Traditionally we think of government as coming in three forms. According to Polybius’s Histories, one of the most influential works in the Western canon, there is democracy, the rule of the common people (demos), where ultimate power rests in popular elections; aristocracy, the rule of the best (aristos), where a coalition of independently-powerful elites is in charge; and dictatorship,1 with one man at the helm.
Each of these three forms has a functional version, which mostly works in the interests of the people and the state, but inevitably decays into a dysfunctional version which mostly pursues its own privileges instead. The dysfunctional version of dictatorship is tyranny. The dysfunctional version of aristocracy is oligarchy, the rule of the few (oligos). The dysfunctional version of democracy is ochlocracy, the rule of the mob (oklos).
Polybius gives a compelling argument that the Roman Republic’s strength comes from incorporating elements of all three forms of government. Polybius is hardly an unbiased observer—he was packed off to Rome and socialized into its elite, then later sent back to his homeland and tasked with setting up Rome’s colonial government, sort of like an ancient Syngman Rhee—but his point that states use a mix of these forms is well-taken. It’s illuminating to analyze states as combinations of these three elements. The U.S. was founded as a mix of aristocracy and democracy, then slowly and steadily became more democratic over the next 150 years or so. Early modern England was a tug of war between aristocracy and dictatorship. Nazi Germany was one of the purest dictatorships in recorded history. Today Brazil, El Salvador, and much of South America is a mix of democracy and dictatorship, which confounds liberal ideology but is no less coherent than these other combinations.
However, this three-part breakdown can’t account for everything. In recent decades, many of the U.S. government’s major decisions can’t be explained by any of these three forms, e.g. the response to Covid. The European Union is even less accurately described by this model. Older societies like Song dynasty China or ancient Ur fare no better.
The missing element in these cases is bureaucracy, the rule of salaried officials whose power comes from an appointed position.2 Like the other three forms of government, bureaucracy comes in both functional and dysfunctional versions. For the functional version, think of the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century, when government bureaus were eradicating malaria, installing artificial harbors at Normandy, and landing men on the Moon. In the dysfunctional version of bureaucracy, which we can call red tape, the interests and privileges of bureaus come before fulfilling their stated missions, and they become a drag on action rather than a source of action. In America today the medical bureaus like the CDC and FDA might be the clearest examples, and any American can list many many more.3
Once we’ve added in bureaucracy, we can account for the remaining cases. America today is primarily a bureaucracy, with democratic elements in the legislature and White House, and aristocratic elements in business. Ur was a mix of dictatorship and bureaucracy, as far as we can tell from the surviving sources. And so on.
It seems these four fundamental forms of government—democracy, aristocracy, dictatorship, and bureaucracy—are sufficient to explain the political structure of states. As I look out across time and space, the governments I see are composed of combinations of these forms, with very little left over.
This essay was originally posted on July 11, 2023.
The Greeks used the word “monarchy”, the rule of a single person (monos). However, over the Middle Ages “monarchy” instead came to mean long-lasting dynasties whose legitimacy comes mainly from royal blood. Polybius would not call King Charles III or Emperor Naruhito “monarchs”, but he would use that word for Vladimir Putin or Lee Kuan Yew or Charles de Gaulle. In today’s English our word for these people is “dictator”.
Why didn’t Polybius include bureaucracy in his schema? Because he didn’t have much contact with it. Salaried officials wielded very little power in the Roman Republic and pre-Roman Greece. A skilled theorist will very often come up with a schema which accurately describes their own time and place, but which doesn’t generalize. The Greek and Roman political theorists could have seen bureaucracy if they looked beyond their own borders—the Achaemenid Empire had substantial bureaucratic elements by the time of their wars with the Greek city-states—but they were never interested in explaining the political structures of the barbarians. Now that bureaucracy has become the dominant power in Western government, we have reams and reams of theory on the subject.
A noteworthy subtype is the dysfunctional military bureaucracy, when a government is dominated by the military, and the military serves mainly as a lucrative jobs program for salaried military officers rather than as a warfighting institution. The most famous example is the Roman Empire’s Praetorian Guard. Contemporary examples include Egypt and Thailand.
One reason he didn't mention bureaucracy is because it appears in all three forms of government whether rule by one, a select few or the many. Rome, like most empires, had a bureaucracy. How else could the empire have survived something like the year of four emperors? There had to be an educated group, loyal to the state collecting taxes, paying the military, maintaining infrastructure, resolving disputes and so many other tasks.
Hitler had a bureaucracy. Someone had to issue all those "papers, please" papers, formulate and enforce the race laws, control imports and exports, collect taxes, pay employees and suppliers and so on. Nazi stormtroopers expected regular paychecks. France under the later Louis had a bureaucracy with its complex scheme of societal ranking, sale of public offices and the judicial aristocracy that was created to counterbalance the older military aristocracy.
P.S. I wouldn't be too hard on the CDC or FDA. They've been seriously underfunded for decades now, and handled COVID surprisingly well given that. The CDC was regularly undercut and opposed by politicians beholden to businessmen who didn't care how many died if it interfered with their next quarter's profits and associated bonuses. Remember, no one knew a damned thing about COVID until the very end of 2019, so decisions had to be made with limited data and the potential downside was extreme. The FDA had a more limited mission, but it did very well expediting things like paxlovid and the vaccines.
I like this breakdown. In case you're not aware of it, Machiavelli makes a strong argument for the Roman Republic model perfecting all 3 of Polybius's methods in "Discourses on Livy".