Absolute Monarchy in a Modern Setting

I've been toying with the idea of a setting in a world much like our own, except that one of the world's major powers is still, at least nominally, an absolute monarchy. I was thinking of setting it on either an alternate Earth or just an entirely new world.

Basically, you have a country with power comparable to the US, or other empires of history (Rome, France, China) but whose technology level is similar to that of the 21st century. (I really liked Kings)

The focus would take place mainly in the Capital city and the plots and intrigues surrounding the Deadly Decadent Court. Some other tropes I'm considering include an Elective Monarchy, Succession Crisis, a quasi-Feudal Future (with Feuding Families and Corrupt Corporate Executives). I want to avoid simply having a Genericist Government and have some ideas for fleshing out the inner workings of the system.

Mainly, I want to avoid a setting that's too "Futuristic" but also not going back to a Medieval-style setting. Are other Tropers familiar with other settings and stories that have a similar feel or setting to them that they could recommend or thoughts to share on this?

You know, there's actually an absolute monarchy or two still around today. Saudi Arabia is a good example, as are a number of other arab states. North Korea also has many of an absolute monarchy's traits even if the Kims didn't officially call themselves kings.

Beaten to the punch with North Korea. Though I will admit I forgot the House of Saud as well.

Monarchy World

Oh, absolutely (snicker). As are Qatar, Swaziland, Brunei, Oman and Vatican City. And they're considered the exception rather than the rule, and among them Saudi Arabia and Vatican City are arguably the most important because of the former's oil reserves and the latter because it's the seat of the Catholic Church. But what I was thinking of was something more in the vein of western-style monarchies. Sort of like The Tudors writ large and transplanted to the modern day. Probably far less overt warfare and a lot more political scheming and backbiting.

In the setting I'm imagining, political advancement largely depends on the service one is to the Crown. The Crown rewards good, loyal service with money, position, prestige and power. In this world, the Imperial Crown directly owns or controls a large chunk of the national economy, in the form of real estate, financial institutions, corporate shares, intellectual property and other assets. In turn, it has to pay for not only its own expenses, but the ordinary expenses of government as a whole. National defense, infrastructure, education and so on. Taxation would be relatively rare. A lot of politics would involve competing for patronage from the Crown, such as an appointment to a corporate board or getting money to start a business. Imagine if the Federal Reserve also operated as an investment bank.

At the same time they also have to be patron of the arts and sciences, so it would fund universities, scientific research, works of art and literature in order to a) show off, and b) attract the best and brightest into its service.

edited 12th Aug '14 4:37:33 PM by Lawyerdude

Saudi Arabia on paper has a Parliament or similar, it just can't overrule the House of Saud.

Monarchy World looks like a good outline. For me, what I'm really interested in is how the setting affects a particular individual (Dammit Mike Judge). One can drone on and on about the particulars of a world, but in my experience you need somebody who lives in that world to serve as a reference point. Or perhaps several someones.

I've started to watch The West Wing. Great series, although some of its stuff is a bit outdated. Maybe I need to focus on a central theme and goal. I may have too many ideas rolling around that focusing on just one or two is the challenge. Perhaps I need to think about no more than two characters. An idea of mine is somebody close to the Imperial Court, and another who is far away looking to make his way up. Then you have the idea of a third person; somebody who feels stuck in the middle. Above the petty day to day politics, but still removed from the true center of power. For me, that is the kind of story I'd like to tell. Yes, there are a lot of parallels to Richard The Third and House Of Cards, but maybe that's because that provides for a better story? Please share thoughts.

edited 12th Aug '14 9:00:28 PM by Lawyerdude

Look no further than Yes Minister, then. That's about as 'middleman' as you can reasonably get, and I suspect it translates quite well to any political system.

An excellent suggestion. In fact, I've watched both Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister in their entireties multiple times. Including today. They are brilliant series, both in writing and in acting.

Hacker is a quintessential example of somebody who is both a middleman and who has ambitions to a higher office. Nevertheless, he is still bound by democratic conventions, as evidenced by his obsession with how he appears on the press and in TV, and his making deals involving his home constituency. On top of it all, Hacker is, as the title of one episode says, a Whiskey Priest; he has a conscience. A dangerous third wheel for a politician.

So, we're left with somebody with high ambition and a public conscience, but on the other hand there is a question s to the source of any grassroots tension. Perhaps he comes from a particularly influential faction, family or entity whose wealth plays a role in high decision-making. In the scheme of things, he isn't much, but if he wants to win support and approbation, which in turn lead to power and prestige, he needs to appease not only his immediate patrons, but also the Imperial Crown.

Maybe the question should be, "What are you willing to sacrifice?" as a variant on "What are you prepared to do?" While some may say that a tripod is inherently unstable, in fact it's the most stable of all structures. Although the structure may stand, the one who sits on it can fall in any direction. All must work together to keep it stable.

...how would religion play out in this monarchy?

(Answer: Pope Jack Hackett.)

But seriously. Is this a 'first family' monarchy or a 'I AM A DIRECT DESCENDENT OF THE GODS (but you can call me Larry)' monarchy?

I'm inclined to keep it nominally secular, with the subjects enjoying a level of religious freedom like they have in the US or Western Europe.

As far as succession goes, one idea I have was to have the Emperor name his own successor in his will, which is kept secret until he dies. Naturally there will be people trying to find out who is named. And since the Crown passes to whomever is designated, regardless of birth order or even blood, there's less murdering your way to the top.

Another idea I had was for the Emperor to nominate a short list of candidates, and then on his death an Accession Council picks one. That does give a lot of opportunity for backroom deals, cloak-and-dagger, made and broken promises and so on. Juicy stuff. Much like the election of Pope Alexander VI as seen in the series Borgia.

Yet a third idea is simply for the Emperor to be elected by some sort of Senate, made up of his closest advisors and top officials. As with the above, there's plenty of room for politicking and dealmaking if you want your side to get a majority. He could of course tell them who he wants picked, but once he's gone it's basically open season.

I doubt that there would be a likelihood of a Civil War, though. If there is a strong national military, loyal to the Crown, then it could put down any uprising. I think I'd want the military itself to be professional and politically neutral, much like modern militaries today. Since their pay and livelihood comes from Crown property, they don't want to see any of it damaged. The reason people want the Crown is because of the immense wealth and power that comes with it.

That first one open up the possibility of a 'the Emperor's Will has been stolen, are you a bad enough dude to recover it' plot. For writing reasons, it's the one I'd probably use.

The second one at least forces a more open succession/accession debate (I can't see any situation where only the council is able to chose). It reminds me of the one from Shining Heresy, and I recall that one ending with the Heresy himself causing all manner of wrecking-up.

I wouldn't do the third one. Too easy to compare to existing systems, mostly.

And with that setup, it won't be a Civil War so much as a rebellion or revolution they'd have to worry about.

Just a few random thoughts on the subject: - "Absolute king in a modern setting" reminded me, in real life, to the Cuba of Fidel and, in a fictional world, to Victor Van Doom's Latveria and to the House of M. - If this is located in the real world or something similar, the people's perception of the government would be of paramount importance, especially if a) something akin to the french revolution ever happened, and b) there is an internet or analog information speedway. How do they keep them happy, without sacrificing their own power?

Right. One reason the system stays in power is because of sheer economic might. It's not a "government owns everything" system like Communism, but rather the government acts as a sort of Mega-MegaCorp, owning or controlling a sizable chunk of the national economy. In my estimates somewhere in the area of 20-30% of national GDP. A second way is that it acts as a major sponsor of arts, entertainment and education. Rather than persecuting the smartest, they give them good education, good jobs and privileges. Also, I was thinking there would be some form of compulsory national service, whether through conscription or a sort of work-study.

There would still be room for private enterprise, but any large enough business entity would either have state sponsorship or state "partnership". For example, in our world when a large corporation goes public, investment banks purchase shares which they then gradually sell off onto the open market. In this system, alongside private equity firms, there would also be the Imperial Bank, which could either compel you to sell it shares or purchase them openly. So the government would have seats on the board of nearly every large enough corporation.

I'm going on a lot about how the economy may work, but I think that's an important element of a fleshed-out world that too often gets overlooked or falls into You Fail Economics Forever.

Also, with the Crown outright owning or controlling a sizable chunk of the national economy, you'd have a lot less need for taxes. And taxation is where a lot of absolutist governments get tripped up. People will tolerate a lot, but if you start taking their stuff without permission, they really get pissed off.

Of course on the flip size, without some kind of representation, a Monarch tends to become too distant from his people and then they may question why they need to obey him in the first place.

Is there an Internet or mass communication? Sure. Although it's probably not as open as it is today. An absolutist system needs to control information and disseminate propaganda. Perhaps there may be a system of "levels" for people who ascend higher also have more access to the Internet. The Roman Empire under Augustus actually enjoyed a great deal of personal freedom. Most people who wanted to criticize Caesar could do so, as long as they didn't incite rebellion.

...while doing the same about a political figure in the late republic would get death squads sent to your house to kill you, your family And Your Little Dog, Too!.

That's one main reason why people rallied behind first the Triumvirate, then Gaius Iulius alone and finally his adoptive son. The republic had become an unholy mess on a level with late revolutionary France, Reign of Terror and everything. Compared to that, what was essentially a military dictatorship (Caesar may have ruled with considerable popular support, but he secured his rule by having several legions directly loyal to him) was by far the preferable option even for outright liberals and free-thinkers (and yes, a number of those existed in ancient rome), and the holdout republicans came across as the bad guys to the man on the street because they wanted to restore a system that, in the end, had caused more terror and murder than Rome had ever suffered before.

The lesson learned here (and later, in Napoleon's rise to power...and maybe even in modern Russia) is that people will readily accept totalitarian rule if it is still demonstrably better than what preceded it.

edited 14th Aug '14 4:44:58 AM by MattStriker

And Caesar Augustus had a very novel approach to consolidating absolute power. Rather than what Julius did, and attempt to make himself Dictator For Life, he held himself out as Just the First Citizen with a mishmash of existing powers that, taken together, made him de facto absolute monarch.

Put briefly, he made himself the Princeps of the Senate, which gave him the right to speak first and set the Senate's agenda. While within the City of Rome, he held the power of a Tribune (Tribunicia Potestas) without actually holding the office, meaning that he could veto the act of any public magistrate, and his person was considered inviolate. While outside the city, he held a form of Proconsular Imperium that was legally higher than the Imperium held by the sitting Proconsuls. Added to that was his immensely vast wealth, his enormous clientella, and his auctoritas, he held effective absolute authority while still nominally a republican official.

He also created a professional civil service bureaucracy and encouraged ambitious young Romans to seek public office. Any state of suitable size needs a professional bureaucracy to deal with the mundane day to day issues of government.

Most monarchs have some sort of High Council that advises them and carries out his instructions. Louis XIV actually had several of them, each with a particular area of responsibility, and he acted as the chairman of each. More like a series of committees rather than a single Cabinet.

Augustus and Louis were both personally involved in the daily government of their countries. I think in the setting I'm imagining, the reigning Emperor is probably getting older, and doesn't personally participate in government very often, instead delegating a lot of authority to his underlings.

Reagan and Bush Jr. were known to have delegated a lot of day to day stuff. Clinton had a more "ad hoc" style, putting together groups of advisors and moving between them. Obama it seems is more collaborative, working with his top cabinet officials to make and carry out decisions.

edited 14th Aug '14 12:37:25 PM by Lawyerdude

General agreement with the sentiment, but a nitpick over word choice: "totalitarianism" is a form of government whereby the state attempts to control, or insinuate itself into, every aspect of the citizenry's lives. The examples you used are closer to straight-up authoritarian—and, yes, it's entirely possible to have authoritarian governments that aren't totalitarian, even though they're more "boring". The vast majority of authoritarian states weren't totalitarian.

And in that sense, a modern-day absolute monarchy would work: plenty of authoritarian rulers around the world are pretty close to it anyway.

EDIT: Never mind.

edited 14th Aug '14 10:13:10 PM by RavenWilder

You could probably write a whole book that focuses solely on how the economy functions. (Like a fantasy-genre Michael Lewis .)

With enough care, history (a few failed monarchies in the past, for example), and preemptive dissolution of extremist political parties, you could sidestep most of the tripping-up issues.

I think... you could get away with a real-world Western level of mass-communications control (say what you want, and someone's always going to hear it - but you probably won't get thrown in the gulag), so long as the crown kept a leash on media figures (with education, etc.). Controlling information and disseminating propaganda - I've noticed that they're actually the same thing, if you do it loudly and convincingly enough, and work in some public support or peer pressure. I imagine that this would be easier than completely controlling the masses directly.

I wonder, though, if there's a limit to how big this country can be, before the tiny percentage of the population that are anti-government elements have enough numbers to be a threat through precise targeting.

Every society will have rebellious elements in it. Most of the time they're relatively harmless. Modern technology, particularly weapons technology, has made outright armed rebellion and forced overthrow of a national government virtually inconceivable. Unless the military and police actively help out the rebels to oust the establishment.

The feasible size of a state is a function of the government's ability to make decisions, communicate those decisions and have them carried out. Modern mass communication has made centralized decision-making for large states far easier. A state apparatus needs to be large enough to do its job, but not so large that decisions get bogged down with red tape.

A professional civil service is a good thing, in that it creates a group of trained workers who know what they're doing. On the other hand, as Yes Minister showed, their very expertise can give them too much influence over whether policy is carried out or not. Perhaps I should research how bureaucracies in modern absolutist states have functioned.

"Modern technology, particularly weapons technology, has made outright armed rebellion and forced overthrow of a national government virtually inconceivable."

I beg to disagree, there are plenty of examples where that is not the case, such as Egypt, Lybia, Ukraine... I think it's because soldiers are people as well: there's only so much atrocities they can commit without starting to question the legitimacy of the regime they support.

squeeeeee polisci powers ACTIVATE

The book to recommend here is Birth of the Leviathan, by Thomas Ertman. (Unfortunately it's pretty expensive.) It examines exactly that question in unmatched depth.

Basically, Ertman splits up early-modern states into four categories: they can be bureaucratic or patrimonial, and they can be constitutional or absolutist. How a state develops into each one is a protracted argument that's absolutely fascinating but a big complex for me to summarize here, but for now it'll suffice to mark the differences between them.

A bureaucratic state has a professional, disinterested, salaried civil service that collects the taxes and enforces the laws of the land; in contrast, a patrimonial state devolves that power to interested parties—usually aristocrats—and instead of paying them regular salaries, essentially sells the position of tax collecting to those aristocrats; the aristocrats finance themselves with a share of the cuts, and in return carry out the functions of the central state. Now, the remaining distinction is pretty easy: a constitutional state is one where the power of the ruler is circumscribed by law; an absolutist state is one where the ruler is above the law.

Now, our starting premises. Going by Tilly's theory of state-building, the state exists for the purpose of war in an anarchic international setting. To do that, however, it needs money—lots of money. So, how does it go about collecting the money from its subjects? And how can the ruler—who wishes to save that money in his war chest—ensure that it's not skimmed off midway by other actors? How can he appease those actors so that they don't kick him off his throne?

Our four variations of states all have somewhat different answers to that question...

• A bureaucratic constitutional state is what we're used to in most modern democracies; the historical archetype here is Great Britain after the Glorious Revolution, which established decisively that the king's powers are limited. Common law and custom restrains the king, and to enforce that, a strong parliament makes the laws. That parliament, too, oversees the civil service, which is not drawn from its own members. We thus have the recognizable modern democracy: the central ruler rules, overseen by the parliament/congress/what-have-you, and the civil service goes about collecting money, knowing that it is under the scrutiny of the legislative branch and thus not inclined towards massive corruption.
• The polar opposite is the patrimonial absolutist state. The case study here is Bourbon France, especially at its height under Louis XIV. The ruler is unrestrained by law or custom; at most, he might be restrained by political factions, but those are political and not institutional restraints. More interesting is the patrimonial aspect: because there was no strong legislative to restrain the king (the Estates General being a joke), there is also no strong legislative body to oversee the process of tax collecting. Instead, the job of tax collecting is farmed out to the noblemen, who—with no institutional oversight—promptly take the opportunity to skim as much off the top as they can. It's no surprise that France, despite being a huge power with a tremendous economy, was destitute and bankrupt by the time of the American Revolution.
• A patrimonial constitutional state has the rulers restrained by a legislature, but strips away their power even more by giving the right to collect taxes not to the civil service, but to the noblemen themselves. If this sounds like a recipe for a crippled executive and an over-powerful aristocracy, you're exactly right. This state of affairs exactly described the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (which historians will remember was further crippled by the infamous liberum veto). Needless to say, there's no civil service here at all.
• Finally, what most dictators aspire to: a bureaucratic absolutist state. Unfortunately, this is much easier to set up on paper than it is in reality; the case of the Kingdom of Prussia under Frederick the Great is our study. We'd have a salaried civil service to collect taxes and to administer the land, and sitting on top we have the unrestrained executive. Sounds ideal, right? But the weakness is this: the monarch, and the monarch alone, would have to oversee the entire civil service. You'd need a totally honest, tireless, genius administrator for it all to work. Luckily for Prussia, Frederick the Great was totally honest, tireless, and a genius. Unluckily, his descendants were competent at best, and the Prussia that folded like a house of cards at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806 was the merest shadow of the state that had made such a name for itself in the Wars of Succession.

That's the four-way division. What explains their performance in warfare? In a word, loans.

See, no matter what your tax revenue is, warfare by the Renaissance and afterwards had gotten so expensive that rulers were forced to take out loans to pay their troops. If you've got a positive revenue flow, great; you borrow the money, raise an army, go fighting, sign the peace, pay your troops off, and repay the loan over time from your revenue. But in so many cases, rulers were unable to continue to take out loans. Then, they had an extremely tempting option available to them as rulers that would cripple them in the long run: default.

A ruler could simply tell his creditors "I ain't paying you shit". Naturally, the moment a ruler declared that, nobody would be willing to loan money to him ever again, except at prohibitive interest rates. This explains the reason that England performed so well at fighting France, which had three times its GDP at the start of the 1700s. After a series of crises with previous kings refusing to repay loans, the situation in England was that the Parliament could legally force the government to repay money that it had borrowed, and Parliament was not afraid to crack that whip. As a result, confidence in English bonds soared; nobody really doubted that if they bought a bond from the English bank, it would be repaid over time. England was easily able to crank up its military spending to match France with a minimum of pain. Additionally, Parliament was able to monitor spending: no longer could the King dip his fingers into the national war-chest for his own needs. (King James II hated that, but as you'll recall, he was turfed off his throne in the Glorious Revolution.) Thus you had a tax-collecting system that ran efficiently, overseen at every turn by a suspicious legislature, and incidentally laid down the institutions to guarantee individual rights and the like.

France, though? By the time of Louis XIV, no creditor was willing to lend France substantial amounts of money; too many kings had defaulted on their loans. Thus, France had to resort to the alternative system, familiar throughout corrupt governments the world over: tax farming. Basically, the right to collect fees and taxes was auctioned off to the highest bidder (which would invariably be noblemen). The nobles would pay the king a lump sum of money; in return, they and their descendants unto perpetuity would get to keep part of the state's revenue stream. If this sounds like robbing Peter tomorrow to pay Paul today, bingo. Even under Louis XIV, the Sun King himself, France was running into serious revenue issues; the fact that it was locked in geopolitical competition with England forced it to continually expend money. Over the course of the next century, France would be driven into bankruptcy.

A similar variation holds for Poland-Lithuania, except that there's not even a strong central government from whom the noblemen had to buy their right to collect fees. When it came to assembling an army, the King was entirely on his own. Add to that his very limited powers of coercion over his unruly noble subjects, and the resistance of the nobles to a civil service that would strip away their right tax their subjects, and, well.

Which leads us to our theoretical bureaucratic absolutist state. Now, the noblemen or aristocrats would not be exercising their powers in the Landtag to restrain the king, but neither would they be collecting the money for the state. What to do with them? Frederick the Great essentially taxed them with a civil service, incorporating them if necessary, and had to personally make sure they weren't skimming money off the top. The thing is, there wasn't an institution dedicated to keeping corruption out of the state. The king himself had to do it. And, as stated, this meant you needed a brilliant king-administrator. This was a bureaucracy with plenty of patrimonial tendencies, kept in check by a supervisory body ultimately consisting of one man (as opposed to Britain, where you had a legislature to do it). If that man were not a ruthless genius, the whole system turns into a patrimonial mess.

Thus, then, it should be no surprise that authoritarian bureaucracies the world over have tended towards being—you guessed it—patrimonial messes. Without someone to keep them in check, the natural tendency is for the tax collectors to accumulate wealth and power, and to dispense favors for his friends. Russia throughout its history was known for this problem, even in the Stalinist years (where the nexus of power shifted towards the secret police.) China today is grappling with corruption and theft on a heroic scale. The ruler may not wish it were so; corruption threatens their own legitimacy, and the honest far-sighted dictator wants a system where the taxes flow smoothly from his subjects to his treasury. (The dishonest dictator wants them to flow into his own pockets.) But without a legislative body to keep the tax collectors in check, that's not possible—and the problem with legislative bodies is that they also tend to keep the ruler in check.

OMG YES! That is precisely the line of thinking I was trying for. If you can find an e-copy of that book, please let me know. I am not looking to build a utopian society; far from it. A juicy story needs conflict, and a political story works well with institutional defects in the system.

OK, so we have what on the surface is a bureaucratic absolutist state. But, as you observed, such a system needs a ruler who is on the ball all the time. Something like that is all but guaranteed to fall apart as the ruler gets old, or tired, or bored, or when he/she dies. Hard-won power is more easily kept than inherited power, as we learned from Caesar Augustus and his successors.

So suppose you have a bureaucratic machine that is in place which exercises a lot of influence as to who becomes the next absolute ruler. Much like how Sir Arnold and Sir Humphrey orchestrated Mr. Hacker's rise to Number 10.

So you wind up with a ruler who is de jure absolute, but de facto owes his position to the bureaucratic establishment. So how could that best be effected? Perhaps my earlier idea of the sitting Emperor nominating a slate of candidates, of which one is elected by a senior council of statesmen.

Since, in my setting, The Crown is effectively a ginormous MegaCorp, such a system would be both functional and provide for a juicy garden of story ideas. The top ranks of the system are filled with lifelong bureaucrats, political appointees, inexperienced yet ambitious young pups, aggressive upstarts, and other opportunists who are striving for power.

So even if you have a functioning bureaucratic absolutist state, it tends to degrade into a patrimonial mess. So a key element of story tension should be on keeping the whole system functional and loyal.

Even in a modern bureaucratic constitutional system, it's hard for the elected officials to change things. It's been compared to steering a glacier. So I'm thinking of whose perspective such a story should take. A newly-placed Emperor who slowly comes to realize that his "absolute" power actually means little at all, or a functionary who is devoted to keeping things stable, or an idealistic up and comer who wants to work his way up while doing the right thing.

And now I'm back to Yes Minister. Of course, you do have the evil ambitious protagonist, which gives us House Of Cards. Or there's the optimistic existing members of the establishment, in which case we have The West Wing.

edited 15th Aug '14 9:32:34 PM by Lawyerdude

Glad to see the positive response. Political science has been a passion of mine for a while now, and it goes together very well with my other love, history.

Anyway, I'm a bit tired to really help you extensively for now, or to crank out another effortpost like that one. The good news is, used copies of Birth of the Leviathan are selling for about $6 on Amazon. That's a terrific price for the book considering that Kindle copies are going for a jaw-dropping $30. The prose does tend to be somewhat dry, but the wealth of information and analysis more than makes up for it. Four years of studying international relations, and that's the single best book I can recommend out of them all.

For help looking into how a bureaucracy tends to function under an absolutist dictator, it might be worthwhile looking into modern-day examples. The Soviet Union is the biggest one to come to mind, although that had a whole parallel state apparatus where the power really resided (i.e., the Party). These days, most states stick to a civil service model, even if it's in name only and the actual power comes from a patrimonial system.

edited 15th Aug '14 10:06:56 PM by SabresEdge

In short, the thing that decides political longevity is its effectiveness in collecting capitol? A good military helps, but natural defenses (particularly in the pre-nuclear age) and more importantly bankrupting the other side is how wars are won.

That being the case, there's that book by that French guy, 'Capitol in the Twenty-First Century' - its primary point is that when 'old money' is allowed to accumulate too easily, it will also accumulate political power wildly disproportionate to the number of people wielding it, who then tend to make it easier to accumulate more 'old money'. ...I think. The book's basically one sentence of conclusion on the first page, followed by 700 pages of historical evidence/proof. The audio book alone is 24 hours straight through.

(Also, thank you, Sabres Edge! That post is TV Tropes at its finest!)

edited 16th Aug '14 10:58:49 AM by DeusDenuo