Literary notes about arbitrator (AI summary)
The term "arbitrator" in literature has often been imbued with the role of a neutral, authoritative judge who is essential for resolving disputes and maintaining order. In early modern political thought, authors like Hobbes used the term to designate a figure to whom disputing parties submit their rights, emphasizing the idea of natural law and social contract ([1], [2], [3]). Similarly, in works that span cultures and epochs—from Cicero’s insistence on royal adjudication, where private individuals could not serve as arbitrators ([4]), to Locke’s commentary on the lack of recourse for the conquered ([5])—the arbitrator emerges as a central facilitator of justice. The concept is also employed in more personal or informal contexts, as seen in literary works from Galdós ([6]) and Mickiewicz ([7]), where the arbitrator serves as both mediator and emblem of fairness, and even in settings as varied as a prince's intervention in disputes ([8]) or a symbolic arbiter represented by nature in La Fontaine's fables ([9]). These examples collectively illustrate how the arbitrator has come to represent both the pursuit of impartial judgment and the broader quest for equitable social order in literature ([10], [11], [12]).
- And therefore it is of the Law of Nature, "That they that are at controversie, submit their Right to the judgement of an Arbitrator.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes - This other, to whose Sentence they submit, is called an ARBITRATOR.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes - And Distributive Justice, the Justice of an Arbitrator; that is to say, the act of defining what is Just.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes - Nor was any private man allowed to be the judge or arbitrator in any suit; but all disputes were terminated by the royal sentence.
— from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations by Marcus Tullius Cicero - But the conquered, or their children, have no court, no arbitrator on earth to appeal to.
— from Second Treatise of Government by John Locke - componedor arbitrator.
— from Doña Perfecta by Benito Pérez Galdós - Have also due regard for my grey hairs, for I have known greater sportsmen than you, and I have often judged between them as an arbitrator.
— from Pan Tadeusz; or, The last foray in Lithuania by Adam Mickiewicz - Shall we ask the prince to act as arbitrator?”
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Instead of judge, it is his plan To play accuser and defamer.' A tree was next the arbitrator, And made the wrong of man still greater.
— from Fables of La Fontaine — a New Edition, with Notes by Jean de La Fontaine - Want of union, want of mutual assistance, want of a common arbitrator to resort to in their differences.
— from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 01 (of 12) by Edmund Burke - I now offer him, what seems to me fair and liberal, that we submit the points at issue to you as arbitrator.
— from Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete by William T. Sherman - Yet he was popular, for he knew every one of the citizens by name, and gave impartial judgment in all cases referred to him as arbitrator.
— from Plutarch's Lives, Volume 1 (of 4) by Plutarch