Introduction
The task of forming a new constitution for the country stressed by numerous military and civil conflicts is a complicated one. In order to include all the necessary points into the new constitution it is advisable that the already existing constitutions of the developed countries are consulted and the works of the reputable scholars in the area of political rights and freedoms are addressed. In particular, in the new Iraqi constitution the special importance should be attributed to the points of order, freedom, equality, and justice in the society. To present the reputable basis of these concepts in the new constitution, the works by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and John Rawls should be consulted as the sources of the prominent political thought in the history of the humanity.
Order
Thus, the concept of order is discussed in detail by the famous English philosopher and thinker Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) in his most known work The Leviathan. In this work, Hobbs draws the line between the personal and political freedom and defines order as the milestone notion that delimits personal freedom and the civil freedoms in the society. According to Hobbes (2008), when the civil freedom rules the society, all actions of the human being are done “not in order to his own mind, but in order to the laws of his country” (p. 346). Accordingly, such a vision of order is conformant with the accepted Western perspective of viewing the notion order, as in the Western world this notion is the basis on which the democratic rights and freedoms are guaranteed to people in exchange for the personal freedom they partly referred to the society.
Freedom
The notion of freedom is also of prominent importance for the development of the new constitution in any country, and the work titled The Second Treatise of Government by the reputable English scholar and political activist John Locke (1632 – 1704) is a proper source to consult in this context. Thus, John Locke (2002) stresses the crucial importance of freedom and argues that “freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it” (p. 11). Again, Locke’s idea of freedom is obviously put in the basis of the Western vision of human rights and freedoms as the freedom argued about by Locke is not the natural freedom but the controlled and partly limited freedom, which is limited for every single person in order to provide equal degree of freedom in the society as a whole.
Equality
Further on, the constitution of the country where the citizens are the basic value should also stipulate the equality as the norm of the social life. For this purpose, the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895) can be referred to but not necessarily followed. The point is that the communist idea of equality was the idea of equality in poverty as far as Marx and Engels (2002) argued that “if you want to enjoy political equality, abolish property” (p. 32). The only common point of the Communist Manifesto and the Western view of equality is the idea that “equality should mean equal opportunity, not equal consumption or equal enjoyment” (Marx and Engels, 2002, p. 46). Accordingly, the most applicable notion of equality is the equal opportunity to develop and increase wealth, not the equality in poverty.
Justice
Finally, justice is the basic element on which the relations of the society and its members are built, and the idea of the social justice as fairness by John Rawls (1921 – 2002) is applicable for the task of developing the concept of justice in the new Iraqi constitution. According to Rawls and Kelly (2001), justice in the society is “a complex of three ideas: liberty, equality, and reward for services contributing to the common good” (p. 166). Thus, justice according to Rawls and Kelly (2001) involves all the above elements of the democratic society and adds the reward for socially developing activities. Obviously, the Western vision of the social justice is similar to the one discussed above and can benefit the Iraqi society as well.
Conclusions
The above discussion thus allows making the conclusion according to which the four basic elements of the constitution that promotes the human rights and freedoms are order, freedom, equality, and social justice. Basically, the ideas on these four elements expressed by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and John Rawls meet the current state of things concerning the order, freedom, equality, and justice in the Western society, and the Iraqi government can use both the philosophic ideas and the experience of the developed countries in order to combine all the necessary parts in its new constitution that would value the human rights and freedoms and facilitate their protection by the state.
Works Cited
Hobbes, Thomas. The Leviathan. Forgotten Books, 2008. Print.
Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Courier Dover Publications, 2002. Print.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Classics, 2002. Print.
Rawls, John and Erin Kelly. Justice as Fairness: the Restatement. Harvard University Press, 2001. Print.