingship & Peacecraft

But what are tribes and nations for?

There are four main fields of human activity: kingship, peaceship, culture and divinity.

These require different forms of administration and no society has existed or endured without them.

Kingship and peaceship are the traditional administrative domains of princes while culture and divinity have always been the concern of poets, bards and troubadours in societies where the princes, allied with the little people in their communities, have out-manoeuvred the priests and the lawyers.

Subsidiarity is the principle of course but applied to what? It is time to start defining some of our terms.

Kingship is the temporal function of collecting, creating and distributing goods, including slaves, within the society. First of all food, then tools, then luxury goods and finally services, each with its own economics.

One of our modern heresies is to seek to apply one set of economic premises to these four different economic systems.

Another is to confuse kingship with peacecraft and to exaggerate their administrative importance relative to culture and divinity.

Peacecraft is concerned with the relationship of the society with other neighbouring societies. Depending on circumstances, such as physical proximity, shared ideas of conduct or the personalities of the governors; these will vary from mutual hospitality and friendship to open war.

The peacecraft function is where warriors, diplomats and several species of international traders will be found.

Diplomacy is war by other means.

Foreign trade invariably involves war and diplomacy as complementary means often with different enemies.

Modern war societies adopt such euphemisms as defence, commerce and foreign affairs for peacecraft.

copies of this document may be obtained from

P.O.Box 36, Rye, Sussex, TN31 7ZE England
e-mail: peteretherden@cesc.net
return to top page