Soon after the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum vote, a very junior member of the Conservative government, Mr Chris Heaton-Harris, wrote to university vice-chancellors asking for the names of all those involved in the teaching of European affairs in Britain ‘with particular reference to Brexit’ – he also wanted copies of relevant syllabuses and ‘links to online lectures’. There was something of a furore at the time, with universities resisting, and many academics scathing in their critique of what were described as McCarthyite tactics. It was then said on Heaton-Harris’s behalf that all he was doing was researching a book, since when we have heard nothing. Heaton-Harris himself has, however, continued to thrive in government: he is presently Minister of State at the Department of Transport.
In September 2020, again in the UK, the Department of Education advised that in delivering the curriculum, ‘Schools should not under any circumstances use resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances on matters. This is the case even if the material itself is not extreme, as the use of it could imply endorsement or support of the organisation’. It then went on to give examples of ‘extreme political stances’ among which was included: ‘a publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow democracy, capitalism, or to end free and fair election’ and ‘a failure to condemn illegal activities done in their name or in support of their cause, particularly violent actions against people or property’. Here was no ambitious politician chancing his arm in search of a temporary limelight; the guidance had the full weight of the government apparatus behind it. There is already a developed body of law – all recent – that aims to prohibit extremism, in schools, defined as ‘vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values…’. The universities are party protected by an earlier law, passed in 1986, protecting free speech on campuses. But assertions of left-wing bias abound: the ruling Conservative Party is full of Chris Heaton-Harrises, and increasingly (it would seem) so too is the civil service.
What is one to make of such political interventions, with their suggestion of a hidden hand of an array of malign influencers seeking to erode a nation’s spirit, its sense of common purpose? In particular, how should social scientists respond? What on earth was Heaton-Harris going to do with all the power-points he wanted? Charge about the country, intervening in lectures? Were the government’s line on teaching to be universally adopted, you could teach Marx (a mere person) but not any of the arguments made by organisations inspired by him, including (one assumes) governments. You would have to condemn peaceful sits-in if they obstructed the highway (illegal) and (it goes without saying) all ‘direct action’ if you wanted your organisation’s work to feature in the classroom – even if it was exactly what you thought needed to be done. Are universities and academic publishers ‘organisations’ exposed to being blacklisted by their employment or publication of persons holding ‘extreme political stances’? But at the same time teachers have to be vigilant to defend British values and these are specifically said to ‘include democracy’. How can you do both? To many scholars all of this is plainly stupid: vague, confusing and contradictory. Does calling it all of these things risk punishment? Can universities afford (in every sense) to state what many academics believe to be obvious?
My own social scientist university has as its motto ‘knowing the causes of things’. How has it become possible for such guidance to enter the public arena, or for minor governmental figures like Heaton-Harris to make such ludicrous demands of senior university leaders? The answer lies, I think, in recent political changes, in shifts in what we think of as sensible to discuss and as legitimate to worry about. This has happened not only in Britain but further afield as well, in continental Europe, the United States, and beyond.
Populism is a word much bandied about but for present purposes we can hone in on a fairly precise attribute of all who are currently riding its wave. Those who characterise themselves, or are plausibly characterised, as ‘the leaders of the people’ (or in the case of minor figures like Heaton-Harris (mere) ‘envoys of the people’) share a belief in the wisdom of ‘the people’ that makes them wary of – indeed hostile too – all intermediate institutions that separate ‘the people’ from the exercise of power. Where many of us see a necessary dispersal of power and an interposition of rational engagement between passion and action, they see betrayal, a set of elite devices to derail realisation of the people’s will. This includes university lecturers and teachers of course (all those power points and lefty books) but goes beyond them: the ‘mainstream’ media, the public service ‘elite’, even hostile parliamentarians fall into this category, as do (of course) intellectuals.
There is a technical hitch to the populist position, however – one that it is hard to see being remedied anytime soon. How do we translate the will of the people into action without intermediaries? Even if we did have early morning plebiscites on this and that for the ‘people’ to decide on via their phone apps when they woke up, who would decide the issues and then (often as important) the questions? Who would ‘count’ the votes? Who would ‘implement’ the decisions taken in these breakfast polls, arrange the arrests of those transiently disliked, the refunds in tax payments that happened to be voted for that day? The people is an impossibly amorphous idea and it is unlikely to stop being this. So, inevitably, they need emissaries, diviners of their will, to say what they ‘really’ believe. In practice, this has meant the Johnsons, the Salvinis, the Farages and the Trumps. And when this voice is not being negative (bashing elites/schools/university lecturers etc) it is invariably emotional. In that empty policy space where he or she who shouts loudest is rewarded with power, the biggest noise will always be rooted in feelings, not reason: love of country; fear of the foreign; belief in your gender’s superiority and/or your God – these raise the rafters, while the thoughtful ones remain rooted to the floor exchanging intelligent thoughts and puzzled expressions.
For people who want to know the ‘causes of things’ – and what social scientists do not? – this presents a problem. Causes are boring – and understanding them is unavoidably rooted in reason. But this is exactly the kind of elite nonsense from which the populist advocates have escaped. And if it is pointed out to followers of this tendency that their devotion to this or that cause or cult-figure is rooted in their situation, is explained by their predicament, indeed is beyond their control, we are (and are rightly) attacked for being patronising: ‘we know more than you do’ is what we are really saying as we explain why we know a person (by situating him or her) better than he or she knows him- or herself. It becomes dangerous (institutionally; individually) to point out that a leader of the people is talking nonsense, because acceptance of their strongly expressed views quickly becomes treated as a litmus test of patriotism, and so subverting their perspective with clever argument rooted in fact risks becoming regarded as a kind of treason.
The judges have in recent years become a prime target everywhere for those committed to realisation of the people’s will: smashing their power to stand between the popular leader and the implementation of those policies that have secured his or her victory is an ongoing project across much of Europe. In a major new book, as excellent as it is disturbing, Cristina Parau takes aim at a discrete but significant part of what most lawyers assume is an unalloyed social good: the growth of the rule of law in what the sub-title claims is ‘contemporary Europe and beyond’. The particular focus is on Central and Eastern Europe, where the old tradition of judicial civil servants had been ‘depraved under Communism’ and so for sure had ‘inured judges to subordination to the Party’ (p. 1) but which has now, it is argued, been dragooned into a new servitude. This contemporary serfdom is constituted by ‘a modern, elite-driven project imposed from the top down through transnational networking for institutional redesign’ (p. 3) which has the effect of ‘excluding popular sovereignty from the make-up of Judiciary organs, and insulating judges from accountability and democratically determined boundaries’ (p. 280). This interference speaks through the voice of transnational rule of law, what Parau throughout calls (and always in upper case) a ‘Network Community’ of elite opinion-shapers. To Parau, far from being benign, this ‘Europeanization of American-style judicial politicking’ means that judges enjoy ‘exemption from input accountability’ which when ‘combined with output supremacy’ makes the ‘autonomy’ thereby secured ‘indistinguishable from autocracy’ (pp. 280-281).
The effect of all this is, to Parau, clearly malign. The ‘universal values’ invented by ‘legal professional networks’ after World War Two and clustering around the rhetoric of the rule of law and human rights ‘have latterly become a goad to whip the “backward” countries of Europe into line with what the Network Community has universally defined as universal values’ (p. 280). The consequent reduction to ‘dormancy’ of national ‘veto players … has enabled the Network Community to advance and consolidate its power, especially since 1989’ (p. 281). In its ‘understanding, no mutuality is possible: judges must be empowered to check and balance elected representatives, and the latter disempowered to act vice versa’ (p. 176). Furthermore, ‘when judges across Europe network transnationally to harmonise their jurisprudence, bonding through a shared identity and assumptions of governance; then that is more consequential, politically, than an expert body, or even an epistemic community. It becomes a new form of government’ (p. 199). The effect is one of ‘seemingly irresistible pressure’ now (having slipped ‘reasonable bounds’) even threatening to require of Northern and Western Europeans that they too ‘sacrifice their most sacred, indeed robust traditions’ (p. 280).
Two questions: who are these elites? And what traditions (if any) are already being sacrificed in Central and Eastern Europe and now threatened further West and North? More later on the second. There is certainly a lot in the book on the first, naturally since this is the primary focus – ‘The transnational elite is a class of people who share a collective identity and a sense of solidarity – paradigmatic assumptions that originate in network consensus, like the revision of the separation of powers and assumption of the Judiciary’s moral superiority – and who disseminate hegemonic discourses that (effectively) coerce the general public’ (p. 281). This ‘Template is rooted in US practice (if not high theory), insofar as judicialization in the USA inspired the paradigm’ (p. 233). As a result of the ‘Network and their extraordinary entrepreneurialism’ none of the Central and Eastern Europe states follow ‘their own pre-Communist traditions, but instead the Network’s template’ (p. 232). The first of the book’s two parts describes across three chapters the ‘ambit’ and ‘identity and solidarity’ of the Network Community, and its modus operandi. The second part is a denser read, detailing how the judicialising paradigm works and the nature of the confident sense of ‘intellectual-moral superiority’ that drives it. It embraces top-tier courts of course but also judicial councils and the training of magistrates.
The book is a deeply researched, methodologically well-crafted account of the set of relationships that underpin and so give force to the Network. The creative driver is Parau’s prodigious reading on the topic but also some 59 players in the world she describes with whom she has conducted extensive interviews (with the details other than the names set out in an Annex). The author is alive to the possibility that there may be more going on with this Network that is beyond law. ‘Judicial empowerment can be fully understood only in a broader political context, as part of a general process of transferring public policy-making power from majoritarian to non-majoritarian institutions; for example to central banks and regulatory bureaux not only to courts …; even to mass media …’ (p. 4). Indeed, ‘[c]ould it be that the Network Community is motivated to want to make public policy through politically insulated institutions?’, and that law is just part of this wider project? (p. 287). (A hint here of Heaton-Harris’s frustrations, and also the UK’s anxieties about what unreliable teachers are saying in their classrooms.)
If the book sounds intense and argumentative then it is certainly both. It is also wonderfully written, not just in the way it is structured and in its development of its argument, but in its style too. Parau’s prose sings off the pages with an angry energy that is compelling and often unsettling: this is Parau on us, the kind of law school scholars who read this journal: ‘Academics tend to be … more involved in the Network Community than judges. What motivates them? Humankind generally seeks money, power, sex, celebrity. In academe, however, the thirst for intellectual glory is overriding: the reward is kudos (the ancient Greek word for “glory”) paid in the coin of being widely cited … Universal admiration is a key behavioural motivator.’. (p. 43). As for lawyers proper, they ‘are by trade servants of power’. And judges? – ‘The judicial regalia may give the appearance of uprightness, but confers no immunity from a universal venality’ (p. 183). Recounting her inquiries within Central and Eastern Europe, ‘the evidence [of the Network’s engagement] was always monotonously uniform’ (p. 48). Of one body that we all perhaps want to belong to, the ‘Venice Commission looms over the judicialization landscape of Europe like a promontory’ (p. 63). As for the well-funded drivers of the changes to which the Network is committed: ‘All kinds of NGOs haunt Brussels and struggle to survive. Billionaire philanthropic foundations are in a class by themselves’ (p. 71). Her literature survey (‘The state of the art and its discontents’, pp. 9-24) oozes an unsettling disdain for much of what she has encountered in the course of her (immense) researches. To use two clichés that the perfectionist in her would never allow into the text, Parau ‘takes no prisoners’ and is very happy to ‘burn her bridges’ as she savages this or that potential future patron.
One chapter towards the end, ‘The Assumption of Intellectual-Moral Superiority’, is particularly coruscating. Deploying a rare level of knowledge of what lurks on the borders of law and political science, Parau locates the growth of judicial power in ostensible democracies in a well-informed historical context and then deploys all her writing skill – in particular her capacity for intense indignation – to try to get the reader to see how implausible, heretical even, the exercise of such power is from a democratic point. Of course she is fighting an uphill battle since ‘the Network’ (or as my colleague and writing partner Keith Ewing named it 25 years ago, ‘the Juristocracy’) has normalised the exercise of this kind of unaccountable power, but she gives it quite a go, bringing an array of fresh insights to what in legal discourse is a fairly well-trodden field. Here her strong footing in political science as well as in law really helps. Her focus on the transnational aspect to the growth of this power is particularly valuable (and flows naturally from the book’s broader remit), as is her (for this lawyer) fresh and compelling account of the role played by an internalised sense of superiority on the part of those grabbing this power from elected representatives.
But what of the second question suggested a little earlier, the nature of these ‘most sacred, indeed robust traditions’ that are being challenged (and on this account being successfully destroyed) by the Network? We know from the text that whatever is being wrongly undermined is from the pre-Communist past of Central and Eastern Europe countries, not that immediate past. (This is presumably because Parau sees Soviet absorption and/or control as being more akin to an imperialist intrusion than an indigenous growth; she is certainly hostile to Soviet-imposed traditions in Central and Eastern Europe.) We also know that she sees the Network as having done damage further afield, in ‘contemporary Europe and beyond’. I am from Ireland, an outlier western European country where something we could certainly call a Network has been an important change vehicle. It is nowhere mentioned by Parau (and there is no reason why it should have been) but it strikes me as fitting the template of a country where many ‘sacred’ traditions have been successfully challenged. And thank goodness they have been! The little town I grew up in saw a girl in my sister’s school die giving birth – outdoors and alone, under a statue of the Virgin Mary beside the local parish church – rather than admit to anyone that she was pregnant. Defenders of tradition used a papal visit to Ireland in 1979 as a platform for an assault on women’s autonomy which one or two referenda later ended up – via efforts to jail students for providing information about abortions abroad – in the 14-year-old victim of rape being initially injuncted from leaving the country so as to ensure she did not end her pregnancy. One of my great heroes of Ireland is David Norris, who successfully established that the criminal prohibition on homosexual practices was a breach of his right to privacy. Another of my heroes, Mary Robinson, was his lead counsel before the European Court of Human Rights. Both were Irish, as were all those who eventually voted in a series of important democratic moments, to overturn the monopoly vision of Ireland imposed by the (yes, definitely robust) defenders of tradition. The Network may have helped open our eyes but they did not determine what we saw, or make us choose our route. The liberally-minded Irish had agency; the ‘Network’ was an instrument not a controller. The debate was with Irish people and was won by the side which laid out a vision of how society could work which was in the end more convincing than that offered by the other. One might hate the end result and deplore the influences brought to bear on the electorate (foreigners were certainly there, on both sides), but the outcome looks and feels democratic.
Back to Central and Eastern Europe. Parau explains the way democratic institutions there went along with the Template’s wishes in the post 1989 period as being the result of ‘the mass of elected politicians [being] almost hypnotically submissive to the hegemonic norms of the Network Community’ (p. 245). Perhaps she is right; maybe they did catastrophic damage in their blind embracing of new (neo-liberal) economic models, in their empowering of the judicial branch, and in their willingness to submit themselves to external oversight. But the winners won these elections. They set up the systems which some later politicians feel reduce too much their freedom of manoeuvre in the changed circumstances of the present. The ‘false consciousness’ of parliamentarians (and the people voting for them) in a book dedicated to the celebration of political sovereignty is not a good look.
And reaching further back, what was so alien about the Network’s ideas anyway? Parau is coy about exactly which pre-Communist traditions are being destroyed by the new framework, but what we learn from time to time suggests it is less foreign than might have been supposed. Judicial review of legislation got going in parts of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century and Romania’s Supreme Court ‘struck down a parliamentary statute in 1911’ (p. 235) – is this not a ‘tradition’ then that local supporters of judicial power could draw on now? Perhaps not, in the author’s eyes, as it seems to have been inspired by abroad and so (it seems) doesn’t count: the judges’ ‘audacity was the by-product of transnational networking, even that long ago’ (p. 236). Maybe all traditions have to be wholly indigenous or they count for nothing? But what can this possibly mean? It reminds me of a now-forgotten leader of the English far right arguing that his ‘white’ people were indigenous when it was obvious to everyone that all they had in common was not being people of colour. As much of a late chapter in the book on the historical background to judicialisation demonstrates, lively debates on the tension between judicial and democratic power have been a staple of European political-legal culture for decades. It can’t always have been foreign and even if it was so what? Who cares if in Ireland Mary Robinson and/or David Norris got their ideas from some Americans they met, even if the meeting was paid for by a billionaire NGO (which didn’t exist in those days anyway)?
And to return to a problem identified in general terms earlier, in Parau’s account who – specifically – speaks for the people? We know it is definitely not the judges and all of their supporting systems of power, and also that it is not anything foreign to the country under discussion: that is more or less what the book is about. But on exactly who stands for the people there is just the sort of uncertainty you would expect when trying to tie down a term as amorphous as this. Generally, Parau equates it with the winners of executive power in democratic elections (other than those elections which supported the reforms of which she disapproves of course – see above). Sometimes ‘public opinion’ is valued as a driver in itself (p. 284), and on other occasions it is a vaguer ‘democratic’ perspective that shines through (p. 286 for example). Another candidate for the people’s voice is of course – and not unreasonably – the assembly of those who are elected (eg pp. 2 and 284) but that seems to take second place in Parau’s mind to the executive power that is in broader terms legitimised by those representatives. Certainly the intense hostility to the Miller decision in the UK Supreme Court in 2017 is otherwise hard to understand – after all, this was a case that took power away from the executive and required that it be exercised by the people’s representatives in Parliament. It seems churlish (as well as factually incorrect) to deplore that victory as merely the raising of a ‘hue and cry about parliamentary sovereignty’ with the (intended?) effect of positioning ‘the legal professional elite to assume a jurisdiction, the ulterior end of which is to put paid to Parliament’s sovereignty’ (p. 292 – almost the last words in the book). So the Network can never be right – even when it is disavowing itself for (representative) democracy it is (merely) playing a deep game. As someone who was once an intense critic of the judicial branch I often ended up attacking decisions merely because they occurred (trespassing into politics!) rather than looking carefully at what they said, and (particularly) why they had come about.
Even if the peoples of the past chose freely to involve what Parau calls the Network in their affairs, is it really true that there is now no escape from its influence? A large question is posed by recent events in many Central and Eastern European countries: is the Network really as scary as Parau says it is? In particular, how true is it that ‘even the slightest deviation … by national governments [has] incensed the Network Community and [been] treated to zero tolerance?’ (p. 233). There does seem to have been a difference between pressure pre- and post- accession to the EU of which more could perhaps have been made: a German expert probably was able to dictate to Romania in 2004, confident in the knowledge that his ‘sway was shored up by the intransigence of the Commission and its threats to delay or adjourn Romania’s accession’ (p. 130), and there are certainly bound to be other examples. On the other hand, Poland – safely within the EU since 2004 – is still run by the sort of people who in Ireland are now a distant memory. The President Andrzej Duda won a narrow election victory in 2020, with the support of the ruling Law and Justice Party. Invoking Polish tradition (naturally) he describes the LGBT movement as a ‘foreign ideology’ which is ‘more destructive’ than Communism and – shades of the UK albeit with a different target – promises to ban discussion of LGBT issues in school as well as to secure a prohibition of adoptions by same-sex couples. Various ‘LGBT free zones’ have been declared by enterprising local authorities determined to be robust in their defence of their traditions and Poland’s constitutional court has recently tightened even further its laws against abortion in a way that has provoked high levels of protest within Poland – but no one seems to argue that the ruling has no legal validity. Many Poles oppose it and many Polish women have gone on strike to force a reversal. Where is the Network when these Polish liberals need it?
Continuing to dole out cash might be the cynic’s answer. Poland thrives on the financial support it secures from the EU, not least in recent Covid-19 emergency funding of which it appears to have managed to secure a large share. At the same time the Polish government is explicitly resisting the Network by seeking to restrict judicial independence, via a new Supreme Court disciplinary chamber designed (it is said) to keep the judges in line, and at very least opening their rulings to the sort of political accountability that the Network deplores. Already one judge who is critical of the changes made has had her immunity removed so as to expose her to corruption charges, and also had her pay cut by 50% (in proceedings held behind closed doors). The same individual had earlier been sacked without explanation from a judicial position by the Justice Minister. An academic sympathetically quoted by Parau (Wojciech Sadurski pp. 10-11) has been sued by the ruling party for allegedly defamatory tweets. For sure, the Venice Commission has issued a critical statement on many of these developments, the Council of Europe is cross, and cases are ongoing before the European courts. But these things have all happened, stamped with the people’s will via victory in closely-fought democratic elections. It is the same in Hungary, where the Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has (so far) successfully defied the Network to remodel the organisation of the judicial branch along more accountable lines: in Autumn 2020, for example, a new president of the Supreme Court was appointed to a nine-year term despite the overwhelming rejection of the nominee by the National Judicial Council and disapproval of the process by the European Commission. While it is true that the Network (of which these two bodies are, on Parau’s account, central parts) has exerted pressure in a way that has halted and slowed other changes in Hungary, it hasn’t stopped these changes, deeply unattractive though they must be to it.
Though this national fightback in Poland and Hungary has been ongoing for years, neither is treated in any detail at all in Parau’s book. Poland gets mentioned twice in the whole volume. No defence is mounted of the ways in which her critical perspective on transnational elites is being echoed in these and other Central and Eastern European countries (albeit less loudly for now). The Network is constantly excoriated while its critics get a free pass. Angela Merkel ‘none of whose business it was’ denounced some changes in Romania (p. 121) that the author is discussing – did we really need that help from the writer in making up our minds about the German intervention? An unspecified constitutional change in Hungary in 2011 is said to have ‘consisted of an ethical alloy of robustly justifiable reforms’ but it had nevertheless provoked an ‘extraordinarily violent reaction’ from elements within the Network (p. 148). This led the European Commission ‘to discursively sanction and humiliate the Hungarian Government’ (p. 149). The result of this kind of writing is that the book at times seems to lack nuance, particularly when the floor is given in an uncharacteristically uncritical way to critics of the Network, as when (for example) a leading proponent of the Orbán-driven changes in Hungary’s judicial system claimed that the European Commission had been ‘blackmailing’ both the Venice Commission and the Council of Europe to toughen their lines on Hungary (p. 149). The book does not indicate where these words were spoken or written. But leaving that aside and taking the remark at face value, surely it is interesting (and worth exploring further), this assertion that the Network is so fractured that bits of it need to blackmail other bits? All may not be as homogeneous with the great controllers as the author’s narrative drive seems at times to need it to be.
There is a sense reading this book that you are encountering a very scholarly version of what in the end is a rather ordinary conspiracy theory – ‘the invisible ascendancy of the Network community’ (p. 146) that is all around us, controlling everything from the shadows. In fairness to Parau, her critique never leads her to suggest that the Network would go so far as openly to subvert democratic outcomes. Poland and Hungary remain sovereign states, and their governments have been legitimately elected. This will be no Iran (1953), Suez (1956) or Czech (1968) intervention by foreign powers, and nor does Parau suggest that there will be. The questions therefore are different ones: must the Network’s prize powerhouse – the EU – continue to underpin the prosperity of those countries whose politicians openly defy it? Is Norway (outside the EU and therefore able to act on its own) within its rights to have withheld its generous support for those states that flout respect for what Norway thinks of as universal human rights? (We won’t invade you, we promise, but we are not obliged to continue to fund your - to us - horrible discrimination and vicious behaviour towards minorities.) Should the Council of Europe say nothing while its flagship Convention on Human Rights is mocked by national leaders? Membership is not compulsory. For those determined to defy the Network and further to reassert their ‘most sacred, indeed robust traditions’ there is always the Brexit option, and Belarus a model perhaps of what that independence will look like if the Council of Europe is forsaken as well as the EU in the name of (as the British call it) ‘taking back control’. (So far that is not working out so well for the people of Belarus in general, or indeed even for Mr Lukashenko in particular given his dependence on another local power, Russia – not in the Network for sure but – how can one put this? – slightly cruder in its means of domination.)
I used to be an intense critic of judicial power and was even among the few academic lawyers who in Britain opposed enactment of a full-blown human rights law in the United Kingdom, an eccentric position indeed for a left-of-centre lawyer in the mid-1990s. Much of Parau’s critique really resonated with me. Now, though, I am not so sure of what I once held as a certain set of truths. My position then appears now to me to be one that rested on an important assumption about the rule of law always mattering and about the democratic system always being able to prevent a plunge into shabby, corrupt authoritarianism under cover of the People’s Will. I still live in England, where the government of Boris Johnson appears set on curbing the power of the judges to counter even basic illegality, where minor figures like Chris Heaton-Harris feel they can turn to coercive tactics to tame the universities, and where a democratic victory in an election can led to a proposed law insulating soldiers from accountability for torture and genocide (a recent measure before the UK parliament). All in the name of British values, or (as Parau would call them) ‘most sacred, indeed robust traditions’. As Parau says, albeit with only the Network in her sights, ‘… the only certainty is that absolute power corrupts absolutely’ (p. 290). Absolutely.
