Elon Musk and the the Threat of the Over-Mighty Subject, Part I

In the era that I studied when I was still part of the academic world one recurrent topic was that of “over-mighty subjects.” This was more a reality of the 15th and 16th centuries, just before my period, the eras of the Yorkists and Lancastrians and the Tudors. But the fear hung over the British Isles and thus over their American colonies well into the 17th and 18th centuries. The term referred to subjects of the Crown who were themselves so powerful that they threatened the sovereign power of the Crown itself. They might command more wealth, hold castles and walled cities. They might command retinues that verged on private armies notwithstanding their notional obedience to the King. (The problem resurfaced in the late 18th century in the different, commercialized form of the British East Indian Company, which used its geyser of cash to quite effectively corrupt the House of Commons.) In the US we have no sovereign; or, more specifically, we have no sovereign head of state. But there is a sovereign, the American people. This architectonic fact of the American order is written into every document that undergirds the Republic, from the founding charters to the simplest phrasings that permeate judicial proceedings where prosecutors appear in court representing “the people”.

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