Re: Evolution of governments (was: Consistency in naming)

Isidora Zamora scripsit:

> > on a regular schedule, perhaps annually for
> >a month or so.  The list of henchmen becomes fixed.
>
> By what process does the list of henchmen become fixed?
Politics, how else?  Giving henchmen a Council vote is a way of
trading off the obvious one-person-one-vote convention against the
fact that some warlords have more power than others.  At first,
the henchmen provide bloc votes behind their superiors.  Later,
they discover the advantages of tactical -- and later, strategic --
voting.

> I'm pretty sure that the Assembly is unicameral, so if there ever were two
> houses, one of them will have to be gotten rid of.
Oliver Cromwell did manage to abolish the Lords for a while, but it
didn't stick.  Perhaps some similar military genius from a country-squire
background grabbed temporary supreme control, and managed to hang onto
it a bit longer before dying of natural causes?  Some things Cromwell
did, like abolishing military land tenure by converting it into ordinary
leasehold, did stick, because it was impossible to undo all the chains
of events -- real-estate transfers -- that had happened since.

> >But it seems to me that 150 years is a little short for such a process.
>
> How long would it take?
Hard to say.  From the Norman Conquest to the Second Reform Bill was
a little less than eight centuries, so that's a generous upper bound.
Half that much time might be sufficient.

> I could lengthen the timeline.  I'm not locked into those lengths of time
> at this point.  I am also not at all certain that the Trehelish state had
> its modern form when the Conquest was over, some 400 years ago.  The
> evolution of the government into its current form could well have
> continued past the end of the Conquest.
Indeed, if the completion of the process was within living memory,
that would be quite a reasonable length of time.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on
the shoulders of giants."
        --Isaac Newton

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