Monarchy

views updated

Monarchy

The term “monarchy” has been used in both a broad and a narrow sense. The broad sense is found in the writings of the Ancients, especially Herodotus and the poets, where it denotes simply the rule of one man (or woman), whether good or bad, legitimate or unlawful, wise or incompetent. Plato and Aristotle introduced distinctions that narrowed the term by restricting it to rule by one good person; Plato defined the good by reference to law, and Aristotle did so by reference to happiness. In the modern West, another kind of narrowing has occurred in response to historical developments, especially feudalism. Here monarchy designates a particular type of one-person rule, characterized by legitimate blood descent, no matter how limited the extent of the governing functions; indeed, the term may even refer to regimes in which the monarch has no governing functions at all, as in Great Britain and the Scandinavian kingdoms.

Monocracy

Since Western historical associations cannot be applied to one-person rule in other cultures, comparative politics stands in need of a generic concept similar to the original Greek meaning of monarchy, a concept that would cover primitive kingship, Oriental despotism, tyranny, dictatorship, and the Western kind of monarchy.

The term “monocracy,” or monocratic rule, first suggested by Max Weber, has been coming into use in recent years. When anthropologists discuss monocratic rule, they usually mean one-person rule among primitives, which prevails, or prevailed before the European conquest, in Polynesia, Africa, and parts of America as well as Asia. The economic, political, judicial, and priestly functions of monocratic rulers differ widely within the same culture area. These rulers are generally regarded as of divine origin, and their acts are invested with divine qualities. They are supposed to possess mana and in their persons are frequently taboo; to touch them constitutes treason. The power of such a ruler is typically related in a magical way to successful crops and wars: there can be little doubt that military leadership is often at the heart of his power.

When the rule of this kind of king-priest was extended over large territories, especially in the ancient Orient, it was accompanied by the development of a bureaucracy. Such a bureaucracy may and often does combine priestly and administrative functions. In Egypt, China, and elsewhere, such extended bureaucratic monocracy was often associated with an official doctrine, such as Confucianism, the mastery of which served as the principle for selecting participants in the regime.

The succession of empires from the Egyptian to the Persian shows how widespread was this form of governmental organization within very diverse culture patterns. Indeed, the extent and durability of such regimes suggest that monocratic rule is the usual form of governing extensive territorial domains. This fact may be related to a persuasive general proposition concerning the appearance of monocratic rule in a variety of social contexts: it appears whenever a group is engaged in a serious struggle for survival. The threat to survival may be internal or external: wars, floods, insurrections, and the crises of industrial society have all been “causes” of the appearance of one kind of monocracy or another.

Ancient monarchy. Primitive government in the historical perspective seems also to have been predominantly monocratic. In Greece, for example, chiefs of divine descent appear to have performed the key functions of military leader, high priest, and judge. But eventually the nobility secured, or perhaps recaptured, an effective share of government. These fluid situations are reflected in such poets as Homer and Pindar. Modern researches in anthropology, archeology, and prehistory have shown that the Greek situation exemplifies fairly universal and recurrent conditions of early government. It is worthy of note, however, that matriarchal or patriarchal monarchy occurs under conditions that call more for magical and arbitral abilities than for military prowess.

Tyranny. A marginal form of monocracy, rarely referred to as monarchy, is tyranny. It made its appearance in Greece, and elsewhere, when class warfare between the nobility and the plebs caused political order to dissolve into civil war and anarchy. According to Aristotle, tyranny is the least stable of all forms of government. The Romans sought to forestall such developments by institutionalizing tyranny in the form of dictatorship. Both forms have, of course, reappeared in more recent times. In Greece, aristocracies, democracies, and tyrannies were challenged by monarchy. Having successfully withstood the onslaught of the Persian kings, at least in Greece proper, the Greeks were overwhelmed by the Macedonian rulers. Philip and his brilliant son Alexander set the stage for a proliferation of dynasties, which had been traditional in Macedonia. These dynasties dominated Greece and Asia Minor during the Hellenistic age until their conquest by Rome.

Although deeply imbued with traditional antimonarchical sentiment nurtured by a triumphant aristocracy, Rome eventually became a monarchy of radically autocratic propensity. After an extended period of transition, during which republican trappings were deliberately cultivated by Augustus and his successors, the Roman Empire emerged as a full-fledged monarchy. It remained troubled by problems of succession throughout its long history, however, because the notion of legitimizing a ruler by blood descent remained unacceptable for many generations. Historians and political philosophers have speculated on why Roman republicanism should have been superseded by monarchical autocracy. In the works of writers from Machiavelli to Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Mommsen, to mention only the most famous, the explanations for this transformation were, variously, the decline in morals, in religion, and in traditional manners, the extension of Rome’s sway and the corrupting influence of Oriental ways, and even the personal defects of Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar.

Actually, the emergence, or rather re-emergence, of monarchy in Rome occurred in response to the same forces that characteristically fashion monarchical government: civil dissension, breakdown of public order, and serious foreign setbacks and threats arising on Rome’s far-flung frontiers. The continued pressure of outside enemies and internal dissensions operated in the direction of monocratic, and indeed autocratic, rule; when, in the third century, Diocletian openly proclaimed such rule, he was merely stating officially what had long been a fact.

Religious legitimation of monarchy

It has been said that the change in the status of the emperor reflected a fundamental transformation in all conceptions of life. This may be true, but the impending Christianization of the empire presumably had an even more profound significance. As against the pagan preoccupation with affairs of this world, the Christian emphasis on the life hereafter became the dominant interest. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” may be taken as the key symbolic utterance of a basic indifference toward politics. Soon the church was to claim complete autonomy, at least in the West, which spelled the end of monarchy in the priestly tradition; monarchy hereafter appeared as the secular arm of the one God, whose primary representative on earth was the monarchical head of the church.

It has rightly been said that the Roman Catholic church preserved and developed the great tradition of Roman law. This heritage had a profound impact upon the development of monarchy in the West. The crucial feature of the emerging monarchical pattern was, at first, not the doctrine of legibus solutus, but above all the emphasis on law as expressed in the principle Quod placet principem, legis habet vigorem. Reinforced by the monotheistic conception of the deity in the Old Testament, which stressed the law-giving aspect, the monarch became primarily the dispenser of justice in the legal sense. This kind of monarch was epitomized in the symbolic figure of St. Louis sitting under an oak tree expounding the law. Such a monarch was a far cry from the omnipotent Oriental ruler, surrounded by pomp and circumstance. A monarch, confronted by ecclesiastical authorities ever ready to remind him of the natural and spiritual limits of the law and to back up their reminder with excommunication and the release of the ruler’s subjects from their allegiance, needed to reinforce his position as an individual by the legitimation of monarchy as an institution. Such legitimation was provided by the hallowing of blood descent.

Absolutism and constitutional monarchy

There has been a great deal of learned controversy with regard to the details of the intertwining of Germanic and Roman traditions in the evolving of Western forms of political order. But there can be little question that a real amalgamation took place. The decisive event in this process was the crowning of Charlemagne by the pope in the year 800. This event, the result of ecclesiastical initiative, decisively shaped Western monarchy, especially in France, Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Poland. After Charlemagne, and in contrast to the caesaropapism of the Eastern Empire, which preserved the older pattern of monarchy and bequeathed it to Russia, Western monarchy was torn between the conception of the Holy Roman Empire and the folkways of Germanic kingship. The latter remained strong in England, Spain, and Scandinavia. In these countries the nobility successfully claimed a share in ruling and thereby provided the restraint that the church sought to exercise in the empire.

Nobility and clergy joined in shaping constitutional forms of monarchy, especially in England and Spain. These were “mixed” governments, rather than “pure” forms. But before they could become universal, most of Europe went through a phase of absolute monarchy. Absolutism, especially as practiced in France, at times turned into despotism. Absolutist regimes were at once the creators and the expressions of national unification. They did away with feudal impediments to economic growth and fostered national churches challenging the ultramontane bonds of Catholicism. What Protestantism accomplished by the complete break with Rome, Gallicanism provided in an indirect way: an ecclesiastical authority closely bound up with secular rule. The absolute power thus placed in the hands of the monarch “corrupted” men and regimes and eventually engendered the violent reaction of revolution. In due course, absolute monarchy was overthrown, never to reappear in the European West; it was replaced by various constitutionalist forms, which were inspired by the example of England but which rarely if ever achieved the stability that tradition lent to the British crown.

The French Charte constitutionelle is typical in that it contains a rather doctrinaire system of separation of powers, even though the theory underlying it was distrusted. Constitutional monarchies varied considerably in regard to the scope they allowed the monarchical element; the scope was gradually reduced, in stages punctuated by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. In addition, a new form of monarchy made its appearance with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Although at the outset he was more a dictator than a monarch, Bonaparte insisted upon acquiring the trappings of traditional monarchy and clearly hoped to found a dynasty. Although a more absolute ruler than the monarchs he emulated, he too acknowledged the persistent Western preoccupation with law in putting through his great codification. Still, his methods served to discredit absolutism, and the autocracy of the Russian tsars did nothing to rehabilitate it. Indeed liberalism, like the Enlightenment before it, rapidly undermined the bases of monarchical legitimacy.

The decline of monarchy

The extent of the corrosion of monarchy was laid bare by World War i. Its revolutionary sequels swept away the monarchy in Germany, Austria–Hungary, and Russia, a process later completed by the disappearance of monarchy in Spain, Italy, and Turkey. Only a few, largely ceremonial monarchs remain in Europe. The decline of monarchy is a world-wide trend. It has toppled in China and is in rapid retreat in Japan, India, the rest of Asia, and most of Africa. It has never been able to establish much of a foothold in America. If it is remembered that in Britain the monarch has long ceased to be in control of the government, one might venture the proposition that traditional monarchy, legitimized in terms of blood descent and ecclesiastical unction, is becoming extinct.

The rise of monocracy

Nothing of the kind can be said for monarchy in the sense of the monocratic rule of one man. This type of government is actually on the increase all over the world, not only in totalitarian dictatorships but in military and even constitutional regimes. The rising importance of executive power, linked as it is to the increasing complexity of the decisions required in a technological age, enhances the monocratic thrust inherent in bureaucratic structures. Not only men like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Tito, and Gomulka but also Kemal Atatürk, Ayub Khan, Nasser, Nkrumah, and in a sense even de Gaulle and some of the more recent Latin American dictators, are the new monarchs in the original Greek meaning of the term. Rulers like the kings of Morocco and of Saudi Arabia are in fact becoming monocrats. The legitimacy of these rulers (as well as of their succession) varies. In the totalitarian states their legitimacy is based upon the party and its ideology; in other countries it rests upon military achievement and support; in still others it is linked to a broad plebiscitary appeal; and in all of them such rule is further legitimized by a rising standard of living and the furtherance of economic development. Nor is there any end to this trend in sight; rather the opposite. While hereditary monarchy is finished—even the movements trying to resuscitate it, like the Action Frangaise, are dead or moribund—plebiscitary monarchy, as first instituted by Napoleon, seems destined to spread during the remainder of the twentieth century.

Carl J. Friedrich

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barker, Ernest 1923 The Conception of Empire. Pages 45–89 in Cyril Bailey (editor), The Legacy of Rome. Oxford: Clarendon.

Bryce, James (1864) 1956 The Holy Roman Empire. New ed., rev. & enl. London: Macmillan.

Coulborn, Rushton (editor) 1956 Feudalism in History. Princeton Univ. Press.

Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1963 The Political Systems of Empires. New York: Free Press.

Figgis, John N. (1896) 1922 The Divine Right of Kings. 2d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press. ? First published as The Theory of the Divine Right of Kings. A paperback edition was published in 1965 by Harper.

Frankfort, Henri 1948 Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Friedrich, Carl J. (1937) 1950 Constitutional Government and Democracy: Theory and Practice in Europe and America. Rev. ed. Boston: Ginn. ? First published as Constitutional Government and Politics: Nature and Development.

Friedrich, Carl J. 1963 Man and His Government. New York: McGraw-Hill. ? See especially Chapter 10.

Gierke, Otto von (1868–1913) 1954 Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht. 4 vols. Graz (Austria): Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt. ? Volume 1: Rechtsgeschichte der deutschen Genossenschaft. Volume 2: Geschichte des deutschen Körperschaftsbegriffs. Volume 3: Die Staats- und Korporationslehre des Altertums und des Mittelalters und ihre Aufnahme in Deutschland. Volume 4: Die Staats- und Korporationslehre der Neuzeit.

Hocart, Arthur M. 1927 Kingship. Oxford Univ. Press.

Hooke, Samuel H. (editor) 1958 Myth, Ritual, and Kingship. Oxford: Clarendon.

Kern, Fritz (1914) 1939 Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Blackwell. ? First published as Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im früheren Mittelalter.

Koebner, Richard (1961) 1965 Empire. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

Loewenstein, Karl 1952 Die Monarchic im modernen Staat. Frankfurt am Main (Germany): Metzner.

Mair, Lucy P. (1962) 1964 Primitive Government. Baltimore: Penguin.

Maurras, Charles (1909) 1928 Enquête sur la monarchic. New ed. Versailles (France): Bibliothèque des Oeuvres Politiques.

Mommsen, Theodor (1871) 1887–1888 Römisches Staatsrecht. 3d ed., 3 vols. Leipzig: Hirzel. ? See especially Volume 2, Part 2.

Nicolson, Harold G. 1962 Kings, Courts and Monarchy. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Petrie, Charles A. 1952 Monarchy in the Twentieth Century. London: Dakers.

Pine, Leslie G. 1958 The Twilight of Monarchy. London: Burke.

Rostovtsev, Mikhail I. (1926) 1963 The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. New ed., 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.

Syme, Ronald (1939) 1960 The Roman Revolution. Oxford Univ. Press.

Weber, Max (1922) 1956 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 4th ed., 2 vols. Tübingen (Germany): Mohr. ? See especially Chapter 3 of Volume 1, Part 1.

Wittfogel, Karl A. 1957 Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press. ? A paperback edition was published in 1963.

Wolff-Windegg, Philipp 1958 Die Gekrönten: Sinn und Sinnbilder des Königtums. Stuttgart (Germany): Klett.

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences