My entry

Ummm... I'm thinking I don't want to be mid-conversation on the Fray come May 31st. So, I'll store Round #1 here:

August's opening post:

Kantorowicz is a writer who changed the way I thought about law. Granted, when I first read him as an undergraduate, my thoughts on the subject were pretty naïve, but I basically considered law to be a set of rules. Kantorowicz showed that it could be much more – a politically charged way of conceiving the world.

I think we are interested in a similar kind of problem – what happened to the unique power of monarchs? Kantorowicz's book helps define that power as a combination of mortal and immortal authority – the first being the result of the physical person of the king, the second reflecting the state itself (which, because it does not die, is in some way Christ-like). For me, the largest question (and the one that seems closest to your work) is, how do we move from this social arrangement of monarchs and subjects to one of nations and citizens?

The King's Two Bodies is probably most helpful on the first part of that question. It is a work, the author tells us, of "political theology." I'll have more to say about the concept later, but basically it means that there is belief ("fiction" in the author's words) at the very center of politics. The problem of conceptualizing the world is thus simultaneously a problem of social organization.

I study government rituals of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in order to get at some of these issues. To me, The King's Two Bodies is mainly a guide to how a good historian pins down an amorphous concept. But it's also a manual of the ways states can depict and enact relationships of power.

At any rate, I propose we read the Introduction and Sections 1 and 2 (pp. 3-41 in my edition) in the next week or so. If I have time, I'll post a couple of sidebars on Kantorowicz's biography and on the genesis of the phrase "political theology."

My response:

I'd like to begin with a rephrase of the two questions you pose in your own introduction. You've asked what happened to the power of the monarch, and how have we transitioned from kings and subjects to nations and citizens. If I might reformulate the opening question, I would put it thusly:

What is the power of the sovereign and where may it lie?

I prefer this formulation, because I'm afraid to beg the question of the King's disappearance. For, one thing which has immediatley become apparent from my reacquaintance with this much of Kantorowicz and my outside research, I've already discovered that the question of the King's twin-ship is more complicated than I'd believed.

On the one hand, the King's "body natural" appears to be less than I'd realized. Whether it be Charles I's treason against his own Crown, or the nonage of Edward VI, the King's physical body seems to be a rather debased and unenviable thing. I was struck with great force by the following passage from Shakespeare's Richard II (p. 30):

For God's sake let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings-
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered - for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To moarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if the flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable: and humoured thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Unfortunately, I don't have the text at hand, but it strikes me as astonishingly similar to a speech delivered by James I to his Star Chamber, in which he demands that his body be considered no different than any other subject, equally bound by the laws of his mystical Kingdom.

If the twinship of the King is rooted in the corpus mysticum of the Christian community - then the body of the King seems one Christologically debased. As a legal construct, it seems far weaker than I realized... less than fully vested with even the basic rights of English subjecthood. Needless to say, if such be the state of the doctrine, its uses for my ashamedly prosaic purposes might be fewer than suspected.

But - this notion of "twinship" infuses the Anglo-American legal tradition. The division between the person and his legal personality is an engine which drives our law forward. How can a man sue in tort after his own demise? Why, he lives on in the person of an estate, with a duly appointed executor... who may exercise his rights directly under law, as though the man himself had survived his death.

Kantorowicz's extensive footnote (#9, pp. 11-12) about the sacramental nature of coronation was fascinating to me:

"If the heir to the crown were attainted of treason or felony, and afterwards the crown should descend to him, this would purge the attainder ipso facto." [... This doctrine is in fact the secularization of the purging powers of the sacraments.

Not only is this consistent with a Catholic conception of office-holding (in which the priest's clerical office is untainted by the fleshly sins of its officeholder)... it's equally consistent with the notion of American citizenship. Under the Immigration Laws, non-citizens do not enjoy the security of their residence within this nation. If one commits a serious felony, contracts a serious disease, or even ascribes to the wrong doctrine (joining the Communist party has until only recently been a deportable offense)... one may face immediate inadmissibility, and in some cases deportability. Actions which would barely tarnish the reputation of an American citizen may subject the resident alien to immediate ejectment from our political community. But the process of naturalization "wipes the slate clean." A naturalized citizen is no less a citizen than those of us who hold it as a birthright. Upon naturalization, the new citizen obtains immediate and retroactive relief in a manner that his fellow non-citizens do not enjoy. One can be deported decades after the fact for having merely been inadmissible at the time of entry (say, for having been a Communist in the 50s). But once naturalized, the former alien can be as abysmal a member of our body politic as you or I. He shall move beyond the reach of the laws to which he was formerly subject. In this sense, nationalization is much like coronation, which in turn is much like baptism.

Another everyday manifestation of this mythology appears in the doctrine of "qualified immunity." When an agent of the government violates the law, he may be sued as an individual, but not as an agent of the government. This is why you see captions like Rasul v. Bush or Padilla v. Rumsfeld. The analytic theory is that when the actions of an officeholder exceed his lawful authority, he ceases to retain the immunity of the sovereign. The man can be held to account for the lawlessness of his actions, because he cannot be anything other than a man before the law when his actions have violated it. If a President cannot lawfully hold a suspect indefinitely without charges, then it is George W. Bush who has done so, rather than the U.S. President. To the extent that these doctrines arise from a political theology, we may call them "analytic mysticism."

In his introduction, Kantorowicz is fairly dismissive of Maitland's analytical criticism of divine Kingship. I hope to interrogate the text, as we proceed, regarding the degree of justice it gives to a rival conception within the Anglo tradition. If the English system has a genesis myth, I'd nominate the Battle of Hastings for the prize. At that historical moment, we witness the fusion of the Roman-derived Norman kindom with a wildly different native Anglo-Saxon tradition. I can't speak to Maitland, but when I discovered a 19th century author having analytic fun with the King's doubled-body, he rested his argument in history rather than logic - in an alternative Anglo-Saxon tradition of "king as highest wergeld."

To what degree are the British and American traditions driven by the engine of discordant harmonies? Of a Church which is somehow both Catholic and Protestant. Of a sovereign which is somehow both parliamentary and monarchic. Of a people who are both subject and free. The King's doubled body may be a dichotomy within a dichotomy. One question I'll be keeping eye on, is whether the move to a republic in fact represents a break with this tradition of sovereignty, or merely a refinement of it.

I eagerly look forward to this discussion, and especially how it relates to the context of your own studies. Though I'm likely to infuse it with constant reference to legalisms, I think what may be at stake for us both is in fact a very personal question - what does it mean to be an American... a personality constituting and constituted by a political system of rituals and laws.