Primary Sources

Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2026/03/06/fireside-friday-march-6-2026/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fireside-friday-march-6-2026

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Hey everyone, we have a Fireside this week and then next week we’ll get back to our somewhat silly break discussing the mechanics of warfare in Dune. But I did want to stop to chatter a bit about something that came up in that discussion, which is something about the nature of personalist regimes in both fiction and the real world.

First off, to clarify what I mean, we can understand the governance of polities to be personalist or institutional. Now if ‘the governance of polities’ sounds vague that is because it is: I want to include not only state governments but also the political systems of non-state polities (tribes, etc.) because these too can be personalist or – to a more limited degree – institutional in nature (though arguably a fully institutional system of government is purely a property of states – but of course ‘state/non-state’ is not a binary, but a spectrum from fully consolidated state to extremely fragmented non-state polities, with many points in the middle). So we’re talking about polities, political entities which may or may not be states.

Basically the issue here is that for personalist regimes, both power and the daily function of the political elements of the society are held personally, whereas in institutional regimes, that power is mediated heavily through institutions which are larger than the people in them. By way of example, in both kinds of regimes, you might have a ‘Minister of Security’ who reports to the leader of the country. But whereas in an institutional regime, the minister of security does so because that is the institution (he holds an office and his office reports to the office of the leader), in a personalist regime, the power relationship depends on that minister’s personal relationship to the leader. He reports to the leader not because his office does but because he, personally is connected – by ties of loyalty or patronage or family – to the leader himself.

The governments in Dune are fundamentally personalist in nature. Power is determined by a person’s relationship to the central leader – the Duke Leto Atreides or the Baron Harkonnen or the Emperor Shaddam IV. And that goes both ways: your position in the state is determined by your relationship, such that the Duke’s own personal private doctor, Yueh, is a powerful key political figure despite not overseeing, say, a health ministry. He is close to the Duke, so he is powerful. On the flipside, the Duke’s ability to run his government is fundamentally contingent on his relationship to his immediate retinue, since no man rules alone and since those sub-leaders aren’t really bound to him by institutional offices, but rather by personal loyalty (something that comes up in the book where Leto discusses the extensive propaganda necessary to conjure the aura of bravura he relies on to lock in the loyalty of his lower subordinates).

But what I wanted to muse on was not specifically the personalist governments of Dune but rather the prevalence of personalist systems in fiction more broadly. Speculative fiction in particular is full of such personalist systems (it is one of the great attractions, I suspect, of writing medieval-themed fantasy, that the time period being invoked was one of ubiquitous personalist rule), but equally other forms of fiction often effectively create personalist systems for the purpose of the fiction even out of systems which are institutional in nature.

And it isn’t very hard to understand why: stories are for the most part fundamentally about personal dramas and the characters in them. At the very least, a classic device of storytelling is to take an impersonal, institutional system and then represent it through a character who stands in for the whole institution. Think, for instance, of how in Game of Thrones, the Tycho Nestoris character ends up standing in for the institution of the Iron Bank (repeatedly stressed as an impersonal institution) to give it a single character’s face. Or in Andor how the imperial security bureaucracy is essentially personalized in the characters of Dedra Meero and Leo Partagaz. It’s a way of embodying an institution as a character by representing it as a character. Stories are often more compelling when they are about characters rather than institutions, so the political systems in our stories tend to be personalist ones centered on characters rather than institutional ones.

But of course stories are also a way we train ourselves to think about unfamiliar problems and here things get a bit awkward because while our fictional worlds are composed almost entirely of personalist systems of rule, the real world is a lot more varied. Absolutely there are personalist political systems in the world today, important ones. But one thing that has been demonstrated fairly clearly is that in the long run, institutional political systems are generally quite a lot better at coping with the needs of complex, modern countries – especially for those larger than a city-state. As a result, the largest and most successful countries generally have institutional rather than personalist political systems. Indeed, personalist systems seem strongly associated with stagnation and decline in a fast-moving modern world.

One of the other reasons why personalist regimes are, I suspect, so popular with storytellers, especially as villains, is that they are easy to defeat on a personal scale. If all of the power in the regime is tied up in the personal relationships of the ruler, then defeating or killing the ruler, the Big Bad, offers at least a chance that no one else will be able to take his place and the system will collapse. That’s not historically absurd – we see it play out in succession disputes repeatedly. The death of Cyrus the Younger at Cunaxa (401) instantly results in the collapse of his revolt, despite the fact that large parts of his army were undefeated – they were there to fight for Cyrus (or his money) and with Cyrus gone, there was no reason to stay. Likewise the death of Harold Godwinson at Hastings (1066) marked the end of effective Saxon resistance to the Norman invasion, because that resistance had been predicated on Harold’s claim to the throne. In the Roman Civil Wars, the flight or death of a given Roman general often resulted in the effective collapse of his faction or the mass desertion of his troops (e.g. the surrender of many Roman senators after defeat after Pompey’s flight from defeat at Pharsalus (48) or Antonius’ army’s defection after his flight at Actium (31), in both cases happening while the ’cause’ of the fleeing party was still very much ‘live’).

And that’s a really satisfying story narrative where the hero is able to defeat the enemy utterly by doing a single brave thing on a very human scale – throwing the Ring into Mount Doom sort of stuff. And for personalist regimes, that can actually work – such regimes often do not survive succession when the charismatic leader at the center whose relationships define power dies or flees. This can actually be exacerbated by the fact that many rulers in personalist regimes do not want to have clear successors, since a clear successor might easily become a rival. Thus not, for instance, the many dictators worldwide whose succession plan is just a bunch of question marks (e.g. Putin’s Russia). Anything else would be inviting a coup.

The danger, of course, is applying that same logic to an institutional system. But since the relations of power in an institutional system belong to institutions which are ‘bigger’ than the people who populate them – power belongs to the office, not the man – slaying the Big Bad Leader has very limited effect. It might briefly confuse their leadership system, especially if quite a lot of leaders are lost at once, but institutional logic triggers quite quickly because you’ve killed the leaders but not the institutions. So the institutions quickly go about selecting new leaders, using their existing, codified institutional processes.

Imagine, if you will, for a moment, that someone did, in fact, bomb an American State of the Union Address, killing most of Congress, the President and the Cabinet. Would the United States simply collapse? Would they be able to impose their own new leader into the vacuum? No, pretty obviously not. Within hours or days, each of the fifty states would be appointing, based on their own processes, replacement representatives, while the ‘designated survivor’ assumed the office of the presidency and quickly appointed new acting cabinet members. Such an act would, at most, buy a week or two’s worth of confusion and panic. Even if you kept striking political leaders (who one assumes would try to render themselves harder to hit) the system would just calmly keep replacing them. Tearing out the institutions in this way would demand blowing up basically every official more senior than Local Dog Catcher before you would actually collapse the institutions.

In practice you could never do that with individual strikes. The only way to tear out the institutions would be through occupation – through putting troops on the ground where they could impose their own systems of control directly on the populace. Of course in many cases that approach might be ruinously costly in both lives and resources, perhaps so costly not even to be contemplated. Which is one of the many reasons it would be important at the outset to distinguish between an institutional regime and a personalist one, to avoid being in a situation where a strike at the ‘Big Bad’ has failed to achieve objectives, leaving a plan trapped between the ground forces it is unable or unwilling to commit and the inability of assassinations and airstrikes to end a conflict once it has been begun.

On to Recommendations.

Naturally with a major conflict breaking out in the Middle East between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran (and Iran’s regional proxies) on the other, there is quite a lot of discussion. One facet of the war that I expect will be increasingly relevant the longer it goes on are conditions in the Strait of Hormuz. I am not a shipping expert, but Sal Mercogliano is and has been offering daily updates on his channel discussing the implications. Close to a quarter of the world’s oil and natural gas moves through the Strait of Hormuz and most of that production has no other effective way to reach markets, making a disruption in the Strait – shipping there is currently at almost nothing and there have been multiple attacks on cargo and tanker ships – tremendously important globally as everyone’s economy relies on these sources of energy. As I write this, oil – at $90.80 a barrel – is up almost 50% from where it was mid-February and still rising in price. That is going to have substantial economic impacts if it remains that way.

The war in Iran is naturally a rapidly evolving one and I don’t want to say too much because I am not an area-specialist. I will simply note if you want to keep track of developments that you will generally find more careful and informed discussion in dedicated national security publications like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and War on the Rocks as opposed to other news media and especially as opposed to 24 hour cable news; I also pay attention to business press like the news side of the Wall Street Journal. My own view, for what it is worth (I have not been shy in sharing on social media), is that this war is a mistake and potentially quite a severe mistake.

In a different ongoing major regional war, I also want to note that Perun has, on his channel, a four-year retrospective on the war in Ukraine that I found informative and useful. Michael Kofman also had a four-year review podcast with Dara Massicot (alas, paywalled) and his expertise is always worth your time; note also his interview with Foreign Affairs a couple of weeks ago looking at the possibility of endgame scenarios (or lack thereof) in Ukraine. Alas, just because a new war has started, it does not mean the old wars have ended (and also more than one new war has started; Afghanistan and Pakistan are also in hostilities).

But let us shift to some Classics news. This week’s Pasts Imperfect was grim but necessary reading, a tally of five significant humanities programs (including two classics programs) being shut down, part of a larger wave of closures and department shrinkage across the humanities afflicting both history and classics and of course other disciplines as well. I know most people do not have this front of mind, but it is the case that we are, as a society, actively dismantling the infrastructure that discovers, learns about and teaches us the ancient past, actively inhibiting our ability to draw on those lessons for present or future crises.

That said, while scholarship in our fields is being reduced, it has no stopped entirely and I wanted to note (hat tip Sarah E. Bond who alerted me) that a brand new publication, Beacons and Military Communication from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, eds. M. Ødegaard, S. Brookes, and T. Lemm has just been released online by Brill in an open-access volume you can download for free, funded by UCL and the Research Council of Norway. European research grants increasingly are making open-access publication in some form a condition of funding (and paying for that kind of publication, which is expensive) and I really wish that grant funders in the United States would follow suit. Though, of course, that would require us to actually fund the NEH.

Finally for this week’s book recommendation, I wanted to answer a question I have been asked quite a few times since I noted that I was teaching Latin this academic year, which is some variation of, “if I wanted to teach myself Latin, what should I use to do it?” And the first answer is, ‘it is very hard to teach yourself a language, you should probably take a class.’ But if you truly are determined to try to self-teach yourself Latin, the book to work from is almost certainly (and this recommendation is going to surprise absolutely no one ) F.M. Wheelock and R.A. Lafleur, Wheelock’s Latin, 7th edition (2011). While this is the seventh edition, Wheelock turns seventy this year, which hopefully expresses how tried-and-tested the approach here is. Wheelock is what I would term a ‘grammar first’ textbook (as opposed to ‘reading first’ approaches like the OLC or CLC), which is going to be more appropriate for adult learners (whereas I think the ‘reading first’ approaches are probably better for Middle/High School contexts, but both approaches can work in any context). The ‘grammar first’ approach means that Wheelock does not have a fun little story for you to follow or characters to meet – it has explanations of grammar rules and practice sentences to practice those rules. But the advantage is that it can be wonderfully systematic, moving you logically from each rule to the next. The disadvantage is that in either a self-study or classroom environment, Wheelock demands that you bring 100% of the discipline and motivation necessary to push through the material.

The other great advantage of Wheelock, especially for the independent learner, is that because it has been the dominant English textbook for Latin for, again, seventy years there are an enormous number of resources built for it, that interface directly with the order and method with which Wheelock presents Latin grammar and vocabulary. Of particular note is R.A. LaFleur’s Scribblers, Sculptors and Scribes (2010) which is a primary source reader using real Latin inscriptions and texts designed to be used as a workbook moving in parallel with Wheelock. Meanwhile, once one has climbed the steep heights of Wheelock, the series is capped off by its own excellent reader intended for use after the main textbook, Wheelock and LaFleur, Wheelock’s Latin Reader: Selections from Latin Literature (2001). And because Wheelock is so old and so standard, there’s no lack of other resources designed to seamlessly hook into it.

Again, for anyone looking to learn Latin I would first very strongly recommend an actual Latin class – learning any language is hard – regardless of what textbook they’re using (I have experience with the OLC, Wheelock and Ecce, I’ve had students come in from the CLC and Lingua Latina, they all work in a classroom setting). But if you really do intend to try to self-teach, I think Wheelock is your best bet.

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