Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 41

41A MutAtInG PeRIPHeRy
occur, and the Icelandic freestate may be compared to other cases ( see e.g.
Borgolte 2002, ch. 2.2: “freistaaten unter Monarchien: Was Island von
den italienischen kommunen unterscheidet”).
There is, however, another side to the question. As the record shows,
the rejection of monarchy went hand in hand with continuing concern
with it, efforts to make sense of it and evaluate its different forms, and
even elaborations of new models for monarchic rule. In this fundamental
sense, anti-monarchic turns were ambiguous, sometimes to the point of
imaginary self­cancellation. Some recurrent historical reasons for this
ambiguity may be noted. There was, in the first place, a general social
rationale for strong monarchic rule, never easy to dismiss: the ruler was
envisioned as “one before whom the rich and the well-born were as vulner­
able as the little man” (Hodgson 1974, I, 282). To put it another way,
visions of strong monarchy lent themselves to association with social jus­
tice. But they also served to focus the pursuit of power for its own sake.
Monarchy represented an eminent, inherently expansive and particularly
meaning-laden form of power. Although only a few monarchies could real­
ize imperial ambitions, it can be argued that there is an elective affinity
between the ideas of monarchy and empire: “Dans la domination…, il y a,
latente, la perspective d’une domination universelle” (Gauchet 1985, 38). At
a more modest level, aspirants to power in non-monarchic regimes were
prone to monarchic temptations. finally, the court societies that crystal­
lized around monarchic rulers became cultural centres of a very distinctive
kind and with considerable radiating power. Norbert Elias’s classic analysis
of early modern court society opened up a vast field for comparative study
of such cases (elias 1983).
for all these reasons, the spectre of monarchy haunts the political life
and the social imaginary of non­monarchic regimes. the richest evidence
for this comes from Ancient Greece (see especially Carlier 1984). to cut a
very long story short, the Greeks engaged with monarchy on four different
levels. Marginal or strangely transmuted forms of monarchic institutions
survived within the context of a political culture centred on non-monarchic
patterns. A fundamentally illegitimate form of monarchy, striving for more
stable authority, emerged as a response to crises of the polis; the Greeks
called it tyranny. efforts to make sense of monarchic orders in the neigh­
bouring Near East brought new perspectives to bear on the indigenous