King in Council

Some of the best classes I took at the Harvard Extension School were the World History series with Prof. Ostrowski. Two points he emphasized have stuck with me. The first, the importance of a sufficiently high threshold of evidence. For example, there is no contemporary evidence that Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door, nor is it ever mentioned in his own extensive writings. Somehow, everyone has still heard this apparently fictional story.

The other point was that a ruler is very seldom an unrestrained, all-powerful dictator. Instead, a much more common model is the King in Council, where the ruler is the balance point between various factions of the elite, who advise him and constrain his actions.

"On the Durability of King and Council: The Continuum Between Dictatorship and Democracy" is quite possibly the academic paper he was inspired by. Certainly it seems like a good discussion of the subject:

Abstract. In practice one rarely observes pure forms of dictatorship that lack a council, or pure forms of parliament that lack an executive. Generally government policies emerge from organizations that combine an executive branch of government, ``the king,'' with a cabinet or parliamentary branch, ``the council.'' This paper provides an explanation for this regularity, and also provides an evolutionary model of the emergence of democracy that does not require a revolution. The analysis demonstrates that the bipolar ``king and council'' constitutional template has a number of properties that gives it great practical efficiency as a method of information processing and as a very flexible institutional arrangement for making collective decisions.