I respect absolutist ontology—"someone always takes the lead in a given social interplay"—but can any of you convince me of statically codified monarchy as compared to the more dynamic Indo-European aristocracy?
I'm working on the ontological and anthropological questions now, and think there could be a range of absolutist models. So, while I find these discussions about cameralism very interesting, I don't have much to say about it. There are still quite a few places in the world with hereditary monarchies, some of them involving genuine monarchical rule (in the Arab world, in particular)--in those cases, isn't it better to improve those orders than try to replace them?
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I don't think so, but I do try to keep the number of proposals I am "hostile" to down to a minimum. I'm not that interested in the nuts and bolts of these things right now--you end up with irrelevant arguments about the composition of the "board" and the rules governing it, etc., and it's all a distraction. I suspect you are pointing to a larger, anthropological, issue, though--the implicit liberalism of this proposal. I think that RF's comment on "cameralism" on another thread gets at some of the problems with seeing government as a business (and citizens as consumers, etc.). I think that rejection of government as business would apply to the "sovereign board" as well, since it's obviously conceived on that model, but maybe I'm missing something.
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I see this as a big, long-term project. We're building an intellectual tradition. There are not too many of us now, but I think there will be more over time. We should be patient, and exploit the "leisure" time we have to think things through in as many ways as possible. I'm fairly new to all this--I came across Land's "Dark Enlightenment" maybe 2-2.5 years ago, and that led me to NRx and RF, and somewhere along the way (maybe 2 years ago, but I could be misremembering) the alt-right came on my radar. I'm really still learning from everyone, yourself included, and I certainly would never have begun thinking in a sustained way about absolutism without RF's blogging and it has been a revelation for me, solving all kinds of conceptual/political problems I'd been working on for years. It may be that all this focus on "engineering the state" led me to back to thinking about sacrality and kingship, but that's valuable as well because I can now read the problem of sacral kingship and its aftermath "against" the structural/engineering frame, which would also make me indebted to that discussion. You say you've been ("apparently") "unsuccessful," but how do you know? Moldbug says somewhere that we should be having fun, and I see it that it--it's a joy and privilege to discuss all these questions--I pity people who are still caught up in trying to devise Rube Goldberg machines to make liberalism work. (Maybe that's how you would describe cameralism, but at least those constructions are less ad hoc.) We should be glad to talk to each other in spite of and because of the disagreements and you really don't know when someone who has been seemingly intractably against you for a long time all of a sudden sees merit in your views and does something with them you haven't anticipated. That's happened to me, on both sides of the equation, more than once. In this case, maybe it will take people a while to see the relevance of this difference between the technology and the anthropology of the state. Sometimes digging more deeply into your own position makes it possible to see the value of another's, even if it takes some time.
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Unfortunately, no, but if you go to his Anthropoetics website you can get a general introduction and the journal Anthropoetics (on the site) has some important essays of his, especially from the early issues.