The King’s three bodies: person, state and public opinion

Abstract

ABSTRACT Constitutional monarchy carries less risk of personal tyranny than its absolutist counterpart, but it lacks the increment in potential efficacy of uniting judgment, choice, authority and power to act in a single will and intelligence. What differentiates constitutional monarchy from a republic needs to be something more substantial and less debilitating than mystificatory and archaic modes of dress. Any clear promise it could offer must rest not, with the monarch’s physical body or its public display, but with a close and distinctive relationship between that body and the state itself. Modern political theory sees the state as resting on an elusive mixture of opinion and coercion and its legitimacy as issuing from the opinion. The exigencies of competing for power make it hard for any professional politician to identify the state convincingly with themselves for long. The sole task of constitutional monarchs is to serve their subjects convincingly.