Catholic Anarcho-Monarchy

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate the State

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate reality of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate!

- J.R.R. Tolkien to his son Christopher, 1944

There’s a certain type of terminally online Zoomer that delights in adopting obscure, unfeasible political ideologies. You’ll find kids in the suburbs who have decided after reading everything there is to read on tumblr that they believe Maoism to be the ideal system of government. You’ll find others who spent far too much time on ifunny and come out the other side calling themselves Strasserites. Ancaps, Nazbols, technocrats - you name it, you can find a 17-26 year old with a wifi connection who believes it.

One of the most fringe and least serious of these ideologies is known as anarcho-monarchism, a combination of anarchism and monarchy. It is so fringe that only two thinkers of note have ever (semi)seriously used the term, though if you had to pick two thinkers to be on your side you could do worse than J.R.R. Tolkien and David Bentley Hart. The ideology is so phantasmal that there isn’t even a definition of what it is. It really seems to be nothing but a punch line, useful for a laugh but not much more.

I’ve become interested in the term for a slightly different reason. I think it is a genuinely useful term to describe the premodern Catholic conception of government. Moreover, I think much of what the most prominent anarchist thinkers (Proudhon, Kropotkin, and their sort) held as an ideal was the reality of monarchy in the Catholic middle ages, even if it didn’t exist in a perfect state.

What is anarchism?

Anarchism often calls to mind visions of chaos, violence, and punk rock in the modern usage of the term. Indeed, anarchists did much to bring that reputation on themselves. In the 19th century, anarchist activists committed numerous acts of terrorism in Europe and the United States, at one point even assassinating King Umberto of Italy, earning their place in the public imagination as a corrosive influence on society. To be an anarchist was, as Tolkien noted in the quote above, to be a “whiskered man with bombs.”

Still, there is a serious philosophical school of anarchism that deserves to be reckoned with, even if many of their supporters turned to terrorism to accomplish their goals. Peter Kropotkin, one of the key anarchist theorists, defined anarchism in the Encyclopedia Britannica as

“the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.”

It’s clear from context that Kropotkin doesn’t criticize government as such if by government we simply mean the organizing and regulation of a society. Every society must be “governed” by something. The sort of government that the anarchists are opposed to is coercive government, primarily in the form of statist government This is why you might sometimes hear an anarchist say that they are not necessarily opposed to hierarchies, only to unjust hierarchies.

The anarchist vision, as espoused by Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, is that governing should only happen by free and mutual agreement. On the anarchist view, man is a rational animal who is able to act in the interests of himself, his family, and his community. In fact, many anarchists would agree with Plato and Aristotle that everyone does the good insofar as they can perceive it. If that is true, they argue, then what is the use of a coercive state? As mankind comes into its own, as we progress in reason, coercive government will become increasingly superfluous until it can be abolished entirely.

The ideal society, once the state is abolished, will consist of free agreements made between individuals in all spheres of life as well as between various groups. A group of individuals might band together in a commune, that commune might band together with other communes, and perhaps there would even be a sort of federalism at play here. Importantly, though, the members of this ideal society would be able to secede at their own discretion. In this way, the anarchists hope to have their society free from statist control.

This also applies to economic control. Most anarchists are firmly on the economic left and are opposed to capitalism. Their opposition to capitalism, however, is different than a Marxist socialist opposition to capitalism. The problem with capitalism, according to the anarchists, is that it leverages the power of the state to form unfair monopolies. If there was no state, they argue, then this would be impossible. In fact, the great split between Marxist and anarchist socialists happened because of their differing views on the usefulness of state power. Marxists sought to use the state to wrest control of the monopolies for the masses, while the anarchists thought this was an absurdity. You can’t end monopoly by placing the means of production in the hands of an even more powerful monopoly, even if the monopoly is “for the people.”

An anarchist society requires three things to actually work, then. 1) Freely agreed upon (non-coercive) social organization between individuals, 2) freely agreed upon social organization between communities, and 3) decentralized economic control.

Freedom and Fealty

The first feature of an anarchist society, freely agreed upon social organization, was a fundamental principle of medieval society. We often project our categories back in time, a phenomenon known as the historian’s fallacy. We hear that there were kings and lords in the middle ages, and we assume that they must have been the kings and lords that dominated Europe during the age of absolutism. These medieval kings, we imagine, similarly dominated their kingdoms with an iron fist, attempting to impose their will upon all of their subjects because they were God’s anointed upon Earth.

This is a faulty picture of medieval kingship. Medieval society was structured primarily by the oath of fealty between different levels of society - king and lord, lord and knight, the knight and the serf, and so on. This oath did not create a relation of slavery, it was marked by mutual obligations both from the one swearing fealty and the one receiving it. This can be seen in this 10th century oath of fealty from England, which is a fairly typical example of a feudal oath:

By the Lord, before whom this relic is holy, I will be to N. faithful and true, and love all that he loves, and shun all that he shuns, according to God's law, and according to the world's principles, and never, by will nor by force, by word nor by work, do ought of what is loathful to him; on condition that he keep me as I am willing to deserve, and all that fulfill what our agreement was, when I to him submitted and chose his will.

Medieval government was not built on a state but rather on personal relationships, as seen above. This oath was usually, though not always, given by the vassal to the lord in person. Typically this involved the vassal placing his hands between the hands of his lord while kneeling and the lord handing his vassal some sort of symbol of his authority and protection. This posture is actually where we in the West get our posture for prayer, kneeling with our hands together. Ideally, the lord was intended to model his conduct towards his subjects after the Lord.

It seems contrary to our modern intuitions, but the use of these oaths is the clearest indication that the medievals held free association in high esteem. Indeed, according to Aquinas (ST II-II Q. 81 Art. 7) an oath made under compulsion cannot be binding - its obligation is cancelled. It is only through an act of freedom that one person can bind themselves to another person - this is why the marriage rite requires a declaration of consent. The use of the oath of fealty to bind society together presupposes that people are able to freely agree to form the relationships that structured medieval society.

The bond of the oath also implicitly contained within it the right to rebel, something that was formally recognized by several medieval thinkers. Thomas Aquinas and John of Salisbury, for example, agreed upon this point. The King of Hungary also formally recognized this with the Golden Bull of 1222, the King of England with Magna Charta, and various Spanish kingdoms recognized this principle as well. When we consider the nature of an oath, this is only reasonable. If one party fails to uphold their end, the oath is made null and void.

It could be a fair criticism to say that the system of oaths was rather limited, with the emphasis usually being on oaths between the nobility. However, in early Anglo-Saxon England, prior to the Norman invasion, every freeman in England was bound to the king and his laws through an oath. At the age of 12, a boy would go before the community and make a solemn oath to uphold the laws of the king and to denounce any crime against them. While this wasn’t true all across Europe, the idea of free association wasn’t necessarily limited to a small social class. Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that a system like this couldn’t expand to cover all of a society.

The bonds created through oaths, both of fealty and otherwise, created networks of what the medievals called auxilium et consilium, networks of aid and counsel. In other words, society was constructed upon networks of true friendship. Recalling the fealty oath above, the vassal promises not only to aid his lord but also to “love all that he loves and shun all that he shuns.” This oath is not intended to create a mere mechanism as modern constitutions intend to. It was intended to create a bond, a relationship. Love between friends was the glue that held the medieval social order together, not the threat of coercive violence.

I am not trying to say here that this was all perfectly carried out throughout the Middle Ages. This system was frequently abused and these abuses caused much suffering. My point is that the ideal of medieval society was the freely sworn oath, from the lowly serf all the way up to the king, which carried with it a view of freedom that is much stronger than we typically give them credit for. These oaths, rather than state power, created the networks of aid and counsel, the networks of Christian friendship, that created medieval society.

Other Political Associations

Besides oaths between individuals, there were also a multitude of free associations between corporate bodies. This included associations between monasteries, towns, and even peasant communities.

Western monasticism, following the example of St. Benedict, spread throughout Europe largely due to support from Charlemagne. The monastery, like society at large, was a community built upon vows and oaths from the individual monk to the Abbot. Individual monasteries, despite not being formally linked to one another through an overarching administration as later orders would be, had a strong spirit of cooperation and association with other monastic communities, especially when it came to transmitting manuscripts. Besides that, monasteries also cooperated by sharing knowledge of agriculture, brewing, and other technical matters.

Towns created associations between themselves to protect their rights against noble and royal encroachment as well as to support other common interests. The most famous of these was the Hanseatic League, also known as the Hansa, in northern Europe. The Hansa was a network of trading cities and merchant guilds that banded together to defend trade routes, regulate trade, and otherwise protect their members from physical or economic threats.

The Hansa operated according to consensus, with its legislative body only meeting whenever the need arose. It had no central treasury, nor a standing navy, nor a strict administrative apparatus. Still, in its heyday, the Hansa effectively eliminated piracy in the Baltic Sea and had some 200 settlements as members. The Hanseatic league is far from unique in its structure or its accomplishments - similar civic leagues existed throughout the Holy Roman Empire as well as in the Italian peninsula.

Lastly, peasant communities throughout central Europe also had several notable instances where they created free associations among themselves. Perhaps the best example of this in the late medieval period is the Swiss Confederation, the famous Eidgenossenschaft (“oath alliance”) between the eight Swiss cantons, but this doesn’t happen until the very end of the medieval period. An earlier example of peasant communities forming a league of their own happened in the county of Dithmarschen in southern Denmark (then part of the Holy Roman Empire).

Dithmarschen had been a county since the days of Charlemagne, but their liege had little actual authority in the region. Slowly over time, lordly authority ceased to be respected at all until eventually the area was given to the Archbishop of Bremen. This proved to be a great boon for the peasants of Dithmarschen, as the Archbishop allowed them broad autonomy which they used to create a sort of peasant Republic. At one point, the peasants successfully petitioned the pope to intervene in a dispute between them and Emperor Frederick III. This local federation between hamlets lasted until the 16th century when the King of Denmark finally conquered the region.

Whether between monasteries, towns, or peasant communities, it was not at all uncommon for medieval people to expand their political organization from local communities, scaling them all the way up to being full-fledged federations. In all of these cases, the principle of free association between corporate bodies is on full display.

Serfdom and Economic Freedom

Following the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe underwent profound political and economic change. The greatest change, perhaps, was the practical elimination of slavery in Christian society. Through a long and arduous process, all throughout Europe the slave became the serf or even the freeholding peasant. This might seem like peanuts to us in the modern age, but it was a radical shift from the one to the other, especially when we survey the rest of human history.

Serfs were laborers on the land, bound both to the land and to their lord. They were the least free portion of medieval society, but through custom even they could reasonably claim a level of ownership over the land they worked. In short, even the serf who was politically unfree had a greater degree of economic freedom than most wage-earners have today.

Hilaire Belloc, in The Servile State, describes the typical medieval estate in England as being divided into three parts; that owned by the lord exclusively, that occupied by the serfs, and that which was used in common. Custom, rather than law, gave the serf a level of ownership over the land that he worked. Yes, the produce of the lord’s land belonged to the lord, but most of the produce on the serf’s land and often even the commons belonged by custom to the serf.

Other peasants were not serfs but instead were freeholders. These peasants had more of a legal claim to the land that they worked, though they still held it “of” someone, in the same way that the lord held his land “of” of the king. These peasants enjoyed more freedoms, they weren’t bound to the land or to the lord in the same way as the serf, but they still owed a (much smaller) obligation to pay a rent or a tax to their lord.

By the end of the medieval era, Belloc estimates that the land in England was divided up between the great aristocratic landowners, the Church (especially the monasteries), and the smallholders. The first two each owned somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the land and the last category owned the remainder, though it was highly divided up amongst them. This was radically changed with the English Reformation, when Henry VIII seized the lands of the Church and dispensed them to the great landowners. In one fell swoop, around half of England’s productive land belong to a relatively small group.

If almost half the productive land had not been concentrated into the hands of a few aristocratic families, the economic history of Britain (and therefore the rest of the world) could have been profoundly different. From this position of strength, a relatively small oligarchy was able to dominate economic life in Britain by the time the industrial revolution began. Had this not happened, it is entirely possible that the “distributive state” of ownership could have survived into the modern age.

It became reasonable to denounce the vestiges of “feudalism” in the modern period, by which most meant the rents and taxes owed by the peasantry to the aristocratic landowners as well as their ties to the land. It was reasonable, however, because the relationship between peasant and landlord had ceased to be one of mutual obligation. The peasant was left paying his rent, taxes, and labor to his lord without any of the promises of protection and support that his medieval counterpart had enjoyed.

I mentioned above that the serf was politically unfree, but this was actually not always the case. There were several instances throughout the middle ages where the bond of serfdom was substantially loosened, if only for a brief period of time. Shortly after the Black Death, with about a third of Europe dead, labor was in such scarcity that serfs, broadly speaking, had the pick of their lords. This didn’t always require a catastrophe of that scale, either. Anytime that labor was in high demand, even the serf had the ability of free association.

The system of serfdom was the least free aspect of medieval society. Still, even the serf possessed a freedom that most of us find impossible today - the ownership of productive property. We can’t say how this decentralized property ownership would have developed if it hadn’t been strangled during the Reformation, but we do know that this sort of decentralized property ownership actually existed in fact, even if not necessarily in law.

The Guilds and Economic Freedom

While the peasant had a sort of economic freedom through custom in the countryside, the artisan had a much firmer economic freedom in the city. Through the system of the Guilds and other related economic associations, decentralized economic ownership was made possible in manufacturing and trade as well.

The function of the Guilds throughout Europe in the middle ages was to 1) self-regulate industries 2) ensure a level of quality control on goods and 3) to prevent unjust monopolies. The Guilds jealously guarded their freedom to do all three of these things, especially by putting strict barriers on entry to the guild.

By fulfilling these functions, the guilds ensured that industry was not divided between the “haves” on one side and the “have-nots” on the other. No one merchant or artisan would have been allowed to corner the market. They would not have been allowed to dispossess their colleagues through economic competition, as that went directly against the cooperative nature of the guild.

Instead of economic competition, the guilds channeled man’s competitive energy in other directions. Guilds often had a patron saint whose feast they would celebrate with as much pomp and circumstance as possible. It became a matter of pride for guilds to outdo one another in these celebrations, throwing elaborate parties, putting on elaborate plays, and ensuring that the liturgy was well-celebrated. Similarly, guilds often had the responsibility of maintaining a neighborhood of their city. Guilds would compete in building fountains, keeping streets clean, and beautifying their parish church.

The problem that the guilds repeatedly created was becoming too restrictive. On several occasions, guilds would ensure that being a master in the guild was effectively a hereditary role. Membership was still somewhat open, but the ability to decide the affairs of the guild and own a workshop became heavily regulated. In response to this, at various times throughout European history but especially in the 14th century, apprentices and journeymen would create new associations of their own often referred to as “brotherhoods.”

The splintering of the guilds with the creation of the new brotherhoods shows how deep-seated this desire for free and decentralized production was. No one in the middle ages wanted to be an employee forever. Everyone desired to become a master. When the guilds made this impossible, the journeymen and apprentices made their own guilds under a different name. This desire was only finally smothered with the introduction of industrial capitalism in 18th century Britain.

Coercive Power

My point here has been to show certain similarities between anarchist philosophy and medieval Catholic government. I don’t, however, want you to leave with the impression that I believe that there is no difference between the two. Perhaps rather than anarcho-monarchy, the medieval ideal might be called “monarchy with anarchist characteristics.” Unlike true anarchists, Catholic monarchs in the middle ages believed there was a place for coercive power. Still, they occupy a middle ground in this regard between modern statist ideologies and philosophical anarchism.

The Catholic thinkers of the middle ages did not think of mankind as being in a natural state of war, a war of all against all, as Hobbes did. Rather, they conceived of mankind as being made for a natural peace. We don’t lose our freedom by participating in political society, either, as Locke thought Rather we gain our freedom by being in relation with each other. This anthropology puts medieval Catholics at variance with most forms of modern statism.

This original peace and vocation to community expressed itself through all of the various associations and relationships that made up the middle ages as described above. Still, everyone acknowledged that we live in a fallen world. Oaths are sometimes broken, associations are sometimes betrayed, and the political order built on counsel and aid comes crashing down.

In these moments, when the original peace that man was made for was disrupted, violence became legitimate in the medieval worldview. The king did not bear the sword in vain. Not only could the king and his vassals use force to restore peace, it was their sacred duty to do so. The thought of shirking this duty by appealing to pacifism would have been the height of folly for a medieval king.

Still, most of the time he kept the sword in its scabbard. Once the Peace was restored, even the threat of force was put away so that Christians could live in fellowship with one another. This is in part why Christendom lacked standing armies for much of its history; it wasn’t simply because of the cost of maintaining them was too high, it was because there was no need for a standing army when the Peace was intact. It shouldn’t surprise us that the first standing armies after the fall of Rome were not Christian armies, but the Janissaries of the Ottoman Turks.

Conclusion

What does all of this mean for us today? I don’t intend to imply that a Catholic vision of politics requires a return to a system of medieval feudalism. Nor for that matter do I mean to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses. There were great evils at play in medieval society, primarily because it was a human society. A republic of angels or, God forbid, a Kingdom of robots might be sinless, but a human society never will be on this side of heaven.

The use of seeing the middle ages through the lens of anarchism is to show that states, as we think of them in the modern world, are not necessary for man to fulfill his vocation of being in community. States, with their implicit assumption of a false anthropology, might even be a hindrance to that vocation. We need political organization but we shouldn’t have to give into evil to have it.

We know that we can’t reverse time, but if something was possible in the past it remains possible today. It might even be the case that what was possible in the past could be refined and improved upon today. It is possible, as we have seen above, to imagine a different way of organizing society. Not through the coercive violence of a state, but through networks of consiliuim et auxilium. Through networks of friends.

From the ashes of the Roman Empire, Christian friendship was able to create the most beautiful civilization mankind has ever seen. God willing, we won’t live to see the collapse our our empire and the suffering that would cause, but we can begin the difficult work of renewing Christian civilization. We can, in Dorothy Day’s language, begin to create a new society in the shell of the old with the philosophy of the new.

This will necessarily involve a revolution, but it is a revolution of the heart - the most difficult revolution of all.