The founders of countries occupy a unique position within modern society. They are often viewed either as heroic and mythical figures or deeply problematic by today’s standards – take the obvious examples of George Washington. Long-held up by all Americans as a man unrivalled in his courage and military strategy, he is now a figure of vilification by leftists, who are eager to point out his ownership of slaves.
Whilst many such figures face similar shaming nowadays, none are suffering complete erasure from their own society. That is the fate currently facing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose era-defining liberal reforms and state secularism now pose a threat to Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
To understand the magnitude of Atatürk’s legacy, we must understand his ascent from soldier to president. For that, we must go back to the end of World War One, and Turkey’s founding.
The Ottoman Empire officially ended hostilities with the Allied Powers via the Armistice of Mudros (1918), which amongst other things, completely demobilised the Ottoman army. Following this, British, French, Italian and Greek forces arrived in and occupied Constantinople, the Empire’s capital. Thus began the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire: having existed since 1299, the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) ceded large amounts of territory to the occupying nations, primarily being between France and Great Britain.
Enter Mustafa Kemal, known years later as Atatürk. An Ottoman Major General and fervent anti-monarchist, he and his revolutionary organisation (the Committee of Union and Progress) were greatly angered by Sèvres, which partitioned portions of Anatolia, a peninsula that makes up the majority of modern-day Turkey. In response, they formed a revolutionary government in Ankara, led by Kemal.
Thus, the Turkish National Movement fought a 4-year long war against the invaders, eventually pushing back the Greeks in the West, Armenians in the East and French in the South. Following a threat by Kemal to invade Constantinople, the Allies agreed to peace, with the Treaty of Kars (1921) establishing borders, and Lausanne (1923) officially settling the conflict. Finally free from fighting, Turkey declared itself a republic on 29 October 1923, with Mustafa Kemal as president.
His rule of Turkey began with a radically different set of ideological principles to the Ottoman Empire – life under a Sultan had been overtly religious, socially conservative and multi-ethnic. By contrast, Kemalism was best represented by the Six Arrows: Republicanism, Populism, Nationalism, Laicism, Statism and Reformism. Let’s consider the four most significant.
We’ll begin with Laicism. Believing Islam’s presence in society to have been impeding national progress, Atatürk set about fundamentally changing the role religion played both politically and societally. The Caliph, who was believed to be the spiritual successor to the Prophet Muhammad, was deposed. In their place came the office of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet – through its control of all Turkey’s mosques and religious education, it ensured Islam’s subservience to the State.
Under a new penal code, all religious schools and courts were closed, and the wearing of headscarves was banned for public workers. However, the real nail in the coffin came in 1928: that was when an amendment to the Constitution removed the provision declaring that the “Religion of the State is Islam”.
Moving onto Nationalism. With its roots in the social contract theories of thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kemalist nationalism defined the social contract as its “highest ideal” following the Empire’s collapse – a key example of the failures of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural state.
The 1930s saw the Kemalist definition of nationality integrated into the Constitution, legally defining every citizen as a Turk, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Despite this however, Atatürk fiercely pursed a policy of forced cultural conformity (Turkification), similar to that of the Russian Tsars in the previous century. Both regimes had the same aim – the creation and survival of a homogenous and unified country. As such, non-Turks were pressured into speaking Turkish publicly, and those with minority surnames had to change, to ‘Turkify’ them.
Now Reformism. A staunch believer in both education and equal opportunity, Atatürk made primary education free and compulsory, for both boys and girls. Alongside this came the opening of thousands of new schools across the country. Their results are undeniable: between 1923 – 38, the number of students attending primary school increased by 224%, and 12.5 times for middle school.
Staying true to his identity as an equal opportunist, Atatürk enacted monumentally progressive reforms in the area of women’s rights. For example, 1926 saw a new civil code, and with it came equal rights for women concerning inheritance and divorce. In many of these gender reforms, Turkey was well-ahead of other Western nations: Turkish women gained the vote in 1930, followed by universal suffrage in 1934. By comparison, France passed universal suffrage in 1945, Canada in 1960 and Australia in 1967. Fundamentally, Atatürk didn’t see Turkey truly modernising whilst Ottoman gender segregation persisted
Lastly, let’s look at Statism. As both president and the leader of the People’s Republican Party, Atatürk was essentially unquestioned in his control of the State. However, despite his dictatorial tendencies (primarily purging political enemies), he was firmly opposed to dynastic rule, like had been the case with the Ottomans.
But under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, all of this could soon be gone.
Having been a high-profile political figure for 20 years, Erdoğan has cultivated a positive image domestically, one focused on his support for public religion and Turkish nationalism, whilst internationally, he’s received far more negative attention focused on his growing authoritarian behaviour. Regarded widely by historians as the very antithesis of Atatürk, Erdoğan’s pushback against state secularism is perhaps the most significant attack on the founder’s legacy.
This has been most clearly displayed within the education system. 2017 saw a radical shift in school curriculums across Turkey, with references to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution being greatly reduced. Meanwhile, the number of religious schools has increased exponentially, promoting Erdoğan’s professed goal of raising a “pious generation of Turks”. Additionally, the Diyanet under Erdoğan has seen a huge increase in its budget, and with the launch of Diyanet TV in 2012, has spread Quranic education to early ages and boarding schools.
The State has roles to play in society but depriving schoolchildren of vital scientific information and funding religious indoctrination is beyond outrageous: Soner Cagaptay, author of The New Sultan: Erdoğan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey, referred to the changes as: “a revolution to alter public education to assure that a conservative, religious view of the world prevails”.
There are other warning signs more broadly, however. The past 20 years have seen the headscarf make a gradual reappearance back into Turkish life, with Erdoğan having first campaigned on the issue back in 2007, during his first run for the presidency. Furthermore, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), with its strong base of support amongst extremely orthodox Muslims, has faced repeated accusations of being an Islamist party – as per the constitution, no party can “claim that it represents a form of religious belief”.
Turkish women, despite being granted legal equality by Atatürk, remain the regular victims of sexual harassment, employment discrimination and honour killings. Seemingly intent on destroying all the positive achievements of the founder, Erdoğan withdrew from the Istanbul Convention (which forces parties to investigate, punish and crackdown on violence against women) in March 2021.
All of these reversals of Atatürk’s policies reflect the larger-scale attempt to delete him from Turkey’s history. His image is now a rarity in school textbooks, at national events, and on statues; his role in Turkey’s founding has been criminally downplayed.
President Erdoğan presents an unambiguous threat to the freedoms of the Turkish people, through both his ultra-Islamic policies and authoritarian manner of governance. Unlike Atatürk, Erdoğan seemingly has no problems with ruling as an immortal dictator, and would undoubtedly love to establish a family dynasty. With no one willing to challenge him, he appears to be dismantling Atatürk’s reforms one law at a time, reducing the once-mythical Six Arrows of Kemalism down to a footnote in textbooks.
A man often absent from the school curriculums of Western history departments, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk proved one of the most consequential leaders in both Turkish history, and the 20th Century. A radical and a revolutionary he may have been, but it was largely down to him that the Turkish people received a recognised nation-state, in which state secularism, high-quality education and equal civil rights were the norm.
In our modern world, so many of our national figures now face open vilification from the public and politicians alike. But for Turkey, future generations may grow up not even knowing the name or face of their George Washington. Whilst several political parties and civil society groups are pushing back against this anti-Atatürk agenda, the sheer determination displayed by Erdoğan shows how far Turks must yet go to preserve the founder’s legacy.
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Where do we go from Here? The paths to Liberty and Heritage – Book review
Last August, a group of leading dissident right thinkers have gathered at a conference titled ‘Where do we go from Here? The paths to Liberty and Heritage’. Each speaker discussed in detail their own idea and concept of how to get the future they want – be it a libertarian pipe dream, an idyllic Hobbiton-like quasi-communist Trumpton, or a reactionary haven. Despite the speakers coming from a vast variety of backgrounds, they were all united by a few common goals – the desire for change, an appreciation for tradition, love for aesthetics and liberty.
Despite not being able to attend the event in person, I had the privilege of reading and reviewing the book that contained all the speeches from the event. I humbly, and not so modestly believe that the choice of the reviewer (me) was perfect – as I can cast an outsider’s eye into the book and review it from the outside as someone who hasn’t even stepped foot in the Warwick University, where the event took place.
The concept of the PATH FORWARD was a brilliant idea to, for once, put the dissident right towards a shared goal – instead of continuous Twitter-based infighting they could all contribute and map out their vision for the future. Bring out the wholesome, squash the grim and bleak.
There was a fair share of similarities – the themes of community, aesthetics, and traditionalism shone forth, which was only a good thing – it showed that despite any apparent differences, there is a common goal.
There were a few notable speakers that many of us have heard names of more than once – our very own Mallardite – Samuel Martin, the famed Academic Agent, and even Carl Benjamin – the creator of the popular Lotus Eaters Podcast.
Many speakers have mapped out the problems with the current world, to then proceed to explaining how to move on forward.
Naturally, one of the most hard-hitting speeches was the one written by Academic Agent, who decided to cover one of the subjects he seems to often hyper-fixate on – ‘Culture is Downstream from law’. Using many studies, research and quoting Caldwell, AA has elaborated on the subject which, I believe, links to the main theme of the event by expressing the need to be in power in order to legislate in order to enforce your own positive vision of reality in the form of Trumpton – an idea which was generally critiqued in the later speech done by Carl Benjamin.
It felt like AA’s essay hasn’t delved too much into the concept of the ‘where do we go from here’ as he already touched on this point many a time in his own YouTube channel – building a network of 10s, the new elite who are best in everything they do, the elite of the new Ubermensch, so to speak.
Following AA, we had speeches/essays by Alexander Adams and Edward Slingsby, both focusing more on the concept of aesthetics. Slingsby was concerned with the matter of architecture and how far it has been bureaucratised. He outlined a few clever ways of how to retake the architecture and return it to traditionalists. He suggests that the architects should try to build their networks with the likeminded individuals and find other creatives who would do the same. This was generally a very strong theme that permeated the entire book – the need for a strong community of likeminded men who can ensure the success and preservation of the values and ideas.
Adams, however, structuring his essay in a highly academic manner, debated the concept of choosing your opponents wisely and ensuring that you don’t alienate people who could help you which was a nice touch. Adams focused on the current tendency to censorship and how to avoid it. Adams is likely one of the best people to talk on this subject considering he published a book last year that discusses a similar subject titled Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History. He also suggested that we need to steer clear from accelerationism advising that ‘you can’t take the Canterbury Cathedral and move it to Idaho’, as you lose the people and the atmosphere in the process. I disagree with this statement – one could make a very similar argument for returning the artifacts to their original place. You can and you SHOULD dismantle and take the Canterbury Cathedral with you. At least you saved it from the imminent ruin. It’s a tribute to the great of the past. But let’s not go on a tangent here because other than this, Adams certainly has a point – He continues by advising of the need of the preservation of the texts in the form of physical copies as well as the return to traditional means of communication – letters and email (how far we’ve fallen since email feels like a ‘traditional’ concept).
One of my favourite essays in the entire book was the one done by Samuel Martin (and I am not saying this because he is literally publishing this piece and he agreed to postpone my deadline on multiple occasions). Sam added a Zoomer-like breath of fresh air to the conference and a passion I have not sensed from other speakers. He decided to talk about the Utopia project. Utopia Project did specifically that – attempted to sketch out a positive idea for the future. Martin goes on to explain:
‘I have never understood why the right focuses so much on strategy. It’s not an irrelevancy, it’s very important. But surely you can only construct an effective strategy if you have a cohesive idea about what you want to achieve. You don’t build strategy first in the hope that you will get somewhere.’
And this captured the pure essence of the book – the creation of the cohesive idea of where we are going.
Ferro decided to dissect and deconstruct Klaus Schwab’s book titled ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and explain why it’s of the utmost importance that we ought to reject the kind of globalist technology he is proposing and ensure we return to tradition.
What I really liked was Not So Obvious’s article, very grounded, very focused on authenticity. He brought up something a lot of us don’t even realise sometimes, I think – how far we are removed from authenticity. The fact that money isn’t physical, the digitalisation of society, friendship, and romance. He offers a cure – by ensuring that we do more authentic friendship-building and doing more things in the real world.
One of the most wholesome elements of the book was the call for getting involved on the local scale in whatever way you can do it. Buy art from your fellow dissidents, read their magazines (worth noting, the Mallard was mentioned), start businesses, make meaningful friendships, find yourself a Twitter autist waifu. Some (Po the Person) even suggested that we should get involved in our local Conservative community and go drink wine with dusty old men who care about housing in your local area. Others advised learning a skill.
What I feel was very important that came across from it was that the path to liberty and heritage really starts from us. If you dislike the modern world, you must take steps to change something. First, you may need to change your outlook (Po the Person, Jogging to get somewhere), look to God for hope (Lambda, What Reactionaries can learn from the Bible), or if you’re a female, quit birth control (Aydin Paladin).
Once you’ve worked on yourself, you can try to tackle issues on the small, local scale, such as rejecting globalist technology and starting your own thing (Ferro, The Technology Problem), institution-building and networking (Samuel Martin), or doing things out in the real world (Not So Obvious).
The essays were all very well done with the speakers clearly highly knowledgeable within their chosen areas of discussion. The calls to change show that there are so many of us so strongly disaffected with the current reality. And this book and these essays map out of how we can disentangle this messy path of intertwined ideas and concepts and find a common goal we can all go towards – maybe not a utopian one but something clearer and more down to earth – a preservation of beliefs and values and passing them on to more people so we could make a meaningful change one at a time. If you’re interested, there is another event coming up relatively soon – if you’re interested – check out the website.
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The Worst Case Scenario
It may actually be possible for the right to be sleepwalked back into the arms of the regime. This might strike you as an impossibility, but I am increasingly unconfident in the rigidity of our opposition to the regime and the system it imposes on us. I still believe it to be highly unlikely that this occurs, but its absolute incredibility as a vision of the future has ceased. But how exactly are they working towards this aim, unknowingly or not, and what exactly am I referring to? I will try and articulate myself as clearly as possible, lest we continue to mope around in the gloomy shadows of doomed projects, forever dissatisfied with our lack of meaningful progress. As someone who continues to self-assuredly profess the inevitability of revolution in Britain, what I fear most are attempts to delay this eventuality – and more importantly attempts to prevent it. A nominally right-wing, authoritarian government could quietly emerge, restore popular comfort with the idea of Britain being a diverse, liberalised country and resolidify the British people’s pessimistic, defeated attitude towards politics, race, and the fundamental structure of the economy. More importantly, it could cause the right to accept the improvements as “enough”, maybe even claim them as the final victory (the battle that has been “won”), and see us de-escalate our efforts. We are entering stage three, the bargaining stage, and many wish to go, cap-in-hand, with offers to negotiate. This is the regime’s perestroika moment, and it absolutely must not succeed.
When you have a non-democratic and ideological regime, as we do in Britain – as most White countries also do, there are many things that it will do before compromising on its ideological tenets. To undo the core pillars that define the regime would be to invalidate the legitimacy of the regime itself, so – despite the societal breakdown and rapid deterioration in living standards – things continue on as they always have, irrespective of popular sentiment. Public services rot at the bone, the police stop functioning beyond their utility as apparatchik tools, etc. So long as the Pravda and Stasi remain competent and efficient the rest can wither and die and those in power won’t care. The Chinese Communist Party was able to transition their country into a quasi-nationalistic yet fundamentally capitalist country whilst preserving the iconography of Karl Marx and the hero worship of Chairman Mao. For many reasons, I doubt that our regimes in the west could have this kind of fluidity of form to persevere – but they may be able to work within the restrictions of their own resolute determination to maintain mass-immigration and the liberal, capitalist status quo.
Since 2016, the western establishment has become more totalitarian in its governance of the countries it occupies. The Leave vote in Britain’s EU referendum and Donald Trump’s election in the USA made our establishment paranoid and defensive (a defensiveness Rory Stewart alluded to in his own deluded way). Those in power will continue to try their best to maintain the status quo to the letter, down to every last miserable and humiliating detail. For that purpose, the Brezhnevian conservative Keir Starmer has been appointed as our Prime Minister to do absolutely nothing but maintain progress at its present pace, no faster no slower and without a single railroad switch change in site. But there will be those that work in the shady halls of power more fidgety than the rest who are especially concerned about the future of their project (the project being a global, totalitarian, technocratic panopticon where a small corporate elite rules over a coffee-coloured serf class – forever). They will be playing wargames where we win and they lose and considering how to defang the right before we are capable of animating the British away from their agenda and towards a fundamentally different trajectory (which ultimately is what Brexit actually represented but, thanks to Dominic Cummings and the December 2019 General Election, that rebellious movement in the zeitgeist was snuffed out and forgotten to history). What is hypothetically possible is a small concession to dissident right positions on race and inequality to refine the status quo, just as communist regimes historically used fascist methods and policies to keep their countries afloat in times of, usually self-inflicted, crisis. This would mean a form of multiracialism that is genuinely “fair”, or at least as fair as it sells itself, that is more palatable both to the general population as well as the right. A truly colour-blind and meritocratic system that punishes criminals adequately, rewards hard work and enacts planning reform to end many of the negative externalities mass immigration is causing – does this sound familiar? It is the outcome ‘ProgNats’ and the like are agitating for – a more effective and efficient Presidium-operated country that will have accomplished making it even harder for people to articulate a legitimate case for an authentic nationalist position.
There is reason to believe that the average person will go along with this soft transformation of society from an overtly egalitarian and explicitly anti-White one to a society that has quietly resigned itself to accepting some degree of hereditarianism (but a society that has only done so to preserve the globalist project). In fact, this transformation is already happening in real time, without any input from above causing it. I had the misfortune of being at a McDonald’s in Leeds just off a motorway and was shown a small microcosm that represented this trajectory. It was a grimy, dirty, noisy square with bright white lights and three interactive telescreens for ordering from. I decided to go forward into the open space between these telescreens and the counter to talk to one of the cramped Maccy’s girls and asked if I could order from her directly with physical cash (a request which she granted me). What I soon realised; stood in my Argosian slumber awaiting the proclamation of my order number, was that there were actually two queues. One had a huddle of immigrant slaves with their corporate rucksacks ready for retrieval (rucksacks which I feel are brightly coloured either to be demeaning or to mask the repulsiveness of the services they are having to render) and the other had a larger group of dishevelled, unkempt White Britons, awaiting their own personal orders. I stood in disbelief, wondering to myself “Are people okay with this? Are liberals okay with this?” and then went on with the rest of my day. Those immigrant wage slaves will work those jobs, and jobs like it, for the rest of their lives – their children will be born into slavery arranged by a Darwinian free-market. They have denied themselves the dignity of working in their own homeland as part of their own strata and been granted their monkey’s paw wish of better wages and better living for themselves – serving in heaven.
There may be the odd moment where someone finds the old liberal, egalitarian conditioning bubbling up again from their subconscious – a White woman might be stood at a bus stop and witness a panting, emaciated Somali riding a bike with one of the aforementioned rucksacks at 6AM and think twice about what is happening to our country (that is a real anecdote) – but ultimately “the bulk of people conform to the energies and pressures that they now feel themselves living under”, and our people will either accept the newly-imported caste of service sector slaves but not collaborate or they will actively, decadently indulge this newfound luxury. The point of bringing these things up is to say that if the right-wing can be made to feel comfortable with, and accepting of, a multi-ethnic society that is allowed to be freely arranged along racial lines, they will have done so with the same impulse as the lumpenaristocrat normies who subconsciously enjoy ordering slaves to their door. It might not even solely be contentment either, given that the right is increasingly unprincipled and no more moral in personal actions than the average person, they too may enjoy the illusion of prosperity that this new feudalism grants them just as much as anyone else. The only possible difference is that the act of a right-winger ordering a Caribbean Wecasa maid to their home may also come with it a post-service “ironic” gigachad tweet boasting of how cool and racist they just were.
As is increasingly pointed out, the liberal consensus is becoming one of ambivalence to the natural order. Likewise, there is no considerable pushback against any of this from those on the left who enjoy the costume of performative socialism. This is because of the very obvious fact that the left’s primary cause at the present is anti-Whiteness; it participates in an inter-ethnic conflict which is ongoing, rather than a class struggle that has been lost. Any criticism of these trends might be construed (rightly) as a critique of mass-immigration itself, might nudge open the heavy eyelids of the sleepy Saxon. We can’t have that, can we? Even if it means pretending the squalor that third-world immigrants create for themselves and the barbarism they make our own people suffer under is an acceptable arrangement for everyone. Because of this fevered fear of the “far-right”, we have a left-wing in Britain and elsewhere that is religiously dedicated to defending everything the liberal status quo does – doing so to quell their own anxiety about a legitimately anti-establishment force from the right which would unravel the regime’s fundamental underpinnings.
Brought to its inevitable conclusion, you end up with a strange consensus that everyone is generally happy with. The left-wing gets their “post-colonial” dissolution of whiteness, the liberals get their Pret a Manger serfs, and the right-wing gets their… [pending peace treaty]. We are hurtling into a rerun of 20th century liberalism where Whites and non-Whites of all political walks all enjoy the zany sheninigans of KSI and Kai Cenat but for very different reasons. This is different to what has been the norm currently, what I am describing is a society where hierarchy is more apparent, in which group differences are more apparent and part of an unconscious acknowledgement of what makes the status quo acceptable to everyone; a hierarchy sustained by a shared sense of relief among those who sit above lowest-of-the-low in the new economic caste system. Maybe liberals are the real slave owners, or maybe we are the real liberals for seeing anything wrong with this so-called progress. This Brave New, Bell Curve-ambivalent, World… a Libtartheid state.
Let us go into the dreams of the compromisemaxxers, those who wish to retain our present texture of life, our liberal, capitalist economic structure and even Britain’s current affliction. Ponder a future in which there is, with the gracious consent of some Bill Ackman-like figure, an end to the Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion that the 2010 Equality Act, 1970 Equal Pay Act and 1965 Race Relations Act have brought – but also the continued assurance that Britain would continue on with its current course of Brazilification. This timeline, though delusional and unlikely – is more likely than mass-immigration slowing or being halted without a meaningful revolution. This alternative world where a government comes to power and makes our national demographic transformation as acceptable as possible is a recipe for turning revolutionary fervour into consigned resignation that the future is impenetrable and our fate sealed – save only for the hope that a White Bumiputera system could be implemented someday. “Okay, a homogenous, White British Britain might be over, but maybe we can have a Rhodesian style government” is essentially a sentiment being passed around now in once-nationalist circles, as the new generation works to dilute opposition to the demographic problem. “Okay, well maybe the American Empire will allow us to be like the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Japan or Israel even! We’ll still bow down and maintain occupation policy on the economy and migration, but the immigrants will be guest workers without rights” – as appealing as a British Gastarbeiter might conceptually be to our friends in middle-class management jobs who work adjacent to power in the centre of London, this silver bullet is in fact a poison pill. This immigration policy might have failed West Germany and lead to Germany having a large and expanding Turkish minority, but I am sure we could make it work here with our own immigrant population. I can see it now, Prime Minister ProgNat declares all immigrants as now being non-citizens, but residents in perpetuity – no push to return Britain to the state it was in when our grandparents were born, but instead the beginning of a giddy rock throwing competition with hornets’ nests as targets. This would transition us to the most tolerable post-majority arrangement but would further breed resentment in the immigrant population – assuring our doom as a people further down the line. Do we want done to us here in Britain our very own Zanzibar revolution? Having delayed the radicalisation of the masses by several decades, it would degenerate inevitably back to the present status quo but with much worse demographics to contend with. We would be scattered specs of diasporic blood across the global windscreen of progress, without any hope of homogeneity ever returning, the final nail in the coffin which holds within it our distinction from every other nation in the world, especially what defines us – our root-nation homeland in Europe. This is not the kind of country I want to live in, or the kind of country I want my descendants to live in. Whole areas lived in exclusively by immigrants – guest workers or not. Bus systems, roads, infrastructure all constructed and maintained to facilitate a large immigrant population – guest workers or not. The status is not the issue, their rights and position as citizen-equals is not the issue, the issue is these enclaves being here at all. Again, compromises are dreamt up in the hope of mitigating the problem, of dampening its consequences and the issues that come with it. But if the problem continues to exist it will endure, and if it endures it will win. Reform will not lead us to victory.
It is as if all revolutionary thought and visions of a brighter future are incomprehensible now to most, to such an extent that even within the realm of a hypothetical fantasy of taking over our country, we still affirm even within our own minds the promontory confines of what can and cannot be done – as rigidly set by the establishment. For the last four years or so we have seen the emergence of a Menshevik/Bolshevik split on the right, a split between those who wish to reform the current system and those that wish to see it all swept away – driven by (I would argue) a widening class divide. This class divide is a new one, caused by the excesses of 21st century capitalism, the continued fallout from the 2007-2008 financial crisis and Covid-19 Lockdown policies – all of which led to the consolidation of plutocratic power over Britain. To further pursue liberalisation of the economy (as if everything that came before now “Wasn’t Real Growth”) would only sharpen the worsening quality of life and living standards of the White British working class. The necessity is greater now than at any other point in our nation’s history for a radical, class-collaborationist economic system that puts the interests of the nation as a whole first – perhaps a form of Corporatism or a modern rendition of Syndicalism. The details are less important than the essence, which is that nationalism is no longer compatible with capitalism (if it ever had been). We need an economic system that doesn’t just benefit the middle class in the South of England (a section of our population that continues to successfully avoid radicalisation due to being economically shielded from most of the repercussions of capitalism).
What might often seem like ankle biting on the Twitter timeline is at its core a division over the basic fundamentals of how our nation should be organised. I am trying to make the case that a middle class-dominated right is currently leading us down into dead ends, pitfalls and off ramps to deradicalisation. There is now within the right a reframing of the issues that places Whites (in the pan-European, London-centric demographic sense) as an exclusively middle-class demographic (comparatively), pitted against a disproportionately black and brown underclass beneath them – a top-down class war with total disregard for the White working class caught in the market forces crossfire. From this line of reasoning, Thatcherite arguments have intruded themselves into our circles – with a broad racialism as their justification. Many on the right now seem to be willing to throw poorer, less-intelligent Whites into a third-world underclass wilderness to compete and struggle against the new slave caste (imported here to undercut them as workers and replace them as people). An example of what I describe occurred not too long ago, when a redpill on the racially-disproportionate occupancy rates of social housing in London was contorted into a dilution of the anti-immigration agenda and support for “selling off of social housing”. Not to state the obvious, but selling off social housing would only accomplish a geographic integration of the immigrant population, in line with explicitly stated regime aims, softening the urban BAMElaw which acts as an eternal reminder of the glaring incongruence between the Britain that was and the Britain that now is. This factitious right-wing continues to be fuelled by centre-right establishment journalists such as Sam Ashworth-Hayes and propped up with power-adjacent backhand deals granting them access to – maybe not the halls of power – but the cloister outside of them.
Our future depends upon reconnecting with the severed ends of our endangered White British working class. The remnants of them that are still out there have been deprived of everything but their blood – their nation is all they have left. Their country, their communities, their jobs, their trade unions, their dignity – all stripped from them as if they were no longer needed. So they wander the post-industrial wastelands, as they have for over thirty years, Ahasverus’ of Albion – longing for the homeland they knew when they grew up, constantly being told that it is not only dead but that it was evil and that it never really existed anyway. What is the liberal right’s answer to these people? What of the generation of White British people born into this post-industrial wasteland? Many have now become Gridlockian, Macra-like shadows of their former glory – anti-social, loutish; addicted to drugs, alcohol, and readily-available techSoma. It follows that the liberal right identifies more with their class than their nation. This is one sign among many that capitalism is ultimately a left-wing force, as is liberalism – perpetuating a materialist worldview that breaks down national bonds and turns individuals with homelands into consumers with shopping malls. This goes back to my earlier point about the desire to make the displacement process “fair” rather than to abolish it entirely; the result is a people that identify more with their class in a revitalised capitalist hierarchy. The new right-wing rejection of any and all criticisms of capitalism as a system comes from an animosity towards the White British working class for still being able to perceive things through a communitarian lens, which is itself a holdover from the trade union movement – which had kept the White British working class economically collectivist in their outlook (with that same tribalism now increasingly taking a populist orientation). Poorer, less-intelligent Whites could only have deportations, an end to immigration in principle and the abolition of capitalism as its survival/victory condition – this solution can never become conscious if the issues are allowed to be oriented around a middle-class class-consciousness purely driven by personal, material self-interest. An atomised, materialist right without a communal and spiritual element, regardless of form or flavour, continues to be stillborn because it lacks the ability to evoke a higher calling or bond that calls the people upwards. A higher calling that would offer higher values beyond their personal, material self-interest is something the White British working class is more open to now due to having had their class-consciousness broken by liberal capitalism. By giving up national economic decision making to shareholder capitalists and market forces, we have cut off our legs to spite our body, the national body, and the liberal right retroactively justifies the real economic contractions and trauma of deindustrialisation as a necessary (even positive) act of policy.
Britain, by every real metric, has ceased to have a meaningful, sovereign national government. We are now an economic zone with the apparition of a state attached – a state which on paper has the absolute authority to do anything in the country through parliament, but which in practice has no such authority. Government bankruptcy is irrelevant to a system that will always want an ever-expanding pool of labour to increase the number of consumers, keep the value of labour down and chill workers’ rights. We once had a mercantilist economic system, with the Navigation Acts and Corn Laws – great guarantors of our national wealth, until the Manchester vision of our country took hold and facilitated the creation of an international business elite that would eventually become greater in power and influence than the nation states themselves. This is the essence of capitalism – a materialist, internationalist system that values only money, productivity and growth – could this really be preferable to communism? It sounds identical to communism, actually. Mass immigration being, in part, not only a symptom of the finance capital growth model but a policy which this system depends upon (especially as it breaks down and self-cannibalises) is proof enough that we must strive for a fundamental alternative. The liberal right can write this off in little quips as much as they like but their solutions are evidently not workable for meeting the current moment. We are capable of organising a new system beyond the EconGrad consensus. We can step over the noxious vision of a nominally right-wing Britain that would be using a vaguely racialised comparative advantage theory of labour to justify the necessity of third-world slaves, second-world professionals and first-world transnational elites.
We are up against self-professed liberals who are incapable of answering their own version of the breakfast question – “What if liberal capitalism and nationalism were mutually exclusive?” – even though it is plainly obvious by now that they are. But maybe the globalists will grant them a scrap from the table down to their comfortable tier on the ivory tower, above the sea of sludge they are generally free from interacting with – like the limousine driving through the favela. Is this not what Milei and Wilders represent? These are surely establishment plots to sell artificial right-wing figures that are still controlled by the interests of capital so that liberalism can be maintained but with an authoritarian update that cleans up the bugs and issues. This only works if the right allows itself to become part of the regime apparatus of control, by the co-opting of dissident online right-wing culture and its domestication into a harmless playpen on the fringes – a playpen where naive, grumbling, headline-quote-tweeting toy soldiers cooperate unwittingly with the status quo. It seems to me the right-wing has found itself desiring only to be pandered to again, wishing for superficial wins to brag about online: like videogames having sexy female characters again or the adverts being trad. The shattered, retreating sentiment of “Maybe we never really wanted a meaningful change to the social, cultural and economic status quo, maybe the texture of our lives in modernity is fine, maybe multiracialism is okay – for they have stopped humiliating my people and our beliefs daily and have begun nominally cooperating with us” completing the total political convergence of left and right on a reformed regime that a depoliticised population can receive some newfound benefits from. That is what I mean when I warn of the perestroika of our time. We must hope and pray this stalls, failing at the hands of conservative figures such as Keir Starmer or prevented by reactionary figures such as J.K. Rowling.
It is time to acknowledge a paradox of 21st century politics, one which only figures like Matthew Goodwin and Glenn Greenwald have alluded to – we are the heirs to the socialist cause despite not believing in equality or a materialist worldview. There has been a “collapse of the far left in the last 20 to 30 years”. Communism as a conscious, ideological force no longer exists. It fell as if it were a cursed ring, melting into the Soviet Union’s now-extinct volcano. The mantle which we take up now is the conservative tribalism which the trade union movement represented in Britain – which once organised workers and communities to struggle against the shifting sands of progress imposed by capital. Just as such tribalism must return to our people through a deeper pulse that reaches beyond the defeat at Hastings to our Anglo-Saxon primordials, the right must also return to the radical anti-capitalism aspired to in previous right-wing movements before its compromises whilst in power. We must now move away from the eternally sliced pie where oligarchs expect their tithe and piece of the nation to run amok with. To meet this moment, it is crucial for us not to lose the thread of working towards an authoritarian, centralised state power – a state that would be mounted firm across the whole of the British Isles, shielding the British people and their liberty from the volleyed shots of moneyed interests. The plunder will end.
Our people can do better than this. We do not have to settle for anything. We do not have to make the most of a bad situation. We certainly should not delight in occupation delicacies. By present trends, our people might earnestly snatch at any offer for improvement without undoing the principles that are baked into our being which caused the problems in the first place. That for me is The Worst Case Scenario – where not only the apolitical masses, but the left, the liberals and even the right reach a pitiful mindbreak akin to the conclusion of Winston’s journey in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. The quiet deflowering of our stagnant present into something far more dangerous – a system that can survive long into the future – is something we must reject with all of our energy no matter how spent we may feel currently. A genuine alternative is possible, it always has been, that is what they fear the most – our recognition of this fact – and why there is any talk at all of the possibility of, or desire for, reform within the establishment. The revolution can and will happen irrespective of potential economic and social turbulence. We can triple the wages and double the pensions of policemen and soldiers; we can do what is demanded of our country even if it will likely hurt our country in the medium-term. A fox gnaws at its leg when it is caught in a trap. The civil strife which is coming is inevitable, but luckily the establishment won’t succeed in its hypothetical reforms – our society might transmogrify into one which is more ambivalent to ethnicity as every group recedes into their own private spaces away from each other – but our western governments are far too dug in to ever consider a change to the present course, even if it could mean the perpetuation of their power (even in spite of suspicious actors on the right trying to make this a reality). Given the foreign policy ongoing in the Middle-East and Eastern Europe, it seems to me that those presently in power would rather see total nuclear oblivion to human civilisation than see their ideological and political grip on the world slackened in any way.
Let us go forth with wind in our sails, with our own form of ambivalence – ambivalence to the radical solutions which we take to be self-evidently necessary. Imagine the spectacular and triumphant scene of a fresh-faced vanguard declaring victory at the signing of a British Lausanne Convention; imagine the sensation of crossing the threshold into a restored nation and rebalanced world, one free of the impending burden of serfdom in a foreign land. We must stamp out the cockroach-like pessimism of skirted-edge 20+ year projects. Embrace the greater you that exists beyond your consciousness and reach within for the fated Anglo-Shintoism that will lead us home to sweeter pastures. The Samurai turned to Ceorl, the Wakizashi turned to Seax – meet your greater form with outstretched arms and welcome yourself back into the fold as a true Englishman, ready to step over this purgatorial dichotomy and the squabbles of then and now and forge something entirely new and yet also distinctly old and true to ourselves. Reject this world in its current form and not only break free of each and every one of its tentacles but severe them like the second labour of Hercules so that our progeny may be freer, safer and more prosperous than we ever will be. Survival depends on the sheer will of men willing to dedicate themselves to the cause, men who we know not the names of now but who will emerge in the eleventh hour and forge the new England, the new Britannia, summoned up as reincarnated spirits of forgotten heroes. All was once over in the 9th century too when all was to be lost and yet was then formed anew. No man is willing to suffer or die for planning reform and means-tested pensions; much less the privatisation of social housing or the lowering of corporate taxes for Tesco and Amazon. Reject the pending peace treaty; reject those that wish to negotiate with power to help it kick our can further down the road. This is our struggle, not our children’s or children’s children’s. Our time is now, and everything is on us. Believe in yourselves and believe in Britain.
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On The Nature of Monarchy
In 1957, Ernst Kantorowicz published The King’s Two Bodies (KTB), a deep and penetrating analysis of the relationship between monarchy and the public realm. In this magisterial work, Kantorowicz explained with unmatched clarity the language of the medieval theologians and jurists, from dignitas to fisc to corpus mysticum, all of which have passed out of the bounds of our quite technocratic political language, but have, in many ways, shaped and laid the foundations for its articulation. The corpus mysticum, for instance, made the very notion of ‘popular sovereignty’ even thinkable, not merely conceivable. This article is an attempt to distill my research into Kantorowicz’s theory of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’, of the corporeal function that kingship played, in both the continuity of a people and in the question of the acting body, to show what the nature of monarchy actually is, beyond a simple constitutional component.
In Kantorowicz’s analysis, there are three consistent themes: first, the synecdochical relationship assumed between the physical body of the king and the unphysical ‘body’ of the people over whom he ruled; second, the important function of continuity that the office performed; and third, the normative relationship between ruler and ruled. However, before turning to these three themes, it is important to note that Kantorowicz’s analysis revolves around two significant observations: first, that there was an awareness of the difference between ‘the King’, meaning of the office of monarch, and ‘the king’, meaning the actual person who occupied that office. This is the origin of Kantorowicz’s chosen title: ‘that by the Common Law no Act which the King does as King, shall be defeated by his Nonage. For the King has in him two bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic’, a juridical fiction which, logically, ‘conveys “immortality” to the individual king as King, that is, with regard to his superbody’ in such a way that, in one court case, loyalty to King Henry VIII could be demanded as if he were ‘still “alive” though Henry Tudor had been dead for ten years’ (KTB:: 7, 13-14).
The second significant observation is that of the role played by Christian theology in the creation of a language of organic unity between ruler and ruled. It was St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (chapter 12, verses 12 and 27) that affirmed the image of the Church as a single body, with Christ as the head, with whom the laity enjoyed unity, but the systematic expression of such a unity was St. Augustine’s to make. He referred only ever to the Church as the ‘Body of Christ’, or in his native Latin, Corpus Christi – though interestingly, the phrase the ‘mystical body of Christ’ was not St. Augustine’s but was coined much later. Regardless, Corpus Christi refers to the idea that Christ ‘is to be taken no longer as an individual, but in His fullness, that is, with the whole Church, with all of the members, of whom He is the Head, as constituting one unit, one whole, one person’ (Grabowski, 1946: 73-75). It is important, however, to bear in mind how one individual person might join the body of the Church: through confirmation, and communion; in other words, through express desire, and continual affirmation of membership. Such an act ‘constitutes a spiritual entity which is [Christ’s] Body here on earth’ that results in ‘the incorporation into the Body of Christ’ (Grabowski, 1946: 84-85). As Kantorowicz shows, such doctrine was used as the basis for the relationship between people and k/King. Though Pope Boniface VIII intended to reassert the Papacy above secular powers, and remind them of their ‘purely functional character within the world community of the corpus mysticum Christi’ [the spiritual body of Christ], it was the implication of ‘the Lord’s two bodies’ that would inform the emergent doctrine of the k/King’s two bodies, to such an extent that Kantorowicz considered it to mold ‘most significantly and decisively the political thinking in the high and late Middle Ages’ (KTB, 194-206):
To summarize, the notion of corpus mysticum, designating originally the Sacrament of the Altar, served after the twelfth century to describe the body politic, or corpus iuridicum, of the Church, which does not exclude the lingering on of some of the earlier connotations. Moreover, the classical christological distinction of the Two Natures in Christ… has been replaced by the corporational, non-christological concept of the Two Bodies of Christ.
It was in the wake of this theoretical shift that the secular powers, competing with the Church for supremacy, were able to adopt the language of the state as a body, with such phrases as corpus Reipublicae mysticum, which allowed the jurists to arrive ‘like the theologians, at a distinction between corpus verum – the tangible body of an individual person – and corpus fictum, the corporate collective which was intangible and existed only as a fiction of jurisprudence (KTB: 207-209). It is important to note here that the unique transformation brought about by the turn to the Christological terminology is specifically the idea of the body politic as a mystical body, not merely a body coterminous with the physical individuals that composed a political community. With this theoretical and theological background informing both the emergence of the doctrine of the k/King’s two bodies, and the internal relationship between them, this creates much of the intellectual condition for the emergence of ‘the people’ as a mystical body abstracted from its component parts.
Focusing, however, on the k/King’s two bodies, the synecdochical relationship between the King and the people was a fiction well-theorised in medieval theology. In the mid-fifteenth century, it was generally acknowledged that ‘an attack against the king’s natural [physical] person was, at the same time, an attack against the body corporate of the realm’, with a qualifying difference of ‘“one [body] descending from nature, the other from the polity”’ (KTB: 15, 46). Drawing on Anthony Black’s comments that legality relied on a certain conception of a people as both a trans-temporal entity that those laws applied to, as well as the source of the authority of laws, the relevance of a people’s corporality makes sense when we observe that ‘“Laws, and not the person, make the king”… a statement well known to Canonists; and according to the lex Digna itself the emperors confess: “On authority of the Law our authority depends”’ (KTB: 150).
If the King is a part committed to the whole of ‘the people’ as a single entity, then it must be remembered the authority of the King is derived from – whilst also being somewhat concurrent with – that entity’s will. After all, as one French jurist claimed, ‘the French king, like the Roman emperor, “had all the rights, especially the right pertaining to his kingdom, shut in his breast”’ (KTB: 153). Of course, this manifested differently across peoples: famously, in England, ‘the people’ was present in specifically in the King in Parliament; just as ‘the comitatus or county took visible form in the comitatus or county court, so the realm took visible form in a parliament’ (Maitland, 1901: 133). This held, however, for the English jurist Henry de Bracton (1210-1268) a paradox: ‘either the king is sovereign or no; if he be sovereign then he is not legally below the law, his obligation to obey the law is at most a moral obligation; on the other hand if he is below the law, then he is not sovereign, he is below some man or some body of men’ (cited in Maitland, 2015: 101). Although this was mostly resolved by the juridical separation between king-as-person and King-as-office, as noted above, it did eventually lead to the question of where sovereignty lay.
Of course, all of this relies on the recognition that there is an entity of ‘the people’ that is physically separate from the king, but ‘the king’s body politic could be the realm as a body politic – with the king as the head and the subjects as the members – or it could be the office of kingship – the dignity’ (Fortin, 2021: 5), . Joseph Canning has also noted the rise in medieval political thought of the distinction between the king and the people over whom he ruled: ‘notions according the kingdom an existence distinct from that of its king, organological views of society organised into a corporate body, and views of rulership as public office’ created the capacity to think that ‘the concept of a royal office, whose purpose was to serve the common good, involved the notion that the regnum or populus had a separate existence from that of its monarch’ (Canning, 2009: 64-65). This especially became emphasised in the later Middle Ages when (KTB: 193):
the centre of gravity shifted, as it were, from the ruling personages to the ruled collectivities, the new national monarchies, and the other political aggregates of human society. In other words, the exchanges between Church and State continued; but in the field of mutual influence, expanding from individual dignitaries to compact communities, henceforth was determined by legal and constitutional problems concerning the structure and interpretation of the bodies politic.
This is a significant development, as it coincided ‘with that moment in the history of Western thought when the doctrines of corporational and organic structure of society began to pervade anew the political theories of the West and to mold most significantly and decisively the political thinking in the high and late Middle Ages’, a change capitalised on by Baldus de Ubaldis in his definition of a ‘populus, the people, as a mystical body. He held that a populus was not simply the sum of individuals of a community, but “men assembled into one mystical body” … a body or corporation to be grasped only intellectually, since it was not a real or material body’ (KTB: 199-210). Despite the emergence, however, of the body politic as an ‘intellectual body’, the k/King remained the physical representation of that body politic in the world, as ‘the polity itself, or the mystical body of the realm, could not exist without its head’ (KTB: 227); hence, whilst the trend developing was to admit that ‘a people’ was a real entity separate from the physical body of the king, it was not thought to be capable of existing or, importantly, acting without something or someone through which it can be embodied.
Interestingly, Marie-France Fortin has recently shown that Kantorowicz’s analysis reveals that, whilst the power of dignity, dignitas, conferred upon the prince by an ‘immortal polity’ (KTB: 397), was concurrent with the office of kingship, it was ‘the Crown, on the other hand, [that] connoted a more general, public and communal sphere’ and was ‘incomplete without the other members of society’ (Fortin, 2021: 2). We can turn here to the second theme of Kantorowicz’s analysis, that of continuity and the problem that the physicality of ‘the king’s two bodies’ created; as Kantorowicz noted, ‘the concept of the “king’s two bodies” camouflaged a problem of continuity’ and it would be a ‘mistake to assume that the new philosophic tenet produced, caused or created a new belief in the perpetual continuity of political bodies’ (KTB: 273) – this was a perennial issue in political thought, and the continuity of the king’s two bodies is more of a product, than a cause, of such an issue.
Indeed, ‘the practical needs of kingdoms and communities led to the fiction of a quasi-infinite continuity of public institutions’ and that ‘practical needs produced institutional changes presupposing, as it were, the fiction of an endless continuity of the bodies politic’ (KTB: 284, 291). This is not to say the k/King was the only source of continuity: as with above, the law was seen a particularly reliable mechanism by which ‘every plurality of men collected in one body’ could be treated as a ‘juristic person, of distinguishing that juristic person clearly from every natural person endowed with body and soul, and yet of treating a plurality of individuals juristically as one person’ (KTB: 306).
On the topic of the relationship between law and custom as methods of continuity for a body politic, St. Thomas Aquinas’ writings are particularly revealing. He claims, for instance, that ‘when a thing is done again and again, it seems to proceed from a deliberate judgement of reason. Accordingly, custom has the force of law, abolishes the law, and is the interpreter of law’ (1988: 80). As conservatives, I think we ought to be particularly sensitive to St. Thomas’ writings on this topic, especially as our modern world often forces us to see the law and tradition in conflict. Nonetheless, in the medieval era, the law increasingly became the source of legitimacy for public actions, be they of the King or any other public office.
However, the law could not resolve the issue of action and decision in and of itself, especially as there were increasing attempts to incorporate the ‘ruler’s will’ in the legal system, to the extent that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tussled with this will when compared to the ‘rights of the community’, with the kingship as an office ‘established with the specific purpose of securing the preservation and well-being of the communities which the ruler served’ (Canning, 2009: 162-166). Whilst I turn to the normative relationship between ruler and ruled shortly, here we can focus on Kantorowicz’s important observation that, as a product of the belief in the continuity of the people ‘as an universitas “which never dies”’ (KTB: 314), there arose the significant question of whether the corporate realm existed between the death of one king and the coronation of another. Whilst the earlier Middle Ages imagined that, due to the intertwining between Church and State, ‘the continuity of a realm during an interregnum had been sometimes preserved by a fiction: Christ stepped into the gap as interrex and secured, through his own eternity, the continuity of kingship’, the increasing tendency of Popes to claim authority as interrex made the fiction politically dangerous. Instead, the fiction arose of the sempiternity of the Crown (KTB: 334-335, 341-342):
In the phrase “head and Crown” the word Crown served to add something to the purely physical body of the king and to emphasise that more than the king’s “body natural” was meant; and in the phrase “realm and Crown” the word Crown served to eliminate the purely geographic-territorial aspect of regnum and to emphasise unambiguously the political character of regnum… briefly, as opposed to pure physis of the king and the pure physis of the territory, the word “Crown,” when added, indicated the political metaphysis in which both rex and regnum shared, or the body politic (to which both belonged) in its sovereign rights.
As Fortin observes, the melding of the two symbols of King and Crown allowed elements of that perpetual community that the King ought to have embodied – the people – to pass into the Crown, such as the eternity of the office, and the corporate realm of the body politic (2021: 8). As a result, ‘in the later Middle Ages the idea was current that in the Crown the whole body politic was present… in this respect indeed the Crown and the “mystical body of the realm” were comparable entities. Neither one nor the other existed all by itself “in the abstract” and separate from the constituents’ (KTB: 363). We see here, then, a similarity to the Aristotelian notion of the polis as an embodied corporeal people, as well as a comparison to John Ma’s analogy of the polis as ‘social memory’; a reliance on a physical presence, be it king, king-in-parliament, or so on, meant the continuity of a people’s acting body had to be reflected in an equally continuous physical presence. In this respect, this was part of the conflation of Crown and King that Fortin analyses, in that each symbol acted complementary to the other: whilst the Crown was the eternal symbol, the King could be embodied in the king. This theoretical move was reflected most clearly in the emergence of the phrase ‘The king is dead! Long live the king!’ which, whilst deceptively simple, ‘powerfully demonstrated the perpetuity of kingship’ by suggesting an unbroken embodiment of the King that did not ‘end’ with one king’s death (or, ‘demise’) and another king’s accession (KTB: 412). Regardless, ‘the Crown… could hardly be severed from the king as King…. It remained possible, for example, to personify the Crown which, representing something that touched all, stood in many respects for the whole body politic’ (KTB: 372, 383).
This brings us to the third theme of Kantorowicz’s work, that of the normative relationship between ruler and ruled. We can see clearly the synecdochical relationship that arose out of the organological, ‘corporate realm’ thought, as well as the use of the office of kingship to reflect a theorisation of the ruled people as a continuous entity, but this has not really answered the question of why an embodiment of that people is necessary. Whereas Aristotle’s theory of the polis as necessary for the bios and therefore the highest expression of the common good, the concomitant principle to the theorisation of a continuous people was one in which ‘the idea of a state existing only for its own sake was foreign… the very belief in a divine Law of Nature as opposed to Positive Law, a belief then shared by every thinker, almost necessitated the ruler’s position both above and below the Law’ (Kantorowicz, 2016: 144). Though the concept of popular sovereignty was historically distant, the awareness of the separability between the ruler and the ruled, at least on a practical level, had to be balanced with the necessity of the people’s capability to act as a political body. The Divine Right of Kings was certainly one answer, as ‘the king acts for the people which has been committed to his care by God and which cannot act for itself’ (Canning, 2009: 21). Just as the idea of Christ as the interrex declined, so too did the religious foundation for kingship, but the organological concept still posited that the King was the head of the body of the people. To justify the capacity for the King to act, not on behalf of the people, but as the people, there arose a particular conception of the universitas, the body corporate, as a legal minor. Largely a product of rediscovered Roman law, the conflation of ‘madmen, children and cities’ under an edict meant that (KTB: 374):
when, in the course of the thirteenth century, the corporational doctrines were developed, the notion of “city”, civitas, was logically transferred to any universitas or any body corporate, and it became a stock-in-trade expression to say that the universitas was ever an infant and under age because it needed a curator.
Importantly, as this idea matured, it was transferred to the symbolic entity of the Crown, to the effect that ‘as a perpetual minor, the Crown itself had corporational character – with the king as its guardian, though again not with the king alone, but with that composite body of king and magnates’ (KTB: 381).
What matters here is the relationship given between ruler and ruled that allows for the concentration of political action in the king; the corporeal embodiment of a people in the political world in a single person in such a way that allowed the people to act was due to that people’s inability to act for itself, owing to its legal immaturity as a single corporate body, and not merely because of its physical disaggregation as a multitude of individuals. As a result, ‘the king appeared as the animate instrument of a fictitious, and therefore immortal, person called Dignity’, meaning ‘the dogma of a political Incarnation, a noetic incarnation of the Dignitas or of the Body politic’ (KTB: 445). To compare this to the polis, then, whereas the people could act as a political community through a deliberation with consideration for the common good, under kingship the people were incapable of doing so, under the prevailing legal fiction, resulting in a concentration of decisionist power in the office of King. This was developed into the sleeping sovereign thesis by early theorists of popular sovereignty, but prior to the emergence of popular sovereignty as a concept, the necessity of an acting person required the existence of the office of King and the concept of Crown.
The King, as the office, was the embodiment of the entire body politic; embodied, of course, in the physcal body of the king himself (or queen herself). This is why the political community of the people lived and died with the monarchy – not the specific monarch, because to do so would risk admitting that the people could die. This was the inspiration behind Thomas Hobbes’ famous Leviathan frontispiece, in which an enormous person was composed of the very individuals over whom he governed; Hobbes was not writing and imagining the grand body of the body politic in a vacuum, and did not create the idea from the abstract, but was speaking to a long and fruitful tradition of treating the people as a single entity with a will that would allow that people to actualise its desires.
This tradition is, as I hope to have shown, the legal fiction that the body of the king, as a temporary and temporally-bound entity, is merely the physical embodiment of the King, which is the eternal and spiritual office of the entire body politic over which a monarch reigns. Our modern ideas of popular sovereignty would never have arisen without this fiction, of the original meaning of the phrase, Rex Est Populus: The King is the People.
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