Hey everyone, we have a Fireside this week and then next week we’ll get back to our somewhat silly break discussing the mechanics of warfare in Dune. But I did want to stop to chatter a bit about something that came up in that discussion, which is something about the nature of personalist regimes in both fiction and the real world.
First off, to clarify what I mean, we can understand the governance of polities to be personalist or institutional. Now if ‘the governance of polities’ sounds vague that is because it is: I want to include not only state governments but also the political systems of non-state polities (tribes, etc.) because these too can be personalist or – to a more limited degree – institutional in nature (though arguably a fully institutional system of government is purely a property of states – but of course ‘state/non-state’ is not a binary, but a spectrum from fully consolidated state to extremely fragmented non-state polities, with many points in the middle). So we’re talking about polities, political entities which may or may not be states.
Basically the issue here is that for personalist regimes, both power and the daily function of the political elements of the society are held personally, whereas in institutional regimes, that power is mediated heavily through institutions which are larger than the people in them. By way of example, in both kinds of regimes, you might have a ‘Minister of Security’ who reports to the leader of the country. But whereas in an institutional regime, the minister of security does so because that is the institution (he holds an office and his office reports to the office of the leader), in a personalist regime, the power relationship depends on that minister’s personal relationship to the leader. He reports to the leader not because his office does but because he, personally is connected – by ties of loyalty or patronage or family – to the leader himself.
The governments in Dune are fundamentally personalist in nature. Power is determined by a person’s relationship to the central leader – the Duke Leto Atreides or the Baron Harkonnen or the Emperor Shaddam IV. And that goes both ways: your position in the state is determined by your relationship, such that the Duke’s own personal private doctor, Yueh, is a powerful key political figure despite not overseeing, say, a health ministry. He is close to the Duke, so he is powerful. On the flipside, the Duke’s ability to run his government is fundamentally contingent on his relationship to his immediate retinue, since no man rules alone and since those sub-leaders aren’t really bound to him by institutional offices, but rather by personal loyalty (something that comes up in the book where Leto discusses the extensive propaganda necessary to conjure the aura of bravura he relies on to lock in the loyalty of his lower subordinates).
But what I wanted to muse on was not specifically the personalist governments of Dune but rather the prevalence of personalist systems in fiction more broadly. Speculative fiction in particular is full of such personalist systems (it is one of the great attractions, I suspect, of writing medieval-themed fantasy, that the time period being invoked was one of ubiquitous personalist rule), but equally other forms of fiction often effectively create personalist systems for the purpose of the fiction even out of systems which are institutional in nature.
And it isn’t very hard to understand why: stories are for the most part fundamentally about personal dramas and the characters in them. At the very least, a classic device of storytelling is to take an impersonal, institutional system and then represent it through a character who stands in for the whole institution. Think, for instance, of how in Game of Thrones, the Tycho Nestoris character ends up standing in for the institution of the Iron Bank (repeatedly stressed as an impersonal institution) to give it a single character’s face. Or in Andor how the imperial security bureaucracy is essentially personalized in the characters of Dedra Meero and Leo Partagaz. It’s a way of embodying an institution as a character by representing it as a character. Stories are often more compelling when they are about characters rather than institutions, so the political systems in our stories tend to be personalist ones centered on characters rather than institutional ones.
But of course stories are also a way we train ourselves to think about unfamiliar problems and here things get a bit awkward because while our fictional worlds are composed almost entirely of personalist systems of rule, the real world is a lot more varied. Absolutely there are personalist political systems in the world today, important ones. But one thing that has been demonstrated fairly clearly is that in the long run, institutional political systems are generally quite a lot better at coping with the needs of complex, modern countries – especially for those larger than a city-state. As a result, the largest and most successful countries generally have institutional rather than personalist political systems. Indeed, personalist systems seem strongly associated with stagnation and decline in a fast-moving modern world.
One of the other reasons why personalist regimes are, I suspect, so popular with storytellers, especially as villains, is that they are easy to defeat on a personal scale. If all of the power in the regime is tied up in the personal relationships of the ruler, then defeating or killing the ruler, the Big Bad, offers at least a chance that no one else will be able to take his place and the system will collapse. That’s not historically absurd – we see it play out in succession disputes repeatedly. The death of Cyrus the Younger at Cunaxa (401) instantly results in the collapse of his revolt, despite the fact that large parts of his army were undefeated – they were there to fight for Cyrus (or his money) and with Cyrus gone, there was no reason to stay. Likewise the death of Harold Godwinson at Hastings (1066) marked the end of effective Saxon resistance to the Norman invasion, because that resistance had been predicated on Harold’s claim to the throne. In the Roman Civil Wars, the flight or death of a given Roman general often resulted in the effective collapse of his faction or the mass desertion of his troops (e.g. the surrender of many Roman senators after defeat after Pompey’s flight from defeat at Pharsalus (48) or Antonius’ army’s defection after his flight at Actium (31), in both cases happening while the ’cause’ of the fleeing party was still very much ‘live’).
And that’s a really satisfying story narrative where the hero is able to defeat the enemy utterly by doing a single brave thing on a very human scale – throwing the Ring into Mount Doom sort of stuff. And for personalist regimes, that can actually work – such regimes often do not survive succession when the charismatic leader at the center whose relationships define power dies or flees. This can actually be exacerbated by the fact that many rulers in personalist regimes do not want to have clear successors, since a clear successor might easily become a rival. Thus not, for instance, the many dictators worldwide whose succession plan is just a bunch of question marks (e.g. Putin’s Russia). Anything else would be inviting a coup.
The danger, of course, is applying that same logic to an institutional system. But since the relations of power in an institutional system belong to institutions which are ‘bigger’ than the people who populate them – power belongs to the office, not the man – slaying the Big Bad Leader has very limited effect. It might briefly confuse their leadership system, especially if quite a lot of leaders are lost at once, but institutional logic triggers quite quickly because you’ve killed the leaders but not the institutions. So the institutions quickly go about selecting new leaders, using their existing, codified institutional processes.
Imagine, if you will, for a moment, that someone did, in fact, bomb an American State of the Union Address, killing most of Congress, the President and the Cabinet. Would the United States simply collapse? Would they be able to impose their own new leader into the vacuum? No, pretty obviously not. Within hours or days, each of the fifty states would be appointing, based on their own processes, replacement representatives, while the ‘designated survivor’ assumed the office of the presidency and quickly appointed new acting cabinet members. Such an act would, at most, buy a week or two’s worth of confusion and panic. Even if you kept striking political leaders (who one assumes would try to render themselves harder to hit) the system would just calmly keep replacing them. Tearing out the institutions in this way would demand blowing up basically every official more senior than Local Dog Catcher before you would actually collapse the institutions.
In practice you could never do that with individual strikes. The only way to tear out the institutions would be through occupation – through putting troops on the ground where they could impose their own systems of control directly on the populace. Of course in many cases that approach might be ruinously costly in both lives and resources, perhaps so costly not even to be contemplated. Which is one of the many reasons it would be important at the outset to distinguish between an institutional regime and a personalist one, to avoid being in a situation where a strike at the ‘Big Bad’ has failed to achieve objectives, leaving a plan trapped between the ground forces it is unable or unwilling to commit and the inability of assassinations and airstrikes to end a conflict once it has been begun.
On to Recommendations.
Naturally with a major conflict breaking out in the Middle East between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran (and Iran’s regional proxies) on the other, there is quite a lot of discussion. One facet of the war that I expect will be increasingly relevant the longer it goes on are conditions in the Strait of Hormuz. I am not a shipping expert, but Sal Mercogliano is and has been offering daily updates on his channel discussing the implications. Close to a quarter of the world’s oil and natural gas moves through the Strait of Hormuz and most of that production has no other effective way to reach markets, making a disruption in the Strait – shipping there is currently at almost nothing and there have been multiple attacks on cargo and tanker ships – tremendously important globally as everyone’s economy relies on these sources of energy. As I write this, oil – at $90.80 a barrel – is up almost 50% from where it was mid-February and still rising in price. That is going to have substantial economic impacts if it remains that way.
The war in Iran is naturally a rapidly evolving one and I don’t want to say too much because I am not an area-specialist. I will simply note if you want to keep track of developments that you will generally find more careful and informed discussion in dedicated national security publications like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and War on the Rocks as opposed to other news media and especially as opposed to 24 hour cable news; I also pay attention to business press like the news side of the Wall Street Journal. My own view, for what it is worth (I have not been shy in sharing on social media), is that this war is a mistake and potentially quite a severe mistake.
In a different ongoing major regional war, I also want to note that Perun has, on his channel, a four-year retrospective on the war in Ukraine that I found informative and useful. Michael Kofman also had a four-year review podcast with Dara Massicot (alas, paywalled) and his expertise is always worth your time; note also his interview with Foreign Affairs a couple of weeks ago looking at the possibility of endgame scenarios (or lack thereof) in Ukraine. Alas, just because a new war has started, it does not mean the old wars have ended (and also more than one new war has started; Afghanistan and Pakistan are also in hostilities).
But let us shift to some Classics news. This week’s Pasts Imperfect was grim but necessary reading, a tally of five significant humanities programs (including two classics programs) being shut down, part of a larger wave of closures and department shrinkage across the humanities afflicting both history and classics and of course other disciplines as well. I know most people do not have this front of mind, but it is the case that we are, as a society, actively dismantling the infrastructure that discovers, learns about and teaches us the ancient past, actively inhibiting our ability to draw on those lessons for present or future crises.
That said, while scholarship in our fields is being reduced, it has no stopped entirely and I wanted to note (hat tip Sarah E. Bond who alerted me) that a brand new publication, Beacons and Military Communication from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, eds. M. Ødegaard, S. Brookes, and T. Lemm has just been released online by Brill in an open-access volume you can download for free, funded by UCL and the Research Council of Norway. European research grants increasingly are making open-access publication in some form a condition of funding (and paying for that kind of publication, which is expensive) and I really wish that grant funders in the United States would follow suit. Though, of course, that would require us to actually fund the NEH.
Finally for this week’s book recommendation, I wanted to answer a question I have been asked quite a few times since I noted that I was teaching Latin this academic year, which is some variation of, “if I wanted to teach myself Latin, what should I use to do it?” And the first answer is, ‘it is very hard to teach yourself a language, you should probably take a class.’ But if you truly are determined to try to self-teach yourself Latin, the book to work from is almost certainly (and this recommendation is going to surprise absolutely no one ) F.M. Wheelock and R.A. Lafleur, Wheelock’s Latin, 7th edition (2011). While this is the seventh edition, Wheelock turns seventy this year, which hopefully expresses how tried-and-tested the approach here is. Wheelock is what I would term a ‘grammar first’ textbook (as opposed to ‘reading first’ approaches like the OLC or CLC), which is going to be more appropriate for adult learners (whereas I think the ‘reading first’ approaches are probably better for Middle/High School contexts, but both approaches can work in any context). The ‘grammar first’ approach means that Wheelock does not have a fun little story for you to follow or characters to meet – it has explanations of grammar rules and practice sentences to practice those rules. But the advantage is that it can be wonderfully systematic, moving you logically from each rule to the next. The disadvantage is that in either a self-study or classroom environment, Wheelock demands that you bring 100% of the discipline and motivation necessary to push through the material.
The other great advantage of Wheelock, especially for the independent learner, is that because it has been the dominant English textbook for Latin for, again, seventy years there are an enormous number of resources built for it, that interface directly with the order and method with which Wheelock presents Latin grammar and vocabulary. Of particular note is R.A. LaFleur’s Scribblers, Sculptors and Scribes (2010) which is a primary source reader using real Latin inscriptions and texts designed to be used as a workbook moving in parallel with Wheelock. Meanwhile, once one has climbed the steep heights of Wheelock, the series is capped off by its own excellent reader intended for use after the main textbook, Wheelock and LaFleur, Wheelock’s Latin Reader: Selections from Latin Literature (2001). And because Wheelock is so old and so standard, there’s no lack of other resources designed to seamlessly hook into it.
Again, for anyone looking to learn Latin I would first very strongly recommend an actual Latin class – learning any language is hard – regardless of what textbook they’re using (I have experience with the OLC, Wheelock and Ecce, I’ve had students come in from the CLC and Lingua Latina, they all work in a classroom setting). But if you really do intend to try to self-teach, I think Wheelock is your best bet.
You say this is about last week’s discussion, but I sense a connection to current events.
It is possible that I had this in mind for a particular reason.
Indeed, I wonder what “Imagine, if you will, for a moment, that someone did, in fact, bomb an American State of the Union Address, killing most of Congress, the President and the Cabinet.” might be inspired by…
Hmm, I’m thinking Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor?
The obvious real world world analogy would seem to be the Gunpowder Plot of four hundred years ago, in which the conspirators intended to bomb the opening of the English Parliament, killing the King, his heirs, the senior judiciary and both Houses of the legislature. This was not expected to do much long term damage to the English state; just cause a political crisis during which a Catholic revolt might hope to install their own preferred candidate as King.
Could also be inspired by repeated US and Israeli airstrikes on gatherings of Iranian senior leadership.
One notable aspect of individualist regimes in fiction is that often the individual in political power has some amount of metaphysical power. Sauron is scary not just because he’s the leader and the orcs and the Ringwraiths and so on are loyal to him, but also because he has specific power that can be used to dominate the will of his soldiers and to attack his opponents. He corrupts parts of Middle-Earth, he sends storm clouds to hinder the Fellowship, and so on. Some of his subordinates, like the Ringwraiths, are only “alive” because of his active power.
A lot of superhero deconstructions make use of this too. A superhero setting is one where law enforcement power is *literally* held by a single individual, and it can’t be handed off to anyone else. This means the supers get a lot of influence over the government because there’s no good alternative for dealing with supervillains.
E.g., in Worm, there are a bunch of superheroes who used to be villains, but switched sides in exchange for having their crimes pardoned or covered up, because their powers were too valuable to let them go to jail.
I’m reading a story right now, Terminate the Other World, which is primarily about a superhero-hunting cyborg ending up in a fantasy litrpg world, but touches on this idea with its background excerpts. In the past, tribes city-states invested in high-level individual champions, with the serious drawback that when they died their people were pretty much doomed. Then the Legion developed, a mass force of professional soldiers who weren’t so high-level but specialized their builds to effectively fight in concert, which made them a force that could survive defeats and compete on a level with the elves, whose long lives let their champions outlevel human ones.
interestingly, i was about to bring Sauron up because he is an example of a system that ultimately was a personalist Regime and fell as a result of it’s head leader being removed.. but the evidence in the book is that Sauron actually seems to have *tried* to set up a form of institutional system within Mordor. we have lots of references to how the orcs have been organized into units with individual member registrations, to heavily systematic logistical systems, layers of management to oversee all of it, etc. it is likely the intent was to make the orcs more effective as an army, by giving them a functioning logistical system (much like say, the romans), and likely in breaking up old clan/tribe ties in favor of common factional identities (much like with the decimalized mongol army)
and it is likely this attempt to built institutions that made the army under the Witch King that sieged Gondor so effective.
but it also shows the catch of institutional systems.. they only work if the people in them them *buy into the institution*. that is that they support said institution and follow it of their own will. with the orcs we see a lot of evidence that the orcs hate the institutional systems that sauron has put in place. Shagrat and Gorbag’s conversation in the two towers being a big example, as they reminisce on ‘better days’ before they were put under all the structure and rules Sauron built, seriously consider the idea of running away from sauron’s army to live the life of regional bandits, before shooting said idea down not because of any loyalty to the regime (indeed they seem rather dissastified with it) but because they know their units are filled with spies and informants. and it isn’t just them, we see it pretty much every time we get to hear orcs talking to each other, such as the trackers that followed frodo and sam from the tower of cirith ungol. and the muster-captain which rounds them up (in their orc disguises) thinking they’re shirkers or deserters.
all of which meant that, even if we ignore the whole bit where the destruction of the ring’s power destroy’s sauron, his nazgul, and his giant fortress.. none of those institutions survived the deaths of said leaders, who put them into place. the loss of their dark lord and his undead generals causes them to panic and run, and keep running. even though they still massively outnumbered the forces against them, and could have carried the day even under lesser leadership. because ultimately the institutions that sauron built were still anchored in a society that wasn’t bought into the system, and still operated under what amounts to a personalist regime hammered into the shape of an institutional one.
“We don’t want to go to war today, but the Lord of the Lash says, ‘nay, nay, nay’.”
I can’t imagine Sauron trying to set up an institutional government that could survive him. Even putting aside the whole immortal fallen angel thing, where he actually could rule forever, Sauron is such a control freak he would never cede power to an institution.
This isn’t necessarily a good-evil thing. The Inner Party in 1984 has no problem setting up an institution devoted to being a boot stamping on a face forever, and even if Big Brother exists and could be killed the Inner Party would continue oppressing exactly as they do. In the real world the USSR post-Stalin became institutionalized oppression. There can be evil institution building, but the evil can’t be based on the cult of personality around an individual and would require evil people devoted to institution building.
I’d like to give a shout-out to Shin Godzilla for being a rare work of fiction that shows institutional governance, and shows it as a source of strength. It’s even got a scene where the Prime Minister and most of the cabinet get killed, only to be quickly replaced. Their replacements are less competent but still competent enough to meet the moment.
On the whole it’s a love letter to liberal democracy in a Godzilla-shaped package, very refreshing to see.
Though, to be fair, institutional governance doesn’t have to a a liberal democracy in order to be institutional governance.
Sure, institutional governance isn’t limited to liberal democracy, but one of the major themes of the movie was how the boring and frustratingly impersonal institutional deliberation nevertheless serve the public better than decisive personalist action.
It’s just rare and refreshing to see a work of fiction that depicts institutions at all, and furthermore depicts them as the good guys rather than as villains or a hostile force of nature. Bureaucratic hell is a real thing, but to look at fiction you’d think that it doesn’t have any upsides, when the unfortunate fact is that bureaucracy is vastly preferable to the absence of bureaucracy.
It’s interesting that your analysis of the film is the opposite of some other reviews. It’s inspired me to watch the film myself soon.
Wikipedia’s
“Themes” section on this film quotes a few critical who claim the film satirizes the incompetencies of the Japanese government, even to the point that (begin quote) William Tsutsui, author of Godzilla on My Mind, wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that “Shin Godzilla leaves no doubt that the greatest threat to Japan comes not from without but from within, from a geriatric, fossilized government bureaucracy unable to act decisively or to stand up resolutely to foreign pressure.”
I might very well be taking it differently from how it was intended, especially since my interpretation of the final scene is apparently a novel one. But my sense of the movie changed pretty dramatically over its course, where people started out frustrated with the slow pace of the endless meetings, but time and again it’s shown to have been *the right decision* to take things slowly, wait for more information before acting, and avoid taking rash actions that cause even greater damage.
The PM dying and being replaced with the geriatric agriculture minister was a setback, but the guy was still capable of both doing the job and taking accountability for his decisions. He was inferior to the guy he replaced, but the system wasn’t crippled.
I absolutely buy the criticisms of the state of Japan’s government, especially the age of its leadership and inability to stand up the foreign pressure, but what I saw was a system that, for all its flaws, 1) was positively shaped by concerns about accountability, 2) was resilient to massive damage, and 3) ultimately succeeded because it had a great diversity of voices within it. A personalist regime would probably have taken decisive action to drop bombs on Godzilla, failed to kill Godzilla, and then become paralyzed when the leader was killed.
I have a fun little story, tangentially about that movie (which I have not seen). Several years ago I took one of my sons to a Minecraft convention here in Los Angeles, and one of the booths featured Max Brooks (son of Mel, author of World War Z, etc.) signing copies of a Minecraft spinoff book he’d written.
There was almost no one in line so we go up and buy a copy of the book and Max signs it. He’s very nice and asks my kid some questions and writes a custom signature in the book. Then he says to me, “Hey have you seen Shin Godzilla? It’s great—” and goes on about the movie for a couple of minutes. I’m standing there thinking, why is he telling me this? Did he write it or something? Eventually we depart.
Several hours later we get home and I go into the bathroom and happen to glance in the mirror, at which point I notice that *I am wearing a Godzilla T-shirt* and had forgotten about it the whole day.
I’d say a big part of the problem there is that our friends on the political right-wing simply can’t grasp the whole idea of institutional or institutionalized structures in any context. And that seems to get the worse the farther you get to the right. The idea that *everything* in life always is, or has to be, about personal matters and specific persons seems to be hard-wired into their brains. See, for instance, their apparent belief that all kinds of things that they don’t like about the modern world would never have happened, or never have appeared, if a young George Soros would have been hit by a bus back in 1951.
I would not assign this solely to right wingers. “Lived experience” is not a concept right wingers spend a lot of time talking about, and outside the USA “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is used by exasperated left wingers about other left wingers.
Personalist rule appeals to human beings generally, something from our hunter-gatherer evolutionary background maybe?
I’m not assigning this solely to right-wingers. It’s just particularly strong among them. Yes, it’s probably an evolutionary inheritance – I kind of think those generally tend to express themselves more strongly among them.
As for “lived experience”, yes, that way of putting it is left-wing and/or left-liberal academic jargon. But I suspect that even right-wingers sometimes talk about “life experience” – and as far as I can see, the term “lived experience” is mostly the term “life experience” translated into one of the look-how-pretentious-I-can-be varieties of the English language.
I have seen “Trump Derangement Syndrome” used roughly 10-100 times more often by right-wingers who are convinced that personal criticism of Donald Trump is the result of some kind of obsessive personal delusion that inexplicably spreads for no reason (perhaps by George Soros mind control rays?). About 10-100 times more often by them, than by anyone on the center or left. Honestly it might be more than 100 times more.
Now, I’m not saying there are literally no cases of people on the center and left doing this personalizing thing. But you REALLY have to reach to find a leftist who seriously believes that you can accomplish significant social change or real victories just by removing a single person from play. Indeed, political leftism, the actual theories, are ALL ABOUT the idea that power is wielded by institutions and large classes of people and that individuals are often at best symptoms and at worst figureheads of the underlying power structure.
Meanwhile, it seemed not long ago that Trump in particular and much of MAGA in general honestly believed that kidnapping Nicolas Maduro would turn Venezuela into an American vassal state somehow, even as they routinely claimed that he was a terrible corrupt unpopular man nobody liked even inside his own country.
A big citation needed IMO, because this smells a gut feeling based on hearing anecdotes about the worst side of the “other tribe” but not about “your tribe”.
Conservatism – outside of the contemporary US usage – is well defined by something along the lines of “trusting the accumulated wisdom of generational-old institutions above the fleeting vagaries of individuals”. At the very least, that’s how The Economist has defined it (not verbatim) on repeated occasions, and that’s a solidly liberal-right institution if there’s ever been one. On the other side, the number of left wing -isms named after individuals (from Marx onwards) and the number of left wing dictators who have created their own cult of personality (lots of overlap with the above) suggests that that side of political spectrum often place individuals above institutions. To claim that either “side” does this more than the other requires serious evidence, because it really does sound like a classic strawman otherwise.
To throw my own theory into the ring, I think it’s more a revolutionary/radical vs moderate (moderate isn’t quite the right word, but I couldn’t think of a better antonym for revolutionary) divide, at least in modern politics. Revolutionaries need to believe that huge change can be effected quickly, which is easiest to do if you also have a “change the person at the top and the rest will follow”. A belief that a small cadre of people can quickly rebuild state-running institutions along their preferred model is really a belief in the importance of the individual above the institution. The moderate, on the other hand tries improve the existing institutions out of a belief that they’re not disposable or easily replaceable; thereby placing institutions firmly at the centre stage while relegating individuals to components of these institutions. Of course, exceptions exist, but I suspect this is a more fruitful starting point than aligning left vs right with institutionalism vs individualism.
@holdthebreach,
A belief that a small cadre of people can quickly rebuild state-running institutions along their preferred model is really a belief in the importance of the individual above the institution.
I don’t think this is quite right: the operative words in your statement are “small cadre”, which is (in theory, anyway) supposed to be quite different than an individual. The revolutionary left wing model of authority is ideally supposed to be the party-state, not the personalist dictator (i.e. the rule of one ideologically cohesive and disciplined party, not the rule of one man). I think defenders of the party-state concept would say that it avoids a lot of the pitfalls of both competitive liberal-democratic politics on the one hand and personalist rule on the other.
A lot of left wing regimes have been, effectively, personalist in nature, but I think that tends to be either a “failure mode” (where authority gets gradually more and more swallowed up by one charismatic leader), or else a “default mode” (where there was never a very strong ideological party apparatus to begin with, and so some charismatic leader filled the vacuum). I think even a lot of the charismatic leaders in question would say that charismatic personalist leadership isn’t the way a revolution is supposed to work.
Fair, there is a difference between the end goals and the methods used to get there. Some left wing revolutionaries are individualists when it comes to methods, but institutionalists when it comes to end goals. This is different to ring wing revolutionaries who usually view individualist power as both the means and the end.
But considering that the institutional primacy rarely seems to materialise post left wing revolutions, and that those who concentrated power onto their person are idealised and viewed as bastions of their ideology even a century after their death (like Lenin); I’m rather sceptical about the commitment to the institutionalist end goal by either the party leadership or the wider membership. On the other hand, the destruction of institutions by the hand of charismatic leaders who seize personal power is common and widely celebrated. I tend to view what ideologies do and hold in high regard as a truer reflection of the ideology than what is written in a dusty manifesto.
If we were to discount examples of left wing autocracy as not being “true” left wing because it’s a failure mode (and we know its failed because it’s an autocracy) is a textbook case of a no-true-scotsman fallacy.
The Soviet Union was never truly a personalist state, despite Stalin’s extremely enthusiastic efforts to make it so. Note that when Stalin died, the USSR was not thrown into complete chaos. Despite being a brutal dictatorship that had only recently subjugated numerous Eastern European countries, the power structure did not collapse. The next tier of “big men” down from Stalin in the hierarchy rapidly met, took care of a few immediate priorities everyone agreed on (such as Lavrenti Beria needing to die), and then sorted out a new internal hierarchy.
This is because the Bolsheviks of 1918 did evolve into an actual institutionalized, bureaucratic state. Stalin securing total dominance of the Party-state in the 1920s and plastering his picture up on walls everywhere did not mean that this party organization was going to stop existing when he died, the way that a true monarchy would probably have imploded when it became clear that Josef’s daughter Svetlana had neither the inclination nor the aptitude to become queen.
All regimes seem to drift towards personalism unless strongly checked. Consider the way Prime Ministers have become more prominent in the UK and Australia (although they remain a long way from autocrats), or US presidents much more powerful since the 30s. That said, there is a difference between a succession of autocrats, as typified by much of Central America, and a party-state.
@Simon Jester,
I wouldn’t say the Soviet Union was ever a personalist state, yea, though after Stalin’s death the Soviets themselves acknowledged they had gone *much* too far in that direction (that’s why the famous Secret Speech was titled “On the cult of personality and its consequences.”) You do have other examples of left wing revolutions though, especially in Africa and Latin America, where taking out the charismatic leader was really all it took for the revolution to be over. This guy is a good example, for all his virtues, after his assassination the whole regime and social order collapsed because there was no institutional depth or ideological party behind him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara
What on earth? The USSR under Stalin is a textbook example of a modern personalist regime.
I’d say they do have a concept of the U.S. government as an institution, and they don’t like it. It’s the Deep State.
linguam Latinam schola didici et consequimentulum hoc commentariolum fuit.
Oh, great to see you here, Ketsuban!
(Sorry, I know next to no Latin.)
Hi!
I was trying to riff on “I learned Latin and all I got was this stupid T-shirt”, except it’s a comment. (I’m not super-pleased with [i]commentariolum[/i] “little notebook” for “comment”, but I couldn’t find a better translation – Vocabula computatralia is a bit too old, and I didn’t feel up to browsing the Vatican’s vocab list.)
One thing about repeatedly killing institutional leaders is they’re always going to have at the back of their mind how they got their promotion…
What are the determining factors of state capacity?
And what superpowers would someone need if they were going to rule alone?
What usually happens is that you have a generation of leaders who are used to hiding from airstrikes and issuing orders in secret, and they tend to be pretty crazy people. In the long run this is not an effective strategy for cowing resistance, because the leaders who survive the experience are the ones whose basic outlook on life is that you really, really, really tried your best to kill them and failed.
We have to see the positive side of things. Imagine the drop in greenhouse gas emission from all the oil and gas beeing unable to exit the gulf. I bet Al gore would not have the balls to use the US military to save the planet lol.
What’s the book that’s been recommended here about how the imperial German army was more prone to committing crimes against humanity than other armies?
Absolute Destruction, by Isabel Hull.
If you kept killing institutional leaders, the institutions might try to keep replacing them, but I doubt many would be able to do so “calmly,” nor is it necessarily the case that every official would need to be killed for this to become untenable. I might want to be Reverend Mother Superior, but if suddenly that office came with a two week life expectancy I might have to change my mind and so might every other qualified candidate.
Too an extent, but leaders can display great personal courage just as much as soldiers. It might (or might not) dampen ambition, but people can have deep reserves of patriotism.
@intropi, the difference between personalist and institutional is that an institution can keep functioning without a leader. That’s what all the policies and procedures and manuals and “company culture” are for. So if the leaders keep getting killed, the institution can just stop choosing new leaders. As Bret wrote, there are just too many people able to keep the institution running.
It’s common in western-ish countries for companies to announce that the CEO is stepping down, search for a new leader has begun. Those companies rarely collapse into bankruptcy. In Australia government departments from time to time don’t have an appointed head (public/civil service position) or minister (elected), but they still keep functioning. The massive “decapitation” strikes carried out on Iran have not stopped the Iranian military from shooting back.
In the case of the Bene Gesserit, will killing the Mother Superior have an impact? Yes, certainly, for good or bad leaders make a difference. But if your goal is to stop the Bene Gesserit meddling in Imperium politics through the influence of consorts, running schools for promising youngsters, seeding pro-Bene Gesserit myths and propoganda, … no it won’t.
Considering that the Bene Gesserit live on through “Other Memories” acquired either hereditarily or, going by the later books, some kind of mind-melding; killing the Mother Superior is probably going to be singularly ineffective at destroying the institution.
This is the problem with dealing with embedded criminal gangs – police officers and judges validly fear retaliation if gang leaders are convicted, and not just personal retaliation but also against their families.
I mean, in some countries (depending on what you mean by “embedded”). In countries where the police are powerful and, if not lacking in corruption, at least built in a way to be less overt about it, I think crime organisations have a tendency to respond to the imprisonment of their leaders by just selecting new leaders and resuming business, because war with the state is a ruinous prospect for them.
Hey, I did the CLC! (In high school, natch. My university latin was Wheellock.) It does have a “fun little story” as you put it, but OTOH “Cerberus tamen in villa mansit. Dominum frustra custodiebat” is a real solid final line.
“In practice you could never do that with individual strikes. The only way to tear out the institutions would be through occupation – through putting troops on the ground where they could impose their own systems of control directly on the populace.”
To be grim about it, I think it may be possible to collapse an institutionalist state with “strikes” as opposed to “occupation” IF the “strikes” are destructive enough. The United States developed all kinds of continuity of government plans during the Cold War, but it’s anybody’s guess if they would have actually worked or not (and it’s obviously not an experiment anyone wants to run). The idea of nuclear war leading to state collapse is a pretty common one in post-apocalyptic fiction (and other sorts of apocalypses, like a large-scale cometary impact, might do the same thing).
Of course “collapsing” a state is not the same as imposing your will on it in the sense of installing a new leadership of your choosing. *That* would require boots on the (presumably now radioactive) ground…and is therefore not likely to be very practical, even overlooking the high probability that *your* state may also have just been collapsed.
WW2 Japan might count as an example? Perhaps not via institutional “collapse,” but the USA did secure the desired unconditional surrender. IIRC, numerous strikes (sufficient to level multiple cities and cause massive civilian casualties) prompted the judgment that surrender and “reconstruction” was preferable to continued hostilities. Hopefully not a model for current events…
Air power alone cannot win a war. I am sure there is a prior post in this blog about that point, but bombing alone didn’t defeat WW2 Britain, or WW2 Germany, or Vietnam, or if there is any example of surgical strikes winning a war I can’t think of it. If you want to go way back Henry V dying and being succeeded by Henry VI meant France won the Hundred Years War, but it still took 40 years of fighting.
I believe the NATO campaigns in the former Yugoslavia in the Nineties are sometimes cited as examples of wars won with air power alone. Certainly it is, at best, very very rare.
I do think we need to clarify what we mean by “win”. If you have pretty traditional goals–conquer the enemy, or at least make them cede territory, and add them to your empire (directly or indirectly) then even if you could somehow bomb them into submission, you’re still going to have to put “boots on the ground” in the form of administrators and tax collectors and so forth in their country (or in the ceded provinces). But IF you just find that country on the other side of the world to be an intolerable threat to you or your interests or your “way of life”, then it MIGHT be possible to “win”–to eliminate that threat–by air power alone, for a sufficiently terrifying definition of “air power”. Trying to figure out what’s going on in what passes for Trump’s mind is probably a losing proposition, but some of Trump’s recent statements–that he doesn’t actually care about Iran being a “democracy”–mean that Trump (or the people around him) may in fact have defined “winning” purely in terms of destroying Iranian power. I certainly hope that isn’t what Trump (and Trump’s “team”, and Netanyahu) have in mind–I think it’s horrific–and it’s also, separately, not at all assured that such a goal can even be achieved by air power alone (or at least not without “air power” in sufficient quantities that it would destroy the world…which I HOPE even Trump isn’t contemplating using).
You may be thinking of “Fireside Friday: July 17th, 2020” where he discusses “Hey folks! Fireside this week; musing on a rather silly topic: the practicality of planetary invasions in a science fiction setting.”
https://acoup.blog/2020/07/17/fireside-friday-july-17th-2020/
Although the intuitional nature of the United States itself is still in place, Trump’s administration operates in a much more personalist manner than previous ones. I wonder if the personalist nature of governments in most fiction have primed some parts of the population, both his supporters and those he are neutral/indifferent, to not recognize just how abnormal (not to mention corrupt) Trump 2.0 has been.
I suspect the reason why institutions don’t get as covered in fiction as personalistic factions is the same reason videogames have the “player autocracy” issue.
Fiction tends to operate on a personal level to get a viewer invested because that’s how we usually engage with others in real life. Institutions however are not bodies that we tend to interact and thus we know little about their operations and aims unless one forms part of one or is forced to deal with them, and their own nature makes them impersonal, an entity that’s powerful yet often not tangible.
Those two factors are why institutions, if they appear, tend to be antagonistic in nature: the party of Oceania of “1984” is horrifying in no small part because it has made its evil an edifice that a single man can’t topple down; the Senate in Episode I of Star Wars is another roadblock for the heroes because the inherent bureaucracy can’t help them save Naboo right at the moment and prevent more suffering (which makes Padme commit the grave mistake in hindsight of bringing down Chancellor Valorum in favour of Palpatine).
Superhero fiction is perhaps more glaring in this issue because a “superhero registration” act, despite being a rather sensible decision from any government with metahumans, is often treated as an undue encroachment of the system on the liberties of the heroes that keeps them from saving people, an implicit declaration that the government is at best inherently inefficient in caring for its citizens, at worst, it might consider doing so detrimental.
To be fair, if I am to think from the writer’s side, it’s easier to point out the glaring flaws of an institution, that end up causing harm to the people under it in the now and before (aka systemic issues), than it is to imagine a functioning one that adapts to the needs of the times or maintains its resilience in the face of a crisis while compensating for that impersonal nature.
I don’t say it’s impossible, Tolkien himself fleshed out the Kingdom of Gondor as a state polity in Middle Earth akin to the Byzantine Empire, but it does take dedication and understanding to do so.
I think another reason why institutions are often portrayed as being “the baddies” is that our moral compass seems to scales good deeds and bad deeds differently, in a way that the more impactful an agent is, the more evil it appears.
Most people would agree that a poor man giving $1 to charity is somehow more intrinsically virtuous than a rich man giving the same $1, because it’s a larger fraction of what he could give. However, a large company having 1 fatality due to a boss pushing employees beyond safe limits is not viewed as meaningfully less evil than a small company doing the same and having the same 1 fatality. Despite that 1 fatality being a far smaller proportion of the former’s workforce than the latter. What this mean is that as any body (be it an individual or an institution) gets more powerful and has a bigger impact its perceived good-to-evil ratio will skew towards the evil end, because its good actions get increasingly discounted (even if it does more of them in absolute terms) while its evil actions keep the same weight (even if it does proportionally less of them).
The theory is that, because institutions tend to be more powerful, or at least long lasting, than individuals they suffer from this “morality scaling curse” more. But this is just a hypothesis, there might well be some psychological study out there about how people assign moral weights to actions / events change depending on who the agent is.
It seems to me that Aragorn is in a rather different political position after he has been invested into the office of King of Gondor than before. That would suggest that the office itself is a thing of some value.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the webcomic “Girl Genius” and how good it is at making the worldbuilding of its governing systems credible. For a long time (that happens to correspond to the time I’ve been following this blog), I’ve thought about how the reign of Klaus Wulfanbach is portrayed as deeply personalist, and how this is repeatedly called out as a weakness of his empire despite the fact that it holds military supremacy across all of Europe. The major conspiracy against his rule explicitly expresses their mission statement as being based on the certainty that his inevitable death will cause his empire to promptly collapse. Part of his objectives is to try and make the governance of the empire more institutional (albeit still within the limits of hereditary rule, just possibly more like a modern monarchy).
It also makes me think of the times 30 Rock would make a gag out of the fact that the corporate governance of NBC is ostensibly institutional, but the needs of the television story keep making it act like its personal or people treating it as such. Jack commenting on how there are about ten people between his VP role and a page, or saying that snarking how some petty personal dispute is not actually his responsibility.
This post left me feeling less confident I understand what a personalist regime is than when I started.
Rebellions, civil wars, and succession crises within monarchies are a strange case because the dispute is precisely over will be the next monarch, so of course if one candidate dies that may settle the matter (unless that candidate’s faction has its own internal mechanisms for picking a new faction leader).
But “what happens if you assassinate the leader of a state not currently having a civil war or similar?” seems to largely be a matter of succession methods. Hereditary monarchies _can_ have a well-defined order of succession with dozens of entries, but if all but one person in the order of succession is killed, replenishing it is not easy. That’s essentially the background for the Norman Conquest. Whereas in the US system, as long as the designated successor is alive they can appoint a new cabinet, replenishing the order of succession (it’s less clear the system works if the entire cabinet, plus the Speaker and President Pro Tempore are wiped out). The Iranian system is arguably more robust, since selection is at the discretion of a largish body several times the size of the US cabinet. The really fragile systems are ones like Putin’s Russia, where everyone knows the “official” rules are nonsense but openly designating a successor—much less a full line of succession with a dozen or more members—would be dangerous.
But is that really all there is to a regime being “personalist”? Succession methods?
Well, all states are somewhat towards the institutionalist side of things. A personalist regime is one where loyalty is to Bob as opposed to The Crown. Fully personalist regimes may effectively cease to exist on the death of the leader, because the office of leader doesn’t actually exist as a concept; the regime is just People Who Like Bob.
Russia is a good example because Putin effectively rules Russia even when he’s not the President. Because of term limits, he actually stepped down in 2007 before resuming the office in 2012, but he was still basically in charge of Russia.
Constitutional monarchies are rather institutional. Even an absolutist monarchy like France under Louis XIV is more institutionalised than a Gallic tribe coalescing around a particularly well-connected Big Man.
More broadly, I think the keystone question is: Does someone become the king because he has the strongest support (either militarily, in cash, or from people who matter [they mostly matter by providing one of those, recursively]); or does the king have the strongest support by virtue of holding the office of kingship? In other words does might-make-right, or does right-make-might. Often it’s a little of both in a tight loop: having power lends legitimacy, and legitimacy makes it easier to accrue more power. Which is why the whole thing is a sliding scale and not a dichotomy.
The handling of succession is important because it’s a test bed for which direction of this loop is strongest, but not the defining characteristic in itself.
One specific critical difference is whether the other participants in your society consider themselves to owe their allegiance to the _office_ or to its _occupant_.
Certainly. Yet another way of putting is is the difference between “the office is empowered by the individual who occupies it” and “the individual is empowered by the office they hold”. In reality, it’s always at least a little of both.
It’s not a binary split.
One of the reasons the Norman conquest worked is that the “King of England” was by 1066 a role that had institutional weight _outside_ of the specific person holding the office, which meant that a competing claimant could terminally depose the previous incumbent and take over the kingdom by doing so. By contrast, in the later 8th century Offa made a pretty credible attempt at asserting Mercian overlordship over most of the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but the unification here was purely personal and did not survive his death.
Any individual polity will exist somewhere on a scale from “fully institutional” to “fully personalist”, with the two completely extreme ends never really showing up in the real world.
It’s apparent in the history of numerous monarchies that even with an orderly succession, it’s extremely up in the air how stable the new government will be based on the personal character and relationships of the new monarch. Edward I and Edward III were some of the strongest Plantagenet monarchs, and their immediate successors fell into disaster because of their bad relationships with key noblemen (and good relationships with other noblemen that were deemed problematic), and rather crude methods of trying to resolve disputes and impose their will. It’s also an apparent thing in many child monarchs, where it’s not just regency in-fighting that makes their reigns unstable, but the lack of prestige and connection to let them have effective supporters.
William I didn’t succeed because the English crown was becoming more institutional, he succeeded because he came with a lot of powerful retainers whom he was able to replace the top existing nobility with. Then his sons spend their lives trying to kill each other over inheriting his lands and titles. Then the youngest of those sons came out on top, consolidated Norman rule, and was reduced to getting his supporters to promise to accept his successor despite her being a woman, with their failure to do so causing the first major English civil war.
I think people are getting hung up on the succession issue. While personalist regimes sometimes suffer a crisis or collapse when the leader dies, they usually don’t. As our host put it, killing the Big Bad offers a chance. Not a certainty, merely a chance.
Partly this is because the regime’s top leadership has an obvious collective interest in its continuation, partly because they have personal relationships with each other that operate in parallel to their relationship with the Leader. Thus they can generally rally around a successor.
For example, after Gnassingbé Eyadéma, President of Togo, died in office in 2005, his legal successor was meant to be the President of the National Assembly. But instead the army and other power-factions installed his favoured son Faure Gnassingbé as President, and he remains in power to this day. Personal relationships triumphed over the constitution.
Similarly, when Stalin died in 1953, the highest party body was the Bureau of the Presidium (a rebadged Politburo, the new name didn’t stick). Actual power devolved to a group of his former lieutenants. Most of these were members of the Bureau, but others were not (Molotov and Mikoyan), and some actual members of the Bureau (Mikhail Pervukhin and Maksim Saburov) were excluded from de-facto power.
“Power is determined by a person’s relationship to the central leader – the Duke Leto Atreides or the Baron Harkonnen or the Emperor Shaddam IV. And that goes both ways: your position in the state is determined by your relationship, such that the Duke’s own personal private doctor, Yueh, is a powerful key political figure despite not overseeing, say, a health ministry. ”
It is not obvious to me that Dr Yueh holds more political influence and authority than, say, Melania Trump.
Well, if nothing else, he has access to a lot of information and can act as a spy or agent in ways that Melania almost certainly can’t because she hardly ever talks to Donald if she can help it as far as I know.
Thing is, though, as some people have already said, even within “institutional” regimes the relationship people in certain positions have to other people is extremely important. Take FDR as an example. He had three Vice Presidents: John Nance Garner, Henry Wallace, and Harry Truman. He used Garner’s connections in Congress to get New Deal legislation passed until the two split politically in his second term, took Henry Wallace as his VP afterward and treated him as his XO, and then when Truman was basically foisted on him almost completely froze him out of the decisionmaking process.
Or think of the Secretaries of State. The amount of influence that, for example, Henry Kissinger had over foreign policy was considerably greater, than that of Cyrus Vance or Edmund Muskie.
To be pedantic, this isn’t the only way: you could try to support some faction within the institutions to reform or overthrow them. But that generally has a lower chance of working.
Could you recommend a similar textbook for Ancient Greek? (Just out of curiosity; I learned Greek using Athenaze and was annoyed by its unsystematicity.)
One set of books where personalist government becomes institutional is Victoria Goddard’s Hands of the Emperor, and which survives the departure of the two major rulers involved (Kip Mdang is very much a ruler and ends up affecting more people than the Emperor, though the Emperor’s covert approval allows all those changes).