Rites of Rulers

Abstract

The rites of rulers are many and diverse. Some appeal to non-natural powers, others to natural ones. Some make fictional claims, others non-fictional ones. These two categories cutting across one another generate four types of political ritual: magico-religious, constitutive, schematizing and representational. These are all common types of ritual and, though they may be mixed in any particular instance, each is in principle a distinct form. Distinguishing between them is crucial to the evaluation of political ritual more generally. The ordinary objections that rituals lie and inhibit social change are shown to apply quite narrowly to the magico-religious variety. Allusions to 'political rituals' are now rather common. Eleeions, Edelman, Rose and Mossawir assure us, essentially serve ritualistic functions. Similarly with budgeting and social planning, Wildavsky, Olsen and van Gunsteren concur.l Quite what is being claimed is unclear, however, given a certain vagueness in the meaning of 'ritual'. In contemporary language, deriving indirectly from Latin through Middle English, the word 'rite' implies 'a formal procedure or act in a religious or other solemn observance'. Since 'rite' straddles religious and other solemn activities, political analysts can, in referring to 'political rituals', allude to quasireligious aspects of politics without actually saying so. Some clearly do intend the religious analogy: Bellah and Verba talk explicitly of 'civil religion', Apter of 'political religion' and Wildavsky of planning as an 'act of faith'. Most, however, are content to hide non-committally behind the looseness of language.2 These theological residues in the notion of 'ritual' get in the way of understanding and especially of evaluating-political rituals. We tend to misunderstand political rituals by supposing that they are necessarily appeals to supernatural powers; and we tend to judge them too harshly by supposing them to be necessarily irrational. We are misled to concur in Arnold's analogy between running a country and running an insane asylum and, along with it, his suggestion that governments emulate that This content downloaded from 207.46.13.151 on Sat, 17 Jun 2017 18:49:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 282 Robert E. Goodin 'government which civilized nations impose on savage tribes, . . . utilizing taboos instead of trying to stamp them out as unsound.'3 I propose to develop here a two-fold typology especially but not uniquely applicable to the analysis of political ritual. Its most striking feature is the exceedingly limited role accorded to religious aspects of ritual behaviour. A great many political rituals can, it is suggested, be analysed far more plausibly as illustrations of other categories. This richer understanding of the varieties of political ritual, in turn, allows us to see traditional objections to such practices as being narrowly applicable to the religious variety almost exclusively. I. VARIETIES OF RITUALS A rite is by definition 'a formal procedure or act in a religious or other solemn observance' (OED). Since the aim here is to produce a general analysis, the broader alternative is adopted: a formal procedure will be called a ritual if it merely involves a solemn performance. Of course, the reason for the solemnity is usually that the rite refers to or reaffirms an important theory of some sort or another. But sometimes the rituals persist long after the theory is forgotten. Indeed, one might argue that rituals arise only once the theory has been forgotten, so its operationalizations and rules-of-thumb can no longer be modified by reference back to the underlying theory and have rigidified instead. Thus, it is far better to tie the definition to solemnity. Two conditions, solemnity and activity, are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for a formal procedure to be ritualistic. The analysis offered below must be understood as an attempt to catalogue the several varieties of ritual. The import of the dimensions to be discussed is that they separate one variety of ritual from another, not that they separate ritual from non-ritual. Neither, it must be added, is there anything in the typology to suggest a developmental sequence or to reflect in any way on the historical origins of ritual. In the two-fold typology of rituals I propose, the first dimension distinguishes rituals according to the character of the powers to which they are thought to appeal, whether they are natural or non-natural. The supernatural is included in, but does not exhaust, the category of the non-natural. That class also includes what might be called 'subnatural powers', those which are owing entirely to human contrivance. Hence, the term 'non-natural' (suggesting something merely 'deviating from the natural order') is favoured over the stronger 'unnatural' (with its implication of something 'contrary or doing violence to nature,