Tag Archives: democracy

Who Rules? Part Three—The Forum

03 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by in History, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Some time ago, we mentioned the four potential ruling groups laid out by Samuel Finer, and discussed the Palace Polity; in the second post in this set, we discussed the Nobility and our first hybrid polity, Palace/Nobility. Now, let’s add the Forum into the mix, along with the Palace/Forum.

While in the Palace it is the autocrat who rules, and in the Nobility autonomous aristocrats hold power and scheme jealously against each other, in the Forum, power is vested in the people. In earlier posts, we have briefly noted egalitarian societies in which no true state exists, in which the people of the society share a voice in the major decisions of that society. In the Forum, the rule of the people is explicit and formalized. State institutions exist to carry out the needs of society, but they are subject to the people and depend on it for their orders. Formal mechanisms such as voting, written law and public law courts, and public debate translate the opinions of individuals into a collective imperative, that is sovereign over the government administrators.

Forums can take several forms, of which democracy is only one—and they need not include everyone in the population. In Greek democracy, for example, the vote was restricted to free males who were heads of their households, and often who met certain criteria of wealth. Most of the time, fewer than 10% of the residents of ancient Athens were eligible to vote. But for Finer, that is sufficient, because the franchise was broad enough to go beyond a narrow aristocracy or oligarchy, broad enough to include significant parts of the people itself in its self-rule.

Ancient Israel, which Finer believes was the very first Forum state in history, was not a democracy; but it was a tribal society in which decisions were made by a consensus of elders, until the rise of the monarchy—and even then, the kings had to be careful not to ignore public opinion or the tribal leadership, as could be seen by Ahab’s hesitance to simply confiscate the land of Naboth, or the secession of the northern tribes from the obnoxious rule of Rehovoam, successor to King Solomon.

In both cases, and in pretty much every durable Forum, the political power of the people rested on a foundation of popular military participation. Usually, a Forum was made up of a nation in arms. One of Finer’s main arguments is that political power tends to correspond to the distribution of military force. In early pre-state societies, all able-bodied men (and occasionally women) were considered warriors. Weapons tended to be simple and were widely available, so that the distribution of power between people was fairly even. This is one of the factors sustaining an egalitarian social structure. (By contrast, one of the key processes involved in the emergence of Danish chiefs, over a society that had previously been egalitarian, was the chiefs’ strategic control over the new technology of iron swords, and their careful distribution of swords to their favored supporters.)

Popular military power was true of the Greek polis, where to be qualified for citizenship you had to be able to serve as a hoplite, a spearman in the famous Greek phalanxes. But it was also true of the tribal confederation of ancient Israel. In its earliest, pre-kingly phase, the Israelites served in the popular militias, largely on foot and without heavy armor. (Thus, in the Biblical account of Deborah’s war against the Canaanite general Sisera, the Canaanites possess heavy chariots which the Israelites could not match. They therefore forced battle in the hill country, where the light infantry of the Israelite militia could negate the Canaanites’ advantage.)

The power of the popular militia restrained the growth of centralized political structures in Israel, for a time. Later, the arrival of heavy armor, chariots, cavalry, and foreign mercenaries provided increased military power to those wealthy enough to afford them, creating the basis for a ruling class; the first monarchy emerged shortly after. (I discuss the social effects of weapons technology in a bit more detail here.) But even during the time of the monarchy, Israel was unique among any polity for over a thousand years in that the Forum remained important. The king was the first limited monarch in history; he was subject to the Divine law, and was not its author or above it in any way.

More recently, the Forum polity of the United States was founded on the colonists’ successful rebellion against the British, made possible by the widespread ownership of firearms; the French Revolution, too, was sustained by the invention of the “citizen’s army,” which resisted the combined invasions of the other major powers of Europe. But wait—the French Revolution was hardly a Forum, you may say. It was a cruel totalitarian regime, soon overthrown by self-styled “Emperor” Napoleon! So why include it here?

The French Revolution may not have been a pure Forum, but it was a classic example of a very important hybrid type: the Palace/Forum. In this regime, though most power resides in the Palace, the legitimating ideology is very different. While a pure Palace draws legitimacy from itself or from the gods, the Palace/Forum claims the right to rule on behalf of the people. In principle, the autocrat is simply a trustee of the people, rather than its master. In practice, this might even be true; the modern United States is effectively a Palace/Forum that, even though imperfect, is far better at actual representation (for now) than are other Palace/Forums such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or any one of a dozen caudillo rulers in South America. But as my examples make clear, even nominally democratic Palace/Forums need not remain so for long, if too much power accretes in the hands of the Palace. As long as the Palace claims legitimacy as a trustee of the Forum, its behavior will be markedly different from a pure Palace. (But not necessarily better.)

(On a related note, popular legislatures today are a poor protector of the rights of the Forum. In the early history of legislatures, the rulers had to pay attention to them because it was the legislatures who collected taxes. Ignore the legislature, and the ruler went broke. But ever since rulers have been able to build their own tax-collection machinery, the “power of the purse” in legislatures has become more and more attenuated.)

How Ideas Drive Societies

08 Monday Dec 2014

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Recently I attended a wonderful seminar on “Capitalism and the Future of Democracy” with the Tikvah Fund. One of the main themes of the class was about how societies and economic systems could not simply exist on their own, but needed justification. Back in premodern times, all over the world, the pursuit of wealth was seen as morally corrosive, commerce was viewed with skepticism if not outright contempt, and governments saw it as their duty to guide economic behavior with a heavy hand. Then came John Locke, who argued that ownership of property was a God-given right, an individual accumulating wealth actually facilitated the welfare of the whole society, and the best thing that governments could do is to uphold property rights and otherwise get out of the way. Thanks in part to that claim, a revolution in thinking about commerce swept across Europe.

Now, many are agitating about growing inequality. Whether or not inequality is a problem (I think it is, though not always for the same reasons as others) and whether it should be solved by government intervention (I think most proposed remedies are worse than the disease), it is surely the case that ideas about economic justice are creating social currents that work against the “natural” direction of our current economic systems. Wealth will have to be justified if it is to be perpetuated.

I came away from that seminar with ideas for another long-term project, now that my dissertation is done. (More on that when I actually decide to launch into the thing…) But a larger point, which is useful for fiction writers as well as those seeking to change the political world, is that legitimacy is a powerful force. New ideas can change notions of what behavior is legitimate, or which institutions are legitimate, or how that legitimacy is to be established and maintained. Before you can overthrow the king and replace him with the glorious people’s assembly, you need to believe that kings are not divine and that people have the right to govern themselves. This is not an obvious belief, and how such beliefs get spread in a society could be a powerful story in itself.

The Social Effects of Weapon Technology (and How to Use in Writing)

22 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, History, Military, Politics, State Formation, War, Weapons, Writing

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Mao said that power flows from the barrel of a gun.  He also said (and this is less remembered) that therefore, the Party must control the gun, and the gun must not control the Party. In other words, the brute facts of violence are important, but so are the social arrangements that control them.

This has been true throughout most of history. Whoever has control of violence will tend to gain political power. In several times and places, the military did not actually rule, but submitted to a legitimate authority—the United States is a decent example of this, or most the the European powers in the last few decades. But more frequently, those with the means of violence make the rules. Recent events in Egypt and elsewhere bear this out, as if we needed more examples.

That said, it makes a huge difference what the state of military technology is. For that will determine if weapons are available to the mass of people, or if they are restricted to only an elite few. Samuel Finer argued that his monumental History of Government (now out of print, and sadly hard to get—inexcusable on the part of Oxford Press in this time of print-on-demand!) that when weapons were widely available, politics tended to feature mass participation and broad egalitarianism, if not outright democracy as in the case of ancient Greek city-states and their hoplites. (Or, one might add, early America.)

On the other hand, when specialized weapons gave advantages to those wealthy enough to afford them, power tended to be concentrated in the hands of a few. For example, the rise of powerful kings in Europe had much to do with the advent of cannon—fantastically expensive to make, requiring a large specialized infrastructure of foundries. Furthermore, with cannon French kings were able to reduce the fortresses of their rebellious nobles, consolidating their own power.

In an earlier age, the armored knight was the undisputed master of the battleground, able to crush unarmored opponents with ease. Thus, power tended to be held by the armored warlords of the feudal era, whose rule depended on their use of naked force. Then the free Swiss militias developed their famous style of pike warfare, which completely nullified the advantages of the knight.

So weapons technology played a large role in politics. When considering a given era, we must ask: how common are weapons? Are they easy to use, or do they require specialized training? Do the wealthy gain any particular advantage from their wealth, or can mass armies defeat them?

This line of argument is one of the bases of the American gun-rights movement (examples can be found here, here, or here, but there are many others). It was also argued by Max Weber that the rise of the Israelite kings (over a previously egalitarian society) was the result of advanced armor, which gave a significant battlefield advantage to those wealthy enough to buy such armor.

This reasoning can also help explain the rise of child soldiers. P.W. Singer argues that child soldiers are now more feasible because small arms are becoming more advanced and lighter. Children can now use weapons effectively on the battlefield in spite of their small size and physical weakness, which has not been true for hundreds of years if ever. As a result, child soldiers are becoming a frequent sight in war-torn areas, since it is relatively easy for a brutal would-be warlord to coerce children into fighting for him (or her, I suppose).

Similar issues are beginning to arise because of drone technology. Robots have often been used for fun by hobbyists; but it is only a matter of time before these can be weaponized, and made available off the shelf. Governments will be unable to stop the spread of drone weapons into the general populace, and the social effects of this shift are likely to be extreme.

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So as a writer, how do you use this?

First of all, when you are world-building, be careful to compare the state of weapons technology with the social system. Kings and castles are unlikely when no one wears armor or carries swords, or if everyone does. Magic can also be a weapon, in this sense, so if powerful magic is rare, it should generally translate into considerable power (unless there are social reasons otherwise).

You can write an interesting story about social upheavals caused by changing technology. For example, I’m presently messing around with a story where magic previously relied on using decades-long mental training to draw sigils of power in your mind; but then someone figured out how to get the same effects with sigils carved into physical media, such as discs of wood, and then everything collapsed into chaos as weapons technology exploded into the populace.

A great example of this concept is in the early installments of the excellent webcomic Schlock Mercenary. A new means of transport allowing for functional teleportation is rapidly weaponized, and bombs are teleported into government offices across the galaxy. Chaos and war break out on hundreds of planets, and things only die down when scientists figure out how to block teleportation into protected areas.

I hope this piece proves useful. At any rate, it should be food for thought.