>How to select the sovereign himself is a problem, because there’s no reason to assume a hereditary monarch will be up to the task. Why? Succession laws are a way to prevent conflict. The longer that the heir has been determined prior to succession, the less room there is for conflict. Why hereditary succession? It is instinctual to care for your offspring's well-being. Deferral is increased by living vicariously through your children after your death. People live less through their siblings than their own children, and the possibility of siblings inheriting presents rivalry with nieces and nephews. Why primogeniture? The first point again, because choosing between children opens the door to conflict and factions. Also, the oldest will be less likely to require a regent or need one for less time. Why agnatic primogeniture? This one is obvious and the difference between men and women doesn't need to be elaborated here. So, Agnatic primogeniture is *as a rule* the least conflict-pr
Maybe you're right. I don't rule it out, but generating possibilities is helpful in thinking it through. In a country without a hereditary monarchy, in particular one that's never had one, a (for example) ruling junta that takes power in a crisis and is looking for someone to hand over permanent power to might find that trying to choose the head of one among many virtually indistinguishable families is more likely to restart the crisis than a system that the leading executives could agree with.
Excellent essay. Question regarding the following: "This is why I think both that the corporate form is the ideal form for the absolutist state and that the state itself cannot be a corporation." Are you saying "cannot but be a corporation" or "cannot be"? Szabo also argues that America's constitution was based on the concept of "corporate charters". You make a great point, about the the founder's incoherence. You see them all moving left as they realize that their break with England must be total and complete and thus have to rely on the "people as sovereign" idea. One of the reasons why we push this "corporate-business" model is that it would, frankly, probably be an easier sell to everyone. It tries to avoid as much metaphysics and contentious politics as possible and argues "look USG is a corporation, it was modeled after corporations but the founders mis-structured the state (what with them not being aware of modern forms of corporations); so let's just re-structure the thin
It's not a typo--the state should be made up of corporations but itself needs to be outside of the corporate structure--because who would have charted the state corporation. Since you speak of "selling," though, i would certainly agree that what you propose would be an immense improvement over what we have now. I'm more optimistic than you, probably because in my anthropological understanding, humans as a species are founded on "peace" (the deferral of violence) not war.
I can see the need for a "minimal" approach that avoids "metaphysical" arguments. That's really what the liberals were originally after as well. But maybe "selling" is not the only way to think about the process.
Perhaps we have said this already or somewhere else, but we have been thinking about your article for a little while. Let's consider two models. One where the sovereign is outside and another where sovereign and state are "fused." For the first, and sticking with the profit-making model, you have a sovereign who essentially creates a Sovcorp. He designs the constitution, he invests his capital and floats the thing on the stock market (though let's say he retain 51% share-holder control). Now, after raising the capital via his own and other share-holders making investments, he selects a board of directors and places himself in the position of Chair. The Board, with the Chair acting both in the informal sense as the sovereign and in the formal sense as the one who has the authority to veto Board decisions when it comes to selection, select the CEO. The CEO then, with the advice and consent of the Board, selects his cabinet. And so on. Now, the sovereign in this case exercises ver
I don't want to sound discouraging, and you may be right to want to get these models right and ready to go when the time comes, but I'm much more interested (if we are to refer to Moldbug) to the "antiversity" side of his thinking: building the elements of the new order through the relentless scrutiny--economic, moral, aesthetic, everything--of this one. It seems to me, perhaps naively, that if we figure out how to become, and help others become, the kind of people that can attract the attention of the most responsible parts of the power structure, all these other questions will be easy to answer when we need to.