I’m going to explain what divine kingship is. Since it was the basis of value for the entirety of human history until at least the Revolutionary Era (the turn of the 19th century), it’s a concept which should be understood in clear political terms. I have reviewed some of the existing literature and, while I won’t deal with it here, I think that what I have to say is different enough that I’m not building off of it in any way. I do intend to make a further review and critique of that literature but I won’t do it here.
Another thing I won’t do here (but I will introduce) is to challenge the Marxite progression of modes of production. I call these stages “production epochs”. As laid out by Marx, civilization in general progressed from the tribal epoch to the ancient to the feudal and then to the capitalist. The difference I have starts in that Marx thinks each epoch is based on a single major mode of production, but I think these epochs are better described by two phenomena — work-value relation (essentially mode of production) and value-body (related to Deleuze & Guattari’s socius) — which are not isolated to their epoch. I won’t talk about work-value relation here but I will talk about value-body. I felt that introducing this would be useful here as context because sacral rule (which includes divine kingship) is the foundation of the value-body for both the ancient and feudal epochs. As I said from the beginning, this form of rule has been a constant in civilization since a time before writing.
First, I should probably make clear what I mean by sacral rule. It’s obvious that this includes two historical concepts — the divine right of kings in Europe and the mandate of heaven in China (and nearby regions) — but what else does it include and what does it not include? I live in the United States of America, a country whose population is officially about 70% Christian, has only elected Christians to be its monarch, has gone through protracted periods of Christian political mania dominating law and justice, and whose majority population regularly abuses religious minorities. Many Americans believe this country to be the favorite of the Christian God, the ruler begins their rule by swearing in upon a Christian Bible, and they are often associated with priests who recognize the ruler as being chosen by God. Does all this mean that America is under sacral rule?
Obviously, my answer is no. The reason this should be obvious has nothing to do with democracy or separation of church and state; it should be obvious because we are in the capitalist epoch and America is the arch-capitalist country. Nothing about America’s political system as described makes it necessarily not sacral rule, though, not even free elections. A system equals sacral rule when it is explicitly based on divine sanction. Trying to parse out what “explicitly” means here is unfortunately not straightforward, given that for instance the United States mandates reciting the pledge of allegiance for a huge portion of its population and yet is not under sacral rule. The important point is, however, that governmental actions are not justified by reference to God but by appeals to the Constitution or the general good of Americans.
To give us a better idea of what systems might qualify as being sacral rule, we can make two inquiries; I say “inquiries” rather than “tests” as these are not simple or definite but these will be more revealing than simply looking at texts. These inquiries are 1) the autocratic justification, and 2) the value-body inquiry.
The inquiry of autocratic justification is essentially a more qualified and specific version of the basic question: what is a government’s authority based on? We get to this by asking what reasoning the government uses to excuse its least defensible actions. Rather than interpreting “least defensible” in terms of morality, I am using it in terms of political and social legitimacy. This should become clearer as I break down the terms “autocracy” and “justification”.
Any official or properly public action or decision by a ruler comes from somewhere. While we could come up with many different sources and/or beneficiaries of these acts to be considered separately, I think the origins of all acts can be boiled down to three: by support of the society, on the advice of interests, and by personal decision (which is autocratic). I am using autocracy here to mean the ruler acting on personal initiative, not as a moral judgement about such acts. The executive function of modern democratic governments is often intended to act autocratically at times, but this doesn’t stop those governments from being democracies. This does not even mean that an autocratic action will be harmful to the society. Most governments will act autocratically at times as a normal part of their functioning. To understand what it means to act autocratically, we should first look at the other two origins.
Support from society and advice from interests make most sense when opposed to one another. What differentiates “society” from “interests” is what they want: society wants welfare (to say it in a less loaded way, we could say that society wants to maintain and sustain itself) while interests want profit. One can affect the other positively or negatively but, it should be understood, society can at best affect the profits of interests, whereas interests can negatively affect the basic well-being of a society. This seeming leniency by the society is due to the fact that interests are part of society, and should the being of an interest fade away, its components would remain in society. On the other hand, interests can lock up resources so the rest of society can’t benefit, hinting at their danger in politics.
It shouldn’t be controversial to say that no one rules alone. Even absolute monarchs and solo dictators had advisors. This doesn’t mean that there are no autocratic actions, it’s just that advisors can be part of autocratic acts and interests are not. Interests are always considered independent political actors interacting with the ruler whereas advisors are like appendages of the ruler. Of course, interests (or their representatives) can serve as literal advisors to a ruler, but that doesn’t change their position as interests.
Why are these important? Looking at these three types, we can see that each is less directly justified to the society as a whole than the one before. Social support obviously supplies that the society at large feels the act is justified. Interests are less immediately justified to society; as part of society and centers of value/profit they are related to society, but their goals might reasonably be seen as selfish. Autocratic acts, in this series, are the least directly justified, and therefore often rely on explicit extra justifications. This is crucial because an accepted justification drains the enthusiasm for resistance to actions seemingly against society.
From this, we can understand justification as the reasoning or understanding given by an actor which persuades a group that an act is acceptable. The clearest justification is group benefit, when the group did not necessarily support the act beforehand but does clearly benefit. The next clearest is an invocation of group benefit. This is different from the benefit itself because the benefit is realized over time but the invocation is presented up front. It’s like the image of the benefit; it can be read as a promise (and often is meant this way) but it isn’t really a promise, even if the ruler intends it to be. As a justification, it’s a statement to be accepted or rejected on its face.
Almost every kind of justification that is successful is a variant of the invocation of social benefit. This idea will return again later. For now, we should understand divine justification (which is the type used by sacral rule) as being an image of the invocation of social benefit. Especially in the West, it’s common to link any alliance of divinity and government with oppression, so it should be understood that this justification is based not on divine force & punishment but on divine providence. Providence is a kind of benefit which originates outside of society and is potentially limitless. Ensuring that this potential is not lost is the responsibility of the sacral ruler, such as by organizing rituals and ensuring divine wishes are followed, and this gives the ruler the justification to take acts which might otherwise be seen as against society. A dramatic example is the system of human sacrifice in the Aztec civilization. It is unlikely that this system was enjoyed by much of the population, but the system was justified as being demanded by the divine as a condition of providence. Remember that what justification accomplishes is a reduction in opposition from the society for an action taken without the society’s consent and/or against the society’s immediate well-being. Without this justification, how could we explain the fact that Aztec people allowed this to continue?
The inquiry, then, is to find an autocratic act by a regime and investigate how the act was justified. I intend to expand this in the future to discuss how this inquiry can actually be performed in more detail but I hope that the concept is clear enough as it is to be meaningful. When a ruler takes an autocratic action, they will have to supply a justification. If this justification is based on divinity, the rule should be considered sacral.
The second inquiry is the value-body inquiry. This basically states that if a society’s value-body is of a specific type, then that society is under sacral rule. I’ll give a name to the type in a moment but I first want to establish what a value-body is. As I hinted at earlier, this idea is an adaptation of the concept of socius as used by Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. Though their concept and use of socius is broad, a quote about it will work for us as a description of the value-body: it is “the quasi cause of production and the object of desire”1. We can probably best understand this in the form of capital. The desire for capital happens because capital can be used to persuade someone else to take a specific action. If a person needs something that another person has, the first person can offer money (the minor form of capital) for that thing to persuade the second person to exchange it. I say “persuade” because in principle such a request could be refused, though in practice refusing to accept money is often a less-than-free situation because having access to money is required to satisfy basic needs; one can only refuse so many offers before one’s well-being is compromised. As a value-body, then, capital is both the essence of value and also the driver of production.
Value does not exist on its own. In the first instance, value is created by utility, or what I call the benefit-value relation: if something provides a benefit to someone (in reality or in theory), that one will value that thing. Unlike more explicit utility theories of value, I am not saying that this is the whole of an object’s value, but providing a benefit is required for an object to be valued at all. As constructed here, there is not a single value but a constellation of values for each object, as each person has their own perspective. For value to become useful for exchange it has to be regularized so there is some shared understanding of how value can be measured. As exchange becomes crucial with the formation of society, it’s at this point that the first value-body is created: society itself. This happens through a process which D&G would call overcoding or “falling back on”. To create a single quote-unquote “register” of values, the various individuals in a group have to be considered as a collective unit; the individuals and their separate valuations are not eliminated, of course, but they are in a way superseded by the valuation of the collective society. For example, even if I value an apple more than a gold mine, society says that I can’t normally exchange an apple for a gold mine because the apple has much less value. Society is the value-body of the first instance because it is based on the actual valuations of the individuals that make up the society.
Humanity has realized two other value-bodies, both of which being overcodings of the society value-body (which I will call societas going forward, for clarity). We’ve already briefly discussed capital. The other value-body is one based on sacral rule: the remit (or dominion) value-body. Remit refers to the ruler’s real and theoretical authority, which may extend beyond the society itself. This can be equated with the full body of the despot as discussed by D&G as a socius, though as I’ve implied we are only discussing the creation and operation of value. As D&G say, the body of the despot miraculates production, “miraculate” meaning something like “to provide through processes which are mystified or obscured by the presence of the apparent provider”. This happens as the sacral ruler establishes themselves as having authority over society. They then reform the construction of value to be centered around themselves and their own desires. This is based not on a regard for their person but for the providence which it is their responsibility to maintain. This is possible because providence can provide more benefit than societas can, so society-as-such would prefer to use remit. By agreeing to do this, they are agreeing to abide by the value judgments made by the ruler.
Many people would see land as a potential value-body and I did consider this but it doesn’t work. Land can’t be a value-body because it is not a source of value, it is a source of benefit which then has value applied to it. Directly, this value is applied by all those who benefit from the land. More abstractly, the value of land is determined by the value-body which prevails in a particular situation.
What is important about this concept of value-body? First, we should understand that we as people don’t simply apply value to objects like a coat of paint, “value” is the way we understand “benefit”. To say it another way, if we eat food, its benefit is how much the food actually helps us but its value to us is how much we mentally (and emotionally) appreciate it. In addition, our capacity for learning means that the things we know others value will also be valued in some degree by us, as we have learned that the valued thing is in some way beneficial. I say all this to make the point that “value” is not just a distant concept that we only encounter in economics and philosophy, it is crucial to how we understand and experience the world.
The value-body’s mechanistic importance to a society is that it provides the basis for cogency, which would be impossible if value and benefit were not linked. By “mechanistic”, I mean to consider society as a kind of classical machine (as opposed to a D&G machine) where the action of one part directly causes an action in another part and so on. This is opposed to the usual view of society where special allowances are made for free will at every point. To be clear, I am not rejecting free will. Society can’t be viewed as mechanistic in detail, which is where free will acts. We can only consider society in a mechanistic sense when we consider it as a whole, in the aggregate. As a classical machine, then, the fuel of society is value.
In this context, the concept of cogency can be understood as the primary force which pushes the social machine. If society is like a car and value is our gasoline fuel, cogency is the combustion which is generated from use of the fuel. More generically, I would define cogency as “non-coercive coercion”. Coercion is forcing someone to act in a certain way by using actual or threatened violence. Persuasion is inducing someone to act in a certain way by presenting that act as having value to that someone. Cogency sits somewhere in the middle. Coercion means violence and cogency doesn’t, while persuasion implies the opportunity to refuse and, again, cogency doesn’t. Persuasion works on the same level where free will operates, it does not translate to the mechanistic level. Cogency can in some sense be broken down into innumerable instances of persuasion, but the difference between a mass attempt at persuasion (like a massive leaflet campaign) on one hand and a real act of cogency (like a tax break or a royal decree) on the other is that an act of cogency implies that its goal will be carried out. As said before, cogency is only possible because it employs value as miraculated by the value-body.
What makes sacral rule particularly attractive for rulers, then, is that its outgrowth which is the remit value-body is almost entirely determined by the ruler (as the one who guarantees providence). With both the society and capital value-bodies, there is the possibility that cogency could be used against the ruler without upsetting the value system. In the remit value system, this is impossible. Overcoding is not erasure, of course, but supplanting a regime which uses a remit value-body usually means abandoning that system, even if replacing it with a different remit value-body. Sacral rule is not the only way to enable an autocratic government (in the usual sense of autocracy) but it is a surer basis for it than the society value-body; the capital value-body is useful for autocrats as well but it was only truly made prominent after the delegitimization of remit in the Revolutionary Era as remit is less risky for such a ruler than capital.
A final note here: about why might or military force cannot serve as a value-body, perhaps of a regime based around coercion. Even in a situation where most of society is driven by coercive measures, those doing the coercing can’t themselves be coerced, they have to be compelled by cogency; it has to be better for them to work with the ruler than to use their violent capabilities against the ruler. I did originally want to bring the example of the car back but I would have to go beyond my knowledge of cars and I didn’t want to leave you with a shitty metaphor.
My goal here was to explain what sacral rule (also called divine kingship) is in a philosophical sense. There are things I didn’t discuss but could have, like the effect of religious participation on the remit value-body, which I intend to do when I revisit this topic. This discussion could also benefit from valuable historical context. This is just a step on the road to something more, but I hope this step is useful to you.
- Deleuze & Guattari. Robert Hurley, Helen Lane, and Mark Seem, trans. Anti-Oedipus. New York: Penguin, 1977. Page 141 ↩︎
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