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selves. The important thing is the underlying observations. For example,
if one really wanted to be specifi c about architecture, one would have
to recognize that the American vernacular church is an offshoot of the
English Baroque.
It
doesn't have much that is Gothic about it.
Although it has a spire, that spire is of the kind introduced into the
churches of London under the influence of Christopher Wren and
Michelangelo and Borromini. There are complex evoluti ons here which
one should not forget. However, Claudio draws attention to the dis–
tinction between the law that prevailed in England at the time of the
expansion into the empire and that which prevailed in Castile; the dis–
tinction between common law and civil law and also between the asso–
ciated ideas of sovereignty. English law grew up as a social product; even
in Anglo-Saxon times it was an affair of local courts or meetings, and
the sovereign did not have much to do with it. Later, of course, the
sovereign was charged with the business of enforcing the law, but he and
his parliament were not the primary creators of the law. The sovereign
was already subject to the law in medieval times, as Bracton notes in his
commentaries. To a great extent, this is what is responsible both for the
law-abidingnesss of the English people and for their penchant for solving
problems by compromise and negotiation, and not by central edict.
It
is
responsible for what I would describe as the ordinariness that is found
even in the greatest of English cultural achievements, such as the plays of
Shakespeare, and for the fact that the English people move with ease and
without ostentation through the cu ltural grandeur which lies ruined all
about them.
This is quite the opposite of the world made in Castile, a world in
which nothing seems to work without an edict coming from a center
and being passed on through highly-regimented jurisprudential systems to
the remote colonies. This led to a crisis of legitimacy, when the edicts
no longer arrived with the speed required. That is one of the reasons for
the economic and social stagnation of South America. I suspect that the
lack of instruction from the center is one of the reasons why nothing
was accomplished there for so long.
The final part of Veliz's book takes off in a new and most inter–
esting direction, using another historical category: that of the Hellenistic
period of late antiquity. Veliz rightly observes that Greek culture was
spread all over the civilized world without the Greeks themselves having
intended any such thing. The Roman admiration for the Greeks is some–
thing which he sees repeatedly in the expansion of English civilization.
This is an extremely illuminating comparison, because Greek civilization
expanded only after it had lost its own life, when it no longer expressed
the great spirit which at first animated it, and when it was living off its
