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.
It’s almost like that’s the exact reference that was being made in a humorously oblique fashion to begin with…
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.
The manga ‘The Hero, The Dragon, and the Courier’ is an extremely interesting take on this, the author is an amateur historian and the manga is a very deliberate exploration of the rise of institutional states and decline of personalistic rule through a litrpg lens. At the end of the series the Podesta, who is the driving force behind the expansion of the city bureaucracy, the proto-industrialization of magic-use, and attempts to defeat powerful high-level characters with mass-conscription armies with firearms, is assassinated, and the proof of her success is that when she dies a new character wearing her mask (effectively her badge of office) walks in and takes over in minutes, unceremoniously disposing of her remains – she has rendered even herself a wholly replaceable part, as her ideals demand.
Oh, the Dragon, the Hero, and the Courier is one of my favourite manga, the ridiculous agglomeration of history and JRPG tropes is really fun and plays into the themes of industrialisation and institutionalisation shockingly well; I’ll have to second the recommendation.
Awesome to see another fan out in the wild!
It seems worth noting that in reality, while there are no superpowers, this exact phenomenon still occurs.
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.
Sauron wouldn’t want an institution that would outlive him, but he also has subordinate leaders who can die. Easier to deal with a replaceable orc general than an orc warlord whose warband will fall into disarray after his death.
Most characters based on Sauron, this would apply to; but Sauron himself on multiple occasions died and then was able to reclaim some parts of what he had left behind after he came back to life.
Actually, North Korea seems to have built a system based on an institutional cult of personality. An odd combination, historically.
“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.”
Sauron had practical reasons to try to do so – and perhaps did. Several times.
What precisely went on in Mordor after Sauron had personally surrendered to Ar-Pharazon and been carried as a captive to Westernesse?
And later on, there was the issue of Sauron being physically in Mirkwood while his subordinates like Witch-king set up governments far away, like Angmar and Mordor.
If, in 2941, the Necromancer, instead of making a safe escape to Mordor, had been intercepted and his body killed, would the institutional government of Mordor by Witch-king and the other Nazgul have collapsed? Remember, the One Ring was safe in Bilbo´s pocket – killing of Sauron´s body would not have affected the Nazgul the way destroying One Ring did.
I suspect not. IIRC, even after Isildur cut the One Ring from Sauron’s finger, the Witch-King still had his base in Angmar, from which he waged a long war on the kingdom of Arnor. It seems the Nazgul still kept the cause of Mordor going in some fashion regardless of what Sauron was doing at any one time. Plus while Sauron seems to have still had a physical, or at least humanoid form in the books (instead of being just a big flaming eyeball), he couldn’t really be killed until the One Ring was destroyed.
The Nazgul went into some kind of state of torpor after Sauron’s first defeat, and their presence did not become apparent again until somewhere around a thousand years later at least. Angmar did not exist at the start of the Third Age, and did not even exist at the time there was any kingdom of Arnor. It rose in response to the opportunity created by the fact that Arnor had become partitioned into three successor kingdoms.
In addition to previous points about Sauron’s personal history giving him reasons to want an institutional regime in Mordor, there’s also that he’s, specifically, an order freak. I can totally see him push for an institutional rather than personalist regime in Mordor merely because the former better fits his preferences than the latter. (And his lack of concern for how his subordinates think could well have him not notice that he ended up with a personalist regime beaten into an institutional shape.)
Institutional evil can’t be based on a cult of personality around a living individual leader. It absolutely can be based around a dead figure’s personality cult. E.g. the USSR with its Lenin-cult several decades after Lenin’s death.
None of the orcs had any interest in what was a war of choice on Sauron’s part, which is why any institutions he could’ve put in place wouldn’t have served any purpose. The orcs had plenty of land available free for the taking, without the need to fight the “free peoples” for it.
And then they got genocided by the good guys 😀
I don’t think there’s any real textual basis for the ultimate fate of all orcs everywhere one way or another.
Sauron was made, by a deity, for the specific purpose of building things. Buildings, jewelry, races, and also institutions. A lot of Mordor is destroyed by setting off a massive explosion in a giant volcano, but the armies and tribes have to be chased down, the alliance web and enslaving society dismantled by intentional force.
It seems to me that a lot of despotic leaders try to set up a system that is essentially personalistic at the top, but institutional at lower levels. The obvious comparison for Sauron’s reforms would be Chinggis Khan’s introduction of the decimal system to the Mongol army, which institutionalized the army, although his rule was still very much personalistic.
So even if Sauron’s institutional reforms had succeeded, it wouldn’t necessarily make his rule any less personalistic.
You can see the logic in that. If your fear as a personalistic leader is the rise of another personalistic leader to challenge you, then attempting to make the processes beneath you a-personal is pretty appealing.
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.
Several iterations of the Transformers franchise have an institutional governance framework as well. Which is why their war lasts so darn long: Megatron’s revolution never manages to actually end the institution of the Prime, even when multiple are killed and/or they manage to kill the entire Senate, etc.
a great entry in what I call “meeting movies,” including Eye in the Sky, Margin Call, and War Book, among others
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.
“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.”
As someone who works in government bureaucracy (the NHS), this elicited an involuntary snort of laughter.
Not to say that the term ‘lived experience’ is one that has no value. It’s immensely valuable, considering how often decision-making ends up being undertaken by people with less than zero experience or understanding of the thing they’re making the decision about (often propped up by things like ‘academic training in a tangential field’).
But it’s funny how we have to dress up these concepts in pretentious language to get people to pay attention to them.
We needed a term for the meaning of “life experience” that is *not* ‘innate (sometimes racial) superior sense of the right course of action that would be discarded by actually studying the situation with intellectual rigor.’ “Life experience” had become such a conservative anti-intellectual shibboleth that it was no longer useful in left-liberal discussions.
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.
Seems to me the jury’s still out on Venzeula. What I’ve seen indicates that yes, Maduro was indeed disliked in his own country, and his replacement seems in no rush to cater to the cartels.
@Gamereg,
Maduro was widely disliked, yes. Probably even by his own regime, whatever lip service they’re paying him now. There was and probably is a considerable base of people, though, who supported the broader party, ideology and revolutionary project while despising Maduro for his really impressive economic mismanagement. The regime is still in power, and if renewed US trade and investment improves the economy (as is looking likely right now), then that’s going to strengthen the regime, not weaken it. (I dislike the Trump government about as much as it’s possible to, but one thing I’ll give him credit for is allowing the vice president to stay in charge, instead of installing the right wing opposition).
If this is a regime change, it seems like a very bizarre one that stopped halfway though, and it’s not sure to me what it’s intended to accomplish, from an ideological perspective.
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.
In an earlier post, you write
“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.”
That’s the usual old-school line that was traditionally used to define and justify conservatism back in the day. And there’s a little bit of truth in it. But in a somewhat later post, you go on to write
” 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.”
And that makes more sense than your previous statement, in my opinion. For a start, conservatives, even long before Trump, seldom showed much sign of wanting to encourage the organic growth of the accumulated wisdom of a culture. They’ve usually been very passionate about wanting to stop and prevent such growth. See Buckley’s (in)famous mission statement, for instance.
And, getting back to “personalism”, right-wingers traditionally seem to have been a lot into the Great Man theory of history.
@Raphael Notice how I said “Outside of contemporary US usage” too in the very bit you quoted. There’s more to right wing / conservatism than Trump, both the concepts and terminology are centuries old and span continents. Indeed, considering that Trump was a radical outsider as recently as 11 years ago during his primary campaign, I’d say that his movement being strongly about personalist power is an example of my claim that this is a feature of radicals rather than being about a left / right divide. If you take a look at, say, Angela Merkel (or any other moderate right leader) and you’ll see how institutions are at the core of their ideology and governance.
What on earth? The USSR under Stalin is a textbook example of a modern personalist regime.
It’s an example of how a party state got derailed by a cult of personality, which I would say is a different thing (though it’s certainly not good).
The USSR under Stalin is a textbook example of a modern personalist regime.
Says a lot about the quality of said textbooks, haha, given that Stalin’s Soviet Union had parallel governmental and party institutions from the village level to the federal level, none of which depended in their functioning on personal loyalty of the officials to their superiors.
“The USSR under Stalin is a textbook example of a modern personalist regime.”
Not sure about that. The Soviet system survived his death perfectly well. It was a dictatorship, but not obviously a personalist one.
“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.”
The more plausible heir was Vasily.
But no, a true monarchy would not have imploded.
Please consider the previous non-implosions. 1533…1547, 1598, 1682, 1725, 1730…
Even 1605 was not really an implosion. When the Godunov regime imploded under Dmitry´s attack, Dmitry achieved quick and universal recognition.
The only true implosion was the one 1606…1611, in stages. And even then, note how completely the monarchy was reassembled 1612…1613!
@holdthebreach,
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.
Oh, I would never say that they were “not true left wing” or anything like that. When I say it’s a common failure mode of left wing party-states, I’m presupposing that these actually were left wing to begin with (I guess it applies to party states in general, though). And if you wanted to be skeptical of revolutions from the left in general, precisely because they often devolve into personalism, I would disagree with you, but I’d also say that your point of view is reasonable and coherent.
I do think it’s worth differentiating between how a system is *supposed* to work, as an ideal, and the various failure modes or default modes it can slide into. Like, it’s not as if the arguments against personal rule had never occurred to people who made left wing revolutions: they were aware of them, and the idea of the party state was supposed to solve them by institutionalizing and bureaucratizing authority.
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.
Oh, that’s a very good point!
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.
For a more theoretical and fantastical (ie “not real”, not “very good”) approach, I wonder if you can define more fantasy state capacity and the superpower need of ruling alone as “delivering information” “receiving information” “encoding/verifying information”, quantifying all of them in bandwidths and computational resources like a computer network. You need to deliver information out to people (so you are ruling them by asking them to do stuff), they need to send information back to you (so you know what’s going on to make decision), and both side need to encode/verify the information packet that yes, this is legitimate and has some level of priority that the receiver need to schedule to process the corresponding information for.
Example: for whatever medieval polity you have, the duke 200 miles away just received the max bandwidth information the king has delivered: man on horse with letters telling him to rally his troops for a war.
He recognizes the king’s seal, king’s paper, king’s signature, and that man on horse certainly looks like a messenger from the capital instead of some random peasant, and that he indeed, remembers correctly that he has a king and just dined with said king a month ago, and that by the law established, this is how the letter is supposed to be, instead of being tied to an arrow or sent via a messenger pigeon. That’s verification.
He then follows the same procedure and send back a letter. The king received it and verify that this is the correct information, with the duke’s seal, the same men on horse, and not a random peasant or an enemy pretending to be one with a piece of paper, and that he indeed has a duke who he just sent out a message to.
The back and forth took 5 days with a relay system and built roads, and past experience all tells the king and the duke that they both exist and should send letters to each other. Finally, the king is expected to process 10 different letters and settle 20 different court cases today, so that’s the additional time resource he needs, sending information to guy, get info back, verify info, make decision. Assume it takes him 10 minutes per court case, that takes him 200 minutes today, not bad for an afternoon. If he needs to process 200 court case, he should consider hiring a few judges or asking someone in the retinue to hand out judgement in his name instead, because this exceeded his processing capacity. He can’t NOT respond to these court cases, he might neglect some, but overall this is a necessary process for him to rule and be king.
Now using the same principle to analyze a superpower that someone need to rule alone. Beyond the violence needed to make others challengers go away (whether it be breathing fire, invincibility, control the weather and cast down lightning), the actual important part is making decision for however many decisions your community needs, and the ability to get information from and to others quickly and verifiably.
For a straight forward example, if someone alone are in charge of judging every murder case in the United States, no bureaucracy, no investigators (assume police has apprehended the suspect, so the enforce part isn’t on him/her), just one person. He/she need to preside over tens of thousands of murder cases per year, dozens or hundreds per day. He/she ideally need a superpower that can make him/her think super fast, and get to decision in 1 sec, instead of how many days actual courts need. He/she also need the ability to quickly get the case informations from hundreds of criminal sites, photos, witness testimonies, whatever it maybe, and verify them to be correct, and analyze them (with any expert knowledge as needed), and then send out the verdict.
This person either needs to be a supercomputer AGI tapped into every camera, chemical lab and microphone in the United States, or Professor X with Cerebro and the ability to simultaneously talk with hundreds of people. Anything short of that, this person will need others to help, thus not “rule alone”.
This reminds me of a light novel called “How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom”. Whether the protagonist is a political realist is a different issue, but one of the ways he rules more effectively is by using magic to allow him to simultaneously process paperwork and make decisions as if he is several people combined, with magic pens embedded with a part of his consciousness.
I love how the Babylon Bee illustrates this:
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.
“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.”
I was thinking about this the other day in terms of my day job (commissioner in the NHS). In my organisation, we have had 5 separate CEOs in 8 years. As far as what I actually do day-to-day, or what me or my team has achieved in terms of transforming health services…there hasn’t particularly been a major impact. It’s changed the hoops we have to jump through to get something agreed, but someone somewhere has been making ‘go/no go’ decisions the entire time.
Leadership might set particular tones or directions, but as far as I can see the actual longevity of long-term institutional function and strategy actually sits diffused among the lower-ranking long-time service personnel and to a lesser degree institutional culture (only to a lesser degree because ‘institutional culture’ is generated by employees, rather than the other way around).
I kinda term it ‘grassroots leadership’, though there may well already be an accepted term for it.
I have, however, noticed that discussing this observation with management types tends to make them fairly uncomfortable for a number of obvious reasons, so I tend to keep schtum and keep nudging things in the direction they need to go in.
May I suggest a nautical metaphor? Large, bureaucratic organizations are (or at least can be) like big ships: spectacularly efficient at carrying their cargo forward in a straight line, extremely sluggish to turn or speed up or slow down, and (to the distressed amazement of many) liable to not behave like a solid object in the face of concentrated force.
Having spent the last 4 years trying to turn a tanker…yep, I like that.
We’re nearly there, but damn it’s been hard work.
There’s always some inevitable degradation when you start removing the topmost layers. A company might function for a while without a CEO, but what if you remove the whole management board during a crisis? Imagine a casual dining chain losing its whole C-suite in 2020. You would have various department heads dealing with the pandemic and trying to secure that promotion for themselves at the same time.
There are plenty of real-world institutions where getting promoted to a leadership position instantly puts you on a more powerful enemy’s hit list, but which persist anyway. If you could destroy an institution just by repeatedly killing leaders the Taliban would not have survived 20 years of US occupation in Afghanistan
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.
@IsatorLevi,
I think the bigger reason US authorities are sometimes hesitant to take out gang leaders is more because taking out the leader can trigger a power vacuum and a subsequent gang war, which can be *even worse* than the status quo.
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.
A good example of the personalist vs institutionalist distinction in fiction might the original trilogy of Star Wars movies vs the Star Wars “Legends” continuity. In the original trilogy of movies, the Empire seems personalist; its power is embodied in the Emperor and Darth Vader. But in the Legends books and comics, it’s clear the Empire is institutionalist. The deaths of the Emperor and Vader fracture the Empire, letting the Rebels organize a competing state in the New Republic, but numerous Imperial governors, admirals, and moffs seem to fairly easily keep control of their territories and fleets. Instead of a quick victory after Endor, the battle against the Imperial Remnant in Legends is a long, slow grind against determined resistance that’s very clearly still using the Empire’s institutions.
The Star Wars Empire reacts to the death of the Emperor by splintering into a dozen smaller empires, rather than putting one new guy on the throne. That hardly looks like a strong institution.
It’s not a strong institution, it has only been a dictatorship for about 20 years and it only ended its practice of parliamentary consultation during the period of conventional warfare with the Rebel Alliance. Not being strong doesn’t mean it isn’t an institution at all.
I entirely disagree. Multiple people comment in universe about how the Emperor has built a system only held together by loyalty to himself, in order to discourage rivals.
The New Republic doesn’t sweep the galaxy in part because the New Order has genuine support in the Core, but more so because the Empire has built the largest military in galactic history, most of whom are firmly anti-Republican, and the defeat at Endor, while incredibly significant politically and significant for the military strength of the Rebellion, represented such a small fraction of the Imperial Navy that it did not meaningfully reduce their strength vis a vis the Alliance.
When the Emperor dies, his government, the Imperial Ruling Council, immediately meet and proclaim their head, Grand Vizier Sate Pestage, as Interim Emperor. That is true, but less than a year late he is forced to flee the capital and replaced, because no one respects Sate Pestage, despite having been essentially prime minister for twenty five years, all his power comes from having been Palpatine’s closest and most loyal advisor for that time and the twenty years before that. He is a palace figure, once the Emperor is dead, no one cares about the court. The Ruling Councul descend into irrelevance with nothing but Death Squadron at their disposal by the time Thrawn arrives.
Out in the provinces, the Empire immediately fractures as a dozen major and hundreds of minor warlords emerge seeking to seize the throne or forge their own kingdoms.
Most do so through naked force, like Blitzer Haarsk, who founds a military dictatorship based on his squadron, or Kosh Teradoc. Others try to mask it – Sander Delvardus makes deals with the Eriadu nobility to legitimise himself but quickly loses their support and the support of anything outside the range of his forces. Treuten Teradoc places a Moff under house arrest and expands his holdings using fig leafs for a time – he is operating in the Moff’s name, he’s operating in the full historic Greater Maldrood not just the limited region, he’s pursuing rebels into others territory and has to take charge etc – it’s nevertheless a cover for naked warlordism.
Delak Krennel builds his own regime, again highly personalist. Ardus Kaine is maybe the only exception among the warlords, he constructed the Pentastar Alignment by bringing in local powers and focuses on maintaining his holdings, and unlike the others, the bloc seemingly survives his death, though the niceties of the government he built are seemingly dropped for a return to military rule by the sector governors once he is no longer around.
Look at Zsinj, the largest warlord and not just in BMI, he built the largest warlord state and did it openly, the moment the Emperor died, in a way so nakedly opportunistic that his title of honour, Warlord of the Empire, became a byword for these upstart Emperors. But beyond military force, his regime is founded on a very impressive web of personal connections with pirates, organised crime and mega corporations. When he dies, these connections vanish and his empire is immediately carved up between his neighbours.
“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…
Honestly not sure I’d count it. The US was gearing up for a land invasion Japan wouldn’t be able to thwart, and the surrender was promted by the reveal of a superweapon they couldn’t counter and the fact the US had multiple of them. They did attempt to negotiate before that, but not on terms remotely acceptable to the US to the point the US assumed they were stalling.
But Japan did not collapse and cease to exist as a state, it was simply compelled to change its policies. If this is your criterion for destroying an institutional state, slaughtering the current American ruling elite (or maybe even just one man) is also likely to alter the country’s political course.
The Japanese surrender is one of the only cases that might just about be attributed to air power – and it also required complete US sea dominance to enforce a serious blockade; a massive shortage of the resources required for industrial war fighting (caused by that blockade); their comprehensive defeat in both naval and land warfare throughout the Pacific theatre over the last several years; the USSR declaring war and invading instead of being available to act as a negotiating power; _and_ the US deployment of a science fictional weapon to annihilate a city.
With all of those factors, it was just about possible to get Japan to surrender without a ground invasion (and even then it was a close run thing in some ways, note the attempted military coup). How things might have gone down if any of those elements were missing is basically impossible to guess at.
But the Japanese surrender was not caused by decapitating the Japanese government, but by destroying its naval and air forces, causing massive civilian casualties, and implementing a blockade which would lead to mass starvation. It was the wartime leadership, not a new government, which agreed to surrender.
Japan does not count as an example of what MEBuckner described. If the national infrastructure had been destroyed to an extent that the institutions of the state had collapsed, then a surrender would have been meaningless. There would have been no way to get soldiers and officials to actually comply with that order of their leadership.
Which is what happened in some cases in weak states: The king is killed or captured but that doesen’t stop the war because there’s no one to negotiate with and every little petty noble is now fighting their own independent war.
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).
Iran could probably get peace with Trump by writing him a large check. Netanyahu is a different proposition – it’s a consistent theme of his brand of Israeli politics that Israel should have no peer competitors in the region. He wants Iran wrecked.
Netanyahu (and for all I know Trump) would certainly welcome the outcome the US produced in Libya: a collapsed government and a failed state ruled by feuding warlords. I don’t know if we can produce that result in Iran, because there was an indigenous armed resistance in Libya, which I am not aware of in Iran.
I know Bret and his comrades don’t want to talk about what was achieved in Libya, because it was done by the greatest president of our lifetime advised by some French intellectuals, and those people can do no wrong.
ey81, it is being reported that the US is engaging with existing Kurdish separatist organizations outside of Iran to try to get them into Iran.
I would be surprised if the Kurds would trust the US after being betrayed so many times, but they may be more foolish than I think.
Netanyahu doesn’t mind peer competitors. Turkey is a much more capable competitor than Iran, for example.
However, Iran has publicly called for Israel’s destruction dozens of times, and that’s something he does mind.
I guess the lesson here is that Serbian leader was a coward, given that he’s the only one cowed by airstrikes.
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/
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/QH95jPJL
Strategic Airpower 101
Better link:
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
Gunboat diplomacy was a thing for a decent while; other than domestic political realities there’s not much reason that similar couldn’t be accomplished by air. Though it would require much stricter goals and a different strategic plan than anyone has been willing to employ since the advent of air power; I suppose, technically, by preventing it from /being/ a war.
Much like the British navy in the early-to-middle 1800s*, when the other power has no credible response to your weapon of choice, they can either: 1.) concede and set about the objective you set, or 2.) refuse and recieve damage. 2b, until internal pressure causes them to concede/collapse, 2c, until an external factor distracts you.
*See, the various ways they ended the Atlanic Slave Trade, the wars with China, (or Americans in Japan). Or the functional end of the Barbary Pirates (1816) for a specific incident (Drachinifel did a video on it recently, tl;dr, the Brits showed up and blew their navy and primary port to pieces, the Algerians conceded to all demands. Though state extinction didn’t occur until 1860 and the French).
While there are cases of the British apparently bombarding their way to victory, they mostly strike me as limited wars in which an adversary might reasonably believe that they intentionally or otherwise attacked the British in some way, and that the bombardments would end if the attacks ceased. If the British had been launching an unprovoked invasion, I think bombardment alone might have been a lot less successful.
Considerably earlier: France invaded Algiers in 1830.
Was it really that quickly after the Napoleonic Wars? That’s pretty funny.
“France must be hobbled for the safety of Europe! …Oh, they’re conquering (parts of) Northern Africa? That’s OK, I guess.”
I suppose it was similar after the Great War; the Interwar 1919-1930s had a surprising number of wars considering the apocalyptic event they’d just gone through and that it was supposedly peaceful.
“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. ”
Perhaps. Can you provide any examples? Hamas seems pretty resilient.
Fortunately I cannot provide any examples, as we have managed (so far) to avoid all-out nuclear war.
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.
I think people think even less coherently than this. Compare the attitudes toward commercial aviation and car driving. As practiced in the developed world, the former is the safest mode of travel to exist yet in all of history (yes, in a few countries rail has an even better record, particularly if one counts boardings rather than passenger-km; the US is not among them in either case) — despite this, being afraid of flying is culturally accepted, it is treated as a plausible attitude for a reasonable person to have. Whereas the latter kills tens of thousands of people per year in the US (to the point that for many ages 0-30 it is the leading cause of death), yet it is considered unconscionable for someone to be afraid of car traffic.
Sure people are bad at judging black-swan probabilities, but I think that’s mostly a different matter altogether.
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.
He was already leading the armies of Gondor (to the Black Gate) before he was anointed though. The difference in his political situation seems to be mostly due to the realm no longer facing an existential war. Also worth noting that (in the films at least) he’s crowned by Gandalf, who’s political influence is deeply personalist in nature, rather than by a high ranking office holder of some Gondorian institution.
In the book he is crowned by Gandalf as well, but it’s clear that who crowns him is not a marker of legitimacy – the expectation of the audience is that he will crown _himself_.
That sounds even more personalist! The textbook RL example is Napoleon crowning himself, because he didn’t like how the precedent of Charlemagne being crowned by the Pope gave the institution of the church too much power.
The textbook RL example is Napoleon crowning himself, because he didn’t like how the precedent of Charlemagne being crowned by the Pope gave the institution of the church too much power.
Charles XII of Sweden did something similar, I think? Though it was probably less striking when he did it, since a Lutheran archbishop isn’t, well, the Pope.
This is a case in which I think there’s a mixed approach to this.
After the death of Denethor, Faramir is next in line of the House of Stewards to oversee the rule of the Kingdom, but it’s implicit that he handles the authority of leadership to Aragorn before the march on the Black Gate, recognising his claim to the throne as Isildur’s Heir. This is also something that gets further discussed in the books when Denethor himself makes a point of not stepping down from his position as Steward of the House of Anarion to a “line that has long been left without dignity”, and Gandalf can’t press the issue at the moment. So we must assume that while there’s a personal element, the office of Steward does hold power on its own.
Also, While Tolkien didn’t build up the institution of the Church in Middle Earth (due to his piety, he thought he would make an unworthy fascimile), there is evidence of an institutional religion in the Kingdom of Gondor that’s also roughly followed by the free peoples as stated in the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion.
Denethor makes a point of saying that his death in a pyre is going to emulate the “heathen” kings of old while Gandalf invokes the Valar during the coronation of Aragorn; we also can’t forget that Mithrandir is one of the Istari, a Maiar sent by the Valar themselves to help the free peoples oppose Sauron, he’s in effect akin to a celestial prelate who only uses his authority in very specific cases, but in the cases he does, he speaks on behalf of both the Valar and the will of Eru Iluvatar.
I don’t think Gondor is a particularly good example, since by the time of the trilogy, it’s in decline and has been for some time, and it is ultimately revitalized by the ascension of a single heroic individual.
(This is, of course, part of the criticism behind George R.R. Martin’s oft-mocked quote about “Aragorn’s tax policy”.)
I’m always fascinated by the rules that certain personalist regimes, recognizing the power that comes from simply being in proximity to a ruler, have put in place regarding etiquette and customs in the ruling court. All of the court rules in pre-Revolution France, for instance – the things one can and can’t say to the king, the way you must enter and leave rooms, etc. – can seem silly at first, but they make a lot of sense as a way to prevent individuals from having too much influence over state policy simply by getting on the king’s good side. (Not that they were ever 100% successful at this, of course.)
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.
If you honestly think that there’s any chance of the modern Russian state going away if Putin dies five minutes after I finish writing this comment, you are utterly delirious. For all the fantasies of a popular President somehow becoming a monarch, there is a clearly defined succession order (for the same nuclear war contingency as in the US) and procedures to vote for replacement.
Putin dying would have as much impact on Russian policies as Trump dying on American ones, or Xi dying on Chinese ones. Or are all these also “personalist regimes”, lol?
Oh, I have little doubt the new ruler of Russia will hold an election to become President. In that exact order.
It’s irrelevant whether you believe an election will determine the next ruler, or whether the next ruler will use an election to legitimise their rule. What matters is that in a “personalist regime” institutions exist that would allow it to continue in its current shape and form (an ultrapresidential federal state with a bicameral national legislature, etc), and likely with less effect of losing its current head of state on its policies than, say, losing the current head of state would have for an “institutional regime” like the modern US. “Personalist” vs “institutional” then is simply not a difference that practically describes a state; a non-metric without predictive power.
@danvolodar I would argue that the USA is not a very good example of an institutional state, and is in fact much closer to a personalist one than many Americans would like to admit. Too much power concentrated in the office of the President, and not just under Trump.
Compare this to something like Belgium, or Switzerland. Belgium (as far as I’m aware) spends long periods of time without a head of state, effectively running along on its state bureaucracy without designated official leadership. And Switzerland has the institution of broad and frequent referendums such that the population as a whole has a significant say in the actions of the government.
With Trump we are now seeing those structural failings come home to roost.
The US having a powerful president doesn’t make it more of a personalist regime, though arguably it’s shifting that way under Trump. The power of the President comes from the office; if it were a personalist regime the power would come from the person, and the office would be an acknowledgement of that fact, or the ruler might not even hold the top office, delegating it to a flunky.
I don’t think there’d be a civil war if succession remains within the cabinet, unless there’s an additional reason for it. They’re all appointed by the elected president, the rules of the order of succession are clear, and there’s an external force to fight against.
If the entire cabinet and legislature are killed (so no rapid appointment of a new speaker/president pro tem) then there might be trouble. There’s no clear line of succession past there, which means multiple people might try to become acting president. There isn’t even a clear supreme military commander to be the default option to take charge for the duration of the emergency, and anyone the military did coalesce around wouldn’t have democratic legitimacy. Likewise it’s not clear which deputy undersecretary would be the civilian option to take charge.
“The US having a powerful president doesn’t make it more of a personalist regime”
I would argue that it does, but in the ‘spectrum of personalism vs institutionalism’ manner rather than there being any hard cutoff between the two.
I think a hypothetical would help. Let’s say that there’s an alternate-universe USA where there is no office of President, with the function instead being delivered by a process of digitised rapid referendum.
One of those options is absolutely more personalised than the other, because decision-making executive held by one individual (even if that individual holds power because of an office) introduces all sorts of risks around personalised interactions skewing the conduct of the person in the office.
In the referendum-example you can’t have a president’s partner skewing decision-making just because they’re in a relationship with the president.
In the referendum-example you can’t have a president’s good buddy from school skewing decision-making just because they’re buddies with the president.
In the referendum-example you can’t have the Saudis buy a private jet for the president to skew decision-making just because the president is a narcissistic conman.
The more powerful an individual office, the greater the risk of personalism, because the role not being personalistic is down to the individual whims and behaviours of the incumbent. And the more powerful it is, the harder it is for institutional checks and balances to de-personalise the office.
Of course, I’m not saying the USA is a Gallic tribe of Big Men. I’m just saying that we have more robust examples of institutionalised power structures than the USA.
I think the major difference that makes it a matter of office is that the presidency possesses those powers regardless of the character of the person who assumes the office. Arguably, there have been some presidents of the last several decades whose character would not otherwise be suggestive of certain applications of power, and yet the actions used to enact policy happen all the same. Some of that is a function of the interests and duties that the president is obligated towards, and some of it arises from how being institutionalised makes it very easy to issue orders that set things in motion.
Even with Trump, there has been a strong extent to which he has been dependent on things like needing to instruct the attorney general to develop the argument for the legal basis of what he has tried to do. And if Congress has been failing to execute the powers that are supposed to keep the presidency in check, that has more to do with a combination of bipartisan deadlock and ideologically motivated complicity than anything Trump has done to assert himself as a strongman in that arena.
@Isador Levi Yeah I do agree, the USA has a thoroughly institutional governance structure. A fairly thoroughly institutional one. I just don’t think it’s as institutional as people seem to portray it, and one of those reasons is the power in the office of the president.
For me it’s a bit like the confidence which many Americans had in how all of their checks and balances are based on written codified laws rather than conventions…and then Trump shows up and it turns out it’s all based on convention after all.
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.
Some government institutions can even be personalist oriented. Consider the difference between a lord chancellor and a lord privy seal. Both institutions, but explicitly different in orientation towards the state and crown. Of course traditionally both are chosen in a fairly personalist manner.
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.
Succession is probably just a rather small part of it. The main distinction as I see it is that an institutional government has a mass of what the military would call TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) that the institution could carry on even in the (hopefully temporary) absence of an individual leader. The state continues to function; obviously lower-level public services like trash collection, vehicle registration, etc. could continue without direct intervention from the head of government, but the more institutional the state is, the higher the level decisions could be made without having to refer to higher authorities, up to a point where the nonexistent Platonic ideal of an institutional state would be a leaderless one that would chug along procedurally with zero regard for who’s holding any particular position in it.
By contrast, the more personalist a state is, the more its decision-making becomes dependent on a single person or a small clique on top. This doesn’t mean lower- and middle-level leaders can’t make independent decisions, but their motivation in deciding what to do would often be currying favour with the personalist autocrat on top — i.e. they decide not what would be the best for their unit of governance, but what would make them look good in the eyes of the Great Leader, rather like how many regional governors in Russia are straining their budgets to offer huge enlistment bounties to recruit “volunteers” for service in Ukraine while at the same time having to cut the provision of some local services in order to afford those bounties.
This I think is a really important point, and focusing on the (frankly absurdly long) order of succession for the office of president misses the forest for the trees. The government of the US is more than just the executive branch, and the executive branch is also a lot bigger than just the president and his cabinet.
Even if you were to remove the president and all successors, that would not stop the FBI from investigating crime, or the CDC from coordinating healthcare across all states, or the IRS from auditing tax returns, or Social Security from paying out benefits, or the military from responding to this sudden attack. Congress and Senate would be able to convene to determine a response, and the courts would be able to be consulted to determine whether these responses are appropriate. Crucially, even in cases where these institutions would look for guidance from above, they would be able to go “let’s just do it as we did before” in the absence of guidance. The more personalistic the system is, the less this approach works because there is no defined “business as usual” beyond following the orders from above.
Replying to myself to note that while this kind of institutional inertia confers resilience, it does not necessarily confer intelligence or flexibility.
We can see that at the moment with the Iranian response to the attacks: The ability of the Iranian military to carry out their operations was not removed by the decapitation attacks, but what was removed was the ability to steer. The military is executing their attacks according to a pre-set strategy without the appointment of somebody in the institutional position to change that strategy, nobody can tell them to stop, even as it turns out to be a bad strategy.
Which is another reason why “Cut the Head off the Snake” is a fraught strategy and should only be undertaken with great consideration. It means removing the figure capable of negotiating for, announcing and enforcing a cessation of hostilities – thus it can prolong the war instead of as imagined winning it with a single stroke.
I think in that case the House is supposed to reconstitute itself and either have the acting speaker run an election for speaker or appoint a new speaker like it was a new House if the line of acting speakers is dead. And we have the regular four-year election cycle.
“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.
This is a valid point in general (although not as such in conflict with what Bret is getting at above), which I would generalise as this: Even democratic, institutionalised systems can still hide personalist power structures inside itself, often to its detriment.
As an example: At first glance, the government of a modern parliamentary system gets elected by the people (institutional process). Except of course usually there’s only one election which elects one person, the president/prime minister/chancellor. All the other ministers are *appointed* and then just confirmed by parliament – the president can choose whoever, and while it’s generally good practise to choose somebody competent, they can just as well just choose some personal crony. And of course not *everyone* can actually stand for election to the top job, they need to be confirmed as candidate of a major party, which in many cases is also pretty much a matter of backroom deals and senior leadership deciding things amongst themselves. And then there’s election financing, which is *intensely* personalist since it very much depends on having a good relationship to individual powerful financiers.
And all of that working together can result in absolute complete incompetents remaining in power and outside any accountability, not because they’re popular with the electorate or suitable for the institution they’re a part of, but because they’re really good friends with the people who *can* get themselves elected.
There are different versions. For instance, in the UK, Australian and NZ systems all ministers are also members of parliament, and answerable to parliament, with the opposition able to question them. The Prime Minister may not choose ministers (although they do allocate portfolios). MPs are selected by branch members, with Party leaders have considerable influence but not total control. And so on. So design matters.
I fully agree that this is a systemic issue and needs systemic, rule-based solutions. That said, “has to suffer the opposition asking them harsh questions once in a while” is still in my book a weaksauce consequence for acts of corruption or incompetence that in any normal workplace would result in immediate termination.
Question Time is every day parliament is sitting, and provides prime media exposure. Ministers are routinely dismissed for being unable to answer questions on corruption or incompetence.
@Peter T While I agree with you that QT is useful…it’s not exactly ‘politicians are routinely jailed for lying’ is it?
Personal relations are important no matter what the rules. Again, an Australian example: two of our last five Prime Ministers proved impossible for their colleagues to work with effectively. Both were replaced within the term. So the institutions worked, by replacing them with more personable people.
“At first glance, the government of a modern parliamentary system gets elected by the people (institutional process). Except of course usually there’s only one election which elects one person, the president/prime”
That’s… not actually how it works in a parliamentary system? You elect your representatives. (exactly how that is done, and how important a particular represnetative is vs. just voting for the party that wins the seat is varies) then parliament forms a government. You never actually vote for prime minister.
Now, these are oftne *party-institutional* affairs rather than state-instutitonal affairs but they’re still *instituttional*. (though often you see a charismatic individual show up getting, a following nad then their party collapsing when they die/retire because they don’t have the requisite party institution to keep going)
You’re not wrong, but to the point I was trying to make that difference is not central. Whether the voter’s process there is “Vote for Joe” or “Vote for Jane, representative of the J party who is campaigning on ‘Joe for President'” is to me not as relevant as the question of “Why is it Joe and not Jane who gets to be the candidate?” Or, which is the second part of my argument, “Why does Joe’s good friend Roe get to be agriculture minister instead of Jane?”
Which yes, I agree, is down to the processes and structures of the political parties. Where we disagree is in our optimism about how strongly institutional these structures are. That many parties just implode into infighting the moment a successful and long-term leader ends their term is to me a sign that they are a lot more personalistic than we should like.
“At first glance, the government of a modern parliamentary system gets elected by the people (institutional process). Except of course usually there’s only one election which elects one person, the president/prime minister/chancellor. All the other ministers are *appointed* and then just confirmed by parliament”
You are not describing the UK parliamentary system, or any other parliamentary system that I am familiar with.
–A UK general election does not elect one person. It elects a parliament, and the leader of the largest party then becomes prime minister (if they can command a majority). This is why if the party leadership changes, for example because of the death or resignation of a prime minister, it does not trigger a general election. The death or resignation of an MP, however, does trigger an election for their replacement.
–There is no process of confirmation by parliament for ministers. Ministers are, though, generally also elected members of parliament, and cabinet ministers are almost without exception.
–I don’t know any country in the world where they have a parliamentary government led by president who picks his own cabinet – the president in a parliamentary system is normally the head of state, not the head of government; the head of government is generally given the title of prime minister (or sometimes chancellor).
–Electoral financing is tightly limited and regulated, and has very little to do with who gets to be leader of the party (though it may affect the election result).
–Any prime minister, incompetent or otherwise, is accountable to at least two groups: the electors of his own party, who voted for him to be party leader, and the members of parliament, a majority of whom support him as PM.
You’re arguing semantics here and I think kind of missing the point I’m trying to make, which is that these kinds of systems can have a lot of positions which *look* like they’re filled with an institutional process but are actually dominated by personalistic preferences. To take a specific example: In the United States, the president is voted for by the people (roughly). But the vice president is not, they’re chosen by the presidential candidate by whatever process they like, and the electorate has no way to express a position of “Yes this candidate but not their pick for vice-president”.
Or for your UK example, a party might have campaigned with one party leader, but the night after the election there might be some backstabbing going on within the party, and suddenly instead of the person the voters were promised, an iceberg lettuce moves into 10 Downing street because it’s the new party leader and the party has an absolute majority in parliament. I think you’d agree that this is not a good process.
The second part of my point is that often these positions are not the top job, but one rung down. Like appointed cabinet members in systems where that’s the case, or the designated next party leader for the above UK example, because we consider these positions not important enough to actually require strong regulations of who can hold them.
I think it would be better if you made whatever point you are trying to make using examples drawn from a system you are familiar with, because this just isn’t working.
That shouldn’t be the US system, because that isn’t the way it works either – the presidential candidate and the vice-presidential candidate form a slate, and you vote for the two of them together. It is wrong to say that “the people vote for the president but not for the vice-president” – they vote for both of them, as is acknowledged by the long discussions around each election of whether X should pick Y as her VP candidate, because that’ll help her with Midwesterners, or shore up her support among her core vote by picking Z instead.
In theory it would be possible in the US to run a slate with the same presidential candidate as another slate, but a different vice presidential candidate.
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).
My Latin class (many, many years ago) used Moreland and Fleischer. It’d probably be challenging to use to self-teach, but in a class it was the right textbook for me.
‘…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…’
Counter-example: Birmingham City Council in the UK.
This is an organization/institution where it’s pretty much a normal month for them when they manage to lock themselves out of their own bank accounts (during yet another of their financial crises), due to modifications to their new computer accounts system which the company selling them the system advised them not to have made.
(And then there’s the current rubbish collectors strike. And the rubbish collectors strike before that. And the pensions crisis. And the faulty fleet of trams they ordered. Etc. Etc. Etc.)
A classic recent example of what happens when you remove a ruler in a personalist system is Libya
That depends. NATO got rid of Gaddafi by destroying his armed forces in the middle of a civil war. After he met his well deserved death nobody cared about Gaddafism. What happened next was up to the Libyans and the various foreign factions that intervened. It wasn’t inevitable that a strongman regime would be followed by warlords.
The workbook that goes with Wheelock is also great
“Indeed, personalist systems seem strongly associated with stagnation and decline in a fast-moving modern world.” I’ve heard increasing numbers, even of ostensibly liberal commentators ask the question if democracy is too slow, too unable to plan for the future to cope with the pace of change in the modern world, and if other systems might be better or necessary. This irritates me, and seems really wrong, but I don’t have the historical grounding to argue the matter one way or the other. I’d be interested to hear the pedant expand on the evidence for this statement.
Batman: The Dark Knight seemed to claim that it was about individuals vs institutions and how Wayne had finally realised that an individual, no matter how wealthy and skilled couldn’t be the fix, and that an institution was needed. Unfortunately it made the mistake you mention of representing the institution of justice in the character of Harvey Dent, which to my mind made the whole thing thematically a mess.
When people criticise democracy in that way, they implicitly compare it with a dictatorship where the dictator shares all of their goals and values. Nobody ever says “democracy is too slow to adapt to the future, but a dictatorship might change things in the wrong direction” because it’s almost too obvious to be worth saying. So the critique ends up being that a benevolent dictatorship (which magically stays benevolent and perfectly aligned with the speaker’s ethics) is better than democracy. Which is true, but says nothing about how a real dictatorship compares to democracy. Comparing messy reality with idealised theory is why the grass looker greener on the other side.
So the critique ends up being that a benevolent dictatorship (which magically stays benevolent and perfectly aligned with the speaker’s ethics) is better than democracy. Which is true, but says nothing about how a real dictatorship compares to democracy.
I think this is all true, but it’s also true (by the same token) that we are not comparing personalist rule, or party state rule, or liberal democracy in the abstract. We’re comparing, in general, *one specific liberal democratic order*, as it currently exists in one country at a point in time, to the plausible nondemocratic options (party-state, personalist, technocratic, military or whatever) that might be on offer *in that situation*. It’s perfectly possible for someone to believe that while liberal democracy certainly has its costs and benefits, it’s not a good option in that place and time.
It’s also possible to believe that the existing liberal-democratic order is *so* dysfunctional that it offers no hope of improvement, while one of these other models of political order might offer the chance at improvement, assuming they share their values. That’s a decision that is ultimately going to reflect one’s risk tolerance, among other things, as well as just how much you dislike the current order.
One could further argue that liberal democracy, or at any rate this particular liberal democracy, has some basic problems *in theory*, or in basic structure, that seem unresolvable in principle, while at least a party-state or personal regime *could* solve them, if the right party or people were in charge.
And one could, finally, point to an example of a nondemocratic social order declining or collapsing, and ask, did it collapse because it was nondemocratic, and would a more democratic state have done better? The communist regimes in Hungary and Yugoslavia, for example (and I bring them up specifically because they had a better, somewhat more market-oriented economic model than other socialist states) are often described as falling because they borrowed money to afford cheap consumer goods, and had to make big concessions to the western powers to settle their debts. That’s obviously a big error and they should have done things differently, but is it an issue that more democracy would have solved? I doubt it, because voters actually like cheap consumer goods, and social spending in general: more political openness would have made it *harder* to have a more investment-oriented economy, not easier. (And let’s not forget of course that the the liberal-democratic US currently has a debt to GDP ratio much bigger than anything Tito or Kadar could have ever dreamed of).
Those are more or less the four points I would stress (as someone skeptical of liberal democracy in general and especially of US liberal democracy in particular: if it were up to me, one of the two big US political parties would be permanently banned, and you can probably guess which one) to “push back” against the defenders of the liberal order. In general terms, obviously if you want to get more specific we can do that.
That’s pretty much exactly what I’d expect somebody like you to say, and it’s been thoroughly refuted by other things already said in this comment section. It’s completely typical of someone who thinks they can theorise their way out of reality, but accomplishes nothing apart from legitimising the path for much worse systems of governance (or, it would, if anyone of importance took any of it seriously in the first place).
One of the big problems is that people tend to ignore how personalist systems, or even other authoritarian regimes actually *do* work.
Dithering, infighting and bureaucratic inertia *are not unique features of liberal democracy*. And despite how they present themsevles even the most autocratic regimes are limited by the very power centres that keep them in power: They cannot act freely anymore than the president of the US can. It’s just that the checks and balances are different (and usually substantially more lethal)
It’s not even a matter of “dictatorships may be faster but that just means tehy might be wrong” it’s that *dictatorships aren’t neccessarily any faster*.
“One of the big problems is that people tend to ignore how personalist systems, or even other authoritarian regimes actually *do* work.
Dithering, infighting and bureaucratic inertia *are not unique features of liberal democracy*.”
I regret only that I am unable to repost this in bigger letters. Yes! Authoritarian regimes are rife with infighting. The propaganda image of the terrifying war machines of the Nazis, Soviets etc was useful but it masked the ludicrous chaos of the governments behind them.
If I were generous, I think this sentiment can be justifiable for people who do not percieve that their reality has any chance of getting better within the democratic system, even if the truth is that a dictatorship is more likely to be harmful to them overall.
For those people, and we cannot just dismiss them given they have a political voice, the potential risk from change is lower than the current risk of the present, which is why they end up flocking to charmful populist leaders that seem to offer them what they want regardless of how impossible it is in the practice (or depressingly, because it is impossible in the practice).
This is a problem that social media has made worse in the past years with what the lack of moderation from certain platforms and the indifference to extremist discourse in the name of engagement,
I think another reason that a significant proportion of popular opinion everywhere likes a vision of a personalist polity over an institutional one is that it provides an immediate “person who is responsible”, by which I mean someone to blame if something goes wrong. That’s an important part of storytelling, and a lot easier and more dramatic, than blaming “the system”. Thus we get a proportion of folks who insist that the person at the top is to blame, even in an institutional polity.
It’s interesting to consider how these perspectives on government get represented in Star TREK as something with particular consistent points of engagement. With my focus being on TNG and DS9.
The Federation: Government consistently represented in terms of the Federation Council, at a distance from the main characters, clearly made up of multiple members, communicates decisions down a chain of command. There’s all of one story line in which they engage on a personal level with the president, and even that is rationalised in terms of his decision making as commander-in-chief during a crisis.
Romulan Empire: Implicitly convoluted and Byzantine even to Romulan citizens, with the impression of a Senate, a series of committees with key powers, and offices with what seem like constantly shifting occupants.
Cardassian Union: Starts out institutional, first with the military high command then the civilian Detapa Council. Main narrative point of contact is with a guy explicitly a few steps down the chain of command, with even his former dictatorial power over a colony subject to review and withdrawal. Then that guy makes himself sole leader of the state, with implications that his appointees for government come from a network of personal cronies, with the assistance of a new military ally. Is able to just about function so long as his strength of personality and charisma can keep those allies in check, but once he’s captured is immediately replaced by guy who was basically just his PA, and whole thing falls apart as the allies are able to dominate government. Once replacement leaves to start insurgency, lack of mechanism to replace him makes Cardassia first an outright puppet state, and then completely disconnected and targeted for destruction.
The Dominion: Odd form of institutional government where the highest institution consists of a distant hive mind that is largely uninterested in the regular exercise of power. Decisions are carried out by genetically engineered races of bureaucrats and soldiers, who are relied upon largely through being biologically instilled with absolute loyalty.
Klingon Empire: Personalist rule to a fault. High council seems to consist of members nominated based on personal property, prestige, and network of supporters in something like vassalage system, or just being somebody that is in good with the chancellor. Chancellor apparently selected by choosing two most prestigious candidates out of everybody who puts their name forward, and then them fighting to the death; can thereafter be replaced if sufficiently high ranking challenger kills them in a duel. Constant references are made to invoking chancellor Gowron’s authority on a personal level, even down to punishment of fairly minor offenders, and relationships with other states or grand strategy seem to rest a lot on chancellor’s friendships. Military seems to be a standing institution for itself, but looks like it works on a system of top ranks being reserved for aristocratic Klingons who can readily invoke personal loyalty to make troops follow them rather than legitimate government. Seems enthusiastically designed to collapse into civil war in the event that all of the leadership was taken out. It’s consistent with the character and values attributed to Klingons, but has limited credibility as a system that could effectively govern an interplanetary state.
I was just thinking ‘so, is Weyoun an institution or not?’…
I think Weyoun’s portrayal is something like a combination of him functioning as head of state by proxy to the Founders and high level strategic decision maker. So there are stages where his direct personal involvement in many activities can be read as consistent with his function as a representative of a larger system, although somewhat tenuously. He otherwise has a position where whatever office he might be regarded as occupying can continuously be refilled by him if his model is regarded as proven to be functional within it.
Still, there are cases where it pushes credibility a bit. That one point where the augmented humans try to sell out the Federation and he and Damar go to meet with them personally is kind of absurd for people of their rank.
For me the institutionality of the Weyouns depends on how much they have been genetically modified to function as an institution.
The fact that the different Weyouns seem to operate slightly differently suggests that it’s not totally institutionalised by that metric. Though I suppose not many things are (in fact, I can only really think of the Borg pre-infection-with-individualism).
Regarding the Klingons, we see at least one collapse into civil war, the one with the Duras sisters in TNG. It’s possible, come to think of it, that this is why the Organians stopped the war in TOS; that the result of allowing it to proceed would not have been liberation of the Klingon subject worlds by the Federation, because there were simply too many systems for the Federation to occupy, but the total breakdown of the Klingon Empire into many-sided war leading to much more suffering and death of the subject peoples.
Yeah, I find that war in question to be telling, because within the scope of the fiction there’s not really much sense of a compelling ideological basis for factional division within Klingon society. It just seems that Duras’ network of supporters was left adrift by his abrupt death (that took place as a result of an honour duel with an outcast that didn’t overtly have anything to do with his power play), and his sisters were able to find a viable inheritor for them in the person of his biological son. At most, there’s a vague sense that the pro-Duras leadership offer a course for the empire that will result in more glory for their supporting aristocrats, but that’s still just personalist rule. The whole thing is threatened with collapse by the exposure of something that would compromise reputation.
Re: the lack of a basis for dividion on Klingon Empire, Star Trek Discovery posits that it’s as simple as the Great Houses feuding. Each House has its own customs and fiefs, which inevitably leads to any one of them declaring war on another to increase the size of their domain (or their standing and influence in the Imperial structure as a whole).
In Discovery, specifically, the Starfleet personnel notes that once each House starts acting independently in the war against the Federation, SF effectively has to fight a conflict against 24 distinct enemies, each one fighting its own way and scrambling to try and bite off a piece of the Federation for itself.
Really interesting post, also overlaps with something I’ve been musing on w.r.t. Kohlberg’s moral development stages (roughly: Stage 2, you’re motivated purely by self-interest; Stage 3, you’re motivated by personal sympathy and loyalty; Stage 4, you’re motivated by a formal role which you’ve made a commitment to fulfill). Where Stage 3 would be personalist and Stage 4 would be institutional.
No modern society can function without Stage 4 thinking, without compartmentalisation of the mind into different roles for different contexts. If doctors, retail workers or bus drivers only helped people they liked or whose political values they shared, we’d have chaos.
And yet populists the world over are aggressively trying to stamp out Stage 4 thinking. In their propaganda they’re training people to not even consider that a person can loyally fulfill a *role* (judge, journalist, election official…) above their personal sympathies. It’s scary.
Actually, at Columbia where I go to school, quite a few medical and academic personnel have declared an unwillingness to provide the professional services for which they are paid to “Zionists.” You leftists are just as dirty as those you despise (and even more self-righteous).
In fairness, one could argue that that is basically left-wing populism/personalism.
But in this case, I do think you’re right–Camel93 was probably thinking exclusively about right-wingers.
In this case, yes – but I’ve also called out personalist thinking in leftist spaces when I see it. Too many people who fall into the same trap of focusing on individual “bad guys” (billionaires, basically) and not on the system behind them. And I do feel the influence of fictional stories as Brett describes them, the thinking in high-profile villains who can be satisfyingly defeated. Plus just a general naïveté and refusal to acknowledge that some social and economic problems are HARD and this isn’t only the fault of some evil billionaire mastermind.
It’s just that, in the current climate, most of the “personalist fallacies” on the left come from these LARPing adolescents on online forums, and sometimes from a few radical activists at the edges of the Overton window. Whereas the “personalist fallacies” on the right are propagated daily and loudly by people with actual power in several countries, to an audience of hundreds of millions.
As for the “Zionists” label mentioned by ey81, that makes my stomach churn as well. Once you move from “Zionism” as an idea (a complex idea with many schools and varieties) to “Zionist” as a label for individual people (with the message that they should go away, shut up, be banned from places etc.) then it’s just a very transparent fig leaf for antisemitism and inter-community shit-stirring.
Fair enough, and I appreciate that–although I do think that you’re not quite right about how prevalent personalism is among the left-of-center.
You know, I do agree that the current political climate has illustrated the very ugly trend of antisemitism that is still found in otherwise progressive circles. It is unambiguously repugnant, and a thing worth challenging.
I’m not particularly convinced that you have any interest in challenging it. Given your tone here and observations of your general history of bringing up such subjects, I believe you’re concerned less with that kind of thing for the impact it has upon actual Jewish people than you are with the opportunity it provides for political point scoring.
That established, in terms of sheer metrics, I think the idea of some kind of equivalence is still not evident. In terms of sheer breadth (the number of categories of people that are hated) and depth (the extent to which it prompts political mobilisation and heights of office it reaches), I think current American conservatism remains far worse.
At both the state and federal level, the highest offices of the land have made it a matter of policy to target non-white people, non-heteronormative people, non-citizens, women, and general political dissidence. I do not recall any executive order or national convention that evinced equivalent hostility towards Jews as something to seek in the presidency.
I’ve worn an Israeli flag button on campus at Columbia through the past two academic years (not this year since there aren’t any protests anymore), and spoken words of encouragement to any students (surely mostly Jewish) mounting pro-Israel counterdemonstrations, so I don’t know what else I could do to challenge anti-Semitism.
Perhaps not conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. That might be a good start.
@Ynneadwraith: Having observed the “I’m not antisemitic, I’m anti-Zionist” crowd in action, there’s a reason for that conflation, and it’s definitely not just the result of anti-anti-Zionist propaganda.
I’m sorry, but people who chant, “There is only one solution . . . . [get the allusion?]” are in fact anti-Semitic. Having said that, I note that the ones at Columbia are also spineless twerps.
Actually, at Columbia where I go to school, quite a few medical and academic personnel have declared an unwillingness to provide the professional services for which they are paid to “Zionists.” You leftists are just as dirty as those you despise (and even more self-righteous).
I think the response of those “leftists” to what you just said would be something like “your side started it, and you can’t bring a knife to a gun fight.”
Well, I wish one of your heroes with a gun would have challenged me when I was walking around campus wearing an Israeli flag button, but they are, in fact, chickenshit twerps afraid to challenge a grown-up.
@ey81,
They’re not “my” heroes, particularly.
It’s interesting to me that you should characterise political opponents as the absolute worst, and yet attribute a lack of violence to cowardice rather than a desire to not do violence.
I wouldn’t exactly call the people who have protested state violence in Minneapolis chickenshit.
Also, I’m not quite sure what you mean by “I wish a person with a gun would challenge me”, but it still sounds a lot like a desire for violence to occur as a pretext to responses with violence. Which brings me back around to the sense that your pins and your words of encouragement are motivated less by who it supports than who it offends.
but they are, in fact, chickenshit twerps afraid to challenge a grown-up.
Plenty of those on the other side too. I routinely get death threats (or these days, “i’m going to call ICE on you” threats, which is funny since I’m a natural born citizen) from the people on social media with American flags in their profiles, but none of these people ever seems to want to challenge me in person.
Also, “chickensh*t” aside, I doubt most of the people on your side would actually be up for fighting a civil war even if they wanted to. I’m not the first to note that people like J. D. Vance and Donald Trump are, uh, not exactly in great shape. There’s a reason why the January 6 riots are referred to as the “Beer Belly Putsch” and why like several of the rioters died of heart attacks while charging the Capitol.
Donald Trump are J.D. Vance are not, in fact, on my side. I’m a liberal democrat, in favor of free speech, legislative supremacy, rule of law, and a host of others ideas they despise.
@ey81,
Fair enough! Apologies for tarring you as being on the same side as them.
The mention of generous EU funding for open access in history has me curious: have you ever tried applying for an ERC Starting Grant or Consolidator Grant? In my field there used to be a lot of universities that would offer permanent jobs to promising candidates on the condition that they land one.
A case Americans might want to refresh themselves on is Boss Tweed. Tweed ended his life in gaol! It still look decades of fighting to break Tammany Hall’s control over New York City. People who dream of being Boss Tweed or Don Corleone receiving supplicants and wheeling and dealing don’t like to think of Tammany Hall or how you can arrest the mob boss at 6 am and someone has moved into his territory by 8.
How is a medieval kingship, much less the Soviet party+government duopoly any less of an “institution” than a modern-day presidency or parliamentary system? There are rules to determine the succession and appointment; these rules are only as good as the legitimacy of the system among the polity’s power brokers, as many fragile states with the full formal trappings of a parliamentary democracy demonstrate.
The rules of what powers come with what positions are routinely bent in any system composed of living humans; say, in the US a vice president with the same formal powers might be entirely sidelined from ruling the country or be the second (if not the first) man in the nation, based on personal qualities.
Believing that there exist some “institutional” states where officials never act in self-benefit, never use their powers to undermine their competitors, and never seek to curry favour with the upper-level rulers, is pure magical thinking.
And with no clearly visible qualitative difference between “institutional” and “personalised”, we’re reduced to quantitative – and there are precious little ways to accurately gauge what the actual inner workings of a political machine are, much less how it would behave under pressure; so we’re not getting accurate quantitative measures, either.
It isn’t, and Prof Devereaux never said anything about requiring presidents or parliaments, nor did he say that democracy was automatically institutional.
Nor did he, or any comment I’ve seen so far, require the people in an institutional system to never bend the rules, never act in their own self interest.
It may be difficult to determine the inner workings of an existing political machine, such as whether Putin’s Russia is personalist or institutional. It’s a whole lot easier to look at historical polities, or fictional polities such as the Dune Imperium with their own reasonably well documented “history”.
One commonly visible difference is what happens when the successor to a monarch/emperor/whatever is five years old. In both Europe and China there were cases where the child “reigned” as King/Emperor and the institutional system just kept working, no major rebellions or upheavals. In polities that were personal rather than institutional, the outcome would usually be a fight over who would be the next ruler.
Another example I guess would be political marriages? Marriage is usually a very personal tie and emphasize the relationship between individuals. Political marriages works for personalized authority (even if sometime this authority rests on a more institutional basis, such as early modern european states), and is always attached to a person rather than a position (princess A marries foreign emperor B, not the imperial throne of this foreign country).
Actually friendship (however it might be influenced by wealth or power) can also count, “being childhood friends” can be a powerful diplomatic influence for local big men style authority (see Bret’s post on Celtic governance), but much less effective in a more institutionalized environment.
Using a more down to earth example, if I can simply ask my friend for a job in his company and my friend ask two of his closest subordinate to simply bring me in, claims of nepotism aside, this is personalist authority at work. If I ask my friend for a job in his company and the best he can do is pass me a referral and I have to follow an exact interview process, that’s more institutional.
As many already commented, personalist and institutional government are not binary choices but a spectrum.
Rules of succession in monarchy are actually infamously often vague and uncodified past the level of a firstborn son (if that), which has numerous historical incidents of creating succession crisis in the event of things like the firstborn son predeceasing the monarch or the monarch failing to produce viable children and creating an open question of who among his brothers, cousins, nephews, etc. has the best claim to be heir. A thing that has numerous instances of one or more of those provisional heirs deciding to not bother to wait for the natural death or willing abdication of the reigning monarch.
That’s before getting into all of the ways that an unambiguously legitimate succeeding monarch runs into problems based on their personal relationships to their household or the powerful magnates of their realm. You don’t have a lot of elected presidents getting into wars with other office holders, compared to the likes of the dispute between Henry II of England and his eldest son Richard concerning matters of proper homage after Richard was endowed with a fief in their French holdings.
Never mind the whole mess there of the English king also being a French duke.
@Isator Levi,
Stuff gets even more interesting when you get into questions like “does an unborn child, who *might* be a son, have the right to inherit”, or “does an adoptive child have the right to inherit”, plus of course all the questions about whether political offices can be inherited by, or through, women.
I think the Wars of the Roses are particularly telling. By all indications, so long as Henry VI remained childless, Richard Duke of York was his legitimate heir. By virtue of his line of descent from the older brother of Henry’s great-grandfather, he was actually a more legitimate heir than Henry was. But he had close personal ties to the Neville family (having been a ward in their house and married to one of their daughters) at a time when they were in a major feud with the Percy family in a way that was greatly polarising among the general English nobility, as well as a personal feus with Edmund Beaufort, Henry’s strongest supporter. So his being legitimate heir was not pleasing to many powerful people.
It’s my understanding that the scholarship finds that the sheer extent to which such ties of personal loyalty made that civil war so ruinous helped to precipitate a shift to a more institutional form of governance under the Tudors and into England’s early modern period. It was a gradual process, but there was definitely a policy of development of boards, committees, and specific offices to carry out governing functions that weren’t necessarily dependent on personal relationships to the Crown. The English Civil War and Glorious Revolution could be seen as a result of these institutions becoming strong enough to outright subordinate the Crown when it attempted to exert too much power outside of their remit.
This isn’t a binary issue. It’s not either/or, but rather a matter of degrees.
In the Middle Ages it was not merely acceptable but required for a king to provide authority, income, and land to someone who did him a favor. Today that sort of thing is considered corruption, and can get you put in jail for quite a while. On the flip side, as you say, there were social structures in the Middle Ages and ancient world. And in the modern world the saying is “People don’t quit jobs, they quit bad managers”, a tacit acknowledgement that personal relationships still matter.
The fact that this is a sliding scale, not a binary choice, doesn’t negate the idea though. Think about the current political situation. Trump is president, period. No one disputes that. They may make statements like “Not My President”, but at the end of the day even Trump’s political enemies acknowledge that he is the duly elected president and thus has the rights, privileges, and authority of that position as outlined in the Constitution, precedent, and various other legal frameworks. California’s governor may dispute his right to make certain demands, but that’s a debate within the framework of the institution. The main fight is within the system–midterm elections, positioning candidates to take on Trump’s successor, etc. (Trump’s discussion of a third term is horrifying precisely because it’s a violation of the cultural institutions in the USA.)
If this were happening in the Middle Ages, in contrast, many states would have broken away from Trump–not because he doesn’t have the right to the authority, but because the governors don’t like him. The territory considered “France” was the territory controlled by the king of France, and was constantly changing, to use an example Bret has previously discussed. There would be disputes and armed conflict, but it would be at a much smaller scale and may be merely pro forma, because people switching loyalties was expected and not wrong in that time.
Is this all dependent on the people involved? Sure, absolutely. Until we develop actual AI, encounter intelligent alien life, or otherwise get another species we recognize as sentient and equal, every political institution is composed of people. And people, being sentient and having free will, can do things that defy logic. But IN GENERAL people follow cultural expectations. People objected to groups breaking away from their kings in the Middle Ages but it was a practical objection, not a violation of the cultural expectations. California declaring independence today, on the other hand, would be considered egregiously wrong and almost certainly spark a war that would destroy the USA.
Resisting the king in arms was a protest, not a secession. It did not change the boundaries of the kingdom, it changed the relative political position of actors within it.
Frequently the intent **was** secession. Burgundy in the 15th C in the case of France.
Or the kingdoms in Outremer established by the Crusaders. Antioch and Tripoli frequently “seceded” from rulership by the King of Jerusalem, usually when the king died. They would instead declare themselves vassals of the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantines, or in one case were willing to swear allegiance to a Moslem Emir in return for assistance in breaking free.
Depends heavily on the time period. The difference between 820 and 1420 is significant. State capacity–and therefore geography and stability–greatly increased when the Church started producing more educate (read: literate) clerks (which is why “clerk” and “cleric” are so similar in sound and spelling). During the early Middle Ages the boundaries of kingdoms, principalities, duchies, counties, and other types of fiefs were much more fluid, and part of that fluidity was based on personal loyalty to the fief holder’s ostensible superior.
This is, of course, complicated by the fact that any nobleman worth his crenulations is going to continue to claim territory as his whether the subordinate, local lords actually are loyal or not.
Regardless, it’s very different from, say, Rome or the USA. A new person becoming governor of Ohio isn’t going to impact who Ohio is loyal to, because the governor is limited by the institutions. It’s not a question of legal fiction; the governor of Ohio CANNOT move Ohio into Canada’s political sphere and out of the USA’s, not without a great deal of violence.
Regarding Russia, modern personalist regimes usually have some sort of nominal institutionalist structures, and that’s the case there as well. It’s entirely possible that Putin’s succession plan is just “tell the election officials before my death to let the next elections be fair”.
It is possible for decapitation strikes to cause collapse of institutional regimes by acting as a Schelling point for revolt and/or a cascading failure in which the inability to act quickly to suppress local rebellions emboldens others to rebel. This seems to be the theory in both Venezuela and Iran, but has not really worked in either.
@William Brennan,
Decapitating Venezuela’s government has ended up with an acting president who’s, if anything, to the left of Nicolas Maduro ideologically, although also more of a pragmatic technocrat, and has a lifelong antipathy (both ideological and personal: her father and brother were killed by a previous right-wing regime) to US foreign policy and the Latin American right-wing. The hard-left press is already spinning that as “the Caribbean Brest-Litovsk”, i.e. a tactical retreat for the ruling party (which is still, you know, in power), and one from which they may be able to recover with time, rather than a defeat. I’m not sure if Donald Trump is fine with that, or if he just is unaware of what the new Venezuelan leader believes, but I guess there is some small silver lining in that he hasn’t actually achieved (at least, not yet) what some of his more feverish supporters on social media think he has.
“I’m not sure if Donald Trump is fine with that, or if he just is unaware of what the new Venezuelan leader believes”
I would bet my mortgage that DJT is unaware of practically anything going on in Venezuela. He had his chest-beating moment to distract from the Epstein files for another day, and do a bit of insider-trading for his buddies, then it’s on to pastures new.
Venezuela maybe shows what happens when institutional and personalist get confused.
I don’t know what’s been happening inside Venezuela for the past few years as to whether Maduro really was trying to establish personalist rule, with himself as the indispensable father of the country / president for life. He did, to his own misfortune, apparently convince the United States that he was the personalist ruler of Venezuela, and that all the US would have to do was kidnap Maduro and then everything would change.
Instead it seems Venezuela is still institutionalist. The vice president took over, no rebellion, no elections, no conceding to every US demand. Probably some internal and foreign policy changes, but nothing dramatic. A quick check on the Maritime Traffic website shows oil tankers cruising back and forth as before.
The second biggest loser after Maduro seems to have been the leader of the Venezuelan opposition. Instead of going institutional, denouncing this assault on Venezuela itself, she also went personalist, “giving” her Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump presumably in the hope he would order the US military to take further action and overthrow the party in power. Didn’t happen, and I doubt it has helped her future political prospects in Venezuela.
Didn’t happen, and I doubt it has helped her future political prospects in Venezuela.
I think her future political prospects are going to depend on the state of the Venezuelan economy (and, i guess, if Donald Trump and his inner circle decide to change their mind). If the current leader can revitalize the economy, then she and her party will strengthen their position and the opposition’s will weaken.
Maybe because I’ve been poisoned by personalist fictions, or because of my pessimism, but I don’t think USA will still be fine after the 10th person is killed in quick succession. There’ll at least be a little tiny bit civil war that follows. No great states ever got challenged like this before, not even Germany or Japan in WW2 (Hitler didn’t die until the very end at it seems like power actually succeed successfully to Donitz. The only Japanese leaders killed is Isoroku Yamamoto?). States would like to boast that their succession method is robust, but we wouldn’t know until they’re tested like Iran now.
What would the motive for resolving that with anything resembling civil war be?
Presumably a similar complex of motives that caused 2,500 people to stage an insurrection on the 6th January…
Sooo… a conspiracy theory that the deaths were actually engineered by domestic political opposition with the intention of acquiring the presidency while bypassing the electoral process? I suppose when it’s put like that, I can’t discount the possibility of that being a conclusion some people would leap to.
I mean, it’s pretty much the conclusion a significant proportion of the US population seems to have reached.
And that may well be true if you substitute either option for ‘major political opposition’…
Same motivation for lots of other civil wars? You’re persuaded that 1) your enemies are a terrifying existential threat to you or the values you care about, 2) they’re *such* a threat that the risk of them being in power is bigger than the costs of civil war, and 3) you think there’s enough of a power vacuum that you could actually have a shot at stopping them through force.
I’m not saying America will have civil conflict anytime in the near future, but if it does, that will probably be why.
I do not believe the case has been made for any of those factors becoming more pronounced if the American executive line of succession had to be invoked down to the 11th in line. It does not even fulfil the power vacuum requirement, because the person to whom the power should go is known and established, in a principle enshrined by the constitution.
Right, well like I said I don’t actually think civil conflict is likely in the near future (though I think it’s more likely than it used to be). But, *if* it happens, it will presumably because having *a lot* of public officials disappear, will open up the kind of power vacuum that leads people to think, “hey, maybe today is the day we have a shot at winning it all.”
Yes, there’s a constitutional procedure for keeping the government going even if, say, 10 or 50 or 200 top officials were gone. But, I think the farther down the line of succession you go, and the farther you get from “politics as usual”, the less legitimate the situation is going to seem to the general public (since I think inertia, “this is the way things have operated as long as I can remember”, is a big part of the way people conceive of what legitimacy is) and the more people are going to start wondering if power really is up for grabs.
I don’t see why having Lori Chavez-DeRemer (currently 11th in line by my count) as president would precipitate a civil war. Presumably, in the short term a president like that with no power base would be more susceptible to domination by both Congress and the executive bureaucracy, but that’s not the same as a civil war. In the long term, it would depend on what she made of the situation. My current governor, Kathy Hochul, was pretty much of a nonentity (a former congresswoman from Buffalo) when she became lieutenant governor, but when Cuomo unexpectedly resigned, she managed to solidify her position, win re-election, and become firmly entrenched as governor.
@wondrous,
The US is unusually polarized right now, but I think the US political order could have survived the death of 10 or 20 or even 200 of its top leaders in 1950 or 1980, or probably even 1970, even if that’s slightly more questionable today.
Slightly more questionable, but not by much. While there are those who would rather rule over a kingdom of ashes than be forced to negotiate with others in a prosperous polity, they are much louder and more visible online than they are in real life, and the actual political, military, economic, and cultural leadership don’t want a succession crisis-driven civil war.
One thing that the institutionalist side also overlooks (and, to be clear, I’m a fan of institutionalism rather than personalism) is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy: There are two kinds of people within any organization–those dedicated to the ostensible goals of the organization, and those dedicated to increasing their own power within, and/or the power of the organization. The second kind always ends up in charge.
To which, of course, the rejoinder might be that this is simply personalism infiltrating the institutions, and while this isn’t an unfair defense, that such things happen is something of an unavoidable reality. When you realize this, it’s pretty easy to see that a lot of the “anti-institutional” stuff that’s been going on lately is less the result of people hating “institutions” as a concept and more of a reaction to perceived personalism within institutions.
Those three Latin books are *exactly* what my college Latin professor used (except 6th ed., because it was a while back)! We were also about to start Lucretius before the course got canceled for lack of interest (I was the only one left).
By the way, I just finished your paper on naval costs of the First Punic War, and why was I so surprised that it sounded just like one of your blog posts, just with less slang
I’m not sure about the example of Harold at Hastings. While his death was a disaster for the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, they still had a cause worth fighting for. Indeed the English hastily acclaimed a new king, Edgar, who on dynastic grounds had by far the best claim to the throne anyway. The issue was that it hadn’t just been Harold who died at Hastings, but also his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine, and almost certainly other major figures, which took out most of the military and administrative leadership of southern England in one fell swoop, thereby injecting a degree of uncertainty and chaos into a system that could probably otherwise have withstood the death of the king. The housecarls also suffered heavy casualties, which combined with the casualties at Fulford among the armies of the northern earls, left England both alarmingly short of professional soldiery and short of experienced candidates to lead them.
William was therefore able to march around London defeating hastily-raised local English armies until one by one the English magnates decided the war was lost and surrendered to him. Even then there were significant uprisings and rebellions under the various other claimants and their allies (Edgar, Harold’s sons, the king of Denmark), with William’s throne not being properly secure until after the Harrying of the North in 1070.
Part of this was because, as another commenter mentioned, England was unusually institutionalised for European monarchies of the period. Of course the king was still a figure of major significance, but the system could survive a short-lived or a bad king (and had done so). William for his part (from a much more personalised government) seems to have been surprised that England didn’t simply roll over after Hastings and that he had to carry on fighting for a couple of months to consolidate his victory.
How 1066 and all that would have worked out if England was less institutionalised is an interesting hypothetical. On the one hand, one could presume the job for William might have been easier because instating a new king would be harder. On the other, the classic failure for a personalised monarchy on the death of the ruler in battle is simply the collapse of the kingdom, so it’s entirely possible that instead he’d have been bogged down in 20+ years of pacification to bring the polity back together.
Notably, Hastings takes place <20 years after the English throne has been handed over from Cnut and his sons back to Aethelred's dynasty, so this is actually the third dynastic transition on the same kingdom without it falling apart in under a century.
I think this is actually a case where thinking of it as “England” is a bit wrong. (even though England *was* somewhat institutionalized) as opposed to a complex web of familial and politics that crossed the channel and the North Sea. William is trying to personally advance his claim on the english throne (though In doing so he’s going to reshape it significantly) but so was Harald, and Sweyn, etc.
An interesting note about pre-conquest England is that it seems to have developed a kind of “national” identity as “English” overlapping with tribal identities. Danish communities in the north of England, while distinctively culturally Danish and probably Danish-speaking, seem in some sources nevertheless to have considered themselves as “English” and fought fiercely and in conjunction with Anglo-Saxon allies under English kings against “foreigners” – the Norse or Norse-Gaels, usually – prior to the Conquest. Part of this may be religious too, of course: the Danes were relatively quickly Christianised while newer Scandinavian arrivals in the later tenth century may have been pagan, but there is a sense that the “English” (whether Anglo-Dane or Anglo-Saxon) had their way of doing things and didn’t like “foreigners” messing with it. Cnut adapted to his English kingdom brilliantly, but Harthacnut faced resistance after he came over from Denmark, as did Edward the Confessor and his Norman friends.
Part of the reason Harold was chosen as king to succeed Edward was that it was well-known William and Harald were planning to invade, and the nobility wanted a strong leader to defend the kingdom. So they gave the crown to their top guy and united behind him, and then when he died they again (albeit briefly) united behind Edgar, rather than just submitting to William. They seem to have guessed – correctly – that William wasn’t just going to assume the throne and carry on with business as usual, but import new Norman aristocrats and practices, and they were right.
Of course it’s such a mythologised event (and period) that it’s not straightforward to get a handle on what people were actually thinking. Harold was clearly an ambitious man all too happy to take the crown. But I don’t think we can rightly judge it as just a clash between rival claimants, either. English institutions put Harold in place, and then stood behind him against both Harald and William. We don’t hear of local rebels or recruitment struggles in the way we do in subsequent personalised invasions by claimants in 1139, 1216, 1327, 1399, 1485, etc. and it was decidedly “national” rather than personal or factional armies that fought at Fulford, Stamford Bridge and Hastings.
That resistance disintegrated after Hastings (although disintegrating rather than collapsing outright) is I think less that people were fighting for Harold’s claim over William’s so the cause died with him, and more that three major battles in quick succession had knocked the stuffing out of the English military and they couldn’t see a path to victory, so submitted to William in the hope of getting better terms.
Serious respect for answering a genuine follow-up question about the Dune posts while also taking the opportunity to drop 2000 pounds of laser guided subtext.
Speaking of characters and stories,
I do think that one of the interesting observations about strategy games is how convincingly they can deliver on a narrative even though they don’t typically have any characters of note.
Maybe there’s just something about a ludic narrative as opposed to a traditional written one that makes our human brains more willing to accept institutions, rather than persons, as characters? Just to bring up a quick example, our host mentioned in his Teaching Paradox: Europa Universalis IV series that the player should be cautious of being taught to see international relations primarily from the perspective of the state, but that in itself implies that the state has a perspective, a sort of perspective that the typical person might sympathise with and be emotionally invested in.
That seems very hard to do in traditional writing. I can’t honestly claim that I’m a competent writer, I’ve dabbled in that sort of vignette fiction from time to time, and I always ended up falling back to the solution the doctor mentions: just having individual characters stand in as narrative personalisations (is there a word for that?) for their institutions.
The most institutional thing in written fiction I can think of is in Omniscient First Person Viewpoint with the Military State, run by Command. Who is Command? The main characters, who include a powerful mind reader, a general of the Military State, and a time traveler who has personally overthrown the Military state several times and watched the Resistance overthrow it several times, do not know. It’s just where the orders come from. The state is also doing its best to make its soldiers interchangable and replacable, though they’re hampered by the fact that this is a fantasy setting with huge power imbalances.
“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”
From one of your recommendations (I forget which) I remember reading that the Roman general was the one who consulted the gods via sacrifices. If the general died, the army often couldn’t do anything, since even “Shall we break camp” required an augury first to determine if the gods approved. They had to send back to Rome to get a new one. And no, there was no deputy who took over.
I have to wonder if the office of lieutenant (from “in lieu of tenant”, i.e. acting for the tenant of a piece of land) was an innovation there.
Perhaps this was not followed later on.
“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.”
Well, that’s the idea. However, it is possible to break things up enough that the new office holders effectively have no control over their areas of concern. At which point, things may mutate.
In the Civil Wars, and the many private wars of the middle ages, the leader was essentially the cause. If they died/fled/were captured then the fight was pointless. An analogy might be an inheritor dying in the middle of a contest over inheritance – the suit collapses (and private wars in the middle ages were often very much an extension of a judicial process, a sort of mass trial by combat)
Dr. Devereaux, I think you wrote (very) briefly about great man theory in your series on Alexander and also in the post on what historians do.
I think people are getting confused between a personalist system, and an absolutist one. They are not the same thing.
Pericles possessed no institutionalist office. He was merely an Athenian citizen, who was more persuasive than any other, and who the assembly would often follow. His claims to authority, then, were purely personal: when he died no one else became equally persuasive to replace him. Xerxes was King of Persia. He ruled because he held an (hereditary) office. When he died Artaxerxes took over that office, and thereby became the ruler.
Pericles had power that was limited and personalist. Xerxes had power that was absolutist, and institutional.
Or take Tolkien: Sam follows Frodo to Mordor out of personal loyalty to Frodo. That is personalism. The Prince of Dol Amroth follows Aragorn to the Gates of Mordor because he holds Aragorn to be the the rightful holder of the office of King of the West. That is institutionalist. But it doesn’t follow that Frodo has more power over Sam than the King of the West has over the Prince.
On the other hand, Imrahil becomes invested in the idea that Aragorn has a rightful claim to the crown through a combination of finding his character in general to be impressive and to think he evinces the qualities of good kingship. Like, Gandalf has a moment of realising how vital it is for Aragorn to go around performing healing on people for the sake of expressing the regal traits described in an old poem. This might be contrasted against the last time somebody from the Arnor branch of the family attempted to press a claim on the Gondor throne, and the council of noblemen convened to address the issue gave no support to it. That was based on a combination of citing vague legal precedents (which should also suffice to invalidate Aragorn’s claim out of hand), and a subtext of it being because nobody could vouch for the candidate’s character.
Never mind any implications related to the fact that Aragorn spent many years in service to Denethor’s father prior to the storyline, performing heroic and noble feats for the benefit of Gondor and his own reputation.
Aragorn absolutely could not have just strolled up to Minas Tirith, declared his credentials, and expected anybody to start following him. To the extent that one might presume that would just be a matter of Denethor blocking it, so much of the practical application of Denethor’s power is also based on his network of personal supporters. Among other things, this is apparent in the fact that he issues a command for the fiefdoms of Gondor to yield up troops in the White Tower’s defence, and almost all send a bare minimum because that’s all they’re willing to spare at a time when their own lands are under threat. While at the same time it’s vitally important that each of those contingents be led personally by the local lords, to fulfil their sworn obligations to Denethor as their liege. Hell, Imrahil is his own brother-in-law.
I do note that the original Arnorian claimant still had to contest with a living heir on the Gondorian side with a male-claim descent (albeit more distant), Aragorn didn’t have any competitors in that sense.
If Gondor had had a different inheritance law, such that Aragorn was clearly NOT the rightful king, he would not have been leading its army to Mordor.
Gandalf might have talked Imrahil into doing so, but that army would not have followed Aragorn out of a personal sense of loyalty to him, because hardly anyone in Gondor had a personal sense of loyalty to him. How could they? They hardly knew him.
Most of that army consisted of people who had seen Aragorn leading the Army of the Dead to the Anduin, overcoming the corsairs, and then leading those ships up to relieve the siege of Minas Tirith while waving his shiny banner. And then do his healing schtick in the aftermath. He had performed actions to build acclaim, including ones that specifically signified his personal, actually mythic, kingship.
That in addition to his own Northern kinsmen and the men of Rohan led by Eomer, who was as good as his sworn brother by that point.
I’d never heard of “War on the Rocks”, so I checked it out on your recommendation. The first (and only) article I read, about “Havana syndrome”, was written by an LLM and illustrated by an AI image generator. It was mushy, prolix, and uninformative, adding almost nothing to the public record about this phenomenon. Anyway, thank you for your website, which is the opposite of all those things.
Percy and Ollie are extremely handsome lads.
Since I’ve been catching up on 99% Invisible’s mini-series on the book The Power Broker it occurs to me that even within institutional systems you can sometimes get pockets of personalist power. If, back in his day, Robert Moses had been hit by a bus and died the various institutions of New York City would continue. But it seems wildly unlikely that any successor could manage to hold more than a tiny fraction of the power he’d concentrated for himself — instead it would diffuse back into the disparate institutions from which he’d managed to assume de facto or de jure control of.
So if one was writing a story set in an overall institutional system it could still be possible to have a goal of overthrowing some smaller personalist power hiding within it. You could even envision a story set back when Robert Moses was tearing down great swaths of New York for elevated roadways where some folks who were going to lose (or already lost; if a revenge tale) their neighborhood to his roadworks struck out physically against someone who’d made himself too powerful for media or normal politics to curb. They couldn’t destroy, say, the Port Authority or the Triborough Bridge Authority institutions — but destroying Moses himself would likely end much of the neighborhood destruction. And that might be all the win the story (and its protagonists, or anti-heros, or whoever) needed
One thing that stands out to me is that, to the best of my knowledge (and based on personal experience in my own country), the heads of government in parliamentary systems tend to be lacking in charisma. And the voting public doesn’t really want or expect that trait of them. People vote for their representatives, the representatives elect the government, and there’s an expectation that will consist of boring competent people who will just carry out the party manifesto. I suspect one can comfortably get by in those countries while hardly knowing who the prime minister is.
I think the bane of institutional democracy is the increasing form in some countries of the celebrity head of government, for want of a better term. It places too much interest in the personality of the office holder, and creates a mounting expectation that their personal activity and visibility is significant to their attaining and executing power. This seems to help facilitate appointments that lean in the direction of cronyism.
I appreciated the question about self-teaching Latin. Would Wheelock still be the best resource, in your opinion, for people who had a reasonable amount of Latin at one point and then fell out of practice but want to get it back? (In my own case, I had enough to pass my grad school language requirements – four semesters and some supplementary medieval Latin – but I spent most of my time with Old English and Old Icelandic after that.)
Yes, but start from the beginning.
Remembering learning something is not the same as remembering the thing itself.