"Makers" and "Takers" in the Paleolithic

Libertarians and classical liberals have long argued for defending the makers who produce wealth from the takers who expropriate it (Contoski 1997; D'Amato 2018).  The makers need protection because for most of recorded human history over the past 5,000 years, most societies have been ruled by a few takers (kings, princes, nobles, and high priests) who coercively exploited the great multitude of people who were the makers of wealth that was stolen from them by the takers.  In these societies, there was little incentive for the makers to produce more than they could consume since most of what they produced would be taken from them, and consequently the general standard of living was low.  

But then, beginning about 300 years ago in northwestern Europe and North America, there was a shift in social conditions that made the life strategy of making--producing wealth for use and exchange--more successful than the life strategy of taking--extracting wealth from others.  That shift in favor of making over taking came with the establishment of modern liberal constitutionalism and free-market capitalism.  Over the past 100 years those institutions of liberal democratic capitalism have spread around the world.  As a consequence of that, most of the 8.3 billion people alive today live longer, healthier, safer, richer, and freer lives than human beings have ever lived previously.  Previously, I have written about this as the "evolution of human progress through the liberal enlightenment.

So how do we explain this pattern in human history--5,000 years of oppression by the ruling elites of takers and then the sudden emancipation of makers that has promoted unprecedented material and moral progress recently for most of humanity?  And if we can explain the causes of that modern progress, how might that help us to prevent any weakening or even reversal of that progress that would allow the takers to regain their dominance over the makers?  Does the recent rise of the "illiberal state"--like that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example--show the return of the illiberal "taker state"?

One of the best attempts to answer those questions is in the work of Stephen Balch (a scholar at Texas Tech University).  In an article (Balch 2014) and in a book that is soon to be published, he puts the history of the struggle between takers and makers within a Darwinian "big history" that integrates the history of life and the history of humanity into a universal evolutionary history of all life.  It is an exhilarating display of expansive multidisciplinary scholarship that weaves insights from the life sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities into a dazzling intellectual tapestry that will forever change the way you think about life.

I have not yet fully thought through everything he has written about what he calls his "naturalist interpretation of history."   But I understand enough of it to say that I find almost all of his arguments persuasive.  I do disagree with him, however, about four points. 

First, Balch fails to see that most of what he says about the universal history of politics--from Paleolithic stateless societies to Neolithic agrarian states to modern liberal constitutional states--confirms John Locke's account of the universal "history of mankind." 

Second, Balch also fails to see that the struggle between takers and makers arose first among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, although he is certainly right in saying that that struggle was dramatically intensified by the invention of agriculture, which created an economic surplus that allowed takers to accumulate great wealth in the form of expropriated crops.  

Third, in his account of the first agrarian states, such as those in Mesopotamia, Balch tends to exaggerate the invincible dominance of the ruling takers, while minimizing the power of the makers to resist or evade exploitative dominance.

Fourth, I don't agree with Balch's claim that classical liberals like Locke have been mistaken in understanding property rights as an outgrowth of the personal rights of self-owning individuals.  Balch wants to separate economic freedom from personal freedom because he worries that personal freedom can include maladaptive behavior such as pursuing sexual pleasure in ways that do not lead to reproduction, which lowers reproductive fitness.  But here he fails to see that a low birth rate can be an adaptive reproductive strategy for people in wealthy societies who want to make a large parental investment in a few children, so that those children will be more likely to succeed in a modern bourgeois society.

Here I will elaborate my second point of disagreement.  In my next post, I will take up the fourth point.

PALEOLITHIC MAKERS AND TAKERS

Among hunter-gatherers, the takers are people who take without giving.  They take what they want from the social resources of their group without contributing anything to those resources: they are free riders or social parasites.  The takers are either cheaters who take what they want by deception, or bullies who take what they want by force.  

The makers respond to this by consenting to moral rules against taking and enforcing those rules with reputational and forcible punishments of those who violate the rules.  Reputational punishment includes ridicule, ostracism, and shunning.  Forcible punishment--including execution--is directed against the worst bullies, particularly murderers (Boehm 2012, 64-74).

Balch does not see this conflict between makers and takers among hunter-gatherers because he thinks that conflict arose only after the invention of agriculture.

"Taking" only came fully into its own when there was some real "take" to be had, when there was a redistributable surplus over and above what was required for individual survival.  The invention of agriculture set the stage.  Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived egalitarian lives.  There was marginal advantage to be had through superior hunting/gathering/fighting/nurturing/negotiating and seduction skills, but--with only so much to go around--rarely big genetic jackpots.  Once, however, there was a possibility of massive wealth accumulations in the form of expropriated crops, all this changed (2014, 12).

"Genetic jackpots" are important for Balch because he believes that the evolution of human nature by kin selection favors what biological theorists call "inclusive fitness": we are naturally inclined to behaviors that advance the reproductive fitness of ourselves, our offspring, and our collateral relatives.  Although we experience some genetic conflicts of interest with our relatives because they are not genetically identical to us, our conflicts of interest with non-kin are much deeper.  We fight with non-kin over scarce resources as we try to take as much as we can for ourselves and our relatives.  But prior to the invention of agriculture, there wasn't much to fight over, and so it was impossible for the takers to accumulate great wealth that they had taken from the makers.  Consequently, Balch argues, Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands were egalitarian in that there was no dominant elite of a few takers ruling over a multitude of exploited makers.

But this ignores the fact that while hunter-gatherers have always been egalitarian, their societies have achieved not an absolute equality but rather--to use Christopher Boehm's term--an "egalitarian hierarchy."  As that term suggests, hunter-gatherers see that human beings are not naturally equal in all respects, because no two human beings are the same in all respects.  By virtue of being separate individuals, human beings are naturally unequal, in any number of respects.  But they are naturally equal in their natural desire for equal liberty--their natural freedom from being ruled by others without their consent.  

A few human beings have a natural desire for dominance--to be the alpha male who rules over others--and these are those whom Balch identifies as the takers.  And while human beings in subordinate positions are naturally inclined to defer to the dominant few, the subordinates are also naturally inclined to resist being exploited by those dominant few.  Thus, Boehm observes, the political nature of human beings is ambivalent in showing the tension between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  The natural desire for dominance can be checked by the natural desire of subordinates not to be dominated.

In an egalitarian hierarchy, the subordinates use sanctions--such as ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, or even execution--to restrain politically ambitious individuals, those with special innate or learned propensities to dominate.  In every society, there will be leaders in some form.  But an egalitarian hierarchical society will allow only a moderate degree of leadership.  Here the power of the takers is checked by the resistance of the makers.

In a few passages of his book, Balch seems to recognize this.  In speaking about how Boehm and Richard Wrangham describe the hunter-gatherer "environment of evolutionary adaptation" (EEA), Balch sees “a strain of oligarchy” and “targeted conspiratorial killing," which points to egalitarian hierarchy and the conditions for some taker/maker conflict.  He suggests that when he says that the worst bullies had to be eliminated (59, 126-27), and “the tension between hierarchical power and leveling morality has been a constant of human history” (129).

Moreover, what Balch calls “primal morality” in the EEA corresponds to what Locke calls the “law of nature” in the hunter-gatherer state of nature (60, 126-29, 218-19).  Locke’s law of nature is enforced by the “executive power of the law of nature”—the right of everyone to punish transgressors through reputational and forcible punishment, which would be supported by Boehm and Wrangham.  What Boehm and Wrangham say about killing bullies in the EEA confirms Paul Bingham’s argument about the importance of “killing from a distance” in enforcing cooperation.

REFERENCES

Balch, Stephen H. 2014. "On the Fragility of the Western Achievement." Society 51:8-21.

Balch, Stephen H.  Naturalizing History: A Biocultural Theory of Progress.  Book manuscript.

Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Contoski, Edmund. 1997. Makers and Takers: How Wealth and Progress Are Made and How They Are Taken or Prevented. Minneapolis, MN: American Liberty Publishers.

D'Amato, David. 2018. "'Makers' and 'Takers' in Libertarian Thought."  https://www.libertarianism.org.

The Evolutionary Psychology of Lex Rex

                                    A Contemporary German Print of the Execution of Charles I

The evolutionary psychology of Lex Rex--that the law rules over the king--depends on two points.  First, we need to see how as opposed to regicide by assassination (murder), regicide by legal execution (as in the trial of Charles I) affirms the impersonal rules of law as superior to absolute monarchy's rule by personal threats.  This understanding of law as impersonal or impartial moral rules is unique to human beings because it arises from the natural evolution of the human capacity for the language of rational symbolization.

The second point is that the denial of the sacred authority of the king to rule with impunity was part of the cultural evolution of the rise of theocratic sacred monarchy (beginning in ancient Mesopotamia) and its decline (beginning in 17th century England) culminating in the Lockean liberalism of King Charles III's Christian monarchy.

Two Kinds of Regicide

In the first systematic and quantitative study of regicide in Europe, Manuel Eisner (2011) has collected data on the frequency of violent death and regicide among 1,513 monarchs in Europe between AD 600 and 1800.  He has distinguished four categories of violent death: accident, battle death, murder, and legal execution.  He found that in the seventh century, the frequency of regicide was 2,500 murders per 100,000 years in office.  There was a long decline in regicide.  So that by the eighteenth century, the frequency of regicide was about 200 per 100,000 years in office.  By comparison, the homicide rate in Western Europe today is around 0.6-1.5 per 100,000 person-years.  Clearly, then, European kingship before the Industrial Revolution was one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, comparable to that of soldiers in combat.

Eisner found that for most of this history, regicide by assassination was carried out within the noble elite in the competition for political rule.  But, then, by the seventeenth century, regicide became a matter of legal execution--the execution of Charles I in England in 1649 and the execution of Louis XVI in France in 1793.  In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, James II was deposed and defeated in war without being executed.

The decline in regicide seems to be part of the general historical decline in homicide (Eisner 2003; Pinker 2011).  This general pattern of declining violence seems to be associated with a Hobbesian pacification process, in which the state claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and with a Lockean liberal culture of bourgeois virtues that arise in modern commercial societies, in which people learn to control their violent impulses for the sake of peaceful economic and social exchange.

Jane Goodall and other primatologists have presented evidence that chimpanzees are similar to human beings in the practice of political assassinations.  There is plenty of evidence of chimpanzees from one community killing individuals from another community, which looks like warfare.  Goodall's observations of chimpanzee intercommunity violence have now been confirmed by similar observations from many chimpanzee communities across Africa.  

What is most surprising about this is that lethal violence within chimpanzee communities is extremely rare (Newton-Fisher and Emery Thompson 2012).  Chimpanzees often become aggressive in conflicts with one another, but they usually resolve their conflicts without physical contact; and even if there is some physical violence, it is almost never lethal, even though chimpanzee canines are powerful weapons for wounding and killing victims.  Most aggression between adult males consists of bluffing attacks without physical contact--threatening gestures and vocalizations and charging displays.  (This is also true for human beings, who often engage in bluffing displays of aggression, but for whom homicide is rare, despite the publicity given to homicidal violence.)

After decades of observations of chimpanzee communities across Africa, there have been only four documented cases of lethal violence between adult males of the same community, in which a coalitional gang of adult males killed a lone victim.  Kaburu et al. (2013) point out that the individuals killed in these cases were either low-ranking males or they were previously deposed alpha males.

In the revised edition of his Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal reported that in the summer of 1980, Luit--the alpha male of the chimpanzee community in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands--was attacked brutally and killed by Nikkie and Yeroen, who had previously been alpha males (de Waal 1998, 211-214).  De Waal describes the bloody scene: "Apart from biting off fingers and toes and causing deep gashes everywhere, the two aggressors removed Luit's testicles, which were found on the cage floor."  This looks like a political assassination.  But it's hard to know whether this case of lethal violence among captive chimpanzees is an abnormal consequence of their captive conditions.  The killing of Luit occurred at night, when the chimps were confined in their night cages.

Kaburu et al. claim to report the first case of lethal violence among wild chimpanzees in which the victim was the incumbent alpha male.  PM was the alpha male of the M-group of chimpanzees in the Malale Mountains National Park in Tanzania when he was killed on October 2, 2011.  He had been the alpha male since 2007.  After a bloody fight between PM and PR, the beta male, PR left.  A weakened PM  was then attacked brutally by a coalition of four other adult males, including two former alpha males (AL and DE).  AL was the alpha male overthrown by PM in 2007.  After the killing, there was a period of social instability.  AL became the alpha male for a short time.  But by November, PR had become the alpha male and is now the alpha male of the M-group.

Kaburu et al. explain this as an opportunistic attempt by AL (the third ranking of 10 adult males) to seize the alpha position once he saw that PM was weakened by the fight with PR, although AL was unable to hold his alpha position for long against the challenge of PR.

When I asked Michael Wilson (a primatologist at the University of Minnesota) about whether there were any other cases of alpha males being killed, he mentioned two cases at Gombe.  Vincent was the alpha male of the Mitumba community at Gombe.  He fell from a tree and severely injured himself.  He lived for another three months before two adult males attacked and killed him.  Michael says he has not yet written a report of this case.

The second case was that of Goblin, another alpha male at Gombe.  He was severely attacked and would have died if a vet had not treated his wounds.  Kaburu et al. mention this case, but they claim that Goblin had been deposed from his alpha position before the attack.

Even if chimpanzees show a few cases of political assassination of an alpha male, which is comparable to the political assassination of a king among human beings, it is clear that chimps are incapable of the legal execution of a leader, because legal execution implies laws as impartial moral rules, which requires the uniquely human capacity for rational symbolization.

Previously, I have written about Peter DeScioli's argument that laws are moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action, which arose first in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation--or in what Locke called the "state of nature."  Laws as impartial rules require moral judgment, which is unique to human beings, because moral judgement depends on the human rational or symbolizing mind that can grasp and share the abstract symbolic values of the good and the just.  

Dominant chimps rule by personal threats: if you challenge my alpha male dominance, I will punish you.  Tyrannical humans sometimes rule by personal threats.  But humans can also formulate impartial laws for judging who has the right to rule:  in America, whoever is elected president by the proper constitutional procedures has the right to rule as president as long as he is constrained by the rule of law.

Charles I claimed to rule by the law of absolute monarchy--that "the king can do no wrong" and is thus above the law--but this was really a personal threat disguised as impartial law.  Because by impartial law, kings must follow the laws like anyone else.  And so, if the king commits murder by initiating a Civil War in which he kills his own people, then he is guilty of murder and should be punished for it as any other murderer would be.  The legal trial and legal execution of Charles I affirmed that principle--that Law is king over the king.

The Cultural Evolution of Sacred Monarchy from Hammurabi to King Charles III

This is a tracing of a rock drawing from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BCE.  Christopher Boehm used this rock drawing at Remigia to illustrate the importance of capital punishment in the evolution of morality and egalitarian hierarchy.  He observed that on the right we see ten men jubilantly holding their bows over their heads.  On the left, we see a man lying on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking in his body or on the ground.

It's hard to know for sure what has happened.  The victim could have been a prisoner of war who has been executed.  In fact, other drawings at Remigia show scenes of warfare.  But Boehm suggests that given what we know about hunter-gatherer foragers in the ethnographic record, it's more likely that the victim here was a deviant member of the band who had violated the moral rules of the band--perhaps by murdering someone--and he was becoming a bully who was trying to assert his dominance over the group.   

This also illustrated Boehm's "ambivalence model" of human nature in politics.  Human politics arises from the complex tension between three levels of our evolved political psychology: dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  Some human beings want to have dominance over others.  Most human beings are inclined to defer to the rule of the dominant ones.  But when that dominance becomes despotic and exploitative, people will resist that dominance and punish the bullies by shunning them, ostracizing them, or--in the most dangerous cases--killing them.  Previously, I have written about this as showing the evolution of equal liberty through capital punishment.

But then about seven thousand years ago, the first agricultural settlements appeared in the ancient Near East.  And about five thousand years ago, the first urban states appeared.  The city of Uruk emerged in ancient Mesopotamia around 3,200 BC.  These states were the first sacred monarchies, in which the king claimed the absolute power to rule by divine right.  This claim to rule by divine authority is evident in the black stone stela that present the Laws of Hammurabi that were compiled toward the end of the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC), who was the sixth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon.

The Louvre stela is almost seven and a half feet tall.  The top one-third of the stela shows the sun-god Shamash, the god of justice, seated on his throne, with King Hammurabi standing before him.  It is not clear whether the god is dictating the laws to Hammurabi, or Hammurabi is presenting the laws to the god, or Hammurabi is accepting the rod and the ring that are the emblems of authority.  In any case, this conveys the clear message to the viewers--even the many illiterate people who cannot read the laws--that Hammurabi's laws are divinely authorized by the god of justice.

The evidence collected by anthropological archaeologists--that has been surveyed by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus in The Creation of Inequality--has shown that in the first monarchic states, the power of rulers over their subjects could not be legitimated by reason alone, and rulers had discovered that they needed to pretend that they ruled by divine right--that political rule was sanctified by a religious cosmology.  Originally, the first human beings had no rulers other than the gods, but eventually they were persuaded that some human beings could rule with divine authority.

Every society has some cosmological explanation for how human beings and their world came into existence, and this cosmological creation story provides moral sanction for their social order.  Typically, the world begins as a formless chaos, and then some supernatural spirits create order out of this chaos, including the creation of human beings.  This creation story constitutes the moral charter for a society because it provides a sacred origin for the moral rules of a society. And thus religious belief is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people together into social groups.

Originally, among nomadic hunter-gatherers, the cosmological creation story sanctioned a celestial dominance hierarchy: the invisible supernatural beings were the alphas, the invisible ancestors were the betas, and the living human beings were the gammas.  Therefore, originally, all living human beings were equal in their subordination to the invisible gods and ancestors.  Inequality of social ranking arose when some living human beings successfully claimed that they or their clans were divine or divinely sanctioned for rule over others, and thus there was a cosmological justification for inequality.

Here in ancient Mesopotamia is the first cosmic teleology of human law as rooted in divine law, which is developed in Plato's Timaeus and the Bible, and which becomes the theme of the Divine 
Cosmic Model of the universe that runs through human civilization for four thousand years.  

But even though this mysterious magic of a sacred monarchy could win the deferential submission of people, a tyrannical monarchy often provoked the resistance of the people.  As I have indicated in my posts on Hammurabi's Laws and the Mesopotamian kingships, whenever a king increased his exploitation of his people--through increased confiscation of grain, increased taxation, increased conscription of soldiers and laborers--this provoked flight or rebellion.  The records of the Mesopotamian states are full of evidence of people running away from their states--slaves running away from their enslavement, soldiers running away from their conscripted service in war, taxpayers running away from oppressive taxation, laborers running aways from coerced labor, and people generally running away from cities racked with famine and contagious diseases.  

There is also evidence that over 3,000 years of Mesopotamian life, there were hundreds of rebellions.  Historian of the Ancient Near East Seth Richardson (2010, 2016) has noted that rebels against the state were described by state authorities as "the violators of contracts (mitgurtu, rikistu)."  The Akkadian words mitgurtu and rikistu denote agreement, consent, contract, or treaty.  Richardson has observed:  "These motifs relating to violation-of-contract strike a familiar chord to us moderns, since they suggest the premise of a social contract between ruler and ruled, or at least the existence of legal treaties and loyalty oaths" (2010: 9).

Not only in ancient Mesopotamia, but also throughout the ancient Mediterranean world--the Near East, Greece, and Rome--one sees the same pattern of rebellions against the state in which rebels assert their natural freedom from oppression and thus confirm Locke's understanding of government as dependent on the consent of the governed (Howe and Brice 2016).

But this raises a question:  if there was so much popular resistance to the tyranny of sacred monarchy, then why was it the predominant form of government for five thousand years?  Throughout most of this history, the number of monarchies far exceeded the number of nonmonarchies.  

But then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies surpassed the number of monarchies.  Today, there are very few monarchies in the world, and most of the most prominent monarchies today--like Great Britain--have a purely ceremonial monarch who has no sovereign power to rule.  This raises a second question:  why has monarchy declined in the last few centuries?

As I have indicated in some previous posts, there are at least two kinds of answers to the question of why monarchy was the prevalent form of government for thousands of years.  The first answer is that historically monarchies have been limited in their exercise of sovereign power over their people, and thus they have been limited in their capacity for the sort of tyrannical exploitation that provokes popular resistance.  For example, the evidence from those first monarchic states in ancient Mesopotamia shows an odd contradiction between their claims of absolute sovereignty and the reality of their severely limited powers.  For example, in their written legal codes, one can see what Seth Richardson has identified as "the curious absence of the state in the text." In the prologue and epilogue to Hammurabi's Code, Hammurabi claims absolute divinely granted authority over Babylonia.  But in the hundreds of laws in his code, there is almost no reference to himself or to the central state as providing judgment or enforcement of the law.  Most of the laws seem to assume private enforcement: when something goes wrong, the wronged party must act on his own with the help of local people to investigate, try, convict, and punish the guilty parties. 

What we see here is what Richardson has called the "presumptive state": the early states in Mesopotamia were presumptive in claiming a sovereignty that they did not in fact possess. Their rhetorical claims for absolute sovereignty have been mistakenly interpreted as evidence for the reality of Oriental Despotism.

Over the past 5,000 years, some states have expanded their power to rule through autocratic bureaucracies--for instance, China under the Song dynasty (960-1279).  But even the most powerful states have had to rely to some degree on law enforcement by private individuals acting through customary laws of vengeance and compensation.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, some states began to extend their law enforcement power by inventing modern professional policing.  Previously, people had policed themselves.  Robert Peel founded the London police in 1829.  The English Reform Act of 1835 extended this system of policing to all municipal boroughs.  Boston established the first American police force in 1838.

As long as monarchic states could not fully enforce their laws directly on their people, and their people were free to police themselves, those monarchic states had little power to tyrannically exploit their people.

The second answer to why monarchic states predominated for thousands of years is that in large societies where people are disconnected, the king provides a readily available focal point for legitimating government.  As I have indicated in a previous post, John Gerring and his colleagues have argued that from the appearance of the first states in the ancient world to the beginning of the modern era about 250 years ago, monarchy was the most common political regime because it was the most efficient solution to the problem of selecting leaders to coordinate social order in large societies where people are isolated from one another.  In the modern era, however, improvements in the technology of communication--for example, the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet--made it easier for people in large societies to communicate with one another and thus to mobilize a mass public for social coordination, which allowed elites to develop new systems of rule that did not need a central locus of sovereignty in a monarch (Gerring et al. 2021).

But doesn't this beg an obvious question--Why can't kings use modern mass communication to glorify their monarchic rule over their people?

We can answer that question by considering again the causes of the English Civil War, which led to the first trial and execution of a king.  Thomas Hobbes (in Behemoth) indicated that disputes over the interpretation of the Bible were a primary cause of the English Civil War.  The translation of the Bible into English in the sixteenth century and the invention of the printing press made the Bible widely available to common people, who could then interpret the Bible for themselves rather than being dependent on the authority of their priests.  The printing press also facilitated the production of thousands of books and pamphlets debating theological and political questions.  This contributed to the Protestant Reformation in breaking from the authority of the Catholic Church.  As a consequence, all the parties in the English political controversies of the time found their ideas in the Bible (Hill 1993).  People like John Cooke could publish books arguing that the Bible did not support absolute monarchy.  And when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II had to order the burning of such books as the greatest threat to the monarchy.

The success of modern mass communication in popularizing ideas of religious and political liberty has made it ever harder to defend absolute monarchy with the coercive enforcement of one national church.  This was dramatically manifested in the coronation of King Charles III on May 6, 2023, which was broadcast around the globe.  In the Coronation Liturgy--as designed by Charles himself--we saw a subtle interweaving of Old Testament and New Testament traditions that reconciled the conflicts between them by favoring the liberal interpretation of the New Testament advanced by Roger Williams and John Locke.

Since Henry VIII, the English King has been "Defender of the Faith"--first the Catholic Church and then the Anglican Church, which meant that the King would enforce a theocracy.  But King Charles III has identified himself as the "Defender of Faith"--that is, all religious faiths.  And indeed the coronation procession into Westminster Abbey included "faith leaders" from a dozen or more religious traditions.  Moreover, the Coronation Oath included a pledge "to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely."  Notice that "beliefs"--as distinguished from "faiths"--suggest that even atheists "may live freely" under the rule of Charles III.

The coronation of Charles indicated how his kingship will follow the model of Christ's persuasive kingship rather than the theocratic kingship of ancient Israel.  At the beginning of the coronation, Charles was greeted by a Chapel Royal chorister: "Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God, we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings."  Charles responded: "In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve."

Here Charles echoed the words of Jesus when he warned his followers not to strive for authoritative rule over others:  "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.  Not so with you.  Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:25-28).

Charles thus intimated here that he is a king who has no coercive authority over his people, particularly in matters of religious belief.  At most, he can only exercise the sort of persuasive authority that comes through Christian preaching.

Unlike the Stuart dynasty, the King of the House of Windsor rules over Great Britain as a purely ceremonial head of state that exercises no sovereign power in what is really a liberal Parliamentary democracy where Law is King.

REFERENCES

Boehm, Christopher.  2017.  "Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects."  Center for Humans and Nature, June 12.

Cooke, John.  1649.  King Charles, His Case, or An Appeal to All Rational Men Concerning His Trial at the High Court of Justice.  London: Peter Cole.

DeScioli, Peter.  2023.  "On the Origin of Laws by Natural Selection."  Evolution and Human Behavior 44: 195-209.

Eisner,  Manuel. 2003.  "Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime."  Crime and Justice 30: 83-142.

Eisner,  Manuel.  2011.  "Killing Kings: Patterns of Regicide in Europe, AD 600-1800."  British Journal of Criminology 51: 556-577.

Filmer, Robert.  1991.  Patriarcha and Other Writings.  Ed. Johann P. Sommerville.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flannery, Kent and Joyce Marcus.  2014.  The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.   

Gardiner, Samuel Rawson.  1906.  The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gerring, John, et al.  2021.  "Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type." Comparative Political Studies 54: 585-622.

Hill, Christopher.  1993.  The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Penguin Books.

Howe, Timothy, and Lee Brice, eds.  2016.  Brill's Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean.  Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

Kaburu, Stefano S. K., Sana Inoue, and Nicholas E. Newton-Fisher. 2013. "Death of the Alpha: Within-Community Lethal Violence Among Chimpanzees of the Mahale Mountains National Park." American Journal of Primatology 75:789-797.

Locke, John.  1988.  Two Treatises of Government.  Ed. Peter Laslett.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Newton-Fisher, Nicholas E. and Melissa Emery Thompson. 2012. "Comparative Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence." In The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War, 41-60. Eds.Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pinker, Steven. 2011.  The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  New York: Viking.

Richardson, Seth.  2010.  "Writing Rebellion Back Into the Record: A Methodologies Toolkit."  In Seth Richardson, ed., Rebellions and Peripheries in the Cuneiform World, 1-27.  New Haven, CN: American Oriental Society.

Richardson, Seth.  2016.  "Insurgency and Terror in Mesopotamia."  In Howe and Brice 2016, 31-61.

Robertson, Geoffrey.  2005.  The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold.  New York: Pantheon Books.

de Waal, Frans. 1998. Chimpanzee Politics. Revised edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

"No Kings!" Is the Waa-Bark of America's Chimpanzee Politics of Resistance to Trump

Last Saturday, we saw a massive display of chimpanzee political rhetoric.  Subordinate chimpanzees utter pant-grunts to signal their fear and submission before a dominant chimp.  But subordinates can also utter waa-barks to signal their defiance of a dominant chimp.  If enough subordinates scream their waa-barks, and if the dominant chimp does not have a sufficiently strong coalition of supporters, he can be overthrown.  The five million people in the "No Kings" protests against Trump were shouting their waa-barks.  The people at Trump's military parade celebrating his birthday were pant-grunting their submission to Trump.  But reporters noticed that the number of spectators at the parade was small, and many of them were looking at their phones to see images of the massive crowds at the "No Kings" protests.  The waa-barks were louder than the pant-grunts.

Although chimpanzees do not have language, they do communicate with one another through sounds, postures, and facial expressions that convey information.  Often that information is about social rank.  An alpha male might engage in a loud display of intimidation that asserts his dominance over the group.  Other chimps might respond to this by signaling their submission to him.  Or they might respond with signs of resistance and defiance.  And some might even signal that they want to overthrow him.  Thus chimps engage in political rhetoric, because they try to persuade one another as to how their social order should be organized.  

We could also identify this chimpanzee political rhetoric as Lockean insofar as subordinate chimpanzees can protest against despotic dominance by the alpha male and thus limit his power, which moves towards the egalitarian social arrangement seen in human hunter-gatherer bands with an egalitarian style of hierarchy in which the leader is only primus inter pares ("first among equals").  This is what Locke saw in the state of nature in which all men are by nature equally free.  Not that all are absolutely equal, because some will have higher status than others, and some will become leaders of their social groups.  But that all adults have the natural right to be free from being unduly subordinated to anyone else without their consent, and that they have the natural right to punish those who threaten their life, liberty, or property (Second Treatise, pars. 4-10, 54, 94, 105).  

To explain the Darwinian evolution of this human state of nature, we should expect to find precursors of this human egalitarianism in our pre-human primate ancestors.  And if we assume that the common ancestor of humans and the African great apes was similar to a chimpanzee, then we might expect to see evolutionary preadaptations for an egalitarian style of dominance in chimpanzee groups.  In fact, as Christopher Boehm has argued, we can see in chimpanzees similarities to the ambivalent political nature of human hunter-gatherers that shows a tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance (Boehm 1993, 1999).  

Dominance is the natural propensity of individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a group.  The political life of primates is organized around dominance hierarchies in which the old tend to have dominance over the young and males tend to have dominance over females, although females can also have a dominance hierarchy, and sometimes coalitions of females can resist male dominance.  This is a political universal for chimpanzees, both in the wild and in captivity; and for human beings throughout history.  Winning or losing dominance is determined by patterns of coalition formation that depend on shifting circumstances and individual decisions.

Deference is the natural propensity of individuals to submit to those who are dominant.  As political universals, deference is the correlative of dominance.  Among the various species of political primates, there are distinctive behavioral cues, both verbal and nonverbal, by which subordinates defer to dominants.

Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of individuals to resist being dominated.  Among some primates, subordinate individuals can resist excessive dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals.  Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy.

The variation in this behavior creates differences in dominance style across species.  As Frans de Waal has observed, rhesus monkeys show a "despotic dominance style" in which subordinates cannot challenge dominants; but chimpanzees show an "egalitarian dominance style" in which subordinates can restrain dominants (de Waal 1996).  Dominant chimpanzees are expected to mediate conflicts within the group and to lead the group in conflicts with other groups.  Dominant chimpanzees can be challenged or even deposed if they do not properly carry out their conflict-mediation role.

Like chimpanzee politics, human politics shows a dominance hierarchy that can be egalitarian in style, based on the principle that leaders are only first among equals.  This egalitarianism is most evident among human hunter-gatherers who use various kinds of sanctions (from ridicule and disobedience to ostracism and execution) to punish leaders who become too despotic in their dominance.  This resistance to dominance was probably a crucial part of human evolutionary history in the Paleolithic era (from about two million years ago to 10,000 years ago).  But with the establishment of large bureaucratic states based on agricultural production, which began more than 5,000 years ago, many states have been more despotic than egalitarian.  The emergence and spread of Lockean liberal democracies over the past three centuries is in some ways a return to the egalitarian dominance of the foraging way of life in which subordinates limit the power of dominants.

To the old question in political philosophy as to whether human beings are naturally hierarchical or naturally egalitarian, the answer from biopolitical science is that human beings are both.  Niccolo Machiavelli was right to see that human political nature is torn by the tension between the propensity of the few to dominance and the propensity of the many to submit to dominance while also resisting oppressive dominance.  The history of political practice and political thought turns on this natural ambivalence interacting over time with particular political circumstances and decisions.

As an illustration of this political ambivalence among chimpanzees, here is Jane Goodall's description of an incident she observed in July of 1964 in Gombe:

"Mike, the new alpha, rests in the shade of a tree.  A sudden crashing in the undergrowth heralds the arrival of Goliath, recently deposed from the top position.  Mike does not move as Goliath charges flat out toward him, dragging a huge branch.  At the last moment Goliath turns aside, swings into a nearby tree, and sits motionless.  Only now does Mike begin to display, swaying the vegetation, hurling a few rocks, then climbing into Goliath's tree and swaying branches there.  When he stops, Goliath displays again, leaping ever closer to his adversary until Mike responds.  For a few moments both are wildly swaying foliage within 2 meters of each other; but there is no fight.  They swing to the ground and charge off through the undergrowth, running parallel, then sit staring at each other.  Goliath stands upright and rocks a sapling; Mike hurtles past, throwing a large rock.  For the next twenty-three minutes the performance continues, and during the whole episode the only physical contact between them is when one is hit by the end of a bough swayed by the other.  Finally, after a three-minute pause, Goliath moves rapidly toward Mike, crouches beside him with loud, submissive pant-grunts, and begins to groom him vigorously.  For half a minute, Mike ignores him, then turns and grooms his vanquished rival with equal intensity.  For more than an hour, they groom until both are relaxed and peaceful" (Goodall 1986, 409).

Notice the ambivalent political rhetoric in this incident.  The male dominance hierarchy is determined by the directionality of displays and pant-grunting among the adult males.  Goodall has kept a quantitative record of this for many years so that she can track the ever-changing history of the dominance hierarchy. If an alpha male is secure in his dominance, he displays towards the others in the group, and he receives pant-grunts from the others; but he never pant-grunts toward any of them.  When Goliath displays towards Mike, Goliath is challenging him, attempting to take the alpha position.  Both are feeling aggressive and fearful at the same time.  Each is trying to bluff down the other.  But while Goliath wants dominance, his fear of Mike finally drives him to signal his submission through pant-grunting; and Mike accepts his submission by reconciling with him.

Displays are more common than physical attacks, because chimps would rather avoid the danger of serious physical injuries that come from attacks.  Charging displays are threats that serve to maintain or challenge the existing order of dominance.  But reversals in rank among the males are usually the result of physical fights.  And while size and strength are important for success in displays and fights, psychological traits--such as intelligence, ingenuity, boldness, persistence, and shrewdness in forming coalitions--are crucial for success.  Mike was actually one of the smaller adult males when he overthrew Goliath, but he figured out how to use empty kerosene cans in his noisy charging displays to shock the other males and throw them into confusion until they submitted to him.  As I indicated in a previous post, Boehm and Goodall have compared Donald Trump's bombastic rhetoric to Mike's displays.

The vocal rhetoric of chimpanzees is complex.  Goodall and other primatologists have identified at least 32 distinct calls that convey particular emotions or feelings (Goodall 1986, 127; Arcadi 2018, 116-23).  One of them is the pant-grunt that Goliath uttered to signal a feeling of social apprehension and submission.  Another is the waa-bark that signals anger and defiance.  Dominant individuals can use waas as a warning to subordinates.  But from his careful study of chimp videotaped vocalizations, Boehm has concluded that most waas are used by subordinates to express their defiance of dominants (Boehm 1999, 164-69).

Boehm has seen this illustrated by what de Waal reports in his studies of the chimps in the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Georgia.  When new adult males were introduced into the community, the Yerkes females acted as a power coalition that rejected males seeking the alpha male position.  Finally, they accepted Jimoh as the alpha male.  But when he acted as a bully, the females punished him.  

For example, one day Jimoh saw that Socko, an adolescent male, was mating with one of Jomoh's favorite females.  Jimoh chased Socko around the enclosure and refused to stop.  Socko was screaming and defecating in fear.

Several females nearby began to waa bark.  They looked around to see the reaction of others.  When others began to join in the waa barking, the intensity of their protests became deafening.  Finally, Jimoh got the message.  He broke off his attack to avoid any further attacks from the females.  It was as though the chimps were taking a vote, and Jimoh had lost the vote.  If Jimoh had not stopped his attack, he might have been overthrown and even killed.

Here are the evolved primate roots of Lockean political rhetoric, in which we see the political ambivalence in the tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.

Last Saturday, we saw a great debate between the deference to Trump at his military parade and the counter-dominance of resistance to Trump at the "No Kings" protests.

Steven Cheung, the communications director for Trump, has said: "The so-called No Kings protests have been a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance."  Of course, that is what he has to say--he has to tell those of us who attended one of the protests that we must not believe what we saw with our own eyes.

Like I say, that's chimpanzee politics.

(Some of the material in this post comes from a previous post.)

REFERENCES

Arcadi, Adam. 2018. Wild Chimpanzees: Social Behavior of an Endangered Species. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Boehm, Christopher. 1993. "Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy." Current Anthropology 34:227-254.

Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goodall, Jane. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

de Waal, Frans. 1996. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The Chimpanzee Politics of Trump's "Unitary Executive Theory" of Demagogic Tyranny

                                                         "You're Fired!"  By Barry Blitt

"If the President does it, that makes it legal."

"I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."  

"He who saves his country violates no law."

That first sentence is a remark by Richard Nixon in an interview with David Frost in 1977.  This was three years after Nixon had been forced to resign to avoid impeachment for crimes associated with the Watergate break-in.  Nixon went on to explain to Frost that "in war time, a President does have certain extraordinary powers which would make acts that would otherwise be unlawful, lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the nation and the Constitution." I have written about this as an example of a president claiming the executive prerogative powers of a dictator (Arnhart 2016: 254-262).

The next two sentences are from Donald Trump.  That's what Trump says when he is accused of illegal actions in exercising presidential power.  

The third sentence has been attributed to the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, and it suggests the idea that in a time of national emergency or war, the national leader must have absolute power to do whatever he thinks is necessary to save the country.  

In the second sentence, Trump is referring to the "unitary executive theory," which says that Article II of the Constitution gives the President complete power over the Executive Branch, and therefore any congressional legislation regulating or limiting that executive power of the President is unconstitutional.  So, for example, the President may rightly disregard any congressional laws that set up independent agencies outside of presidential authority or laws restricting the president's power to remove employees within the executive branch.  This theory is what justifies everything that Trump and Elon Musk have been doing to take control of the federal government, even though much of this violates federal law.

The unitary executive theory is based largely on an interpretation of the first sentence of Article II: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."  The claim is that this sentence vests all of the executive power solely and exclusively in the President.  And, therefore, the Congress cannot deny or restrict the President's absolute power over the entire Executive Branch--all of the Federal administrative agencies and departments and all of the three million civilian employees (including the USPS employees) and 1.3 million active-duty military employees.

Moreover, it is argued that this follows necessarily from the principle of the separation of powers.  To prevent the tyranny that would come from one or a few people having too much concentrated power, the executive, legislative, and judicial powers must be strictly and completely separated.  And that means that in the government of the United States, the Congress and the courts must never exercise any executive powers, which belong only to the President.  Consequently, President Trump in the exercise of his executive powers can do whatever he wants.

It is also argued that the President has the authority to act as the one supreme leader of the government because he is the only person who has been elected by the American people in a national election to fill the Office of the President at the head of the government.  This allows a popular demagogue like Trump to say he must be free to do whatever he wants to fulfill his mandate from the people.

It is likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon have to decide whether this unitary executive theory as expansively interpreted by Trump is correct.

There are at least three reasons for thinking that the Supreme Court should rule that the proponents of this theory are mistaken.  First, their interpretation of Article II--and particularly, the vesting clause--violates the original meaning of the constitutional text.  This is remarkable since the advocates of this theory claim to be constitutional originalists who look for the clear meaning of the text as it was written by the constitutional framers in 1787 and ratified in 1789.

Second, the proponents of this theory fail to see that the principle of separation of powers with checks and balances does not dictate a complete separation of powers because securing a balanced government requires some partial mixing of those powers, and this was understood by the constitutional framers.

Third, the proponents of this theory do not grasp how the balancing of powers through a partial mixing of those powers is the only way to prevent a demagogic president like Trump from becoming a tyrant.  The Founders saw this threat to liberty from a Caesaristic demagogue like Trump when they warned "that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants" (The Federalist, number 1).

In explaining these three points, I will show how the need for the balancing of powers in government to check the tyrannical propensities of ambitious demagogues is rooted in the evolutionary history of the human beings.  I will move through three levels of biopolitical history: the natural history of the "chimpanzee politics" of dominance hierarchies, the cultural history of using a constitutional balance of powers to steer the ambitious striving for dominance away from tyranny, and the biographical history of ambitious individuals looking for ways to satisfy their desire for dominance (Arnhart 2009; 2012).  (I will link to previous posts that elaborate some of these ideas.)

We should see that there is a complex co-evolutionary interaction between these three levels of evolutionary history.  Natural history enables and constrains, but does not determine, cultural history.  Natural history and cultural history jointly enable and constrain, but do not determine, biographical history.  Shaped by their social and personal history, individual political actors must decide how best to satisfy their peculiar ambition for political power within the contingent circumstances that they face.

NATURAL HISTORY

Human politics is rooted in an evolutionary history of power-seeking and rivalry for dominance shared with other primates--monkeys and apes.  Frans de Waal found that Niccolo Machiavelli's Prince was the one book that most helped him understand the complex political life of chimpanzees.  Machiavelli analyzed politics as competition for power and glory organized around three orders of human beings--the "prince," who is number one, the "great ones," who are high-ranking individuals with ambition to rule; and the "people," who are the majority of individuals in a society with no ambition to rule, but who do not want to be oppressed by the "prince" or the "great ones."

Just as Machiavelli saw a balance of power as the fundamental mechanism for maintaining a stable political order that would not be despotic, de Waal saw a similar mechanism at work among chimpanzees.  Noticing how the alpha male often had to rely on the support of an ally to keep challengers down, de Waal explained this as a "balance of power: the superiority of one party over another depends on the support of a third, so that each party affects the position of the others."

Although every human society shows an order of dominance, a well-balanced society can achieve egalitarian dominance rather than despotic dominance.  De Waal observed that rhesus monkeys manifest despotic dominance, because a dominant rhesus monkey instills unremitting fear in subordinates.  But among chimpanzees, the dominant chimp often acts to protect subordinates, and if he becomes a bully, he can provoke an alliance of subordinates to throw him out of power.  Something similar seems to happen in egalitarian human communities.

Among human hunter-gatherers, the few people who are ambitious to rule can become leaders; but leaders who become too proud are attacked with social ridicule, and in extreme cases, leaders can be deposed or even executed by their followers.  Christopher Boehm argued that this supported an evolutionary political psychology of dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  A few human beings who are ambitious for dominance will fight with one another for the highest social ranking.  Most human beings will defer to these dominant few.  But if the few dominant ones become too oppressive in exploiting the multitude, the people will resist and perhaps even overthrow the dominant ones.

CULTURAL HISTORY

Beginning with the emergence of the first archaic states about 5,000 years ago, power became ever more centralized and concentrated in a bureaucratic state under a ruling class of priests and kings that was inclined to autocratic tyranny.  When that despotic dominance became oppressive, it could provoke popular resistance and rebellion.

In this autocratic form of government, all power is concentrated in a few people or even one person with supreme sovereignty.  By contrast, some societies have had a balanced form of government, in which power is divided between independent entities that check and counterbalance one another in a system of countervailance with no supreme sovereignty.

The predominance of these two principles of government--sovereignty versus countervailance--in the cultural history of governments over the past 5,000 years suggests that despite the great diversity in the forms of government, these two principles identify the two basic models of social organization.  According to the model of sovereignty, the authority to command is hierarchically structured with the supreme power at the top.  According to the model of countervailance, the authority to command is distributed across a network of independent powers--so that power controls power--and there is no supreme power.

Scott Gordon--in Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today--has sketched the cultural history of these two models from Athenian Democracy and the Roman Republic to American constitutionalism and modern Britain.  He coined the word "countervailance" to denote the counterbalancing of powers in a social system.  Although the Oxford English Dictionary does not recognize the word "countervailance," it does recognize "countervailing" as a noun, a verb, and an adjective.

Gordon's two models correspond roughly to what David Stasavage calls "autocracy" and "democracy."

The Balanced Republic of the Founders

The American Founders clearly chose the model of countervailance, although they identified this not as a pure "democracy," but as a "republic" with a balance of powers.  As early as 1775, when the revolutionaries were first discussing what the new American constitutionalism should look like, John Adams proposed:

The Course of Events, naturally turns the Thoughts of Gentlemen to the Subjects of Legislation and Jurisprudence, and it is a curious Problem what Form of Government, is most readily and easily adopted by a Colony, upon a Sudden Emergency.  Nature and Experience have already pointed out the Solution of this Problem, in the Choice of Conventions and Committees of safety.  Nothing is wanting in Addition to these to make a compleat Government, but the Appointment of Magistrates for the due Administration of Justice.

Taking Nature and Experience for my Guide I have made the following Sketch, which may be varied in any one particular an infinite Number of Ways, So as to accommodate it to the different, Genius, Temper, Principles and even Prejudices of different People.

A Legislative, an Executive and a judicial Power, comprehend the whole of what is meant and understood by Government.  It is by balancing each of these Powers against the other two, that the Effort in human Nature towards Tyranny, can alone be checked and restrained and any degree of Freedom preserved in the Constitution (Letter to Richard Henry Lee, November 15, 1775).

What Adams calls "Nature and Experience" is what I call natural history and cultural history.  The natural evolutionary history of the human species explains "the Effort in human Nature towards Tyranny," and the cultural history of balancing the three powers of government shows us how to check and restrain that natural tendency to tyranny and preserve freedom from tyranny.  But then at the individual level of history, Adams recognizes that his sketch for a constitution, which he elaborated in his Thoughts on Government in 1776, will have to be accommodated "to the different, Genius, Temper, Principles and even Prejudices of different People" in constitutional and ratifying conventions.

Adams and the other Founders generally agreed on a form of government that would balance the three powers--legislative, executive, and judicial--so that "ambition must be made to counteract ambition," and none of the three powers could become tyrannical (Federalist, number 51).  But they were unsure of how the presidency should be designed to fit into this scheme of balanced government.  At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Alexander Hamilton proposed a presidency that looked like an elective monarchy.  But others wanted the president to be constrained by an executive council of people because they feared giving all the presidential powers to one person.

Once they agreed to give the presidential powers to one person, they worried about how he would be selected.  They did not want a national popular election of the president because they feared that the people would choose a popular demagogue who would lead a party faction contrary to the public good.

They devised a complicated indirect system of selection through the Electoral College.  They were confident that "the process of election affords a moral certainty that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications," that the "talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity" would not elevate a man to the presidency, and that "there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue" (Federalist, number 68).  

This was a mistake, perhaps the single biggest mistake in the Constitution.  Within the first ten years of the government, the selection of the president came under the control of two intensely partisan political parties.  And within fifty years, most of the state legislatures had handed over the selection of presidential electors to popular vote.

Republican Remedies for Presidential Democracy

From the beginning, presidents persistently claimed presidential control of the executive branch, which would support the idea of a unitary executive at the head of a presidential government (Calabresi and Yoo 2008).  But beginning in the 19th century, the cultural history of the American state shows the emergence of various extraconstitutional contrivances for constraining presidentialism in favor of republican balancing, which Skowronek, Dearborn, and King (2021) have called "republican remedies" for presidential democracy.

For example, early in the 19th century, Congress controlled presidential nominations: the congressional party selected the national candidates and then coordinated the local electors in supporting the candidates.  By the middle of the 19th century, local party bosses controlled the nomination of candidates.  And presidents were expected to hand out jobs in the executive branch to all the factions of their party.

By the turn of the 20th century, Progressive reformers attacked this control of the executive branch by the spoils system.  They set out to render executive administration nonpartisan by providing civil service protections for the government workforce and by establishing various independent regulatory commissions that were largely insulated from presidential control.

To be continued . . .