Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule
Bendix, Reinhard
KINGS OR PEOPLE: POWER AND THE MANDATE TO RULE Reinhard Bendix / University of California Press I $20.00 Fred Baumann Most of the world used to be ruled by monarchs who derived their titles from...
...The factual inadequacy of these explanations is not the main point...
...Thus, writing in 1978, he assures us that the Chinese seem to have managed to substitute Confucian techniques of persuasion for the harsh tyranny of Soviet collectivization...
...It is not the absence of juicy anecdote...
...That he makes the link is laudable...
...He is sharply critical of the Soviet Union which has, in his view, inherited traditions of Russian despotism in its model of modernization...
...He implies that the USSR is one...
...disturbing evidence of the power of myths to persist...
...The people are left as the only basis of a claim to rule...
...Today republics are nearly universal and they claim as a rule to represent the people...
...Rather, these lame generalizations are symptomatic of a fundamental weakness in the project...
...not much juice is likely to survive when a thousand years of the history of five great nations is freeze-dried into 600 pages of narrative...
...KINGS OR PEOPLE: POWER AND THE MANDATE TO RULE Reinhard Bendix / University of California Press I $20.00 Fred Baumann Most of the world used to be ruled by monarchs who derived their titles from heaven...
...Thus, despite the importance in the Christian world of the division between the cities of man and God, Caesaropapism managed to flourish in Byzantium...
...Bendix knows that the choices made by rulers and the ideas that guide them do make a big difference...
...What makes Kings or People all too often resemble an unconvincing high school history text is its frequent reliance on the explanation that doesn't explain...
...His project thus necessarily involves re-establishing the connection between sociology and the older disciplines of history and political philosophy out of which it sprang...
...Sociologists quite naturally concern themselves with the transmission of ideas, since they are interested in their social function...
...In Kings or People Reinhard Bendix surveys the histories of Japan, Russia, England, Germany, and France for the last millennium or so in order to explain why political life everywhere has changed its basic form...
...Professor Bendix understands that the transformation from monarchy to republic is an aspect of modernization...
...What was it about the peculiar mixture of Shinto, Buddhism, aristocratic morality, political custom, and language that made the omnipotent-impotenremperor a plausible and stable alternative for the Japanese...
...There are plebiscitary dictatorships, he says, which are not really examples of popular rule...
...But it is a commonplace of history that a modern government, whether liberal democratic or totalitarian, can exert far more control over the lives of its citizens than could any feudal monarchy...
...That he has to argue this point explicitly is Fred Baumann is a program officer at the Institute for Educational Affairs in New York...
...But it is at least as important that the modern state is a sovereign state...
...Professor Bendix knows that history is not just the product of abstract "social forces," or of spontaneously generated technological change...
...But precisely because he has not detected the potential for despotism in modernity itself, his judgment of other contemporary powers is often shockingly gentle...
...Furthermore, the themes of Kings or People are, as stated, unobjectionable...
...Because Bendix sees the key transformation as moving from traditional monarchy to popular rule, and not from the pre-modern to the modern, sovereign state, he has great difficulty accounting for the questionable inheritance of much of modernity...
...To his credit, Professor Bendix does try to answer these questions, but his reliance on the non-explaining explanation is a sign that he has not gone far enough into the phenomena themselves...
...Modernity therefore means popular rule, along with individual liberty from traditional hierarchical claims...
...After all, the first regimes to base themselves on the modern doctrine of sovereignty were the early modern divine-right monarchies...
...Professor Bendix is of course aware of the problem...
...How did the transformation happen...
...If plebiscitary dictatorships are not examples of popular rule, then, since most of the world is ruled by them (or by regimes that don't even bother with plebiscites), modernity cannot involve the triumph of popular rule...
...But if it refers, as I think it must, to the Pol Pots, Quaddafis, Amins, and Khomeinis, then, with all due regard for the personal courage of these modernizers, the offer of humility and respect seems at best one-sided...
...What was it about the peculiar religious and political culture of England that gave rise to the specific kind of parliament it created, and that led to that "partnership" between central and local authority Bendix observes...
...That this sovereignty can ultimately derive from the authority of the people does not therefore mean that the sovereign state represents the triumph of popular rule in any necessary or necessarily meaningful way...
...If they are examples of popular rule, then popular rule is nothing more than a euphemism for the triumph of the sovereign state that claims, however justly or unjustly, to stand for the common good...
...Principles of that degree of abstraction, however, are not prohibitive causes, since they lend themselves to many metaphorical forms and applications...
...Bendix defines this modernization as the "breakdown in the ideal-typical traditional order...
...It is in the working out of these themes that something goes wrong...
...Thus the chapter which serves as the book's axis, "Transformations in the Sixteenth Century," deals largely with "intellectual mobilization," in other words, how new ideas were spread in new ways...
...It may be a question of disciplinary preference...
...Would it really have been easy to detach Alexander the Great from power once he had discovered his divinity...
...One idea that is central to Ben-dix's.project is that of modernization...
...Something happened in Western Europe that gave birth to a society which we, its inheritors, call modern, and which has since conquered and destroyed every other ("pre-modern," by definition) society it has touched...
...Similarly, to explain the relatively moderate character of the Prussian monarchy, Bendix argues that the idea of a single, divine, imperial lineage, though possible in Shinto Japan, is prohibited by Christianity, which reserves to God alone continu-ous presence in nature and history...
...Thus, the peculiar Japanese phenomenon of a theoretically omnipotent but practically impotent emperor is explained like this: "Where the ruler is believed to be a god, it is easy to so exalt the incumbent that he cannot concern himself with the management of the affairs of the country.'' It is easy drowsily to let this pass, unless one thinks of all those less easily distracted divine rulers who inhabit history's pages...
...But because he fails to pay sufficient attention to its meaning, his whole undertaking is given a strange and ultimately self-contradictory skew...
...And he concludes by asking the heirs of the Western tradition to "watch the new states with humility and respect for the personal courage of people who must try to blend restored traditions with the demands of modern development under the conditions of the twentieth century/' If this refers to the mass of the populations of most of these nations, then perhaps pity for what they are enduring should be added to respect for the courage with which they endure it...
...But first it is necessary to have a good grasp on what those ideas were...
...The breakdown involves the decay of belief in revelation and thus of divine-right monarchy...
...This is partly a matter of technology...
...Although Professor Bendix knows how important ideas are, he is either unable or unwilling to immerse himself sufficiently in the minds of his subjects to give a persuasive account of why they did what they did...
...These are that monarchy requires religious sanction, that kings and nobles stand in a relation of mutual dependence and hostility, that educated elites are important in spreading the idea of popular rule, that more "advanced" models are adopted by an intellectual elite as examples for their own nation, that there is consequently a tension between a nation's own history and the models it adopts, and that, finally, a nation's own history always prevails in the end and thus creates still another model for others...
...At one point, Professor Bendix tries to define away the problem of popular rule...
...one that, in principle, locates ultimate authority in the public realm...
...In any case, analysis can have its own, austerer charms...
...But this will not do...
...I only wish it had been made more firmly...
...And if belief in a transcendent God is supposed to prohibit belief in a single, divine, imperial line, it does not seem to have prevented the Shi'ites from turning the lafter doctrine into the cornerstone of their sect...
...He knows, for example, and seems disturbed by the fact that the French Revolution and its successors have viewed with deep suspicion the right of private association (which is ultimately the right of individual liberty...
...One symptom is the book's imposing dullness...
Vol. 12 • October 1979 • No. 10
