Hereditary Monarch Research Articles

Thomas Carlyle and kingship

ABSTRACT Despite an efflorescence of historical scholarship on the theme of monarchy in nineteenth-century Britain, the views of the great Victorian man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in this regard have been explored only in fragmentary and incomplete fashion. The present article aims to offer a comprehensive survey of Carlyle's thought regarding monarchy, arguing that on the whole, Carlyle was strongly and consistently opposed to monarchy on the hereditary principle, claiming that this had become an absurd anachronism in the modern (democratic) world. Instead, Carlyle strongly and consistently promoted a merit-based aristocracy of talent, in which the ‘best’ man would rule, regardless of heredity or social origin. Indeed, in his historical writings, he was quite prepared to endorse regicide as a means to replacing inept hereditary monarchs with low-born men of destiny such as Oliver Cromwell. Although Carlyle refrained from publicly demanding the abolition of the monarchy in contemporary Britain, his private correspondence and conversation were replete with sneers and snide asides regarding Queen Victoria and her predecessors.

Constitutional monarchies and semi-constitutional monarchies: a global historical study, 1800–2017

ABSTRACT The issue of executive power sharing in democratic countries with a monarch as head of state has received little scholarly attention. In many ways this make perfect sense; since there is no place for a powerful hereditary monarch in a democratic system, one could argue that systems with powerful monarchs do not qualify as democracies. Nevertheless, there are many examples of political systems, classified as democracies by most reputable categorizations or indices, where the monarch has, or has had, more or less the same position as a president in semi-presidential systems. The aim of the present study is to study to what extent the occurrence of semi-constitutional monarchies, i.e. democratic regimes in which power is shared between a prime minister and a monarch, can be explained by reference to Huntington’s notion of the King’s dilemma and the size of countries. The study is global and encompasses the time period 1800–2017.

Intertestamental, Apocrypha, NT Use: Qumran

Intertestamental, Apocrypha, NT UseQumran William J. Urbrock, Christopher T. Begg, Eric F. Mason, John Thomas Willis, Isaac M. Alderman, and Rory K. Pitstick 1953. [DSS] Martin Abegg jr., “He Who Freed the Dead Sea Scrolls,” BARev 44 (2018) 24–28. A. reviews the pivotal role played by the then BARev editor Hershel Shanks in 1990–1991 in making the Dead Sea Scrolls available to the wider scholarly community for publication and ongoing research. Photo-illustrated.—W.J.U. 1954. [4Q386] Kenneth Atkinson, “Interpreting the Assassination of Pompey the Great in Light of Biblical Prophecy: The Use of Jeremiah 46, Ezekiel 30, and Hosea 9 in 4QPseudo-Ezekielb (4Q386),” QC 23 (2015) 81–100. The DSS show that the Jews of the Hasmonean period commonly interpreted political and historical events of their time as fulfillments of biblical prophecy. Although the Scrolls’ statements in this regard should be treated with caution for purposes of historical reconstruction, it should be recognized that the Scrolls’ fulfillment notices are no less accurate than their extant classical parallels. For the author of 4Q386, prophecy was not something pertaining solely to the distant past. This manuscript’s contemporized interpretation of the prophecies of Jeremiah 46; Ezekiel 30; and Hosea 9 shows that Jews of the Second Temple period read Scripture as a living text whose predictions were being realized in their own lifetimes. For them, Pompey’s murder was both the fulfillment and verification of Scripture. The messages of Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel brought some measure of comfort to the readers of 4Q386, since these prophets had predicted that justice would be realized in this world. 4Q386’s warning to its Jewish readers—and to Pompey’s successors—was that God is in control of world events and continues to intervene in history to punish sinners. Because the writer of 4Q386 1 4 predicts that the children of Pompey will also perish, the text should be dated either sometime before Caesar’s Spanish campaign that extended from the autumn of 46 b.c.e. to the spring of 45 b.c.e. in which he defeated the last of the Pompeians led by Pompey’s sons Gnaeus and Sextus, or, alternatively, prior to 35 b.c.e., when the latter was killed. These dates match the paleographical dating of 4Q386 and suggest that it was composed shortly before Pompey’s assassination. If so, 4Q386 should be seen as the earliest extant document to mention this momentous historical event. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 1955. [4Q175] Kenneth Atkinson, “John Hyrcanus as a Prophetic Messiah in 4QTestimonia (4Q175),” QC 24 (2016) 9–27. The Qumran document of A.’s title shows that prophetic messianism played a major—and hitherto unappreciated—role in Hasmonean history by providing the family [End Page 679] with a divine sanction to hold both religious and secular power. When read in light of all the available evidence, 4Q175 suggests that Hyrcanus claimed to be the “true prophet” with the sole right to do as he wished in religious as well as secular matters. His family continued to govern as hereditary monarchs until the Romans terminated the Hasmonean state. What made the Hasmoneans unique was their use of prophetic messianism and the tradition of the “true prophet” to bypass their lack of a Davidic pedigree and to enable them to transform their kingdom into a Hellenistic state that their ancestor Mattathias would hardly have recognized. Despite the best intentions of Simon to follow in his father Mattathais’s footsteps, the state he created was in many respects a Hellenistic kingdom like those of the surrounding nations, the one difference being that it emerged only a century after the neighboring kingdoms were formed. The family’s use of prophetic messianism was similar to the Davidic messianism in its combination of divinely sanctioned political and religious authority with the use of violence. It was the Hasmoneans’ astute use of religion and politics and their appeal to prophetic messianism that ultimately enabled them to transform their kingdom into a true state led by a monarch who, like those of the neighboring kingdoms, claimed divine sanction to rule. [Adapted from...

Is There a Polis in Euripides’ Medea?

Abstract The polis is a dominant force in scholarship on Greek tragedy, including Euripides’ Medea. This paper addresses the question of whether there is, in fact, a polis (i.e. a Greek-style city-state) in the play. The polis proper does not often feature in tragedy. Euripides’ Corinth, like many urban centres in tragedy, is a generic palatial settlement ruled by a king. It is not a community of citizens. Creon is a non-constitutional absolute hereditary monarch, and it is a commonplace of tragedy that absolute sole role is antithetical to the idea of the polis. Medea is exiled, not ostracised; she is never a metic. Her relationships and actions are governed by elite xenia, not citizenship. Thus, though ‘political’ interpretations of Medea are all to the good, polis-centric interpretations become much less attractive once one observes the almost complete absence of the polis from the play.

Contending Political Networks: A Study of the "Yellow Shirts" and "Red Shirts" in Thailand's Politics

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In recent years, the explanation for Thailand's democratization has been subject to intense debate. The binary opposition between the urban elites and middle class people, on the one hand, and the rural majority on the other has led the country's democratic transformation into a situation of what I consider a polarization of two influential networks: the network of anti-Thaksin protests led by the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) in 2006 and 2008, and the network of pro-Thaksin demonstrations led by the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) in 2009 and 2010. The past 10 years is viewed as a time of contentious politics, the politics of contested political networks.This paper is an attempt to investigate two contesting political networks in Thailand's politics, namely, the PAD and UDD. Using primary data and interviews with PAD and UDD members in 2009, 2010, and 2014, this paper explores the politics of contestation of the two political networks.1) While the first network is associated with the monarchy, the military, and the bureaucracy, the second network was led by former Prime Minister Thaksin and a series of his sequential political parties2) as well as individuals who disagreed with the 2006 military coup. The significance of these two networks can be seen from their politically influential roles in the Thai democratic process in the last five years.To understand these two networks, the paper will provide a brief background on Thai politics and its contextual conditions with regard to political networks. Second, it will examine both networks in three categories: political conception and perspectives; organizational structure, which includes key decision makers and networking; strategies and activities of network's members. Third, the paper will critically analyze specific characteristics of both networks, their key persons and affiliated members, as well as their functional mechanisms. Finally, the paper will offer a political interpretation of both networks with regard to their positioning in Thai politics.I Thailand's Politics from a Network Point of ViewFollowing the re-election of then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra3) in 2005, Thailand has been caught up in a political contestation between two power networks: the PAD and UDD. This section provides a brief background of Thai politics and its contextual conditions with respect to the country's contemporary politics. It will discuss the dynamism of political and economic governances that have an impact on the politics of networking in Thailand.The Thai political system operates within the framework of a constitutional monarchy, whereby the prime minister is the head of the government and a hereditary monarch is head of state. The judiciary is independent of the executive and legislative branches. The country has a political history of long periods of authoritarianism alternating with periods of semi-democratic government. Since the installation of the first representative government in 1932, the military has interrupted the constitutional order more than 18 times, with Thai citizens witnessing more than 20 changes of government and 18 written constitutions after the abolition of absolute monarchy. In May 2014 there was a coup to remove Yingluck Shinawatra, the first female prime minister and youngest sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in the September 2006 military coup by a group known as the Council of Democratic Reform.4)After the September 19, 2006 military coup that removed Thaksin from office, the monarchy-centered network played a dominant role until December 2007, when the People Power Party-a successor of the Thai Ruk Thai party, which was dissolved due to a vote-buying scandal-won the first post-coup election. During most of 2008,5) a pro- Thaksin government held office under protracted protests by the PAD. It was judicially ousted in December of that year, when a backroom political deal made Democrat Party leader Abhisit Vejjajiva prime minister without the benefit of an election. …

Disputed Heroes: Early Accounts of the Siege of Londonderry

Disputed Heroes:Early Accounts of the Siege of Londonderry Karen A. Holland The one hundred-and-five day Siege of Londonderry in 1689, at the close of a conflict-ridden seventeenth century, was a crucial episode in the larger War of the Two Kings (1688–91) that brought Catholic forces into conflict with Protestants in Ireland. The deposed James II had arrived in Ireland in March 1689 to capitalize on the support of his fellow Catholics in an attempt to regain his crown. By the time the king began his march north, Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell—whom James II had appointed lord deputy of Ireland—had established Jacobite control of all of Ireland with the exception of Londonderry and Enniskillen in Ulster. The Siege of Londonderry began in April 1689 when the combined Irish and allied French forces led by James II arrived before the city walls and demanded the surrender of the Protestant town. Instead of the expected capitulation, they were met with gunfire that killed several of the king’s bodyguards and the possibility of surrender was lost. By June, the military siege had entered a second phase with a blockade of the neighboring River Foyle in an attempt to starve the resistance into submission. It would take an English relief expedition six weeks to break the boom and, with vital supplies now reaching the city, the Siege was lifted on July 31, 1689.1 The relationship between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland was marked by a deep and enduring animosity; the relationship among the various Protestant sects on the island was likewise often rancorous. Religious tenets, politics, and ethnicity all divided the two predominant confessions in the North, the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians. Ethnically, most Presbyterians were [End Page 21] Scots colonists to Ulster. The Episcopalians were the New English immigrants to Ireland.2 The episcopal Church of Ireland was the established church. Presbyterians, who dissented on church organization and theology, were suppressed. In matters of governance, the Episcopalian church was administered by bishops, whereas the Presbyterians favored a more republican organization overseen by ministers and elders. The Puritanism of the Dissenters was also in conflict with the remnants of popery that the Presbyterians believed continued to be practiced by the Churchmen. Furthermore, both sects had fundamentally different political philosophies. Anglicans were, by and large, supporters of “divine right” monarchy that saw the ruler as a chosen representative of God. Presbyterians, on the other hand, tended to be versed in resistance theory and supported the concept of the deposition of a tyrannical monarch. Presbyterians were frequently quicker in their support of William III than the Episcopalians, who struggled intellectually with the overthrow of the hereditary monarch James II.3 Historical and literary accounts of military engagements often unanimously extol one outstanding individual as the hero of the campaign—for instance, the role of Patrick Sarsfield at the Siege of Limerick. The varying accounts of the Siege of Londonderry, however, present no clear-cut hero. 4 Four works authored in the first two decades after the Siege, in a range of literary genres, propose a variety of individuals as the hero. Two of the authors promote themselves as the heroes of the Siege: Rev. George Walker in his journal A True Account of the Siege of Londonderry (1689) and John Mitchelburne in his five-act tragicomedy Ireland Preserv’d or The Siege of Londonderry (1705). The other two texts acknowledge Colonel Adam Murray as the champion of 1689: Rev. John Mackenzie in his history A Narrative of the Siege of Londonderry (1690) and Joseph Aickin in his epic poem Londeriados or a Narrative of the Siege of Londonderry (1699), each portray Murray as the hero, though they emphasize different aspects of his personality. The conventions of the literary genre that each author purposefully selected—a journal, a drama, a narrative history, and an epic poem—require certain attributes of the hero and create certain expectations and interpretations on the part of the reader. Readers do not treat genres as interchangeable; rather, as one recent scholar of the history of reading noted, they link the text to others they have already read, signaling “the appropriate ‘pre-knowledge’ in...

Two presidents are better than one: the case for a bipartisan executive branch

When delegates discussed the structure of the presidency at the Constitutional Convention in June 1787, serious objections to a unitary executive were raised. Edmund Randolph warned, for example, that a one-person presidency would become the “foetus of monarchy.” Controversy over the idea of a single president was predictable. Only recently had the framers freed themselves from the tyranny of King George III, and they were firmly committed to creating a new government that would not abuse its powers and oppress its citizens. It must have seemed preposterous to replace a hereditary monarch with an elected monarch.To be sure, the framers invoked important arguments for a unitary executive. While Congress would deliberate, the president would act with decisiveness and dispatch. A single president would bring order and energy to the national government. With the passage of time, however, it has become clear that the founding fathers misjudged the consequences of their choice:They did not anticipate the extent to which executive power would expand and give us an “imperial presidency” that dominates Congress and that too often exercises its authority in ways that are detrimental to the national interest. They did not predict the role that political parties would come to play and how battles to capture the White House would greatly aggravate partisan conflict. They did not recognize that single presidents would represent party ideology much more than the overall public good. And they misjudged the advantages and disadvantages of single versus multiple decision makers.Had the framers been able to predict the future, they would have been far less enamored with the idea of a unitary executive and far more receptive to the alternative proposals for a plural executive that they rejected. Like their counterparts in Europe, they might well have created an executive branch in which power is shared among multiple persons from multiple political parties.If the presidency is to fulfill the founding fathers’ vision and function more effectively, it needs to be reconceived. This need for constitutional change led me to the proposal for reform that I consider in this book — the replacement of the one-person, one-party presidency with a two-person, two-party presidency.A coalition presidency carries the potential for many important benefits — a balancing of power between the executive and legislative branches, a dampening of partisan conflict in Washington, an executive branch more representative of the entire electorate, real opportunities for third-party candidates to win election, and wiser presidential decision making.After more than two hundred years with the Constitution’s one-person presidency, it may seem preposterous to suggest a plural executive. But a coalition presidency would be far more faithful to the framers’ view of executive power. They wanted a president with limited authority who would serve as a co-equal with Congress. They also believed that power should be contained by dividing it and requiring it to be shared. A two-person presidency relies on the framers’ structural devices to promote their core values. And by correcting the dysfunction in Washington and making the executive branch operate more effectively, a two-person, bipartisan presidency can be justified even without reference to original intent.

The Romance of Hereditary Monarchs and Theocratic States: Ethiopia and Emperor Haile Selassie I in Rastafarianism and Tibet and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, in Western Buddhism

The Romance of Hereditary Monarchs and Theocratic States: Ethiopia and Emperor Haile Selassie I in Rastafarianism and Tibet and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, in Western Buddhism

The Role of President in India

Pratibha Devisingh Patil, the first women President, has assured that she won’t be a merely figure head of the country. My curious mind immediately inquired whether the President of this country is a real head or a mere figure head. The Preamble of our Constitution clearly articulates India as a Republic. Being a Republic, the head of the State is the President and not a hereditary monarch. In India, the President is indirectly elected. Article 54 of the Constitution of India provides for the election of the President and it lays down that the President shall be elected by an electoral college, consisting of the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the State Legislative Assemblies, in accordance with the system of proportional representation by means of single transferable vote by secret ballot.

Defending the Faith(s)? Democracy and Hereditary Right in England

The persistence of traditional monarchies in modern societies, which are otherwise characterized by democratic and egalitarian values, remains a paradox in the social sciences. In part this is attributable to the lack of psychological investigation into the relationship between subject and sovereign, and in particular the ways in which the political and social values of the citizenry shape understandings of a hereditary monarch's right to represent a national community. Adopting the qualitative analysis methods of discursive psychology and grounded theory, the current study examines vernacular accounts of nationhood and monarchy in England in both formalized conversational interviews (n = 60) and impromptu street interviews (n = 56). Focusing on accounts of Prince Charles's recent proposal to change the role of the monarch, from “Defender of the (Christian) Faith” to “Defender of Faiths,” those in favor treated it as a positive step towards reflecting a diverse (religious) community, bringing the monarchy into line with current concerns of pluralism and upholding values of personal choice and individual rights. Participants who rejected the proposed change in title construed it as antithetical to these values in terms of reflecting personal stake and interest, an abuse of power, or an imposition on other faiths. In all accounts, the prime concern was in safeguarding the political and social values of the citizenry. In conclusion it is argued that the study of subjects' relationship to the monarch, its function and legitimacy, can provide an opportunity to examine how values can characterize a national community and facilitate national diversity.

Behn's Monmouth: Sedition, Seduction, and Tory Ideology in the 1680s

Behn's Monmouth:Sedition, Seduction, and Tory Ideology in the 1680s Toni Bowers (bio) Tower Hill, London, 15 July 1685. The crowd clamoring around the scaffold that summer day had gathered to witness an event unparalleled in English history: the execution without prior trial of a vigorous and beloved royal prince, the favorite son of the late king despite his illegitimate birth, and, in the opinion of many Protestants, the nation's best defense against Roman Catholic tyranny. Rumors, opinions, and debates flew around the place of execution: First, That it was barbarous and cruel to behead him without any form of Trial; certainly if People were never so guilty of Rebellion, and taken in the Fact, yet as they are Englishmen born ought to have a Trial for their Life by their Peers. . . . And certainly if any Favour is shewed, it should be to . . . the Son of a King. . . . Others said, you may see how popish Councils prevail; . . . Others said, . . .what was so done was according to Law, and there was no injustice done unto the Duke, for he was taken in the Fact, And Had He Been Cut to Death as Absalom was, he had his just Deserts.1 [End Page 15] The final speaker voices a Tory point of view. As Tories saw it in 1685, the prisoner, James, Duke of Monmouth, could only be condemned as a great and guilty sinner, a rebel against father and king. As the official representatives of Crown and Church also present at his execution insisted, Monmouth had betrayed the doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance, a definitive doctrine for both the Anglican Church and the Tory party in the late seventeenth century.2 But at the same time, the bastard prince also seemed to many to be more sinned against than sinning. Whether or not Monmouth had "his just desserts" was a question very much at issue, not only on the day of his execution, but throughout his notorious (though brief) public career, and even after his death. No doubt some of those present at Monmouth's execution could recall a similar scene 36 years earlier, when Charles I, the prisoner's grandfather, met death at the hands of a rebellious parliament. By 1685, Tories openly decried that event as the most dreadful act of collective folly in the nation's history; many fasted on January 30, the date of Charles I's execution, to show abhorrence of the regicide and veneration for the "royal martyr."3 Charles I, of course, had been brought to the scaffold despite his stature as the nation's reigning hereditary monarch. When they killed him, his subjects broke all previous rules of government and launched the nation on a new course: the political state actually became, for more than a decade before the restoration of Charles II, a republic (or "commonwealth") rather than a monarchy. In the early 1680s, the peace was seriously threatened again, not only by Monmouth's rebellion but also, as before, by disaffected and fearful parliamentarians. Those disquieted by echoes of the earlier execution could take comfort, though, in the great differences in circumstances between the execution of the "royal martyr" and that of the royal traitor taking place before them. The problem with Monmouth, after all, was that he was not the legitimate heir. Far from a victim of regicide like his grandfather, Monmouth stood convicted of having plotted that very crime against his uncle, the legally descended James II. So when Monmouth climbed the scaffold, observers would have been unlikely to find in him the "innocent lamb" or "Blessed martyr" that many by that time saw in the murdered king of an earlier generation.4 On the contrary, though certainly no Puritan, Monmouth seemed to his contemporaries, and especially to Tory observers like the one who thought he had his "just Deserts," only too like the revolutionaries of the 1640s.5 As poems, pamphlets, and broadsides from the 1680s make abundantly clear, contemporaries were used to imagining the bastard prince as a kind of walking paradox —the personification of all that was lovely and heroic [End Page 16] as well as all that was despicable, ungodly, and...

“All Americans are hero-worshippers”: American Observations on the First U.S. Visit by a Reigning Monarch, 1876

When Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, visited America in 1876, he planned to assess industrial and technological innovation on display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and to pay visits to men whom he admired. Most Americans were fascinated by the emperor, even though his visit came at an awkward time. During the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, America was hosting an emperor—and from the last major slaveholding country. This article reviews newspaper accounts of the visit and analyzes the ambivalence displayed toward his visit. Americans were supposedly devoted to equality. Nonetheless, wherever he went during his three-month sojourn, the emperor was met by admiring crowds. One newspaper explained: “It is not the monarch so much as the novelty that attracts in this country.” This article views the visit not from Dom Pedro's impressions of America, but from American responses to the visit of a hereditary monarch—the first to travel around America during his reign. The paper concludes that centennial-year fascination with royalty generally overcame historic contempt for hereditary privilege and lack of interest in royal visitors. Such ambivalent attitudes toward visiting royalty continue into the present day.

The Politics of Revision in Samuel Daniel'sThe Civil Wars

Samuel Daniel's historical poem The Civil Wars has traditionally been regarded as a conservative text, committed in presentation and in practice to upholding the principle of hereditary right in monarchy. Such a view overlooks Daniel's many complex revisions to the poem between its first appearance in print in 1595 and the final—though still unfinished—version published in 1609. Comparative analysis of the different printed editions of the poem shows that between 1595 and 1609 Daniel's political priorities changed significantly, especially on the question of the role and legitimacy of kingship. Whereas the 1595 Civil Wars does indeed adopt a broadly conservative attitude to the rights of hereditary monarchs, the 1609 text of the poem no longer automatically endorses kingly authority but instead consistently privileges the monarch's commitment to the “publique good” and the just execution of the laws. This subtle but radical pattern of change culminates in Daniel's vignette of Elizabeth Grey and Edward IV (1609, Book VIII), which departs from the poet's sources in representing Grey's resistance to Edward's attempted seduction in explicitly politicized terms. This observable shift in Daniel's political values also foreshadows later aspects of his historiography in the prose Collection of the Historie of England (1618). (G.W.)

Genealogy in the Era of Genomics

kinetic theory. He is interested in applying the methods of sta tistical physics to revealing pat terns of complexity in social and biological systems. Address for Manrubia: Centro de Astrobiologia, INTA-CSIC, Ctra. de Ajalvir Km. 4,28850 Torrej?n de Ardoz, Madrid, Spain. Internet: cuevasms@inta.es What plain proceeding is more plain than this? asks the Earl of Warwick in the Shakespearean play VI, Part II. Henry doth claim the crown from John of Gaunt, the fourth son; York claims it from the third. Till Li onel's issue fails, his [John of Gaunt's] should not reign. In truth, nothing was plain for another two generations, as the ruling family, the Planta genets, nearly butchered themselves into extinc tion during England's 15th-century Wars of the Roses, precipitated by the competing claims of the House of Clarence (descendants of Lionel, third son of Edward III), Lancaster (founded by John of Gaunt, the fourth son) and York (the house of the fifth son, Edmund). The smoke cleared only after Gaunt's descendant VII of Tudor defeated the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, in battle. He consolidated his power with an intra-family marriage to Elizabeth of York. Their son, VIII, was descended from King Edward III (1312-1377) in four different ways?each one marking a key alliance and a turning point in English history. The story of the royal houses of England il lustrates not only how the fate of nations can turn on questions of genealogy but also how the phenomenon of coalescence?the merging of the branches in a family tree?is staggering ly common in any closed population. In fact the Plantagenets are in some ways utterly typ ical. In a population of 1,000 people who choose their mates at random, 10 generations are normally enough to guarantee that any two people have some ancestor in common. Per haps even more startlingly, 18 generations nor mally guarantee that any two people in such a population have all their ancestors in common. So it is not the least bit surprising, for example, that every hereditary monarch in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century was a descen dant of Edward III. In recent years, the field of genomics has revolutionized our perception of how closely all human beings are related to each other. The study of DNA, or mtDNA (passed on without change, except for muta tions, from mother to daughter), and certain genes on the chromosome (passed on from father to son) has enabled geneticists to place the time of the mitochondrial Eve or the Y

Presidents, Congress, and Courts: Partisan Passions in Motion

In a fascinating exchange of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Adams wrote words that fairly vibrated with alarm, my dear sir, Elections to offices which are great objects of Ambition, I look at with terror.1 He unburdened himself of this opinion, rather startling for a man committed to representative government, after reading a copy of the new constitution for the United States that had just been sent from Philadelphia. Both men were on diplomatic missions in Europe, far from the fascinating developments taking place at home. Constitution's provisions for the presidency drew their immediate attention. A bad edition of a Polish king (they were elected for life), Jefferson exclaimed. Adams chose to canvass their different reactions: You are apprehensive the President when once chosen, will be chosen again and again as long as he lives. So much the better as it appears to me.2 Having grown to manhood as subjects of George II and George III, Adams and Jefferson could not wholly detach themselves from the referent of a king when they thought about the executive fashioned by the Constitution. However deficient hereditary monarchs might be in other ways, they had solved the transfer of power problem. The King is dead; long live the King, crowds shouted when death delivered the throne to the heir apparent. Such considerations aroused Adams's fears; their absence marked Jefferson as the democratic iconoclast of his generation. Elections, as the crusty John Adams saw, were the solar plexus of representative government, fragile vessels for performing that political alchemy of turning power into authority. They also diffused lifeblood into democracies. Through them that chameleon sovereign, the people, expressed its will. United States Constitution, with all its awkward compromises, achieved a certain clarity in the office of the president, the only officer chosen by the whole electorate and answerable to them in quadrennial elections. In crafting the mechanism for selecting a president the convention delegates plunged into another one of their balancing acts.

Australia: The Politics of Becoming a Republic

In recent years several parliamentary democracies have considered replacing hereditary monarchs--the most visible remnant of the predemocratic era--with popularly chosen presidents and a republican form of government. This democratic reform is not easy to make, however, because it involves combining the well-established sovereignty of parliaments with presidents who may stake their own claim to sovereignty and popular support in clashes with prime ministers and their cabinets. Selecting presidents, limiting their power, and ensuring that they remain above the political fray are tricky matters. There is a risk that constitutional and power balances will be upset. Groups favoring or opposing the adoption of a presidential office often have more sweeping agendas that are not easily compromised. A constitutional referendum on the change confronts voters with complex issues about which they have little knowledge and interest, so that campaigns for and against such a referendum may readily degenerate into crude shouting matches.

Los lienzos de Acaxochitlán (Hidalgo) y su importancia en la historia del poblamiento de la sierra norte de Puebla y zonas vecinas

The Spaniards first went to Mexico looking for slaves to replace the millions of natives of the Antilles who had died from disease and overwork in the gold placers. We will never know how many young men were rounded up along the coast from Yucatán to Tamaulipas and shipped to Cuba and Santo Domingo, but most of those who stayed behind in the tropical lowlands soon died from Old World diseases. There is no doubt that the superposition of European diseases and religious and political institutions were catastrophic, but Guy Stresser-Péan points out that the people of Mesoamerica were no strangers to trauma. A series of invasions of more or less civilized aggressors often with superior technology (apparently the bow-and-arrow were more effective than the atlatl ) swept through his area, enslaving women and children and subjecting male prisoners to horrendous forms of “ethnic cleansing.” Not long before the Spaniards’ arrival, the Aztecs are said to have taken 24,400 captives from one of the towns studied in this book to be sacrificed at the inauguration of a temple at Tenochtitlan.The documents reproduced and examined here serve as a palimpsest for a vast amount of background material drawn together to form an erudite regional study. The book is divided into three parts. In the first section, the author traces the history of the people who lived on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre in central Mexico from the ninth century of our era to the Spanish conquest. The following section is a descriptive account of two pictorial manuscripts that were recently found in the town of Acaxochitlán (Lienzo “B” has since “disappeared”). The last section offers an original cartographic reconstruction of the lowland polities at first European contact and the early colonial years.Stresser-Péan adroitly avoids the trend in recent Mexican historiography to fit everything into a Nahuacentric mold. Mesoamerica was multiethnic and polyglot. It faced on its northern marches a primitive warlike people. South of this frontier was a patchwork of farming communities whose inhabitants spoke many languages. We do not know how many of these people were bilingual, nor to what extent Nahuatl was used as a lingua franca before mid-sixteenth century, nor do we know in many cases the degree of autonomy of a Mesoamerican polity. Some were urban agglomerations centering on important religious and commercial centers, hubs of empire; some were relatively modest theocratic-military entities with an elite led by an elected or hereditary monarch or two or more rulers; some were confederacies; some were military garrisons and centers of tribute collection. Stresser-Péan provides a useful map showing the distribution of languages, and discusses in some detail the complicated political situation here, as well as it can be determined, before and after the Spanish conquest.The Spaniards found it expedient to retain precolumbian polities throughout the colonial period, and in some cases they remain relatively unchanged even today. However, the demographic collapse followed by the resettlement of the survivors in nuclear centers in the sixteenth century left much of the land unoccupied. Then, as the population recovered, many states that had been subordinate to others sued for autonomy, and there were boundary disputes. It would seem to have been such a conflict between Acaxochitlán and its neighbors that was the origin of one of the pictorial manuscripts described here. Stresser-Péan argues that Lienzo “B” of Acaxo-chitlán is a painting drawn in 1738 by a European or a thoroughly acculturated Indian, who made a realistic perspective sketch of the town center, and then used for the surrounding villages a map drawn in the late sixteenth century. Some details were added in 1824. Following this intricate hypothesis, the original map was the product of a dispute over certain communities once subject to Acaxochitlán which had been transferred to neighboring Guauchinango. Lienzo “A” is a rather crude map, with pre-columbian cartographic details, of Acaxochitlán illustrating the extent of communal lands. It bears the date 1639, but the text and the material (industrial cotton) are from the early nineteenth century.The final chapter is a well-illustrated reconstruction of various indigenous states in tierra caliente, where once populous cities were left in ruins and their survivors moved to higher and healthier sites. The text of this fine book is in both Spanish and French. It is a welcome contribution to ethnohistory, and complements Bernardo García’s Los pueblos de la sierra, and Stresser-Péan’s Le codex de Xicotepec.

Heinrich Brüning's Recollections of Monarchism: The Birth of a Red Herring

Scholars have long debated whether Heinrich Bruning was the “last democratic chancellor” of the Weimar Republic or the trailblazer of dictatorship, and this debate intensified when his memoirs were published a few months after his death in 1970. He had already written a first draft in 1934–35 but decided after the end of the Second World War never to publish memoirs until they “serve a purpose for our fatherland and the public seems receptive,” conditions that he never saw fulfilled during his lifetime. Bruning’s critics and defenders alike were nonplussed when his revised memoirs finally appeared and explained that he had sought as chancellor to promote consensus in favor of a constitutional amendment to replace the elected president with a hereditary monarch. Depicting himself as a staunch conservative in the spirit of Bismarck, Bruning termed the restoration of monarchy the “crux (Angelpunkt) of my whole policy” as chancellor. According to this version of history, he had discussed a restoration with General Kurt von Schleicher at their first meeting in the spring of 1929 and with Hitler in October 1930; thereafter he employed secret intermediaries to forge an alliance with the second most powerful Nazi leader, Gregor Strasser. He intended to make way for a Nazi chancellor at some point in the year 1932 in a coalition government dedicated to restoring monarchy, and he even secured the acquiescence of leading Social Democrats for this plan as the only alternative to a one-party Nazi dictatorship. They were thwarted, the memoirist concluded, by President Paul von Hindenburg’s legitimist devotion to the hopelessly unpopular ex-kaiser (still alive in Holland) and by hypocrites on the Right who placed partisan advantage above monarchist principle. Careful readers soon questioned the reliability of this account for several reasons. First, the author never identifies the potential monarch, glossing over

The United States Supreme Court and the Enforcement of African-American Rights: Myth and Reality

Judicial review has run the gauntlet of criticism ever since John Marshall declared in Marbury v. Madison that “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is….”The critics have emphasized the incompatibility of judicial review with democratic values. In doing this, they have sometimes drawn, for effect, on the contrasting evolution of England and the U.S. on the issue. It is noted that the doctrine and practice of judicial review as they obtain in the contemporary U.S. were known “only in very attenuated form” in late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century England (Huntington 1968, 112), and were based on the need to guarantee that the King would no longer influence English judges “to support royal claims to the detriment of the liberties of the people” (Melone and Mace 1988, 207–08). Furthermore, by the eighteenth century the doctrine and the practice were extinct to the point where Blackstonecould flatly state that no court could declare invalid an act of Parliament however unreasonable it might be. To admit such a power, he said, “were to set the judicial power above that of the legislature, which would be subversive of all government.” (Huntington 1968, 112)Since at the time of the Philadelphia Convention there was no hereditary monarch in America “with a vested interest in maintaining power at the expense of liberty,” and since government officials were elected by the people and were “consequently controlled by them,” it was argued, to no avail, by the likes of Robert Yates, that there was no need to repose virtually uncontrolled power in the judiciary “unless the goal is autonomy, not from a despotic King, but from the democratic tendencies of a free people” (Melone and Mace 1988, 207–08).

The United States Supreme Court and the Enforcement of African-American Rights: Myth and Reality

Judicial review has run the gauntlet of criticism ever since John Marshall declared in Marbury v. Madison that “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is….”The critics have emphasized the incompatibility of judicial review with democratic values. In doing this, they have sometimes drawn, for effect, on the contrasting evolution of England and the U.S. on the issue. It is noted that the doctrine and practice of judicial review as they obtain in the contemporary U.S. were known “only in very attenuated form” in late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century England (Huntington 1968, 112), and were based on the need to guarantee that the King would no longer influence English judges “to support royal claims to the detriment of the liberties of the people” (Melone and Mace 1988, 207–08). Furthermore, by the eighteenth century the doctrine and the practice were extinct to the point where Blackstonecould flatly state that no court could declare invalid an act of Parliament however unreasonable it might be. To admit such a power, he said, “were to set the judicial power above that of the legislature, which would be subversive of all government.” (Huntington 1968, 112)Since at the time of the Philadelphia Convention there was no hereditary monarch in America “with a vested interest in maintaining power at the expense of liberty,” and since government officials were elected by the people and were “consequently controlled by them,” it was argued, to no avail, by the likes of Robert Yates, that there was no need to repose virtually uncontrolled power in the judiciary “unless the goal is autonomy, not from a despotic King, but from the democratic tendencies of a free people” (Melone and Mace 1988, 207–08).