“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
Anarcho-monarchism? Anarchy with a king? What is that?
The first, and at present most correct, answer is that it is a meme ideology. A joke, shared amongst a certain brand of Tolkien fan. But would it be possible for it to be more than a meme? Is a coherent “Anarcho-Monarchist” society really possible?
Tolkien's letter gives us an understanding of where he was coming from. “Grant me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you dare call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers… ...it works and has only worked when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way” A king who’s primary purpose is to occupy the position of king so that no-one else does, whilst the rest of society gets on with its business. The king sits on the throne so that busybodies do not.
But can we flesh that out a bit more? For a king who is king in name only is not going to be an effective bulwark against a would be tyrant. The king must have some power, if only to execute those meddlers who wish to interfere with everyone else’s lives. Were we to try to build a functioning society with such a system, what role would our monarch play, and in what sense would it also be anarchic rather than just a normal state, constitutional or not?
To figure that out, we must first figure out what a state is. Max Weber defined the state as the organisation that has a monopoly on the use of force in a given territory. Whilst that is a good starting point that properly understands where state power ultimately flows from, I believe it is fatally flawed. A gang terrorising a neighbourhood may have a monopoly on force if the de jure state is weak, but very few people would consider it to be a state, even in miniature. A state has more than raw force. A state has a bureaucracy to organise that force and control its use.
The evidence for the earliest states considered to have existed are not smashed in skulls – those long predate the cities of Sumer – but rather on irrigation canals, granaries, and the records of scribes. They were not merely the turf of some ancient warlord; these cities had a system to organise their forced labour and to determine what portion of the workers hard worked for food would be apportioned to the king. The earliest states married bureaucracy and violence, and it is that which I consider to define the state.
Which then leads to the intriguing question – can these two be separated? Could a society exist in which the way people organise themselves and distribute resources is severed from those who are recognised as having the right to use force to uphold the society? A separation of powers in the truest sense? A society which would be both anarchist, being organised without the use of force, but also monarchist, in having an individual who is sovereign? If society can organise itself without violence, what purpose can a monarch serve?
The King is a Schelling point. A person who is acknowledged as being the final arbiter of disputes. A commander in chief the militias can rally behind if some upstart warlord decides that the distributed system of muddling along isn’t to his liking.
At the same time, he is only one man, with perhaps a few hundred retainers, not all of them men of violence. The King’s ability to project force is limited – he has no standing army, no bannermen from whom he can call up levies. He is, more than any other sovereign, reliant upon the consent of the governed, not just the consent of a few thousand powerful men.
Power in an anarcho-monarchist system is personal, which means it is limited in extent. You do not deal with the Forest Department, you deal with a forest ranger, a direct emissary of the King and as such directly answerable to him. There are no endless layers of bureaucracy to be bounced between if you have a dispute – if you can’t handle it in your own community (and almost all disputes could be handled by such), then you take it to the magistrate, and either get a resolution, or know exactly who to go to to get it.
Could such a system actually work? I do not know. Certainly, it does not seem like a system that would be suited to the sizes of countries we have today – a few million people perhaps, at most. And of course, there isn’t much room to try it out in our modern world, with all land claimed by one warlord or another. A few historical parallels perhaps, such as medieval Iceland, but nothing that I am aware of that is like I have described. Still, it is fun to speculate.
Anarcho monarchism: more than a meme ideology?
Maybe within the next decade we can start larping being in such a kingdom in some VR mmorpg. Total immersion has a potential to do something today EVE and the likes today can’t. And hopefully the next century we can have O’Neil kingdoms all over the solar system...