#8 Democracy, Acclamation and the Coronation
Some notes while watching the coronation of Charles III
Few have missed that a ceremony took place yesterday in London. I was invited to the UCL European Institute’s blog to share my thoughts. It became a quickly written piece on deep topics, trying to connect the work of two anthropologists, David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, who published a very interesting book On Kings in 2017, with the analysis of acclamation in Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory (2011). Read the piece here: Democracy, Acclamation and the Coronation
I just want to add these two fascinating excerpts from Graeber and Sahlins’ book (available open access), which did not fit in the blog post. I hope to come back to them in future writing.
There are kingly beings in heaven even where there are no chiefs on earth.
It follows that the state of nature has the nature of the state. Given the governance of human society by metaperson authorities with ultimate life-and-death powers, something quite like the state is a universal human condition.
It also follows that kings are imitations of gods rather than gods of kings—the conventional supposition that divinity is a reflex of society notwithstanding. In the course of human history, royal power has been derivative of and dependent on divine power. Indeed, no less in stateless societies than in major kingdoms, the human authorities emulate the ruling cosmic powers—if in a reduced form. Shamans have the miraculous powers of spirits, with whom, moreover, they interact. Initiated elders or clan leaders act the god, perhaps in masked form, in presiding over human and natural growth. Chiefs are greeted and treated in the same ways as gods. Kings control nature itself. What usually passes for the divinization of human rulers is better described historically as the humanization of the god. (Graeber and Sahlins 2008 p. 3)
[…]
There are no egalitarian human societies. Even hunters are ordered and dominated by a host of metaperson powers-that-be, whose rule is punitively backed by severe sanctions. The earthly people are dependent and subordinate components of a cosmic polity. They well know and fear higher authority—and sometimes they defy it. Society both with and against the state is virtually a human universal.
This does not mean the famous egalitarian ethos of so many hunting societies, and not just them, is an illusion. Just as assertions of the absolute power of the sovereign are also, tacitly, assertions of the absolute equality of his subjects (at least in relation to him), so assertions of metahuman power are also ipso facto ways of asserting that mortal humans are—in all the most important ways—the same. The difference is that a flesh-and-blood Sun King needs an apparatus of rule (which almost invariably becomes the primary object of hatred of his subjects); if the actual sun is king, well, human beings are pretty much all equal compared to the sun. The first ideals of political equality—especially, the refusal to give and take orders between adults, so well documented among many societies with particularly terrifying cosmic powers—are themselves an effect of the cosmic polity such men and women inhabit. This no less makes them pioneers of human freedom. (Graeber and Sahlins 2008 p. 20)