Dante Alighieri
Dante was the author of the most important antipapalist, imperialist tract of the Middle Ages, the De Monarchia, where he asked three questions:
- Is a world government, ruled by a monarch, necessary for the welfare of the human race?
- Did the Roman people acquire world dominion by right?
- Does the authority of the emperor derive directly from God or from some minister, Vicar of God, that is the Pope?
“A world government is necessary for the ’settlement of disputes between states without war’: where there is controversy, there ought to be justice.”
In the most recent and contemporary thinking about the possibilities of world order, it is generally recognized that the first institutional development toward world government is likely to occur in the field of judicial settlement of specific disputes rather than in legislative enactment and executive enforcement of universal laws.
Dante is one of the first writers on the problem of world government to separate the issue of political sovereignty, which must be vested in the control organ of world government, from the issue of cultural autonomy, which the individual nations and nationalities will fully preserve in a political world community.
According to Hegel,
“World history is the world court.”
