The Relevance of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus and Metalogicon to Contemporary Legal Thought

Abstract

Any account of the medieval natural law tradition must record the name of John of Salisbury (1115/1120–1176), a central figure who has attracted comparatively little interest among Indonesian students of legal philosophy, even though scholarship devoted to him has been pursued intensively and with remarkable depth since Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861). This study asks which elements of the Policraticus and the Metalogicon remain relevant today. The findings show that in the Policraticus John addresses the questions of 1688 and 1789 more directly than Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics. He argues that injustice committed by those in power is the gravest of political crimes, and demonstrates that every tyrant meets a bad end; on divine authority, removing a tyrant is both lawful and honourable. The Metalogicon, in turn, stands as his principal contribution to the history of legal theory and philosophy. It defends the verbal arts and the logic of the Trivium — grammar, rhetoric and logic — held essential to classical education in the medieval period. John wrote it against contemporary educational trends that, in his view, abandoned traditional learning in favour of practical skills, maintaining the Trivium as the foundation of intellectual development and critical thought: rhetoric and the art of persuasion for constructing effective argument and public address, and logic for distinguishing truth from falsehood and for rigorous intellectual inquiry.