Grand unified books thread

[Syt]

I was thinking of some old school fantasy escapism, and lookie here, there's a HumbleBundle with a bunch of DnD books by R.A. Salvatore.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/salvatore-showcase?hmb_source=navbar&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=tile_index_6

I was annoyed that books 1-6 of his Drizzt series are not part of it, but then I realized I bought a DnD book bundle on Humble a few years ago that included those books, plus a few more. Oops.  So I guess I'm covered for now.

[The Brain]

Absolutism =/= dictatorship.

Maybe in some cases, but hardly in this case.

[Admiral Yi]

Absolutism =/= dictatorship.

The only difference i can think of is the legitimacy conferred by heredity.

[Oexmelin]

Absolutism =/= dictatorship.

The only difference i can think of is the legitimacy conferred by heredity.

It's a pretty big difference, but it's one whose consequences and effects can be difficult to grasp. Absolutism belongs to a world where liberty is understood above all as privilege competing with other legitimate forms of authority and privilege (notably history and time). An absolute king - a relative novelty in the history of kingship - is a king wrestling with the idea of the state, because states provides new frames of reference re: history and time. 

A dictator - at least post Roman era - is a man of power wrestling with the idea of popular sovereignty. It's circumstances that brought him there, as a temporary guardian of power resting somewhere else. Dictatorship has to pay hommage to the fact that "society" is something that exist independent of the dictator's will.

Now, this may seem like irrelevant detail if arbitrary power is the only thing that seems to matter in both cases. But that's more or less the point: how, and to whom, that arbitrary power is justified, is what sets them apart. Toppling a dictator is something that has historically been envisioned way more frequently than toppling an absolute king. Even the exercise of power depends on ways of thinking - about functions and identites - that are difficult to conflate between 17th-18th c. Europe and 19th-20th century Europe.

[The Brain]

Absolutism =/= dictatorship.

The only difference i can think of is the legitimacy conferred by heredity.

It's a pretty big difference, but it's one whose consequences and effects can be difficult to grasp. Absolutism belongs to a world where liberty is understood above all as privilege competing with other legitimate forms of authority and privilege (notably history and time). An absolute king - a relative novelty in the history of kingship - is a king wrestling with the idea of the state, because states provides new frames of reference re: history and time. 

A dictator - at least post Roman era - is a man of power wrestling with the idea of popular sovereignty. It's circumstances that brought him there, as a temporary guardian of power resting somewhere else. Dictatorship has to pay hommage to the fact that "society" is something that exist independent of the dictator's will.

Now, this may seem like irrelevant detail if arbitrary power is the only thing that seems to matter in both cases. But that's more or less the point: how, and to whom, that arbitrary power is justified, is what sets them apart. Toppling a dictator is something that has historically been envisioned way more frequently than toppling an absolute king. Even the exercise of power depends on ways of thinking - about functions and identites - that are difficult to conflate between 17th-18th c. Europe and 19th-20th century Europe.

I don't see any argument here that makes the difference big enough to change absolutism into not being a dictatorship. Sorry.

[Sheilbh]

Absolutism =/= dictatorship.

The only difference i can think of is the legitimacy conferred by heredity.

In my head dictatorship requires a modern sort of post-1789 state. It's more intrusive and more effective. There's something modern about it - I read dictator and I think of 20th century dictators or Francia, not fools in old-style hats and capes.

Absolutism is more early modern. It doesn't have a state, it's around one (crowned) person. They generally diddn't necessarily want to govern in as instrusive a way as a dictator, and even if they wanted to lacked the state capacity around them.

Although I feel like absolutism can build up state capacity

[The Brain]

If the state in a dictatorship has to be more intrusive and effective than the Swedish state under Charles XII, then my impression is that many modern-era third world rulers with absolute power would not be dictators, which strikes me as a strange idea.

If hereditary power means that it's not a dictatorship then latest decades North Korea, or Haiti under Baby Doc, were not dictatorships. Again, this strikes me as a strange idea, and a rabbit hole the attraction of which eludes me.

To me it seems weird and unnecessary to artificially limit the meaning of dictatorship. There's a world of difference between Cincinnatus and Hitler, but they were both dictators. And the spectrum between them is very wide, certainly wide enough to accomodate most absolute rulers I'm aware of (the exact positions of individuals at the very extremes can be discussed endlessly).

To add a more general point, I think that a preference for era exceptionalism doesn't help with actually understanding history.

[Sheilbh]

Thinking about it I think Oex's explanation gets at what I mean more - and it's possible less to do with state capacity than the concept of the state.

Absolutism operates in a world where there's lots of loyalties and authorities and formal divisions across society that all have rights and are partly self-governing: all of the town charters, the fueros, the church, the rights of each class or estate, feudal ties, local courts or parlements, the republic of the Indians. All of which interlink and there's a monarch at the top. It's society as family tree, lots of branches doing their won thing. Absolutism to me is the monarchic system that either those rights and authorities don't exist because as a divinely appointed monarch they overrule it, or that tries to rationalise all of those so they feed into the monarchy.

Dictatorship to me is more of an up-and-down ladder. The leader, to which the state answers and the people. There may be alternate loyalties and, in effect, different rights like the military but that's not by purpose and is normally just a reflection of multiple competing power-bases, rather than an ordered and deliberate world. It may just be that dictatorships haven't lasted as long as monarchies so they aren't necessarily institutionalised. Maybe absolute monarchies are what dictatorships look like after a few hundred years from direct power of a local warlord to a more elaborate system. If I was reading a book I'd understand them slightly differently - not to bang on about Hobbes but in my head you need that idea of the Hobbesian state/sovereign to have dictatorship.

I think dictators and monarchs, Cincinnatus and Hitler are all autocrats. But yeah to me I would think they're different. And I'm afraid I have no idea about the Swedish state or monarchy so it may have swept away all those Medieval legacies earlier and actually been closer to a dictatorship.

[Oexmelin]

If I was reading a book I'd understand them slightly differently - not to bang on about Hobbes but in my head you need that idea of the Hobbesian state/sovereign to have dictatorship.

That's it. To put it in more abstract terms, the Hobbesian state does away with the notion that things are the unchanging reflections of who people fundamentally are; states become actual creations that can therefore be influenced and modified. How? That's what absolutist kings will try to figure out. The modern state meanwhile will no longer be that lone apparatus: it will be locked in contention with the sort of constraints that people collectively and unknowingly create: society. What that means is that people are no longer brought to obey because of who they are, but because of what they do. This is very alien to someone of the 17th century.

It's not about era exceptionalism, it's about understanding time period on their own terms, rather than flattening them all into being reflections of our own experiences. Otherwise, some things become impossible to understand. Why do kings in the 16th century start chopping heads of their powerful courtiers, when kings of past eras generally didn't? Why do most dictators of the 20th century bother with a constitution? Were the expectations of obedience the same under Louis XIV as they were under Mussolini?

[crazy canuck]

If I was reading a book I'd understand them slightly differently - not to bang on about Hobbes but in my head you need that idea of the Hobbesian state/sovereign to have dictatorship.

That's it. To put it in more abstract terms, the Hobbesian state does away with the notion that things are the unchanging reflections of who people fundamentally are; states become actual creations that can therefore be influenced and modified. How? That's what absolutist kings will try to figure out. The modern state meanwhile will no longer be that lone apparatus: it will be locked in contention with the sort of constraints that people collectively and unknowingly create: society. What that means is that people are no longer brought to obey because of who they are, but because of what they do. This is very alien to someone of the 17th century.

It's not about era exceptionalism, it's about understanding time period on their own terms, rather than flattening them all into being reflections of our own experiences. Otherwise, some things become impossible to understand. Why do kings in the 16th century start chopping heads of their powerful courtiers, when kings of past eras generally didn't? Why do most dictators of the 20th century bother with a constitution? Were the expectations of obedience the same under Louis XIV as they were under Mussolini?

To add to that, Brain's analysis expressly equates Cincinnatus with Hitler, while acknowledging that there is "a world of difference between them" he dismisses all of that difference by simply saying "they are both dictators".   One of the differences is that Cincinnatus both gained and gave up power according to the norms and laws of the early Roman republic which anticipated Hobbes by recognizing that there were times when a Leviathan is needed if only for a limited period of time.  Modern day dictators warp the norms and laws of their societies to become an approximation of Leviathan but lacking the legitimacy which would otherwise attach to the exercise of that power if accepted norms and laws had been followed.

[The Minsky Moment]

If I was reading a book I'd understand them slightly differently - not to bang on about Hobbes but in my head you need that idea of the Hobbesian state/sovereign to have dictatorship.

That's it. To put it in more abstract terms, the Hobbesian state does away with the notion that things are the unchanging reflections of who people fundamentally are; states become actual creations that can therefore be influenced and modified.

That's is abstract, perhaps overly so.  Pre-Hobbesian monarchs and princes often interacted with states as creations that could be influenced and modified.  Machiavelli most obviously is pre-Hobbes, as is Jean Bodin.  But even before that there is considerable evidence of conscious state building and institutional design in the High Middle Ages or even the Carolingian era.   And if one leaves the little European backwater (e.g. China) then one can go well far before that.

[The Minsky Moment]

  One of the differences is that Cincinnatus both gained and gave up power according to the norms and laws of the early Roman republic which anticipated Hobbes by recognizing that there were times when a Leviathan is needed if only for a limited period of time.  Modern day dictators warp the norms and laws of their societies to become an approximation of Leviathan but lacking the legitimacy which would otherwise attach to the exercise of that power if accepted norms and laws had been followed.

We are risk of falling into the semantic rabbit hole: "Dictator" is name for a particular office under the Roman Republic - one that changed over time - but is also and English word of common usage connoting any ruler at any time with pretenses towards exercise of total or absolute power.  In the latter common English sense an absolutist monarch could qualify, although of course one can make meaningful distinctions between 17th/18th century monarchies on the one hand and both the Roman Republic dictator and 20th century dictators on the other.

[Oexmelin]

But even before that there is considerable evidence of conscious state building and institutional design in the High Middle Ages or even the Carolingian era.   

I disagree with these interpretations, or at least the strong versions of them, which generally have been suggested by medievists who seem to think that state-building lends validation to their research, i.e., that medieval people were not "unsophisticated".  That there is the survival of something like the "res publica" amidst medieval jurists and kings is one thing. That it coincides with the specificities of post 16th century states is far from certain. To put it otherwise: what we read as "institutions", medieval people usually read as "bodies". We read them through their outcomes, and it's therefore easy to disregard how they operated to focus on outcomes, and claim they are the same. They read them through their representations.

The case of China is different - which makes it more interesting. The problem is that most of Chinese historiography is consumed with the issue of modernity (again, asserting that China was "modern" before Europe), which means that the research / conceptual questions is already skewed towards establishing sophistication. 

[Oexmelin]

We are risk of falling into the semantic rabbit hole...

It's not really a semantic rabbit hole - it's the heart of history of ideas, including history of political ideas. We always have to struggle with the fact that words have a history, and that what we read one way today was not read with the same way in the past. Favorite examples include: State, Republic, King, Corporation, etc., etc., etc. Unless one wants to claim it's all the same, really, in which case we are left with quite blunt instruments like "the few", "the many", "power" and "violence". A lot of ink was spilled, in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century on the definition of "tyrant" precisely because the subtleties of such definitions had very real political consequences.

There is a difference between communicating bluntly some aspects of power for a contemporary audience (here, it seems to be arbitrary power) and studying the subtleties of difficult concepts to gain some access to past realities. What the Swedish War Museum sought to do here, I do not know. I just know that, for most serious historians, absolutism and dictatorship are not synonymous.

[The Brain]

I am now reading First To Fight, by Moorhouse, to prepare me for the books on the campaign in the West. I'm not an expert on the Polish campaign, but the book seems nice so far. That being said its focus is the human drama, it's not a detailed military history of the conflict.