Theoria

Among the contributions to political theory and practice that one can inscribe to the French aristocracy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the discoveries of the social, the political, and the political function of history. That is, they discovered that history was not simply the retelling of the great deeds of kings; the constant and consistent recording of his most minute actions in annals; history had the function of amplifying power – and history could be used against power. The political function of history explains why all grievances against the king put forward by the nobility (and, later, upon discovering the power of history outside the story of the king, by the king’s supporters as well) were written in the form of histories of feudalism. Uncovering the history of feudalism was to present the constitution of France – that fundamental law essential to the monarchy as Montesquieu understood it – and, thus, to also present the history of the king’s usurpations of power.

The Third Estate learnt its lesson from the nobility quite well: in that most bourgeois of nations, the United States, which was never plagued in any significant way with a hereditary monarchy and, at best, an absent king (who was quickly dispatched with anyway), the Library of Congress has developed the most comprehensive system for library cataloguing: it is the one used in all universities in North America. If the a researcher, such as myself, was interested in books about a particular subject, we would type our inquiry, in my case “absolutism,” and request the catalogue to retrieve all titles with the subject of absolutism – for instance, Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State. The problem, however, is that the cataloguing system does not recognize “absolutism.” Instead, it suggests that the researcher “See: Despotism.” Worse, “Despotism” is a residual category that contains titles on tyranny – ancient and modern – and totalitarianism. The residual category “Despotism” is, really, “anything un- or anti-democratic.”