Workshop of Joachim Beuckelaer (c. 1533 – c. 1570/4). Kitchen maid preparing meat with Christ in the House of Mary and Martha beyond. Property from the Estate of Francesco P. Zuccari.

As is well known, Hegel advocated constitutional monarchy as the only appropriate form of political order that fits modern society. His numerous critics see this weird advocacy either as a clear sign of Hegel’s immanent philosophical limitation or as a sign of his political conformism, with some more benevolently disposed critics interpreting it as a cunning trick to delude state censorship (first among these sarcastic critics is none other than Marx).1 Klaus Vieweg’s critique of Hegel’s deduction of monarchy is by far the most thoughtful in this vein: what he tries to prove is that Hegel’s deduction is wrong in Hegel’s own terms. Hegel justifies the necessary role of the monarch with reference to the syllogism, to the syllogistic structure of the state power, but Vieweg claims that the very form of syllogism to which he refers (disjunctive syllogism) would impose a democratic solution with people as the ultimate source of legitimate power.2 So can Hegel be fully defended today? Let’s begin with Mark Tunick’s concise summary of Hegel’s position:

Hegel is not a democrat. He is a monarchist. But he wants monarchy because he does not want strong government. He wants to deemphasize power. He develops an idealist conception of sovereignty that allows for a monarch less powerful than a president…3

That is to say, less powerful than a democratically elected president. How would this work in practice?

Hegel supposes that the monarch's counsel, whose members are chosen by objective criteria, can resolve an issue at least to the point where only an arbitrary will can choose among the options. The counsel rules out all the bad alternatives (which democracy doesn't do), until the remaining options are equally meritorious. Even if the monarch decided every political issue, the issues he'd be deciding would be different than the issues as they first appear, and which a democratic vote would have resolved. The monarch makes a 'groundless' decision that still has grounds.

Tunick uses the example of prison overcrowding: some of the potential solutions to the problem (such as letting convicted criminals go free or killing all the prisoners) will be eliminated by the counsel. “The remaining alternatives are grounded (i.e. in the principle that we must not kill, or that we must punish wrongdoers), but suppose it's arbitrary which of them we choose. The monarch decides this.”4

It should be clear from this example what Hegel fears (as well as why his fear is even more urgent today): the direct rule of experts which justify their decisions with (pseudo-scientific) reasons incomprehensible to the majority of ordinary citizens. Just recall how today economic decisions are legitimized by experts as simple neutral scientific insight, and in this way the political bias of these decisions disappears from view, dismissed as “ideological”… Hegel is aware that a Master who is elevated above the system of knowledge (in Lacanian terms, of the “discourse of university”) is needed, so he wants to keep the power that decides outside expert knowledge. However, he is at the same time aware that a return to the premodern master who reigns directly is unacceptable in modern times; his solution is therefore a monarch whose function is ultimately just to dot the ’'s and cross the t’s, to sign his name on decisions prepared and proposed by qualified experts.

Vieweg is right in claiming that the key for the proper understanding of Hegel’s notion of monarch is provided by his notion of disjunctive syllogism (as a further development of the syllogism of necessity); but he accuses Hegel on misreading the political implications of this syllogism. Its structure is that of PUI: the universal dimension (people represented in legislative assembly) mediates between the particular dimension (executive power) and the individual (monarch as the decision-maker). In short, in contrast to the premodern monarchy where the king directly rules over its subjects, in a modern state the people in their universal dimension regulate and control both extreme, executive and deciding power:

The application of the disjunctive syllogism to the structure of the state’s internal constitution leads to a most surprising result in contrast to what the Outlines (of the Philosophy of Right) claims: it effects the theoretical legitimization of a republican, democratic constitution and reveals the fundamental importance of the legislative assembly as an expression of a representative-democratic structure.5

But does Hegel really violate the logic of disjunctive syllogism? It is Vieweg himself who ignores what its name indicates, the dimension of disjunction located by Hegel into the mediating universality itself – here is a passage from Hegel’s small logic (Encyclopaedia, par 191) which already points towards the role of the monarch:

the mediating Universal is explicitly put as a totality of its particular members, and as a single particular, or exclusive individuality — which happens in the Disjunctive syllogism. It is one and the same universal which is in these terms of the Disjunctive syllogism; they are only different forms for expressing it.6

Disjunction thus divides Universality itself into the totality of its particular members and the exclusive individuality which directly gives body to the universality – as we say in everyday jargon, the monarch does not represent the people, the monarch IS the people, only through the monarch is the universality of the people actualized. In his precise essay “The Jurisdiction of the Hegelian Monarch,”7 Jean-Luc Nancy emphasizes this performative dimension of the monarch (to use today’s parlance) which comes close to what Lacan called the pure signifier (the Master-Signifier, a signifier which falls into the signified and is as such a signifier without signified). This is how one should read the tautology “Socialism is socialism” - recall the old Polish anti-Communist joke: “Socialism is the synthesis of the highest achievements of all previous historical epochs: from tribal society, it took barbarism, from antiquity, it took slavery, from feudalism, it took relations of domination, from capitalism, it took exploitation, and from socialism, it took the name.” Does the same not hold for the anti-Semitic image of the Jew? From the rich bankers, it took financial speculation, from capitalists, it took exploitation, from lawyers, it took legal trickery, from corrupt journalists, it took media manipulation, from the poor, it took indifference towards washing one’s body, from sexual libertines it took promiscuity, and from the Jews it took the name… And this is also why a king is a king: he just adds his/her name. But, again, why is a monarch needed? Why is it that representative democracy (or, even better, some form of direct self-organization of the people) cannot do the job?

To fully grasp this, one should take note of the gap that separates two syllogistic triads: that of the entire society (individual family life, market and production in civil society, state) and that of the state as institution (legislative power, executive power, decider-monarch: UPI). When Vieweg elevates the political form of universality (“legislative assembly as an expression of a representative-democratic structure”) into the central mediating role, he ignores another disjunction: however it is formed (even in the most open democratic elections with universal right to vote), legislative power is always by definition at a gap from “actual people.”

In the last decades, a whole series of events made this gap palpable. Remember the protests of yellow vests (gilets jaunes) in France that went on for over twenty weekends from late 2018 to early 2019. They began as a grassroots movement that grew out of widespread discontent with a new eco-tax on petrol and diesel, seen as hitting those living and working outside metropolitan areas where there is no public transport. The movement has grown to include a panoply of demands, including “frexit” (the exit of France from EU), lower taxes, higher pensions, and an improvement in ordinary French people’s spending power. They offer an exemplary case of the Leftist populism, of the explosion of people’s wrath in all its inconsistency: lower taxes and more money for education and health care, cheaper petrol and ecological struggle… Although the new petrol tax was obviously an excuse or, rather, pretext, not what the protests are “really about,” it is significant to note that what triggered the protests was a measure intended to act against global warming. No wonder Trump enthusiastically supported yellow vests (even hallucinating shouts “We want Trump!” from some of the protesters), noting that one of the demands was for France to step out of the Paris agreement. The thing to note here is that when representative of yellow vests met with government representatives, the talks were a total failure – they simply didn’t speak the same language.

Or recall the UK elections of 2005: in spite of the growing unpopularity of Tony Blair (he was regularly voted the most unpopular person in the UK), he won the general elections - there was no way for this discontent with Blair to find a politically effective expression. Something is obviously very wrong here – it is not that people “do not know what they want,” but, rather, that cynical resignation prevents them from acting upon it, so that the result is the weird gap between what people think and how they act (vote); such a frustration can foment dangerous extra-parliamentary explosions, especially in the form of rage in today’s populism.

Years ago, the Spanish Podemos undoubtedly stood for the populist protests against the state mechanisms at its best: against the arrogant Politically Correct intellectual elites which despise the “narrowness” of the ordinary people who are considered “stupid” for “voting against their interests,” its organizing principle was to listen to and organize those “from below” against those “from above,” beyond all traditional Left and Right models. The idea was that the starting point of emancipatory politics should be the concrete experience of the suffering and injustices of ordinary people in their local life-world (home quarter, workplace, etc.), not abstract visions of a future Communist or whatsoever society. (Although the new digital media seem to open up the space for new communities, the difference between these new communities and the old life-world communities is crucial: these old communities are not chosen, I am born into them, they form the very space of my socialization, while the new (digital) communities include me into a specific domain defined by my interests and thus depending on my choice.)

Far from making the old “spontaneous” communities deficient, the fact that they do not rely on my free choice makes them superior with regard to the new digital communities since they compel me to find my way into a pre-existing not-chosen life-world in which I encounter (and have to learn to deal with) real differences, while the new digital communities depending on my choice sustain the ideological myth of the individual who somehow pre-exists a communal life and is free to choose it. While this approach undoubtedly contains a (very big) grain of truth, its problem is that, to put it bluntly, not only, as Laclau liked to emphasize, society doesn’t exist, but “people” also doesn’t exist… However, problems arose when Podemos decided to change into a political party and entered a government: its politics there was indistinguishable from a moderate social-democratic party.

Can this gap be filled by deliberative democracy, composed of popular assemblies composed of civil experts and individuals chosen by lot to debate a certain topic? Deliberative democracy can help, but it must be sustained by a clear structure of decision – the key point is that the deliberative assemblies don’t decide. This is why, today even, something like monarchy is needed. As the top-decider, he is not qualified by any characteristics, he stands for the people as such, in its universality, which are excluded not only from the state institutions but also encompass all inner divisions and factional struggles. This disjunctive unity is best rendered by the fact that media report on the personal habits and preferences of the monarch and his family (music, books, gardening, sports…), things that are totally uninteresting in an ordinary person – who cares what food my neighbor likes! The king is a common man elevated into the top-decider – more radically, we can even say that he is a member of the rabble, of those with no determinate place in social hierarchy. We must take into account here the difference between sublation (Aufhebung) and sublimation: when an object is sublated into a higher form, it is not sublimated. Sublimation occurs when what resists sublation, its indivisible/non-sublatable remainder, is elevated from the status of trash to a sacred object, to a stand-I for the void, for what is excluded from the symbolic order. In Hegel’s theory of monarchy, the monarch is a non-sublated rest of the social edifice, his position is not mediated through its social achievements, it is just determined by the biological contingency of his birth, he is with regard to his properties like any other ordinary citizen, and he is as such elevated to a sacred status, to the sublime embodiment of society as a whole. One thing is sure: the way to reinvent something-like-a-king today should definitely include a lottery aspect, it should be left to chance. What is expected from a monarch is just some common sense since, to quote Bill Murray: “Common sense is like deodorant. The people who need it most never use it.”

Was Lenin himself not on the path towards this solution when, in his State and Revolution, he proposed the famous slogan: “Every Kitchen Maid Should Learn to Rule the State”? It is worth taking a closer look at the precise context of Lenin’s justification of this slogan which, at a first sight, may appear extremely utopian, especially since he emphasizes that the slogan designates something that “can and must be made at once, overnight,” not in some later Communist future: “the mechanism of social management is here already to hand” 8 in modern capitalism - the mechanism of the automatic functioning of a large production process where the bosses (representing the owner) just give formal orders. This mechanism runs so smoothly that, without disturbing it, the role of the boss is reduced to simple decisions and can be played by an ordinary person. So all the Socialist revolution has to do is to replace the capitalist or state-appointed boss with (randomly selected) ordinary person.

But it didn’t work in this way, and it is interesting to see how it didn’t work: there is one title which condenses what went wrong, that of the “general secretary” of the Party. After the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War, the Office of General Secretary was created by Lenin in 1922 with the intention that it serve a purely administrative and disciplinary purpose. Prior to Stalin’s accession, the position was not viewed as an important role in Lenin’s government: previous occupants had been responsible for technical rather than political decisions. Its primary task was to determine the composition of party membership and to assign positions within the party. The General Secretary also oversaw the recording of party events, and was entrusted with keeping party leaders and members informed about party activities.9 So how did we arrive from this non-political “technical” role to the position of the absolute Master not only of the Party but also of the state and its entire population? The problem was not that the General Secretary was a new form of monarchic dictatorship, but the exact opposite: the General Secretary, imagined as a modest non-political post, filled in the gap opened up by the absence of a monarchic (purely symbolic) power.

In some countries (the US, Israel) in which the executive branch is perceived as getting too strong, the role of the monarch can be partially taken over by the Supreme (or Constitutional) Court – is this not why, in the months before the Hamas attack of 7 October 2024, the political struggle that triggered mass demonstrations in Israel was the opposition’s attempts to prevent the government from abolishing the autonomy of the Supreme Court? Although the function of the Supreme Court is just to protect the rule of law, it often has to decide in ambiguous or open situations. Another social institution which can (rarely, but nonetheless) play this role is the army, as none other than Fredric Jameson argued in his magisterial An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army10 - his point is that army could play this role precisely because it is organized in a non-democratic way (top generals are not elected, etc.).

That’s why Hegel fanatically opposes all reasoning about the justification of king’s authority: this authority is not a topic of debate, it is unconditional and, as such, empty. The best argument against the monarch’s actual power is the tautology: “The king is a king.” In his brief outline of social ontology, Kafka distinguishes three levels that he designates with A, B, and C.11 To put it in a very simplified way, A is the One, the core of our being out of our direct reach, or (politically) the summit of power. As such, A is always minimally transcendent, its signs cannot be read in an unambiguous way, so they have to be interpreted, transformed into fixed regulations, by some form of B: ideological institutions, interpreters of the obscure Sacred Word which bombard individual subjects (C) with messages that remain ambiguous since their A remains blurred. Is there a solution to this predicament? The worst option by far is B without A, i.a., a reign of experts with no higher authority – this is the most concise definition of totalitarianism where inconsistent institutions reign. An A is thus needed, but how to avoid a traditional authority like monarchy? I am more and more inclined to claim that a monarchy with a stupid monarch who is selected by a lot and is just like one of us, with no expert knowledge (like Lenin’s kitchen maid) is the only realistic solution even if it appears the most utopian.

To venture further still, the structure should be triple: not just democracy plus a stupid monarch elected by a lot, but a collective body standing for social wisdom, not just experts (disgusting as this word is). Take ecology: the necessary tough measures needed to cope with ecological threats cannot be left to democratic vote. Today, in an age when the fateful limitation of the Western model of multiparty liberal democracy is becoming more and more obvious, the need to supplement liberal democracy with another mechanism of power is also growing. Attempts in this direction are already taking place, although they largely pass unnoticed. Recall Switzerland, a definitely successful and stable country. Very few people know who are the ministers there or which parties have majority – government is considered a kind of neutral mechanism that one can safely ignore. Plus in Switzerland they have often referendums, but with a nice totalitarian touch: when a citizen goes to vote, he gets two pieces of paper – his ballot, and a leaflet where the state gives him/her the advice how to vote. (It is through a referendum held in February 1971 that women got the right to vote, and women’s suffrage didn’t affect in any serious way the relationship between the political parties.) A couple of decades ago, a Communist served as the mayor of Geneva, a city which embodies modern capitalism, and life just went on, with no disturbances (the same thing is in 2024 going on in Graz, Austria). The secret is that, elevated above the state administration, there is a kind of state council composed of less than 10 (financially, economically…) important members who, although they mostly stay in the shadows, effectively control and regulate social processes.

With all the inevitable critiques of Iran, one must admit that, when Khomeiny took power, he took great pains to formalize a quite similar structure: a democracy, but with an external body controlling it, deciding, vetoing, etc. This body is the Guardian Council composed of the top representatives of the Muslim Clergy and led by the Supreme Leader (first Khomeiny himself, now Khamenei). Iran has a democratically-elected parliament, prime minister and president, but all candidates have to be confirmed (and are often vetoed) by the Supreme Leader to safeguard the Islamic purity of Iran. Iranian constitution has thus been called a "hybrid" of "theocratic and democratic elements". While Articles 1 and 2 vest sovereignty in God, Article 6 "mandates popular elections for the presidency and the Majlis, or parliament".12

But what about China today (and Vietnam and…)? Do we not have there the Communist Party as the non-elected guardian which controls and directs the state apparatus inclusive of all elected bodies? There are obvious problems with this model: elected bodies are a rubber stamp for the decisions of the party (which, interesting to note, is excluded from the legal system: it doesn’t exist from the standpoint of the law, it is nowhere registered as a legal entity) plus what is obviously missing is a stupid monarch elected by lot. China is thus further away from this goal than Iran, where there is a minimum of public political struggles (between “moderates” and “hardliners”).

But the main problem here is, of course: how will this controlling body be nominated? Who will do it? Of course it should NOT be democratically elected, and it is also not “apolitical” – in some sense, it is the most political body of them all, the outcome of an informal class struggle. Ideally, its basic orientation should be that of a moderately-conservative Communism (aware of the urgency of radical changes, but cautious in their realization – my own stance, curiously enough!). In contrast to the democratic state administration, it clearly stands for a dictatorial element.

I am far from suggesting that we need the same (Iranian) model in Europe (after all, Iran is an Islamic republic based on a sacred book); however, we in Europe (and all around the world) are facing the same problem: how to combine a secular democracy with a non-elected advisory body plus a non-sacred quilting point, a top agent or agency of formal decision which performs a political collapse, deciding among democratic superpositions.

Slavoj Žižek is Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. His latest book is Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).

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