This chapter explores Schopenhauer’s views of the political systems in North America, Europe, and China. Schopenhauer understood the United States as a modern republic geared toward maximum individual freedom. He also took note of its high levels of interpersonal violence. Importantly, he repeatedly returned to US slavery as the most egregious example of institutionalized exploitation and brutality. In his treatment of the United States, he then connected republicanism to slavery and concluded that they were tightly associated. Schopenhauer’s argument against American republicanism does not, however, suggest that he endorsed traditional European monarchies. Against both North America and Europe, Schopenhauer instead held up the example of China as an advanced state that was hierarchical and imperial and yet resolutely nontheist. For Schopenhauer, China combined political stability and peacefulness with a philosophically sound atheism and thus demonstrated the realization of his political and his philosophical ideals.

In June 2020, the largest democracy movement in a generation emerged in Thailand. The movement began with three demands: the current PM must resign, a new constitution must be drafted, and the state must stop threatening dissidents. In August 2020, a fourth demand was added: the monarchy must be reformed. This demand is where the transformative power of the movement came from, but also led to a swift crackdown in the form of police violence and prosecutions. This may appear to be a particularly egregious illustration of the rule-by-law regimes favored by autocrats, but close examination indicates that the law is being used to criminalize peaceful dissent and the mere questioning of how power is exercised. By examining several key cases, this chapter shows how the Thai regime aims to reshape both the rule of law and the polity through the arbitrary exercise of repressive power.

In order to situate the women who worked in royal and aristocratic households in their proper context, the first chapter explores household composition, demonstrating similarities of servant arrangements at all levels of elite society even though household size varied at different status gradations. Over time, households of every status level grew, offering further career opportunities, especially since elite households became more welcoming to women in the late fourteenth century, even though throughout the Middle Ages they remained almost exclusively male domains. This chapter argues that female servants gained their positions through kinship and patronage opportunities that favored their placement and promotion. In investigating the qualities that employers desired in their servants, I contend that they chose attendants who demonstrated useful skills, good character, and pleasing appearance. This chapter reveals that turnover occurred due to death, retirement, marriage (which did not necessitate retirement), dismissal, or transition to different households, and seems to have been a frequent aspect of life for a lady-in-waiting, yet I also assert that a minority of attendants served their ladies for long durations, at least a decade or more.

This chapter explores the role of the monarch in facilitating political transition and in the constitutional governance of contemporary Malaysia. It sets the historical context for Malay kingship and its eventual form as a constitutional monarchy after Malaysia’s independence from British colonial rule. It then tells the story of the role played by the King – the Yang di-Pertuan Agong – during the country’s political transitions in 2018 and 2020. Following royal interventions between 2018 and 2021, the monarchy has emerged as a key actor in the formation and functioning of Malaysia's government. The chapter concludes with observations on some features of monarchy in Malaysia and the region and raises broader questions about the role of non-electoral institutions in safeguarding against incumbent capture or accelerating democratic erosion.

Chapter 7 concludes the Jordanian case study by analyzing the theory’s expectations for how strategic interactions around delegation and blame influence repression, protest, and accountability in authoritarian political systems. Original protest data indicates that the monarchy permits hundreds of protests each year and that security forces repress only a tiny fraction of these events. Instead, repression is highly targeted at those individuals who cross the regime’s redlines by publicly blaming and criticizing the king. The chapter explains how this approach to repression complicates anti-royal coordination, even among those opposition figures who personally blame the monarchy for Jordan’s ills. The chapter also illustrates how the monarchy provides limited accountability by removing prime ministers and cabinet ministers when the public becomes visibly dissatisfied with the government’s performance.

Chapter 1 builds from the example of the Arab Spring uprisings to illustrate the importance of blame for authoritarian politics and its relevance to the stability of ruling monarchies. The chapter summarizes the book’s argument about how power sharing affects attributions under autocracy and how autocrats strategically try to limit their exposure to blame by delegating decision-making powers to other political elites. It then describes why autocratic monarchs are better positioned than other autocrats to avoid blame by sharing power. The chapter also discusses the book’s contributions to scholarship on authoritarianism, including how popular politics affect regime stability, when autocrats are more or less likely to share power, why autocratic monarchies have been so stable, and how power sharing and popular politics interact in authoritarian settings. The chapter ends with an outline of the remainder of the book.

Chapter 8 evaluates the argument that ruling monarchs are more effective than other types of autocrats at avoiding blame through delegation. It does so by drawing on cross-national data from around the world in addition to more specific comparisons of monarchies and republics in the Middle East. First, the chapter establishes that ruling monarchs tend to share power more credibly than presidential autocrats both in the Middle East and beyond, and it shows that this difference is recognized by people living in these regimes. Next, the chapter draws on an original survey experiment administered in Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, and Tunisia, in addition to data on constitutions, to demonstrate that monarchs benefit from reduced expectations that they will govern and be held responsible for policy outcomes. These expectations imply that delegation by ruling monarchs will be more in line with how the public expects responsibility to function in the political system. The chapter concludes by tracing patterns of opposition during the Arab Spring and analyzing cross-national protest data to show that monarchs are less likely than other dictators to be targeted by mass opposition when the public is dissatisfied, suggesting their advantages in avoiding blame contribute to their resiliency.

Chapter 6 continues the Jordan case study by providing an important assessment of the theory’s expectations over time. Drawing on archival documents, internet search data, elite interviews, and secondary sources, the chapter shows that Jordan’s kings have shared power more credibly when they have more reasons to be concerned about popular discontent. Furthermore, it also demonstrates that Jordanians have responded to these changes as the theory expects, becoming more likely to blame the king for their grievances when the monarchy controls the decision-making process more directly, and less likely to blame the king when he delegates more credibly to other political elites. Not only do these findings demonstrate the theory’s utility for explaining changes in authoritarian decision-making over time, but they also help to account for alternative explanations to the argument, such as the possibility that the Jordanian monarchy benefits from traditional legitimacy that protects its reputation from popular anger.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed account of the book’s theoretical arguments. It first expands on why blame is important for dictators, explaining how even the most powerful autocrats must be worried about a revolutionary uprising if enough citizens come to the conclusion that they are personally responsible for the country’s problems. Next, it outlines a theoretical framework of power sharing and blame in authoritarian regimes, defining the actors, their interests, and strategic interactions around blame and delegation of decision-making responsibilities. As autocrats become more concerned about threats from the public, they should be more incentivized to share power to shift blame, but they must also take into account the risks of delegating to elites who may try to challenge them from within the regime. The chapter then explains why monarchs are advantaged in using delegation to avoid blame, arguing that monarchs can share power more safely with other elites and that such delegation is more likely to align with the public’s expectations about how responsibility should be attributed for governance. The chapter concludes by outlining the key implications that will be tested in the subsequent empirical chapters.

Chapter 4 begins the detailed case study of Jordan. It first provides important background information on the country and reviews academic literature explaining the monarchy’s durability over the past century. It then draws on my elite interviews and other country-specific sources to explain how Jordan’s policymaking process functions. The chapter shows that the Jordanian king does grant meaningful decision-making influence to political elites in the cabinet and parliament, even though this delegation can result in policies that do not reflect the monarch’s preferences and can increase potential elite threats against the monarchy. The chapter also provides evidence that this delegation is intentionally used by the monarchs as a blame avoidance strategy. Interviews with senior decision-makers, including former chiefs of the royal court and prime ministers, reveal that the monarchy is aware that its reputation is likely to suffer if the king governs more directly and attracts more blame for the public’s grievances. This awareness is also reflected in how the Jordanian educational system teaches students about the decision-making process, and in the monarch’s willingness to share power more credibly for economic and social issues rather than foreign policy and security issues.

Chapter 9 looks comparatively within monarchies to assess whether the theory contributes to understanding why some monarchies survived and others were overthrown in the past two centuries. It begins by analyzing two datasets of ruling monarchies from the 1800s to the 1900s, showing that monarchies that shared more power with parliaments were less likely to fall to revolutions. It then uses case studies of the Iranian and Nepali monarchies to illustrate how centralizing monarchs made themselves vulnerable to blame and attracted mass opposition, ultimately leading to their downfalls. The chapter suggests that the theory has implications for understanding historical transitions from monarchy, and it underscores that kings who forego their delegation advantage and monopolize power are also vulnerable to being blamed and facing mass opposition when they govern poorly.

This chapter shows how ‘Liberty’ gained an ideological colouring in the eighteenth century largely due to its capacity to embrace a number of artistic/political perspectives, from an opposition to the legacy of anti-Walpole sentiments derived from centralising governmental influence, to an aesthetic reversal of taste away from generic prescription to a specific association with Whiggish denial of some inherited property rights. Goldsmith is rarely regarded as a deep political thinker, yet he mixed with several who could be thought to be polemicists for Liberty. This chapter shows how his poetry (The Traveller and The Deserted Village), plays (The Good Natur’d Man and She Stoops to Conquer) and his prose (The Citizen of the World) gave voice to his interrogation of English libertarian myths.

How has discrimination changed over time? What does discrimination look like today? This chapter begins by highlighting severe and systematic acts of discrimination throughout American history. It then assesses contemporary discrimination through a range of audit studies and other methods and then delves into individual perceptions of discrimination.

Chapter 3 provides a review of democratic theory, moving from the “minimal conception” of democratic politics to democracy in its representative, constitutional, participatory, deliberative, and epistemic forms. The chapter offers a comparison of where America stands today among the world’s democracies and introduces the question of whether democracy carries the assumption of equality; it also reviews data on inequality throughout American history and on the more recent increase in inequality. We propose the idea that inequality is not extraneous to our democratic politics, but a direct result of it.

Agustín de Iturbide was a renowned Spanish American military man who switched sides and led his Army of the Three Guarantees to declare Mexico’s independence in 1821. Within a year, Iturbide was forced off the throne and sent into exile on the condition that he never return. The ex-Emperor quickly broke his promise and traveled to London, where he spent four months conspiring with politicians, merchants, and bankers. He departed for Mexico in May 1824 and was executed soon after landing. Iturbide’s interregnum in London was significant – for the future direction of the young Mexican state, for political debates about recognition, for relations with Spain and the Holy Alliance, and for those merchants who were interested in Mexican markets and silver. This chapter describes the lived experience of a prominent exile whose fate was closely followed on three continents and offers a case study of the exile experience during the Age of Revolutions.