Aztec Legitimacy
By Interesting stuff from Xavier Marquez:
Consider this passage Clendinnen quotes from the Florentine Codex (one of the main sources for pre-conquest Mexica thought and culture), coming after the speech with which the Mexica greeted a newtlatoani (ruler; literally, the “Great Speaker”) and exhorted him to good behaviour:
Those early and anxious exhortations to benevolent behaviour were necessary, ‘for it was said when we replaced one, when we selected someone … he was already our lord, our executioner and our enemy.’ (p. 80; the quote is from Book 6, chapter 10, in Dibble and Anderson’s translation from the Nahuatl).
It’s an arresting thought: “he was already our lord, our executioner, and our enemy.” (Clendinnen comments on the “desolate cadence” of these words). The ruler is not understood by the Mexica as normally benevolent though potentially dangerous; he is the enemy, and yet as the enemy he is indispensable. There is something profoundly alien in this thought, with its unsettling understanding of “legitimacy,” something I do not find anywhere in the classical Western tradition of political thought. (Indeed, as longtime readers may guess, I think the political thought of the Mexica is further evidence of how impoverished and irrelevant our ideas about legitimacy are in the vast majority of historical cases).
Read the rest. I’m not sure whether to think about the Mexica political vision as anti-Hobbesian, hyper-Hobbesian, or post-Hobbesian, but as Marquez notes it’s certainly a challenge to how Western political theory tends to treat political community and legitimacy. I’m curious about how this vision of legitimacy would fit into Scott’s conception of the “exit option;” I suppose that the theatrical state replaces the protection racket state, at least in terms of emphasis.