Royal Supremacy: When The World Lacked Freedom

2017

The Fateful 20th Century I. The Downward Trend in the Islamic World II. The Concept of Kingship III. The Downward Trend in the Christian World IV. Other Extant Monarchies V. Clarifications

Monarchy has two elements, autocratic government and hereditary succession to office. After surveying arguments for and against hereditary access to public office, the paper illustrates that theoretical explanations of the rise of representative government do not account for the abolition or preservation of hereditary monarchy in contemporary democratic states. The paper then distinguishes between proximate and fundamental causes of the fall of monarchy. The former are military defeat, dissolution of the state as a result of war defeat and decolonization, and revolution. Fundamental causes are those that explain how proximate causes led to the overthrow of the monarchy and focus on the failures of monarchs to preserve national unity and to withdraw from a politically active role.

In the tradition of Schmitt and Agamben’s “political theology”, anthropologists David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins have traced the concept of political power and sovereignty to an initially religious impulse - an attempt to channel the raw violent potential of humans and, as importantly, nature into a ceremonial vehicle. They differentiate between two models of ancient sovereignty - divine kings (whose divine power is absolute and unrestrained) and sacred kings (who embody power in order to contain it). In these terms - insofar as the sovereign is conceptualized as the one who imposes the state of exception, rather than the sacrifice on whom it is imposed - political thought in the Western tradition embedded in the tradition of divine kingship. Robert Graves, following James Frazer, proposed an alternate lineage of sacred kingship at the earliest origins of the Western tradition in the myth of a dying and resurrecting king, ultimately subordinate to the true source of divine power, the Goddess of life, who is slain and replaced by his double. This sacrificial ritual, unlike current binary models of sovereignty, is mediated by a third term which operationalizes a second binary, splitting that in which the "sovereign" always arises as the dominant term against itself. Though its historicity has been challenged, I argue that this model taken as a formal hypothetical presents a useful paradigm for demonstrating the contingency of the form of the paradox of sovereignty asserted by Schmitt, Agamben, etc., and reading it in relation to the structure of binary contradiction and dialectic - manifest distinctly in the structure of double kingship and in the opposition of sovereign and homo sacer - as well as the absent term of mediation.

This chapter discusses the current state of the historiography of the origins of the French Revolution.

Monarchy is liberalism’s little secret. Given the number of articles and books appearing every year dealing with liberal democracy as the hallmark of contemporary western societies, it is astonishing that monarchy is rarely ever mentioned despite the fact that monarchy, and not a republic, is the constitutional form of quite a number of western liberal states. I argue that considering the political reality of the established monarchies in Europe leads into a dilemma: either contemporary liberalism is not the kind of theory it claims to be, or it has to reconsider its central tenets. In conclusion I show that the dilemma cannot be solved or avoided but needs to be embraced by conceiving liberalism not as an applied moral theory but as a political theory that leaves room for various symbolic self-understandings and acknowledges the crooked timber of historical realities.

2012

The development of strong kingship in Thailand has received considerable attention from researchers. Some studies have examined it as a whole while others have examined just some of its aspects. 1 A number of scholars, for example, have examined the change in legal structure or the formation of the Thesaphiban provincial administration system. Surprisingly, though, little attention has been paid to the intellectual background to the formation of the absolute monarchy. Recently, a study examined the intellectual history of the 1932 Revolution2 which examined the attitudes of different groups before and after 1932. The study, which also described the intellectual climate and how the royalty adjusted to the change in government, provided a better understanding of the attitudes of those holding power in the absolute monarchy. Nevertheless, the study of the origin of attitudes to kingship, how these related to cultural factors and to actions taken by the ruling class cannot be avoided in...

2019

Banatul azi, 2022

All of the world media is now writing about Queen Elizabeth II. We decided to reflect a little on the role of the British monarchy in today's fluid, globalized and globalizing world, with its dissolving values and principles, as well as on the need for the British people to maintain such an institution that, to many, seems obsolete. We faced the function of the monarchy with the challenges of contemporary nationalism, trying to identify what was irreplaceable in the Queen's performance, in increasing the fascination she generated as well as her aura of a pole of stability.