I'm honored to see so many people here willing to listen to a lawyer who studies 19th century American literature and who has a cold come and talk about 12th century Britain.
Yes, yes, that's right. This is what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Geoffrey of Monmouths,
The History of the Kings of Britain. This book was published in 1136. And just to give
you some context, at this time there's a crisis of succession in England. Stephen of Bloy
and Matilda are fighting over the throne. Who are these people? They are grandchildren
of William the Conqueror, William the Conqueror having, you know, triumph in the Battle of
Hastings in 1066, and William the Conqueror's fourth child becomes, he's Henry I, his daughter
is Matilda, so he has, Henry I has two legitimate heirs, Matilda and William. William dies at
C, leaving just Matilda as the only legitimate heir.
So when Henry dies, there is just Matilda left as the only legitimate heir and her claims
the crown.
The crown is contested by Stephen, who is also a grandchild of William the Conqueror
and Stephen traditionally is thought of as having gained the crown over Matilda but at any rate,
this book is taking place at sort of an unruly time in Britain, a time when kingship and authority
is uncertain. This is certainly far from the era of say Louis XIV who was able to make a declaration
There are no kings or potential queens that are able to make that claim because there are so many uncertainties, there's this crisis of succession, there's a papal schism in Rome.
In a lot of ways this book is a validation or a legitimization of authority. It seeks to validate power itself.
So it's an appropriate book to look at in the context of state formation, and I think especially important to look at in the context of Rothbard's Anatomy of the State.
By the end of this talk, you'll learn that I'm sort of of two minds of this text, but we'll get into that later.
So the goal of this paper is twofold. It's to demonstrate how Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State
provides a useful theoretical lens through which to view literary myths and
legends in Jeffrey of Monmouth's The History of the Kings of Britain and to
demonstrate how even literary texts can provide valuable political
economic insights. These are ambitious goals and in the time we have here I
can't come close to achieving them perfectly of course. This paper will only
Throughout the paper I am going to use the post-17th century understanding of the word
state to apply to the nation that Jeffrey describes, in part because Rothbard uses the
term state in Anatomy of the State and in part because although nations may refer to
something less geographically determined than states, I would like to emphasize that
The State and the Nation are similar organisms sprung from myths that can inspire the polis
to consolidate rules and regulations on the basis of cultural solidarity.
So for my purposes, I'll define State as Rothbard did in the essay, which is, the State is an
organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and
and Violence in a Given Territorial Area and which is the only organization in society
that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered
but by coercion.
The History is a 12th century chronicle, as I've already explained, written by a Welsh
cleric and it offers evidence for Rothbard's claim that the state has never been created
by Social Contract but instead by conquest and exploration, that the ruling group, once
it has established itself as the condition or agency necessary for the state's existence,
must conduct a rhetorical and ideological campaign to validate the power it enjoys,
and that the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance
of the majority of its citizens.
The History tells a story about the lineage of kingship and government in Britain and
so tells the story of the rise of the British state.
That's what Rothbard's Anatomy of the State does as well, except for it's just in the
context of the state in general.
Considering Jeffrey's text in light of Rothbard's is interesting, to say the least, because
Jeffrey writes during a moment of crisis, when there is no one certain British sovereign.
There's no king or queen, but they're in violent contests over the crown.
Jeffrey can't risk, what this means essentially, is that Jeffrey can't risk glorifying one
potential ruler over another, one contemporary potential ruler over another, since at any
time that potential ruler could be defeated by his, or in the case of Matilda, her rival.
Therefore, Jeffrey glorifies the state itself, and rather than celebrating any contemporary
Later, he celebrates kingship in general as being a necessary and proper manifestation
of the state, or perhaps as the proper state icon.
The history would seem to promote liberty only to the extent that it suggests that kings
are bound by a precedent of law and order that precedes their rule.
I'm going to talk about that a little later.
This is something that I was reconsidering before I decided, before I was coming to terms
The book also seems to validate the power of the king and the state simply for the sake
of Glorifying Power, going so far as to couch both the king and the state in religious and
ecclesiastical terms.
The history exalts the ideals of statehood and nationalism, and it suggests that the
power and authority of the state are good and noble and divine.
In 1100, Henry I had become king during a crisis of succession when he ratified a treaty
with Robert Duke of Normandy, and this is basically the history I explained earlier.
His son passes away. Stephen the boy gets the throne over Matilda, Henry's daughter.
Stephen is Matilda's cousin. As Matilda challenges Stephen's claim to the throne, it precipitates
civil war in Britain. And when Jeffrey completes the history, Matilda's son, Henry II, is three
Three years old, in this chaotic age the validity of anyone sovereign is called into question
and so intellectuals like Jeffrey were inclined to glorify the concept of the state rather
than any one person as the iconic representation of the state.
Jeffrey therefore promotes sovereign authority generally by attending to tales about putative
justice and rule of law while strategically avoiding references to contemporary sovereigns
The History Facilitates a Semiotics of History
of Power. The story celebrates three strong, manly kings above all. Brutus, the invented
father of the nation, Brutus is supposedly the great-grandson of the Trojan Aeneas. Bellinus,
who supposedly sacked Rome with his brother Bryneus, and Arthur, who married the beautiful
Guinevere, was portrayed by Mordred and oversaw legendary knights and conquered and subjugated
Many Foreign Peoples. So the history of the Kings of Britain is basically the original
text from which we draw our theory and legends. So it's got Arthur, it's got Excalibur, it's
got Guinevere, it's got Merlin, we've got the Knights of the Round Table. So this text
is extremely important. It becomes extremely popular, not just in Britain but in the continent.
These fictional men serve what Rothbard calls the classic paradigm of a conquering tribe
pausing in its time-authored method of looting and murdering a conquered tribe to realize
that the time span of plunder would be longer and more secure and the situation more pleasant
if the conquered tribe were allowed to live and produce with the conquerors settling among
them as rulers exacting a steady annual tribute.
Now it's worth mentioning here before I get too far into this that Arthur is also known
for waging a defensive war early in his career, but later he becomes more or less an imperialist
and he does fend off the Saxon invaders as a young man, but then he conquers and subjugates
the rest of Britain, what hasn't been consolidated, also Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Gaul, and he
tries to sack Rome before he returns back to try to reclaim his crown after Mortred
has started having an affair with Guinevere and starts assuming kingship in Arthur's absence.
So this is precisely what the rulers in the history do. After waging war, imposing rigid
legal codes and assimilating resistant yet conquered tribes, the supposedly great kings
ensure the complete submission of their subjects, both foreign and domestic, not only by the
use of force, but also by providing public goods that are meant to win ideological support.
More than one-fifth of the history is devoted to King Arthur, who wins the support of the
polis and validates the lust for power among those real potential monarchs living in Geoffrey's
time. It's important to remember that the wealthy, the intellectuals, the clerics are
are all enamored by this book.
If Arthur provides a quasi-religious justification for state power in the book, he also inspires
and romanticizes state power in real life.
Bears mentioning Rothbard's comments that rulers like to present the idea that they
are given their authority by God.
This is, after all, the sovereign whose birth is something of a magical conception enabled
by the soothsayer Merlin and whose death is never explicitly mentioned, for Arthur was
described as having been merely carried away to the Isle of Avalon where he awaits the
moment when he will fulfill Merlin's prophecy by reappearing in history, that is, when he
will enjoy something like a second coming.
Jeffrey treats the body of the king as the site of law and the nucleus of the state.
His first sustained treatment of law in the sovereign appears at the end of Brutus' section.
Here Jeffrey submits that when Brutus built his capital on the River Thames, Brutus not
only presented the city to the citizens by right of inheritance, but also gave those
citizens a code of laws. Wow, that's very fast.
Jeffrey depicts the need for a centralized power secured by laws and regulations. The
The lack of a centralized authority are definite sovereign is why, according to the history,
Britain falls into disarray when, after Brutus' death, Brutus' sons divide the kingdom into
thirds. As a result of this partition, the brothers are unable to maintain the unified
military presence necessary to preserve the polis and its laws, and thereby the island
suffers from foreign invasion and bloodshed.
The goal of this chapter, if I can read one into the chapter, is that laws and regulations
enable the British kings to enhance their military power, and military power is necessary
to defend and spread the national ideology. So this is what's going on in the text and
also how the text is functioning in its own culture. With five minutes left, I'll have
The Legend of Kings and Law shows how Jeffrey employed claims of antiquity as indirect appeals
for the continued import of governmental supervision and state control in Britain.
Part of the law's enforcement power had to do with its capacity to inspire adherence.
Adherence are necessary to carry out the terms and conditions of the sovereign who is the
icon of the state.
The state needs followers, not just enforcers, and the act of following has a self-policing
mechanism built into it.
The explanation for Jeffrey's frenzied insistence on lineage lies in his commitment to the supremacy
of the state on the one hand and to his strategy of hagiography on the other.
So Jeffrey's tale is something of a secular theology with the sovereign as Godhead.
The history invents a past for the state.
It's important to point out that 90% of this is pure fiction.
Thus lending the state a textual foundation and a mythologized foundation, the message
is that law in the 12th century has a legitimate origin and a guaranteed lineage and is therefore
of unquestioned force and unimpeachable quality.
The better the law, the more expansive the state needs to be to protect and defend the
law.
That's sort of the logic.
During Arthur's reign, laws and regulations begin to crystallize into something of a state
with Centralized Power. A sovereign such as Arthur can issue commands that the polis ought
to and will habitually obey. Establishing Arthur as a model king validates the notion
of sovereignty and statehood as well as the various commands that flow from sovereigns,
and I use the word commands intentionally in contradistinction to the term, to the common
Jeffrey of Monmouth was, as far as we know, an intellectual. Rothbard points out that
it is evident the state needs the intellectuals. For a king to gain essential acceptance, Rothbard
says, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise, and at
at least inevitable and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. That is precisely
what the history sets out to prove. Promoting this ideology among the people, Rothbard goes
on to say, is the vital social task of the intellectuals or of people like Jeffrey. For
the masses of men, explains Rothbard, do not create their own ideas or indeed think through
these ideas independently. They follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the
and the Body of Intellectuals. The intellectuals are, Rothbard concludes, therefore, opinion
molders in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the state most desperately
needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the state and the intellectuals becomes clear.
Now this is a short paper, and I've had to skip over quite a bit. Thank you. But in a
larger project, it might be worth considering the history with a little more scrutiny and
to treat literature as purely the ideological function of some powerful group or another, and I hesitate to try to do that in a Rothbardian way to treat the book as nothing but some kind of ideological project. I don't like thinking of text as determined, and I like to think that good complex works of literature offer various interpretations, and this one possibly offers some interpretations that are conducive
The Theory of Money and State The Theory of Money and State
competing interpretations through two great Austrian economic thinkers that we could sort of play out and compare and say something not just about the text but about the differences between these two Austrian thinkers.
Thank you very much.