Historians generally proceed in one of two ways. Some begin with the recalcitrance of the evidence and cautiously infer larger patterns. Others begin with a system and invite the evidence to illustrate it. Michael Arnheim’s Five Thousand Years of Monarchy is very much a book of the latter kind.
The fact is mildly surprising. More than half a century ago Michael Arnheim, a practicing barrister and remarkably prolific writer,[1] first attracted attention as a promising Roman historian. The Senatorial Aristocracy in the Later Roman Empire was a serious piece of scholarship: carefully argued, firmly grounded in evidence, and attentive to the ambiguities of power rather than to universal formulas. It belonged to that honourable tradition of historical inquiry in which conclusions emerge from the sources rather than being imposed upon them.[2]
Quae mutatio rerum! In his latest book Arnheim advances nothing less than a general theory of political history. The key to five millennia of human government, we are told at the very beginning, is “power structure” (p. 3). Once properly understood, it explains stability, liberty, equality, foreign policy, social mobility, political legitimacy, and much else besides. Historians have largely failed to appreciate this elementary truth. Most, according to the author, have either ignored the issue altogether or have “managed to get hold of the wrong end of the stick” (p. xxiv).
Arnheim is not merely proposing a new interpretation of Rome, Greece, or China. He is advancing a judgement on the discipline itself. If he is correct, entire historiographical traditions require reconsideration. Concepts that have structured historical discussion for generations become secondary or irrelevant. Such confidence inevitably invites scrutiny.
Arnheim opens the book not with a problem, a question, or even a hypothesis, but with a list of findings. After an investigation said to range across five millennia and much of the inhabited world, the reader is informed that there are essentially only two forms of government, monarchy and oligarchy; that society invariably consists of elites and ordinary people; that the two exist in permanent tension; and that political history is best understood through this opposition (p. xxf.; cf. p. 13–21).
The procedure is unusual. Most historians begin with evidence and proceed, cautiously or otherwise, towards conclusions. Arnheim begins with conclusions and invites the evidence to organise itself accordingly. The reader is therefore confronted not with an inquiry but with a completed system whose subsequent task is less to test its validity than to demonstrate its universal applicability. This is particularly evident in the author’s definition of monarchy. Fidel Castro qualifies as a monarch because he exercised effective personal power (cf. p. 190-3). King Baudouin of Belgium does not because he lacked it (p. 273). The distinction is perfectly legitimate as a matter of definition. The difficulty is that it largely guarantees the result the book is designed to reach.
Once monarchy no longer denotes a specific constitutional institution but simply concentrated personal authority, monarchs proliferate, from Sargon of Akkad in the third millennium BCE to Abdullah II of Jordan in the twenty-first century. Given sufficient determination, one suspects that a surprising number of university vice-chancellors, trade-union leaders, and cricket captains might eventually qualify as well. The subsequent discovery that political history contains a great many monarchs can therefore hardly come as a surprise.
It is worth pausing over Arnheim’s treatment of earlier scholarship, not because the individual disputes are of decisive importance, but because they expose the assumptions underlying the book as a whole. The issue is not whether Arnheim disagrees with Ronald Syme, Antony Andrewes, Peter Brown, Moses Finley, Fergus Millar, or Mary Beard (cf. p. xxiv-v). The issue is why he disagrees with them, and why scholars of such different interests, methods, and conclusions all appear to arrive at the same destination: the wrong side of the author’s axiomatic theory.
Syme’s famous observation that monarchies commonly rule through oligarchies is dismissed because monarchy and oligarchy are defined as mutually exclusive categories (cf. p. 104-7). Andrewes supposedly failed to recognise that the Greek tyrants constituted a single phenomenon of “popular anti-aristocratic monarchy” (p. xxiv). Peter Brown is reproved for describing the imposition of religious conformity in terms insufficiently critical for modern sensibilities (cf. p. 118-9). Finley is reduced to his “left-wing credentials” and his inability to recognise monarchy where it allegedly existed (p. xxiv). Millar is accused of overlooking aristocratic domination in Republican Rome (cf. p. 110). Beard’s interpretations are dismissed as “baseless” (p. xxv), once they conflict with the author’s conception of power structure. What is striking is the ease with which decades of scholarship are brushed aside once they collide with the author’s assumptions.
Brown’s discussion of religious coercion in Late Antiquity provides an instructive example. Quoting Brown’s observation that correct religion was imposed in a manner reflecting “the overwhelming dignity of the imperial power”, Arnheim asks: “How can it ever be justifiable to ‘impose’ a particular religion on people, and how, in any case, can it be imposed with dignity?” (p. xxiv). The objection misses the point entirely. Brown was not justifying religious coercion. He was explaining how late Roman emperors conceived of it. Historians are expected to reconstruct historical settings, not interrupt the analysis whenever historical actors fail to conform to modern expectations. One does not refute an explanation by mistaking it for an endorsement. Something similar occurs in the treatment of Finley. Whether Finley’s views on Homeric society or Athenian democracy remain persuasive is a legitimate question. Yet reducing a lifetime of scholarship to “left-wing credentials” is not an argument. It is a substitute for one.
There is, moreover, a contemporary dimension to the argument that deserves notice. Despite its immense chronological sweep, this is not an antiquarian exercise. The book is animated throughout by concerns that are unmistakably modern. Discussions of parliamentary government, affirmative action, “wokeness”, the American presidency, British constitutional practice, and Western policy towards Ukraine repeatedly intrude upon the historical narrative. One gradually realises that Arnheim is not merely classifying political systems across five millennia. He is also participating in present-day political controversies. This does not in itself invalidate the enterprise. Historians have always written, at least in part, from within the concerns of their own age. The difficulty is that contemporary preferences occasionally appear to determine historical judgements rather than emerge from them. Strong rulers who confront entrenched elites are consistently viewed with sympathy. Representative institutions are treated with scepticism. Popular support acquires an almost talismanic significance. The reader may occasionally wonder whether the real subject of the book is not monarchy at all, but a sustained dissatisfaction with the political institutions of the contemporary West. The distinction between analysis and advocacy is therefore not always easy to maintain. As the narrative approaches the present, the categories themselves begin to take on an unmistakable ideological colouring. At such moments, the historical argument begins to look suspiciously like a political preference extended backwards across five thousand years.
A further peculiarity of the book is its curious intellectual solitude. At the level of general theory, readers unfamiliar with the literature might occasionally gain the impression that the systematic study of power, legitimacy, domination, charisma, bureaucracy, and state formation has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention until the appearance of the present volume. In reality, one of the more puzzling aspects of Arnheim’s enterprise is the extent to which it proceeds in apparent isolation from many of the major theoretical discussions of the last century. The difficulty is not that the major theoretical literature is entirely absent. Max Weber, for example, does make an appearance. Yet the appearance is revealing. He enters the discussion primarily as the scholar who identified “charismatic leadership”, after which the reader is offered a modern textbook definition and the argument proceeds on its way (cf. p. 24). What is largely absent is engagement with Weber as a theorist. This is no small matter. Charisma, in Weber’s work, was never merely a personal attribute, a communication style, or a talent for inspiring followers. It formed part of a much larger analysis of legitimacy, domination, authority, institutionalisation, and political order. One need not accept Weber’s conclusions to recognise that they address precisely the questions at the heart of Arnheim’s enterprise.
The same pattern recurs throughout the volume. Major scholars occasionally appear, but more often as suppliers of useful terminology than as participants in a scholarly debate. Concepts are detached from the intellectual frameworks that originally gave them meaning and incorporated into the author’s own classificatory system. The result is less a dialogue with previous scholarship than a selective appropriation of convenient labels. The situation is no less striking within ancient history itself. Over the past three decades the study of monarchy and imperial rule has become one of the most dynamic areas of classical scholarship. The Roman Principate in particular has generated a vast literature concerned with legitimacy, consensus, representation, communication, court society, political culture, and the symbolic foundations of imperial authority. One thinks of the work of Clifford Ando[3] on imperial ideology and consensus, Egon Flaig on acceptance systems and political legitimacy,[4] Aloys Winterling on the social grammar of the imperial court,[5] Olivier Hekster on imperial representation and communication,[6] and many others besides. These scholars do not merely provide additional evidence. They have fundamentally altered the questions historians ask about monarchy. Yet sustained engagement with this literature is surprisingly difficult to find. This is unfortunate because many of the problems Arnheim discusses have already been explored, often with considerably greater nuance, within precisely this body of scholarship. The reader is therefore left with the impression that debates which have occupied ancient historians for a generation are being reopened without first being acknowledged.
Taken together, these omissions contribute to the book’s distinctive atmosphere of self-sufficiency. The principal interlocutor is often Arnheim himself. There is something faintly old-fashioned about the spectacle: a scholar announcing a comprehensive theory of political power while conducting remarkably little business with those who have spent the last century theorising political power, and only limited engagement with those who have spent the last generation studying monarchy itself.
The consequences of this intellectual self-sufficiency are visible not merely in the book’s conclusions but in its architecture. The table of contents reveals the extent of the ambition. The book is divided into sections entitled “The Framework” (p. 1–130), “Accession” (p. 131–218), “Varieties of Monarchy” (p. 219–327), “Correlations and Contrasts” (p. 329–363), and “Exit” (p. 365–395). Within this architecture political life is decomposed into a sequence of categories: charisma, divine right, legal framework, social mobility, aristocratic ethos, heredity, election, conquest, revolution, autocratic monarchy, military monarchy, totalitarian monarchy, constitutional monarchy, hybrid monarchy, liberty, equality, religious toleration, foreign policy, assassination and deposition.
The effect is initially impressive. Everything appears to have found its proper place. Yet the cumulative impression is less that of a historical argument than of an administrative system. The chapters are not stages in a developing analysis but compartments in a collector’s cabinet. Historical realities enter these compartments only after much of their individuality has been removed. The Roman Principate, Bourbon France, Peronist Argentina, Maoist China, and the contemporary United States are all processed through the same conceptual machinery. Diversity survives largely as illustration; explanation has already been supplied in advance.
One begins to suspect that the book’s true subject is not political history but taxonomy. This tendency reaches its inevitable conclusion in the remarkable checklist with which the volume ends. Here the entire complexity of political history is reduced to four classificatory labels—A, A*, H, and C—denoting, respectively, genuine (or “true”) monarchs “without specific popular support”, popular monarchs “ruling against the interests of the elite with active or passive popular support”, hybrids “sharing power with an elite”, and constitutional figureheads “with little or no actual power” (cf. “Round-Up”, p. 403–407). What appears at first glance as a convenient summary soon reveals itself as a methodological catastrophe. One may reasonably ask what historical problem is solved by discovering that Pericles, Augustus, Adolf Hitler, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Juan Perón, and Fidel Castro belong to the same category (A*). The answer appears to be: none at all. The classification merely restates the author’s assumptions in abbreviated form. The absurdity becomes increasingly apparent as one proceeds through the lists. Henry VIII, Robespierre, and Xi Jinping are grouped together (A). Solon of Athens, Hirohito, emperor of Japan, and Hussein, king of Jordan, are transformed into constitutional monarchs. Thus “monarch” becomes little more than a synonym for any political actor exercising substantial personal authority. One is left with the impression that the author’s “checklist” is applicable everywhere and illuminating nowhere.
Notes
[1] Cf. his website https://doctormike.co.uk/ [2026-6-30].
[2] Michael Arnheim, The Senatorial Aristocracy in the Later Roman Empire, Oxford 1972.
[3] Clifford Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, Berkeley 2000; id., Law, Language and Empire in the Roman Tradition, Toronto 2011; id., Roman Social Imaginaries. Language and Thought in Contexts of Empire, Toronto 2015.
[4] Egon Flaig, Den Kaiser herausfordern. Die Usurpation im Römischen Reich, Frankfurt a. M. 1992 (2nd ed. 2019).
[5] Aloys Winterling (ed.), Aula Caesaris. Studien zur Institutionalisierung des römischen Kaiserhofes in der frühen Kaiserzeit, München 1999; id., Caligula. Eine Biographie, München 2003; id., Politics and Society in Imperial Rome, Malden 2009.
[6] Olivier Hekster, Caesar Rules. The Emperor in the Changing Roman World (c. 50 BC – AD 565), Cambridge 2022.