Three arguments relevant to the history and theory of monarchy

Abstract

This article states a claim about the fundamental nature of monarchy as something which in antiquity and medievality straddled the immanent and transcendent worlds but which is only half understood in a modernity where the world which is wholly immanent and so has a politics which must be theorised in wholly consistent terms. It draws on theories of antique monarchy, medieval monarchy, constitutional monarchy and popular sovereignty, and asserts three distinctive arguments: that politics is always fundamentally torn between law and power, that the philosophy of political history requires us to see that our resources for attempting to resolve the two have been narrowed in the last two hundred years, and that monarchy, theoretically considered, is best understood as something which has a transconsistent political logic.