Monarchy

Plato treats the art of politics as a form of knowledge comparable to medicine or navigation, and he draws from this the conclusion that the man who possesses such knowledge has a title to rule whether or not his subjects consent. In the Statesman the Eleatic Stranger describes the true ruler as a royal weaver, one who combines the differing strands of civic character into a single fabric. Law occupies a secondary place on this view. It is a general prescription which cannot anticipate the particular case, and it is for that reason inferior to the living judgment of a man who knows. Whether such knowledge is ever available to a human ruler is a question Plato leaves open, and his answers to it differ from dialogue to dialogue. The standing of political knowledge among the arts and sciences is considered further under the ideas of Prudence and Wisdom.

The Statesman classifies constitutions by two criteria, the number of those who rule and whether the rulers govern according to established laws. Six forms result. Among those bound by law, monarchy stands first, aristocracy second, democracy third; among the lawless, the order is reversed, so that tyranny stands lowest of all. The reason offered turns on efficiency rather than on justice. Where the forms are otherwise equally lawful, government by one moves with less friction than government by a few or by many. Where the forms are lawless, one man unrestrained can go further in doing harm than a multitude which, as Plato remarks, is unable to accomplish either any great good or any great evil. This argument from unity of direction reappears in the modern defense of a single executive within a republic, and is treated more fully under the ideas of Government and Law.

Above all these forms Plato sets a government which, he says, excels them all and is among states what God is among men. It appears monarchical in type, yet it is not lawless in the manner of tyranny, since it stands above the need of written or customary rules altogether. The myth retold in the Statesman describes a god shepherding men and deciding every matter by wisdom without recourse to statute. In the Laws the argument takes another direction. The Athenian Stranger, doubting that such a ruler will appear among men, proposes for the colony of Magnesia a constitution which combines monarchical authority with popular consent and the sovereignty of law. Plato thus seems to conceive monarchy in two quite distinct ways, as an absolute rule superior to law and also as one of the legally limited forms of government.

The two conceptions descend separately through the tradition. Aristotle takes up the first in his treatment of the god-like man whom it would be unjust to number among ordinary citizens, while the mixed constitution of the Laws is developed by Aquinas and by later defenders of the mediaeval regime that is at once royal and political. Mill, denying that the rule of even a good despot could be an ideal, argues against both.

Aristotle enumerates five types of kingship in Book III of the Politics: the Spartan generalship, the hereditary rule of the barbarian kingdoms, the elected dictatorship or aisymneteia, the kingship of the heroic age, and absolute kingship or pambasileia, in which one man has the disposal of everything. He sets the last apart from all the rest. The other four are in one way or another kingships according to law, and of these Aristotle says that the so-called limited monarchy is not a distinct form of government at all, since under any constitution, democratic or aristocratic alike, a general may hold office for life and one person may be made supreme over the administration of the state. Absolute kingship alone raises the question in its full form, for it corresponds, as he puts it, to the control of a household: as household management is the kingly rule of a family, so kingly rule is the household management of a city or a nation.

The title to absolute rule, on Aristotle's view, depends upon a radical inequality between ruler and ruled. If there were a man so far surpassing the rest in virtue and political capacity that no law could measure him, it would be unjust to treat him merely as a citizen and to subject him to the rotation of office. Such a man would stand to others as a god to men, and the just course would be to obey him willingly. It would seem equally unjust, Aristotle adds, for a man who lacks that superiority to rule his fellows in the manner of a king rather than holding public office for a time. Since none of the historic kingships he classifies exhibits the divine sort of rule, absolute monarchy of the kind he describes remains a hypothetical construction, as it does for Plato.

Actual kingship, in Aristotle's account of its history, has a patriarchal rather than a divine origin. It is the form of government appropriate to the village, which is an outgrowth of the family, and for that reason the Hellenic states were governed by kings before they came together into cities. The same comparison runs in the other direction when he says that the rule of a father over his children is royal. Book V treats the corruption to which one-man rule is liable. The king who looks to his own advantage rather than to that of his subjects becomes a tyrant, and the two are separated by the greatest difference although both are forms of rule by one. Hereditary succession leaves the difference to chance, since virtue does not pass reliably from father to son. The line dividing kingship from tyranny is examined further under the idea of Tyranny.

The conditional character of Aristotle's defense sets the terms of much later dispute. The argument which would justify absolute rule by a supremely virtuous man supplies no means of identifying him beforehand or of removing him should he prove ordinary. Aquinas retains the conditional justification and adds to it the analogy of divine governance; Hobbes rests sovereignty on the need for peace rather than on any superiority in the sovereign; Montesquieu denies that Aristotle's classification identifies monarchy at all, holding that the Persian empire was a despotism and Sparta a republic.

Aquinas argues for kingship from analogy. Every multitude, he holds, is best directed by one, as the body is ruled by the heart, the soul by reason, and the universe by God. A ship with two pilots will founder, and a kingdom whose authority is divided will fall into the discord it exists to prevent. Since the good proper to a community is its peace and unity, that form of government is best which is most apt to secure them, and government by one seems more apt than government by many. The parallel between the rule of a king over a kingdom and the rule of God over creation is drawn throughout, though Aquinas does not conclude from it that any particular king holds his office by direct divine appointment. The wider question of divine governance and its analogies is treated under the ideas of God and World.

The same reasoning that recommends kingship indicates its danger. Aquinas distinguishes the king, who governs for the common good and according to law, from the tyrant, who governs for himself; and he holds tyranny to be the worst of the corrupt forms, worse than oligarchy or the rule of the mob, for the reason that it is the corruption of what is best. Where power is most concentrated, its misuse is most damaging. He therefore counsels that royal power be tempered, so that the king may not readily fall into tyranny. On the question of what subjects may do when it has fallen, Aquinas allows recourse to a higher authority and, in certain cases, the deposition of a ruler by the community which set him up, while cautioning that resistance may produce disorders worse than the tyranny it opposes.

In the Summa Theologica Aquinas describes the best ordering of a polity as one that is partly kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy, in so far as a number of persons are set in authority; and partly democracy, in so far as the rulers can be chosen from the people and the people have the right to choose them. He cites the Mosaic polity as a precedent, in which Moses and his successors ruled as princes, seventy elders formed a council, and the people had a voice in the selection of officers. Within this mixed arrangement the sovereign stands in a double relation to law. He is exempt from its coercive power, since properly speaking no man coerces himself; yet he has not the power to frame laws except as representing the people, whose consent expressed by custom counts for more than his authority. This conception of the mixed regime is discussed further under the ideas of Constitution and Government.

A question is left to Aquinas's successors. If the king's authority is limited by divine and natural law, it remains to be settled what earthly power enforces the limit. Hobbes holds that any such limit destroys sovereignty and restores the condition of war which sovereignty was instituted to end. Locke answers instead that the community retains the power of last resort, and describes the king, in a formula close to Aquinas's own, as holding his authority as the people's representative rather than in his own right.

Machiavelli sets aside the question of what monarchy ought to be and considers instead what the maintenance of princely power in fact requires. The Prince is addressed to a new ruler, and its counsel proceeds from the observation that a man who acts in all respects as a good man will come to ruin among so many who are not good. The prince must study how to maintain his state, and this may oblige him to act against mercy, faith, humanity, and religion as necessity dictates. The traditional virtues are not denied their name; they are made conditional upon circumstance, so that liberality practiced without measure impoverishes a state and a reputation for cruelty may prove more merciful than the disorders which excessive clemency permits. Whether such counsel describes the conduct of princes or prescribes it has been disputed since the book appeared, and the question of the relation between political conduct and moral rule is treated under the ideas of Virtue and Vice and Prudence.

The image of the lion and the fox states the argument compactly. There are two modes of contending, the one by law and proper to men, the other by force and proper to beasts; and because the first does not always suffice, the prince must know how to make use of the second. He must be a lion to frighten wolves and a fox to recognize snares, since one who understands only force cannot detect a trap. To this Machiavelli joins his account of fortune, which he estimates to govern about half of what men do, leaving the remainder to virtù, the energy and adaptability by which a ruler meets changing circumstance. Princes who succeed are those whose manner of proceeding accords with the times; those who fail are commonly the ones who persist in a method that once served them. In the Discourses the same considerations are applied to republics, whose longer duration Machiavelli attributes to their greater capacity to accommodate diversity of character.

The prince so described resembles neither Plato's philosopher-king, who rules by knowledge, nor Aristotle's king, who rules for the common good. His art is the acquisition and retention of power. Machiavelli is not on that account indifferent to how subjects fare, since he holds that the surest defense of a prince is the goodwill of his people, that fortresses are of less use than the affection of those who might otherwise storm them, and that a ruler should keep his hands from the property and the women of his subjects, men forgiving the death of a father sooner than the loss of a patrimony. Severity is recommended where it secures order and condemned where it is prolonged, cruelties being well used when committed at a stroke and ill used when they increase with time. The appearance of mercy, faith, and religion is to be maintained throughout, whatever the prince may find himself compelled to do.

Monarchy is thus treated as a question of survival and technique rather than of justice or divine institution. Hobbes proceeds from a comparable estimate of human nature, though he derives from it an argument for sovereignty rather than advice to a sovereign. Rousseau reads The Prince as a book written for the instruction of peoples under the pretense of instructing kings, and later opponents of absolute rule cite it as evidence that princes are not to be trusted with unlimited power. The strategies of princes are considered further under the idea of Tyranny.

Hobbes derives the case for absolute government from the problem of civil war. In the state of nature, where there is no common power to keep men in awe, they live in a condition of war of every man against every man. To escape it they covenant with one another to authorize one man or one assembly to bear their person and to act in their name. The sovereign so constituted holds power that is absolute and indivisible, since a power limited by another is not sovereign but subject to whatever body imposes the limit. On this reasoning the necessity of absolute government does not depend upon any superiority in the sovereign. Hobbes does not ask whether the man in whose hands such power is placed deserves it by reason of personal excellence, which distinguishes his argument from the ancient discussions of royal government that make the title to rule turn on virtue.

Absolute power belongs, on this account, to aristocracy and democracy as much as to monarchy. The three forms are equal in the power they confer, and differ only in what Hobbes calls convenience, which is the ground on which Chapter 19 of Leviathan prefers the rule of one. In a kingdom the private interest of the sovereign is more nearly the same as the public, since the riches, strength, and reputation of a king rest upon the riches, strength, and reputation of his subjects, whereas the members of an assembly may enrich themselves at the public cost through faction and corrupt favor. A single ruler may take counsel privately from whomever he chooses; an assembly deliberates before an audience and is exposed to the contagion of oratory. Its resolutions are also liable to inconstancy as members are absent or present. Against these Hobbes sets the one inconvenience of monarchy which he acknowledges, the difficulty of succession, and he assigns the disposal of the succession to the reigning sovereign.

To the objection that monarchy lodges too much power in one fallible person, Hobbes replies that every sovereign may err and oppress, and that the harm done by a king's favorites is smaller than the harm done by the factional warfare into which divided authority falls. The inconveniences charged against monarchy proceed, he says, not from monarchy but from the ambition and injustice of subjects. He holds further that only absolute monarchy is monarchy at all. Where the king is limited in power, the sovereignty lies in whatever assembly had the right to limit him, as in Sparta, where the kings led the armies but the sovereignty was in the Ephori, so that such a government is in fact aristocracy or democracy. His illustration of absolute monarchy is the rule of one people over another, of a mother country over colonies or a conqueror over a subjugated nation, which suggests a parallel between the problems of monarchy and those treated under the idea of Empire.

By grounding sovereignty in self-preservation rather than in divine right or natural hierarchy, Hobbes gives the argument for absolute government a form that does not depend on the older theories of royalty. The argument that the nature of the state requires a unified repository of absolute power appears again, in altered shape, in Hegel. Locke and Rousseau both define their positions against it, the one by denying that a ruler above law can be said to govern a civil society, the other by locating sovereignty inalienably in the people.

Locke begins where Hobbes begins, in the state of nature, and arrives at the contrary conclusion. Men are in that condition free and equal, with rights to life, liberty, and estate, and they quit it by consent to secure those rights through a settled law, an indifferent judge, and a power to execute the sentence. What is wanting in nature is not power but impartiality, since there each man is judge in his own cause. The form of a government, Locke says, depends upon the placing of the supreme power, which is the legislative; where the power of making laws is placed in the hands of one man, the government is a monarchy. He observes at the same time that in all moderated monarchies and well-framed governments the legislative and executive powers are in distinct hands. The question of what makes a government constitutional is treated further under the ideas of Constitution and Law.

Absolute monarchy fails by this criterion. A monarch who holds both legislative and executive power and stands above the law remains, with respect to his subjects, in the state of nature, since whenever a dispute arises between him and any one of them he is judge in his own cause. Such a government preserves the defect it was instituted to remedy, and men who guard themselves against the mischiefs of polecats and foxes are, on this view, taking it for safety to be devoured by lions. The argument bears equally against the theory of the divine right of kings advanced in the tracts of Filmer, which the First Treatise is written to answer. Locke there denies that royal authority descends from Adam's paternity, and so denies the patriarchal derivation of political power which Aristotle traced in the village and which Aquinas and Montesquieu treat in other terms.

Monarchy as such is not rejected. A king who governs under law, sharing in legislation only as one representative among others, may be a lawful ruler, and Locke describes the moderated monarchy of England in these terms. The king's distinctive office is executive, and its absoluteness he defines by prerogative, which is a power in the hands of the prince to provide for the public good in cases which certain and unalterable laws could not safely direct, acting according to discretion without the prescription of law and sometimes against it. The extent of prerogative narrows as matters come to be regulated by statute, and Locke denies that the people encroach upon the crown when they secure by positive law what had been left indefinitely in the prince's hands. Where the prerogative includes the power of convening the legislature, he observes, there can be no judge on earth between them, and the appeal lies to heaven.

The discussion is thus shifted from the comparison of forms of government to the limits of any government whatever. Locke's picture of a mixed regime, in which the king's power is absolute within the executive sphere while sovereignty is not, states in modern terms the arrangement which Bracton called a regimen regale et politicum and Fortescue a political kingdom. Montesquieu takes the English constitution of the same period as his model of monarchy; Rousseau and the authors of The Federalist press the argument further and deny that any monarchy, absolute or limited, is compatible with the sovereignty of the people.

Montesquieu separates monarchy from absolute government entirely. The Spirit of the Laws divides governments into three kinds, republican, monarchical, and despotic, and assigns to each both a nature, which is its structure, and a principle, which is the passion that sets it in motion. The nature of monarchy is the rule of one person according to fixed and established laws, exercised through intermediate, subordinate, and dependent powers, chief among them the hereditary nobility, and preserved by a depositary of the laws such as the parlements. Its principle is honor, by which Montesquieu means the ambition of each rank to maintain its own prerogative and distinction. Monarchies and republics thus stand together as the two kinds of constitutional government, aristocracy and democracy being the two kinds of republic; despotism, whose principle is fear, stands apart from both. The relation between a government's form and the manners, climate, and extent of the country it governs is pursued throughout the work.

On this classification absolute monarchy does not deserve the name of monarchy and should be called despotism instead. A king who governs by settled law and respects the prerogatives of the intermediate bodies differs in kind from a despot who governs by will and caprice; when he destroys the nobility, silences the depositary of the laws, and draws all power to his own person, the monarchy is destroyed and despotism takes its place. Montesquieu applies the distinction to the ancient world and finds no true monarchy there. He criticizes Aristotle's fivefold classification of kingships on the ground that the Persian empire was a despotic state and Sparta a republic, and he remarks that the ancients had not a clear idea of monarchy. Since his own conception requires a body of nobles holding intermediate powers, the form he describes belongs to the kingdoms that arose out of feudal conditions.

Book XI extends the argument through the distribution of powers. Political liberty is found only where power is not abused, and to prevent abuse it is necessary that power should be a check to power; legislative, executive, and judicial functions must therefore be lodged in different hands. Montesquieu takes the English constitution of the end of the seventeenth century as his model, and says of that government that it may justly be called a republic disguised under the form of a monarchy. A king may hold the executive power and a share in legislation through his negative voice, while the making of laws belongs to a representative body and judgment to courts drawn from the people. Montesquieu also holds that monarchy suits states of middling extent, republics small territories, and despotism large empires, since a wide dominion requires a speed of decision that distance would otherwise defeat.

Monarchy is here justified by its institutional structure rather than by the virtue of the ruler, and a question follows which Rousseau presses. If honor, the ambition of rank, is the passion on which monarchy depends, then the form rests upon a cultivated attachment to inequality, which those who hold sovereignty to reside in the people cannot accept. Hegel, agreeing that constitutional monarchy is the opposite of despotism, replies that Montesquieu has described the feudal kingdom rather than the state whose constitution is fully articulated.

Rousseau considers monarchy within his distinction between sovereignty and government. Sovereignty belongs inalienably to the people and consists in the exercise of the general will; government is the intermediate body charged with applying that will to particular cases. Whether the government is committed to one, to a few, or to many is on this account a separate question from where sovereignty resides, and the form of government remains subordinate in every case. A king is therefore not a sovereign but a magistrate, holding office at the sovereign's pleasure. Rousseau's terms shift with his purpose, so that he says in one place that every legitimate government is republican, meaning by that any state governed by laws, and in another that monarchical government ranks below republican; yet he also treats royal rule as one of the three legitimate forms. The relation of sovereignty to the several forms of government is treated further under the ideas of Government and Democracy.

Certain advantages are granted to monarchy within this framework. A single magistrate acts with the greatest vigor, since all the springs of the machine are in one hand and the state moves toward one end without the friction of assembly. Where a people is numerous and its territory extensive, that vigor may be needed more than direct participation, and Rousseau accordingly holds that monarchy suits large states as democracy suits small ones and aristocracy those of middling size. He observes also that the choice of ministers is often better made by a prince, who appoints on his own judgment, than by an assembly, which advances men whom the suffrages of the many have made conspicuous. The bearing of a country's size and wealth upon its form of government is discussed further under the idea of State.

Against these Rousseau sets the defect he takes to be inseparable from royal government. In every form the private will of the magistrate tends to work against the general will, and in monarchy that tendency is strongest, since the whole force of the government is lodged in a single person whose interest is that the people should be weak and unable to resist. The court that surrounds him labors in the same direction. Succession supplies a further difficulty. Election opens intervals of faction and civil war, while heredity leaves the state to the accident of birth and raises children and monsters to the throne as often as capable men. Rousseau adds that the education of princes is such as to unfit them for rule, and that the history of kingdoms shows long stretches of weak or wicked reigns broken only occasionally by an able one.

By placing sovereignty inalienably in the people, Rousseau reduces monarchy to a revocable administrative arrangement rather than a form ordained by God or superior by nature. Kant and the authors of The Federalist take a similar view of popular sovereignty while differing from him on representation. Hegel, on the other side, dismisses the sovereignty of the people as a confused notion and holds that a people without its monarch is a formless mass and no longer a state.

Hegel conceives monarchy as a moment within the rational constitution of the modern state rather than as a rival to constitutional government. In the Philosophy of Right the state is the actuality of ethical life, and its constitution articulates the universal, the particular, and the individual will. The legislature answers to the universal in the making of laws, the executive to the particular in administration, and the crown to the individual in the moment of decision. Constitutional monarchy so understood is the opposite of despotism, and its development, Hegel says, is the achievement of the modern world. He credits Montesquieu with recognizing that the ancient world knew only the patriarchal kind of kingship, a transference of familial government to larger communities, but holds that Montesquieu's own account, resting as it does on the privileges of nobles and corporations, describes feudal monarchy rather than a state organized into an objective constitution.

The monarch's office is not command in the Hobbesian sense. He is the point at which the state acquires subjective individuality, the one who says "I will" and places the dot upon the i, completing as a final term what the articulation of the constitution has already determined. In a well-ordered state the content of decisions comes from the laws and from ministers who are answerable for their counsel, and the crown adds the formal moment of resolve. From this Hegel draws a conclusion which sets him apart from the ancient defenders of royal rule: the particular character of the monarch is of little consequence in a mature constitution, since the objective side belongs to law alone. The question of personal excellence, which for Plato and Aristotle supplied the whole title to absolute rule, is here declared irrelevant, as it is by Hobbes for different reasons.

Hegel opposes both the contractual theory of the state and popular sovereignty in Rousseau's sense. The state is not made by agreement among individuals who exist beforehand; it is the ethical substance through which individuality becomes possible. The sovereignty of the people he calls one of the confused notions based on the wild idea of the people, holding that a people taken without its monarch and without the articulation which monarchy accompanies is a formless mass and no longer a state. Hereditary succession follows from this, not because blood conveys virtue but because birth removes the crown from the contingencies of election and faction. Hegel does not argue for divine right, though he maintains that the constitution establishing the supremacy of the crown is not something made by men but is divine and constant. It may be asked whether an account which treats the sovereignty of the state as absolute toward its own subjects escapes the objection that monarchy is inseparable from absolutism.

Monarchy is thus absorbed into a theory of the rational state. The constitutional monarch here is neither Plato's philosopher-king, who rules because he knows, nor Hobbes's sovereign, who rules because peace requires it, but a formal principle of decision within an institutional order. Hegel's remark that public freedom and hereditary monarchy guarantee each other stands opposed to the position of Rousseau and Mill, who identify the freedom of citizenship with republican or representative government; and the opposition between his theory and republican theories of constitutional government remains a standing difficulty in nineteenth-century political thought.