On Monarchism

And the Great Reactionary Folly

Monarchy is so old a form of government that no one exactly knows how old it really is. But we see it in the earliest civilizations, coming into being almost by default. Even Aristotle did not know how far back they went:

There is a fourth species of kingly rule—that of heroic times—which was hereditary and and legal, and was exercised over willing subjects. For the first chiefs were benefactors of the people in arts or arms; they either gathered them into a community, or procured land for them; and thus they became kings of voluntary subjects, and their power was inherited by their descendants. They took the command in war and presided over the sacrifices, except those which required a priest. They also decided causes either with or without an oath; and when they swore, the form of the oath was the stretching out of their sceptre. In ancient times their power extended continuously to all things whatsoever, in city and country, as well as in foreign parts; but at a later date they relinquished several of these privileges, and others the people took from them, until in some states nothing was left to them but the sacrifices; and where they retained more of the reality they had only the right of leadership in war beyond the border.

-Politics, Book III, Chapter 14

There are other things to take away from this passage. This is about a fourth kind of monarchy — the oldest kind — as opposed to hereditary despotism (“barbarian monarchy”), elective tyranny (the “Aesymnete” or “dictator”), and the hereditary generalship (“Lacedaemonian monarchy”). Which means that ancient monarchy, just within the world the ancient Greeks knew of, had many forms. Also, please observe that this ancient form of monarchy underwent transitions and evolutions and became something very different. Monarchy means the sovereign power held by a single person. That can happen under many forms, with many limitations. It could in the ancient world, and it can today.

Monarchism never needed an ideology until monarchy was dead. Monarchy was simply normal: an organic state structure, not constructed but evolved out of a tribe’s traditions and needs. We find the earliest examples of monarchism as a theory only when it began to be questioned, i.e. 17th Century England. And it immediately becomes very silly.

I once attempted to read John Locke’s Two Treaties on Government, but could not, because I got stuck in the first treatise, which amounts to an extended fisking of Patriarchia by Robert Filmer. It’s a bit like reading Aramis fisk Athos, and it becomes tedious very quickly. I’m largely in agreement with Ogle’s note above, that Monarchism is a newer school of thought, as modern a creation as the steam engine. However, that may not be to it’s advantage.

Monarchy existed primarily at a time when political theory either did not exist, or was confined to the upper echelons of society. Indeed, it would not be difficult to define The soi-disant Enlightenment as the era in which political philosophy spread to the masses, enabling the questioning of authority that previously simply was. Monarchism has been an attempt to answer the questioning, to react to modernism. Tradition becomes theory when it is dying.

And what are the theories of the monarchists?

1. The Enlightenment was a mistake. Societies are naturally hierarchical, and any attempt to make a non-hierarchical society is either doomed or must hide its power. Both capitalist and communist societies have demonstrated this. Not all human material is fungible; some people really are just peasants.¹

2. Monarchy, and especially absolute monarchy, is ordained by God. This is a natural consequence of the centuries long alliance between the Catholic clerisy and the Germanic aristocracy. I have written about this here, and also here. This idea is built up on two ideas: a wish to create a symbolic analogy of the Great Chain of Being, and a profound nausea at what the Enlightenment has wrought. As Christians, especially of the Catholic/Orthodox variety, become disenchanted with the Post-Modern Babylon, it seems reasonable to RETVRN to the moment right before, the Early Modern Period of Absolute Monarchy, in which an institutional state was managed by a sagacious monarch who kept the aristocrats on a leash, governing in the name of all.

3. The genealogy of past monarchs is important. Given the reactionary tendency of the idea, it’s completely expected that monarchists would find themselves wondering who the “rightful” Tsar of Russia is, the “rightful” King of France, the Jacobite heir to England or Carlist heir to Spain, what the current head of the House of Hoenzollern or Habsburg are up to. Given that primogeniture was the common method of succession at the moment most monarchies died, it’s natural to dream of Restoration of the kind that Charles II pulled off and Louis XVIII did not.

I must lay my cards on the table and admit to myself being a monarchist of sorts. Not because I have a philosophical belief, like Filmer’s, that monarchy is the one true government. Aristotle didn’t believe that, either. Even Machiavelli was flexible. The kind of state you live under, as I have said elsewhere, is not a syllogism but a fashion. Political systems shift and evolve as the society they grow from does so. When a society can no longer support a decadent system, it collapses and is replaced. This has always happened, and always will. You Cannot Solve Politics.

No, I simply believe that, as Enlightenment Democracy degenerates into Oligarchy, authoritarianism rises along with it.² Incompetent dictators will fail, but competent rulers will have the opportunity to build new states.

I agree that the Enlightenment promise of Universal Reason has instead yielded Universal Absurdity, because Logic serves whoever sets the Premises. I don’t think monarchy is intrinsically holy, despite the sacral/symbolic nature of a traditional monarch’s authority. The Old Testament had more than enough anti-monarchial sentiment, and the medieval alliance of Altar and Sword was one of convenience; the various republics of that time got a long with the Church just fine.

Finally, the descendants of ancient dynasties are as relevant to modern politics as the direct-male descendant of John Adams. Anyone with a passing knowledge of medieval history knows that royal dynasties collapsed, died out, lost power to usurpation and war. Where are the Merovingians? Where is the House of Wessex? Gone, baby, gone, because that’s what happens in this world. If France ever has a King again, he will not be a descendant of Hugh Capet.

This might seem obvious to say, but the longing to revivify what has died is a tendency those in Our Thing need to be aware of. Not Kill, because killing the past is what bugmen do. Just be aware that our love of Past Things is the love of Fantasies. That is not bad in itself, but we can’t confuse Myth with Fact. Myth is a guide, but we live here.

What I mean is, the Wokies are right when they say we can’t turn back the clock. The recent past can’t be erased any more than the distant past. We can’t return to a political order that emerged in the 4th century because this is the 21st century. That doesn’t mean we have to accept all their Inversionary shrieky nonsense. But new kings will not look like old ones.

This man, Julio Francisco Franco, gets called a Fascist by people who use the word to mean “something not desired”. The truth is rather more complicated: Franco allied with fascists, certainly, but then again, even progressives found Mussolini admirable until they didn’t. He refused to join the war on the Axis side, allowed Allied POW’s to escape through his country, protected Jews from the Holocaust, and shipped the most virulent Spanish Fascists to go get killed on the Russian Front. He didn’t appear to get along with Hitler, who said that he’d rather have his teeth pulled than deal with Franco again.

He was primarily a Catholic monarchist, and this was his problem. Having fought to overthrow the Revolutionary Spanish Republic, in defense of Catholicism, he could not but think of the regime he founded as a Regency in between legitimate kings. Never mind the fact that he governed Spain more successfully than any Spanish Bourbon since the 18th Century, pulling her out of the devastation of the Civil War and giving her economic growth and peace.³ Despite this, and despite his supreme political authority, he could not put a crown on his own head. He had not the magic of Royal Blood, so his supremacy meant nothing at all.

This is the Reactionary Folly: to engage in authoritarian half-measures, to believe blood and iron can be put away once you stop using it. In ancient Rome, Sulla made this mistake, and more recently, Augusto Pinochet. Both of them were too devoted to the dead past to make their revolution permanent.⁴ Franco could have put a crown on his own head, or established a Caudillate to follow him. Instead he did neither, out of deference to a monarchism too weak to maintain the supremacy he ceded them.

William the Conqueror had no theory of monarchism; he killed the old king in battle, marched to the cathedral, and told the bishop to get on with it. No one was offended by his lack of LeGiTiMaCy, any more than the Pope was offended when Pepin the Short told him that he wanted the Merovingian figurehead king gone quod not erat utilis⁵. The Pope made a deal and Pepin got his crown, same as Napoleon did. Order is the evidence of God’s favor, and collapse the evidence of His wrath.

Monarchy needs no more theory than that.

Speak not to us of laws, for we have swords.

-Pompey the Great

1. I am working my way towards a Class Theory of Politics, which will aim at respecting the legitimate interests of all classes, at recognizing the necessity of each, and giving each of them a seat at the table. There will be Ruling Classes and Non-Ruling Classes, and each will have rights (legitimate interests) and responsibilities (obligations). Click here for the beginnings of this.

2. All advocates of “Castizo Futurism” are pretending this dynamic is not at play. If you mass-import people from authoritarian political cultures, you get increasingly authoritarian politics. The Constitution ain’t Magic.

3. Yes, he killed a lot of his enemies, upwards of 200,000, and political rights were distinctly un-Englightened in his day. However, most of this was front-loaded into the early years of his reign; as time went on the killings and much of the repression and censorship relaxed, because Franco wasn’t an ideologue bent on breaking human nature to his theory. As dictatorial regimes of the 20th century went, you could do a lot worse.

4. Sulla was perhaps less guilty in this case. He really intended to have the Republic still operating while he made needed reforms to it. Augustus copied his approach more than Julius Caesar’s.

5. “Because he is not useful.”