Okay that's a relief, for a moment I thought I was stuck in a discursive dead-end there.
It's important to remember that people with absolute power can have paranoia or egoism (respectively) that rivals their commitment to equality. In fact it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that absolute power engenders these anti-social qualities in individuals. Or to suggest that dividing authority in different areas to different people is something that not only allows them to specialize better, but makes the organization more secure, less vulnerable to infiltration or subterfuge or assassination, and less likely to get caught in patterns of abuse.
There are a lot of things from capitalist culture that we need to un-learn. "The master's tools will not dismantle the master's house", and so on. I'm actually leaning towards the position that the very concept of leaders and leadership is a creation of the bourgeoisie to maintain the dynamic of all-encompassing authority.
They had quartermasters, doctors, and cooks, each of which had power in their own sphere. On pirate ships, the captain was directly elected by the crew for a limited time, his absolute authority only occurred during battle, and outside of battle his authority was very limited. In many cases the quartermaster was more powerful than the captain for most of the time. Pirates weren't able to bring a classless society to preeminence, but they were able to make their fragments falling away from colonial society to be very nearly classless.
It was most common in North American indigenous societies for power duties to be spread. Across the Eastern Woodlands macroregion, it was most common for a council of matriarchs to make important decisions including selecting a war chief, and the authority of medicine men was separate from both of these. Even the Mexica, by most standards a fairly aggressive and expansionistic nation, divided duties between a "military" tlatoani and a "civilian" cihuacoatl.
It's likely that in Napoleon's time, many people were heard to say...
Calling for a permanent end to the monarchy is a bit excessive. The social relationship between ruler and subject would be qualitatively different in a parliamentary monarchy. But a country needs a king the way an army needs a general.
Okay that's a relief, for a moment I thought I was stuck in a discursive dead-end there.
It's important to remember that people with absolute power can have paranoia or egoism (respectively) that rivals their commitment to equality. In fact it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that absolute power engenders these anti-social qualities in individuals. Or to suggest that dividing authority in different areas to different people is something that not only allows them to specialize better, but makes the organization more secure, less vulnerable to infiltration or subterfuge or assassination, and less likely to get caught in patterns of abuse.
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There are a lot of things from capitalist culture that we need to un-learn. "The master's tools will not dismantle the master's house", and so on. I'm actually leaning towards the position that the very concept of leaders and leadership is a creation of the bourgeoisie to maintain the dynamic of all-encompassing authority.
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Ships didn't just have captains.
They had quartermasters, doctors, and cooks, each of which had power in their own sphere. On pirate ships, the captain was directly elected by the crew for a limited time, his absolute authority only occurred during battle, and outside of battle his authority was very limited. In many cases the quartermaster was more powerful than the captain for most of the time. Pirates weren't able to bring a classless society to preeminence, but they were able to make their fragments falling away from colonial society to be very nearly classless.
It was most common in North American indigenous societies for power duties to be spread. Across the Eastern Woodlands macroregion, it was most common for a council of matriarchs to make important decisions including selecting a war chief, and the authority of medicine men was separate from both of these. Even the Mexica, by most standards a fairly aggressive and expansionistic nation, divided duties between a "military" tlatoani and a "civilian" cihuacoatl.
It's likely that in Napoleon's time, many people were heard to say...