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Your view of a hyperagentic ruling class relies on a one-sided interpretation: was a concession extorted through force, or freely given out of altruism/sentimentality? You see a man get mugged, and you interpret it as an act of charity because he did not fight to the death. He “enabled his nominal enemy.”
At the class analysis level, I don't see a functional difference between being forced and conceding. These are the same thing. You failed to summon superior organization capacity and are defeated.
Louis' failure isn't being a weak man per se, it's failing to make the right alliances and structuring a political movement against him through his actions.
Elite classes aren't beggars in the street, they're sovereigns in anarchy. If you get yourself to a position where you can be mugged, you will be. When animals get out-competed by one another we don't seek to introduce these silly moralistic components, I don't see how this should be any different. Machiavelli's foundational contribution to sociology is precisely that these do not matter and what we ought to be concerned with is the world as it is. Complaining that looking at the real object lionizes scoundrels like Cesare Borgia is missing the point.
Maybe you're just objecting to the characterization of the phenomenon. But whatever the cause, if an elite doesn't keep organizing its power (through the belief in its own political formula among other things), it loses it.
I don't disagree. I think brutality can, and often does work, even though it's evil. I just don't think it's a silver bullet.
While a progressive has a tendency to say stuff like 'people revolt when they are too oppressed', as if the just world was punishing rulers for their immorality, the reactionary, as a .... reaction, trying to overcorrect the previous lies, will then say 'people only revolt when they are not oppressed enough', which is also false.
I understand what you're going for, but the moralistic language is again obscuring the matter.
I bet you yourself don't even disagree with Tocqueville's paradox if we don't couch it in such words.
I’m not sure it’s a paradox. You think rulers reforming is the sole cause of their downfall. I think changes in society (eg, wealth increase, weapons becoming more democratic (eg, guns vs cavalry)), reshuffling the underlying power relationships within society (ie, who would win a civil war), are largely causing both the reforms and the revolution. The ultimate cause of both is that the mugger gets a gun - first he extorts, then he shoots.
And these changes happen under the auspices of government (by which I mean society, not just the State).
Surely we can grant that it is difficult for rulers to predict where the technological landscape will go, but staying on top of the chaotic system is what ruling is.
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