The Absolute State Part One

Politics in the summer period is marked by two major shifts in how the state operates. It is first marked by the rise of the Dynasty idea; it is then marked by a shift in consciousness relating to the growth of cities. Both work together to create the class-state as opposed to the estate-state.

The arrival of the class state is usually closely correlated with the rise of an individual ruler. Crowds are units of blind feeling. When a call to action is made against a crowd, always will an individual rise to command over them and bring them into form. When the crowd has direction, continuity presents itself in the idea of an inherited will from leader to leader. Historically speaking, this has almost always manifested in the prominence of a monarch who passes his will from himself, to his children and his grandchildren as a continuation of that feeling of form.

“The same deep and plantlike trait inspires every real following, which feels in the continuance of the blood of leadership both a surety for and a symbol of the continuance of its own.”

The dynasty idea, composed of an individual ruler and his inherited will, is the fundamental principle of the state idea. Every state idea in every culture, including the anti-monarchical Classical world, is an augmentation of it. In the West following 1500, the genealogical principle that dominated feudal politics empowered the dynasty idea to the length of aborting or birthing nations depending on the family that rose to prominence. “Where a Lothringian and a Burgundian dynasty failed to take shape, there also nations already embryonic failed to develop”. In the Magian world, the individual ruler issued from the consensus of the ruling blood ties. Remember that the Magian house is not patrilineal but often issues from both. When Theodosius died in 550, a relative nun gave her hand to the senator Marcianus. This was taken as a hint from above that his rulership was sanctioned and therefore the dynasty of Theodosius continued through him. Following the Chou period, extensive rules and regulations involving legitimacy to kingship (wang) resulted in equally extensive wars of succession.

Now it’s understood that the Greeks have a worldview that explicitly denies continuity of space and time. Dynasties are a symbol of continuance of time, and so a long history was always destined to play out whereby kings were looked at with scorn no matter the justification. Between 1100 – 650 BC, the destruction of kingship and hereditary succession is apparent in the abolition of kingly qualities as the polis reduced these positions to termed offices. The nobility and priesthood of the early estates found themselves in equivalent circumstance. As city and state became the same territory, the dignity of these ranks fused into what we now recognise as oligarchy. So how did a dynasty, or at least a type of dynasty, come out of such a resolute rejection of the idea?

When Spring turns to Summer, the powers of the land and powers of the city at on equal footing. Money and mind are on equal footing to power and piety and so their form begins to reveal itself. In this moment of history, the plurality of power foci across the culture, in the form of feudal landed estates, concentrates its power in a capital city. The centre of politics goes from aristocratic castles to kingly courts and palaces, and with it the conception of the class state. Not a hierarchy of vassalized estates, but a single organism with different roles; the state on its arrival organises its territories to maintain its form.

The more it affirms its existence, the more it threatens the old order. The class state can be seen as the transition period between Feudalism and the “Absolute state” in this light, a state of political condition where aristocratic class relations are further degraded into social differences. Naturally the state seizing power from the estates is rather threatening. In the West this resulted in the various wars between the power of King and Aristocracy epitomised in the Fronde Wars. In the Classical world, the 6^th century brought with it the Tyrants.

What begins to take shape here is the idea of “nation” as a political currency. In these instances, the Kings and the Tyrants appealed to the non-estate in the war against the estate. Money and mind become influential for the first time as it becomes a sort of “client” of the state, essentially establishing them as the Third Estate as the State needs allies.

So the answer to how even the Greeks had their own dynasty idea comes from the Tyrannies’ alliance with the third estate. Oligarchy opposed it on the grounds of class, established by the polis’ contraction, whilst the Tyrants affirmed it as embodiments of the state. Peasantry and burghers, the non-estate, became influential for the first time. In correspondence to the rise of Tyranny is the promulgation of the popular religions against the Apollinian.

“Therefore, again, it backed the Dionysiac and Orphic cults against the Apollinian; thus in Attica Pisistratus forced the worship of Dionysus on the peasantry, in Sicyon Clisthenes forbade the recital of the Homeric poems, and in Rome it was almost certainly in the time of the Tarquins that the trinity Demeter (Ceres)-Dionysus-Kore was introduced. Its temple was dedicated in 483 by Spurius Cassius, the same who perished later in an attempt to reintroduce the Tyrannis. The Ceres temple was the sanctuary of the Plebs, and its managers, the sediles, were their trusted spokesmen before the tribunate was ever heard of.”

If we look at England in the 1500s, we find a Tudor Dynasty in the aftermath of the War of the Roses. Henry VIII is often seen as impulsive for leaving the Catholic church to divorce his wife, but adjacent motivations around this include a nationalistic concern about the power of a foreign church over the sovereign King. In other words, the young English state wanted to affirm its power over a feudal religious order. The late 1510s brought about the Protestant reformation, which connected the individual directly with God. The establishment of the Anglican church was therefore a response to the spread of this urban Christianity, and its adoption was simultaneously a rejection of Feudalism, an affirmation of the absolute state, and a spiritually Tyrannical promulgation of popular over aristocratic religion in counter to the dwindling power of the estates.

With the Tyrannis we get the concept of the citizen, the polities, the civis, which become the soma of the city-state. But to establish its own support, the Tyrannis created its own downfall. When the people were given their own form in politics, the fear of dynastic lines in power led to its disassembly and the affirmation of Democracy.