The Palace, in The Types of Regime, by Samuel Finer [his 'History of Government'; our Part 6]
[Followed shortly by Section 3.2. ‘The Forum’]
3. The Types of Regime Outlined
3.1. The Palace
3.1.1. Constituents of 'The Palace'
'The Palace' is a metonym for the people who inhabit it. It is a very useful metonym, however, because it also describes the place in which they work. Sometimes we may refer to this not as Palace but as Court, and this again is a metonym for the courtiers who frequent it.
The Palace is, invariably, the seat of a monarch: what kind is immaterial— emperor, king, prince, tyrant, dictator—the important point here is that the Palace is a type wherein supreme decision making rests with one individual. It is therefore, inter alia, autocratic and monocratic.
The Palace belongs to the monarch, and so, in a sense, do those who work in it. They are his servants. It is possible, and indeed it is very likely, that they will include priests and noblemen; but in this pure type of Palace polity these have no independence. The priests will have been appointed or approved by the monarch and he can remove them; likewise for the court nobility. It is quite possible that in the backlands there exist noblemen who live on their estates and are important in their own right, but these are not the ones who serve the monarch in his court. Indeed, very often there is an antagonism between the local and independent nobility and those who serve at court which provides the motor for governmental change.
Ancient Egypt, the Mesopotamian kingdoms or empires, the Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Chinese, and Islamic empires are all examples of the Palace type polity. So too are some of the eighteenth century European absolutisms—the court of Louis XIV, for instance.
3.1.2. The Base(s) of Its Legitimacy
Max Weber gives us a lot of help here and we can adapt some of his distinctions. Broadly speaking, we may divide the sources of the monarch's legitimacy into two, charisma and tradition. The first tends to slide into and become the second.
Charismatic Legitimation
'Charisma' is a theological term meaning the gift of grace; sociologically it refers to extraordinary, often superhuman powers and characteristics attributed to an individual. The powers may be military or religious or both. This charisma bespeaks a personality that breaks all norms. It is, literally, extraordinary. In its pristine state, charisma is personal. It is also highly unstable, for it can vanish as quickly as it came. …
Legitimation by Tradition
Charisma is immediate and personal. As the gift begins to fade with time, this charisma starts to fuse with tradition. For who is to succeed the charismatic leader and how will he be found? So occurs what Weber called the 'routinization of charisma'.
In some cases the ruler himself designates his successor. In others, a successor is acclaimed. This is sometimes expressed as 'elected'. But it is not an election in the sense we use it today. For this is not a choice; it is an epiphany. The ruler has been recognized, not made. In yet other cases the criterion of charisma is lineage descent from the original charismatic leader. Thus the emperors of Japan have from the earliest times been credited with descent from the sungoddess Amiterasu.
In the phase of routinized charisma the ruler's legitimacy rests on some divine, or at least supernatural, basis. It may be the claim that the king is himself a divinity, as in the case of the Egyptian pharaohs or the Aztec emperors. It may be—as in ancient Mesopotamia—the claim that the king is the vicar or ishakku of the gods, and that 'kingship descended from Heaven'. This is a kind of vicarious divinity.
The well known European example, the 'Divine Right of Kings', exhibited itself in a wide variety of forms, but all of them reposed on the notion that monarchs derived their authority from God. The Chinese case is strange and interesting. The Chinese believed in a very shadowy kind of supernatural entity called Ti'en or Heaven. One basis of the emperor's legitimacy was that he possessed the 'Mandate of Heaven' (a doctrine the Confucianists were to adopt and transmute into their own sanction for the emperor conducting himself along Confucian lines). But intertwined with this, and of more immediate salience, went the belief that the emperor was the link between humanity and the wider cosmos and that the indispensable harmony on earth and between earth and Heaven could be attained only if he pursued appropriate rituals of astonishing number and complexity.
One final point about all foregoing varieties of legitimation. They are all, without exception, authoritarian. There is no question of popular sovereignty. The monarch's authority descends on him from a Higher Power and sets him above the people. This is what Ullmann has appropriately called the 'descending theme of government' [Walter Ullmann, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages (London, 1975).
Popular Legitimation
But it may be objected that some autocrats—nowadays a great many—are legitimated by popular election. True, but for reasons that will become clear later, these cases are best regarded as a most important mixed, not pure, type of polity. They are, in fact, Palace+Forum politics.
For all that, there remain two seeming examples where the autocrat is apparently legitimated by popular election, and as these are the emperors of respectively the Roman and the Byzantine empires, they can hardly be shrugged off. Certainly these emperorships were supposedly the fruit of popular election, but this was entirely fictional, and moreover the notion lost any legitimating power it might have once had very early on.
In the Roman Empire the fiction grew from the Augustan settlement. Augustus pretended that the Senate and People of Rome had legally and duly conferred the highest magistracies upon him; hence the style in which he referred to himself—as the princeps. This fiction that the emperor was the outcome of election by the Senate was maintained till the very end of the Western Empire, but the succession was usually decided by an army acclaiming its general as imperator, or by the ruling emperor designating a co-emperor. In all cases the Senate simply ratified what had been decided elsewhere. When this pretence itself wore thin, as it had by the third century AD, it was succeeded by Ulpian's view that the emperors owed their legitimacy to a purported lex regia, by which (he alleged) the Senate and People of Rome had conferred their sovereignty upon the emperorship for all time.
This notion was to play an important role in the Middle Ages, when some jurists invoked it in the name of popular sovereignty, but in the Later Roman Empire it served only to legalize rather than legitimize the ruler.
In practice emperors came increasingly to rely on religious legitimation. The imperial cult, attempted somewhat half-heartedly ever since the days of the first divus, Julius Caesar himself, was not really pressed until the early third century AD. By the time of Diocletian the emperor was routinely claiming divine descent; he was surrounded by the most elaborate oriental pomp and ceremony; he had to receive the obeisance; and he was referred to always as 'the sacred'.
Once Christianity had become the empire's official religion, it did not weaken such religious legitimation, but made it an article of faith for the entire Christian ecclesia. The Sacred Christian Emperor was presented to the Christian community as ruling by Christ's grace for the purpose of sustaining his Church, and as isapostolos, the equal of the Holy Apostles themselves.
The 'popular election' of a Byzantine emperor was even more farcical because Constantinople had never had a Senate equivalent to Rome's. 'Election' by a duly constituted Senate was replaced in the empire's eastern capital by acclamation. Those who 'acclaimed', however, were the court-centred nobility and officials. Here again, it was the religious (Christian) legitimation that counted, symbolized by the coronation. To tell the truth, it was not a very powerful force. Most Byzantine emperors were not permitted to reign for long. The force of events, like the domestic controversy that attended Iconoclasm or failure in war, overrode it very easily.
3.1.3. The Characteristic Political Process
The surviving histories of Palace polities in, for instance, the pages of the Bible, Tacitus, or China's greatest historian Ssuma Ch'ien, are almost entirely concerned with personal relationships, with feud, faction, and intrigue. This is what makes them so entertaining, so dramatic. It also makes them very misleading.
Rulers—or their surrogates, at least—were in the business of governing. How they did this appears in their archives, not in the 'histories', and what we know of it is the result of patient reconstruction by recent scholars.
We have to distinguish, then, between the interpersonal relationships in the Palace—what we may call Palace politics, and which are essentially pathological—and the orderly processes by which the palace carried on the business of government.
In either case, of course, the typical personnel of the Palace polity remains, mutatis mutandis, much the same. They consist of the ruler and his family circle; his harem or gynecaeum; his courtiers, that is, persons who are either of noble birth or have had noble rank conferred on them; the higher clergy; the higher military commanders; and the ruler's personal staff which protects, counsels, informs, and acts for him and consists of such persons as ministers, clerks, slaves, eunuchs, guards, as the case may be.
These are the main interest of the court historians we have mentioned. But, of course, only when they act in an interesting way, and that means when they act, so to speak, out of turn—in short, pathologically. This pathology basically consists in one or other of two things, or both things together. The first is the intrigue and conspiracy among the courtiers, the ruler's staff, the harem, and the like, to get privileged access to the ruler's ear and if possible to shut out all other voices—the 'gatekeeper' function. Or it can go much further; the same kinds of plots from the same quarters, but to remove the ruler and replace him with somebody else, or—as often occurs where the throne is left empty—to preempt the succession.
The other variant of these last processes is where they are undertaken not by courtiers, but by the military. Here it is a prominent commander who takes the initiative in evicting the occupant of the throne, and either taking it for himself or choosing the successor. Often the civil and military personnel at the court coalesce to bring about such results. For English speaking people the most vivid portrayals of the pathology of Palace politics are to be found in Shakespeare's 'Histories'.
But there is a sober, systematized routine of government that goes on at the Palace, also.
Where the polity is reasonably well bureaucratized—by which I mean that it has already thrown up specialized agencies for the main tasks of government—it is common to find something like the following. The ruler makes his decisions either alone or in council or alone, after taking counsel. The decisions he takes are based upon information which has flowed in to be processed through the specialized agencies until it finally reaches ministers, who thereupon put it, together with the policy alternatives, to the ruler. But sometimes the ruler feels that he is being pressured by these ministers and advisers and sets up his own counter-intelligence agency: a personal staff of inner counsellors, usually of inferior birth and breeding to those who monopolize the great offices of state.
This process of sifting information, taking counsel, and then deciding can be done very well: witness Trajan or Hadrian or, in more recent Europe, Louis XIV or Frederick II. But it can go badly wrong. There is a pathology of this administrative process, also. Many are the cases where, with our historians' hindsight, we know that the information supplied to the ruler was suppressed or distorted; where the established official bureaucracy was at loggerheads with the ruler's personal staff; where his ultimate decision was bent by the influence of favourites or by the women of his harem; and, in the worst cases of all, by the defectiveness of the ruler. We find rulers who took no interest whatsoever in matters of state. There are others who did take an interest, but only to satisfy a momentary caprice. There are others who were mentally deficient or even mad.
There is one further point, I think, to be made about the political process in the Palace. It is the matter of ritual. Once again, this has to be reconstructed by modern historians, since the contemporaries took it for granted. The extent to which a ruler was committed to ritual varies with the kind of religion of his society. Where the ruler was the link between humanity and the cosmos, ritual bulked very large indeed and the ruler had to spend a vast amount of his time in it. Such was certainly the case in the archaic monarchies of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and in Imperial China. It was much less the case in, let us say, the Roman Empire, and even less so in its barbarian succession states.
[You have now reached the end of this Social Science Files exhibit.]
[Followed shortly by Section 3.2 (part 7). ‘The Forum’, and thereafter by the other ‘types’ which were listed in the previous (part 5) exhibit.]
The Source of today’s exhibit has been:
S. E. Finer, The History of Government From the Earliest Times: Volume I, Ancient Monarchies and Empires, Oxford University Press 1997
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