Illegitimate Monarchical Government
What makes a government legitimate or illegitimate? Is it possible for a government to be legit or are all states sus? The entire discussion revolving around legitimacy seems to involve a lot of moral dogma. Im not sure that it is a good idea to moralize when we philosophize because morality might be the product of philosophy instead of vice versa. Saying that a king or queen is good or evil seems to involve a lot of assumptions and theoretical presuppositions. Plus Its difficult to adopt a position or accept it as axiomatic and necessarily true if you dont already believe that it follows logically from previously stated premises. Is monarchy the best form or kind of government? Or is this question equivalent to asking how you would prefer to be enslaved and or executed? I dont have any personal preference when it comes to forms of government and I am interested in hearing what other people think about this subject. Also I know that good governance or good government sounds like a slogan but it might be worthwhile to examine it thoroughly in detail.
Comments (38)
Is it a group of 100 or a billion? Is it stone age, nomadic, agrarian, age of empires, or a modern technocratic state?
Monarchies must have arisen as a suitable social structure at some stage in history. Why did they work in that context, and what context are we now discussing them in?
What is a king if he has no court, no lords and ladies, no knights or servants? There has to be some kind of hierarchy in place otherwise a king lacks all the usual distinctions that would make him any different.
So scale does matter. To be a king you would at least need a population where all the average folk know who the king is by name, but the king probably doesn't know many of his subjects by name.
This kind of information asymmetry is essential to there being the kind of tight hierarchical order we would be talking about.
And monarchies would work in the sense that they are effective and last. As a way to distribute power in a society, they would allow a kingdom to coherently regulate itself while also coherently reacting against other kingdoms, or groupings of less social order.
We would expect likewise that the monarchies would start to fail when having to deal with new and more effective varieties of social organisation. So there would be a time when they stop working as something better has come along.
Couldn't a government experience instability as a result of alternative factor such as plague and natural disasters? I think it is a bit unorthodox for someone to automatically conclude that the only explanation for failure and malfunction in a social system is some form of obsolescence. Correlation and causation are notorious for the ease with which they can be incorrectly identified.
Quoting apokrisis
I think that what you are referring to would constitute a government in exile which could at least theoretically regain or establish its hegemonic position as the dominant force in society as well as on the international stage of warfare and geopolitics. I'm not sure that the list of things you mentioned are as decisive as you seem to think but I am also open to the idea and I could be wrong so feel free to try and sway me. On the whole though I would say what I have said already which is that correlation and causation are actually very relevant. The things you mentioned may indeed be correlated with regnal power but may not be causally connected in the sense that they are what gives a king his essence.
Sure. It would have to be resilient in the face of perturbations of all kinds. That is part of the design criteria.
Quoting Average
Theories of self-organising systems would point out that this is a coin with two sides. The better adapted an organism is to its niche, the more brittle it becomes if the world changes in ways that werent anticipated.
So obsolescence can be revealed - as when an asteroid hits the planet and makes it suddenly too cold to be a dinosaur anymore. But up until that moment, the dinosaurs were wonderfully fine tuned to their circumstances.
Quoting Average
Its your argument. So you would have to define what is essential, what is accidental, to being a king.
Im just pointing out where I would start. Which is defining what counts as his kingdom.
This seems like a strange yardstick and I'm not sure what it is supposed to measure. If it is the "coherence" of foreign and domestic policies I'm not sure if there ever was a social system that lived up to such a high standard of excellence. Obviously it would be a lovely ideal to try and strive towards but it might not be the most useful tool in terms of day to day decisions. As you stated even the mighty T Rex went extinct but does this mean that it was less majestic as a result of it's mortality? Immortality might be nice in theory but in practice we are probably stuck with the inevitable end in the form of death. I don't want to ramble too much so I apologize if some of this is tangential or seems like irrelevant nonsense.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm no pro so in other words I'm just an amateur arm chair philosopher indulging in pure speculation. I confess that I have no idea where I would even begin attempting to describe what counts as a realm in terms that could qualify as a definition. One man's trash is another man's treasure as they say so I don't know if your method is my cup of tea but I think I can appreciate your insistence on definition.
What did I say that you are now reacting against? This is how you might identify the beliefs which ground your own views here.
So I argue from a viewpoint that social structures are pragmatic. They allow communities to organise in ways that are resilient enough to last a long time.
A king-kingdom setup is functional for some good reason. History has already shown that. But now we need to sharpen our understanding in terms of why it might be sub-optimal in other eras outside where it once dominated.
Im not sure what your paradigm of political excellence might involve. You would have to state your model here. But are you looking at it from the point of view of a modern democracy which is obviously better as who wants to have to obey some kind of absolute and hereditary autocrat?
Quoting Average
You seem interested in this as an exercise in doing philosophy. This is what critical thinking looks like.
Start by digging into what you already believe to be true so you can contrast it with alternatives to that way of understanding things.
I am asking what does it even mean to be a king except that you have a kingdom. So define kingdom and you make clear what it is you think of as a king. After that, we can compare and contrast.
Couldn't you just as easily ask what does it mean to be a kingdom except that it has a king? I mean it seems kind of strange to define something in terms that are etymologically linked to it in the first place. That would basically be a circular definition. At least that's what I think.
Quoting apokrisis
What about historical revisionism? How do you know that your understanding or interpretation of history is actually factually grounded. Even if it is why am I under any obligation to accept it as such without doing my own due diligence? Simply asserting things like this doesn't seem that persuasive.
Give it a go then. Define a king without mentioning kingdoms. Define kingdoms without mentioning kings.
If you can do it, your approach works. But you have yet to do it.
Quoting Average
Its your argument. And you have provided no facts to ground your position. You havent even defined a position properly. We dont even know what would count as facts for or against.
That aint persuasive, is it? In fact it doesnt even yet reach the threshold of attempting to persuade.
You are sat at the chess board but havent even made the first move yet.
What position? I don't remember making any kind of deductive or inductive argument. Maybe I did but I definitely don't remember it. Maybe I haven't made the first move because it's your turn. All I did was ask for other people to share their opinions in an attempt to resolve some of my philosophical puzzles.
Now do you really just want opinions or a rational critique of how to take this further?
I posited pragmatism as an alternative axiomatic basis. I said it is factual that monarchies persisted as historically successful forms of social organisation.
So was this because they were moral or because they were pragmatic?
Did you have some other axiomatic basis to discuss or something?
Do you have facts that would count against my pragmatic approach?
Quoting apokrisis
Honestly I think that both could be beneficial.
As in Maslow's hierarchy of needs - https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html#:~:text=There%20are%20five%20levels%20in,esteem%2C%20and%20self%2Dactualization.
So any form of human social organisation starts with delivering food and shelter. It then can start to deliver belonging and esteem. Self-actualisation can then be regarded as taking things to another level. Or at least that seems to be a positive reason why liberal democracy claims to be better than what came before.
A monarchy at least could tick off the first four levels for enough of the time to be a form of political order that kept rebuilding itself. That would give it a pragmatic basis for assessing it.
Quoting apokrisis
This reminds me of marxism and it's theory of the base and superstructure. Even though I myself am not a marxist I can understand it's appeal to different people. However I need to insist on the reality that priorities differ from person to person. One could say that man shall not live by bread alone. There are other values besides material ones and one could invert the formula and start with the latter part of this list. After achieving these things we could then go on to construct the so called essentials of housing and food production. What I'm trying to say is that the simple fact of a famine killing large parts of a nation's population doesn't automatically mean its government is failing in terms of its most important mission. For example the opposite extreme could be overconsumption or overproduction and obesity.
Well both are bad. But famine is worse. In reality, no one is forcing your to over-eat, especially if you voted for a self-actualising democracy that makes it your own informed choice.
So famine is a much more basic failure. And what you would be aiming for is a political system that could maximise population health over time.
Can you tell me what that looks like. Maybe more like Japan and the Mediterranean than Anglo-sphere customs and regulations?
I don't see how suicide is somehow better than death by natural causes or natural disasters. There is such a thing as advertising and propaganda designed to induce emotional reactions and or emotional eating and other unhealthy habits. Most of the time this stuff is designed to circumvent the intellect and appeal to that which is furthest from the rational side of human nature. I will cite Edward Bernays and his theories of democratic dictatorship in human society. All of this is implicitly applicable to the political side of human life like voting.
This bit. Something I hadnt said, but which you now claim as a fact worth considering.
Are you just wanting to play games? Or do you have an interest in the OP you posed?
How does f cause g?
I was thinking about this, and what rights a population might have to overthrow the government if it were considered illegitimate. This is what I sketched out. It's my first thoughts, but this is what I came up with:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security
Considered illegitimate by who? If you are suggesting that the consent of the governed and the opinion of the many is somehow the basis of legitimate government then I am forced to cite Edward Bernays and his theories of democratic dictatorship. The electorate, the citizens, or the subjects are easily manipulated by clever and crafty men and women covertly subverting the intellect.
Quoting Hanover
Is this the deistic formulation of creation which would mean mechanistic materialism? It can easily be asserted that the idea that the truth is self evident is self evidently false. It may sound like a contradiction but how can you refute it if no argument is even provided to support the conclusion? Anything that can be asserted without an argument can be rejected without an argument just as easily. Self evident principles and conclusions seem like they are probably just lazy philosophy.
The problem is in your question. "legitimate" is related to "legislation" and so your question addresses the legitimacy of the legitimising process. Transferring the meaning to reason and philosophy does not help; because then you are questioning the logic of logic...
Quoting Average
...like this. Reason can help to keep our thinking straight in the sense that it is truth preserving. This means that the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion of a reasoned argument. but without 'self-evident' principles as premises, reason has nothing to operate on.
Thus you have an unassailable rational position of nihilism and ignorance. The rest of us have no other recourse but to point out the vicious circle and move on to organise the world as best we can on fallible but congenial claims we take as 'self-evident.' When we get in a total mess, we might go back and see if another principle will help us better. "Some men are God's appointed rulers." used to be held self-evident, but there were problems...
You use different tools for different problems don't you? If you're an up and coming agricultural society slowly transitioning from a pastoral one due to finding a place to settle long enough that people seem to tolerate, you have to decisively correct problems as they happen when they happen (famine, invasion, rebellion, etc) in order to cement your society's place in the area sufficiently well enough to begin the phase of permanent or modern society (industrial). You can't risk legions of men rebelling against you or small groups of citizens who in their ever growing freedom start to forget the horrors of survival and begin to shift their obsessions of desire from need to want, while still operating under ingrained the life or death biological mindset in every now shortsighted and selfish action. You need to stop it right then and there at all costs no matter who objects or, quite possibly, everybody will perish.
Now, once you don't have to worry about the lot of that your focus shifts to just making sure crazy, foolish, or large people don't bother or molest sane, intelligent, or smaller people so society can function as a free and friendly thing people want to and are proud to be part of and so will protect with their lives willingly and by choice, no conscription needed. This is what democracies excel at.
An excellent monarchy is better than a corrupt democracy and vice versa. Of course, common sense will tell you not only does the apple sometimes fall far from the tree, it can end up in the next city. Therefore, now that things have appeared to have settled some - for the moment - the cruel dictator telling you what to do depriving you of your wants is a larger concern than the benevolent monarch defending the kingdom against "the hordes" that would otherwise deprive you of your needs.
Isn't this only technically true in a deductive argument? I was under the impression that an inductive argument only provides good reasons to believe the conclusion is true but doesn't guarantee that it is necessarily correct.
Quoting unenlightened
You seem to be assuming that you will survive the ensuing chaos. The consequences of self evident conclusions might be too catastrophic for you to simply use as a learning experience especially when all of society is forced to confront the ramifications of someones false political or sociological theories.
Couldn't it easily be argued that democracies also excel at placing crazy, foolish, and large people in positions of power where they then proceed to molest sane, intelligent, and smaller people? Isn't this famously what happened to socrates? Maybe my understanding of athenian history is far from factual but I'd be surprised if democratic regimes never or only rarely behaved tyrannically.
No, I assume some of us will. If none of us do, your question of legitimacy has no application either.
But I see you are interested in a form of dialogue that I cannot be bothered with, so you'll have to carry on without me.
Good OP.
We have to keep in mind the fact that some successful countries consider the monarchy as "sacred" such as Japan and Naruhito is considered as a "emperor". He is the only head of the state in the world who actually holds this heading. I don't consider him (neither Japanese Imperial Family) as "illegitimate". Also, it is clear and there are a lot of arguments proving the fact that Japan is one of the most important countries in the world. After WWII, there was a deep frustration on the figure of the emperor. Nevertheless, Hirohito remained in power until his death in 1989 because Japan understands that they would lose their culture and honour removing the sacred icon of the Imperial family.
This situation is similar in other European countries: UK, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, etc... where the role of the kingdom has a strong historical root. Furthermore politics, a lot of citizens see in the monarchy the representation of the culture and values of their nation.
Nevertheless, we have a big problem: we discovered so recently that some royalty members are corrupt or they act without integrity. This issue leads people to start doubting about how worthy is the role of the monarchy. We can say in Europe there is a deep crisis along royal families, but don't worry that much, Japan is and will still be there.