Hirschman describes the reactionary narratives thus:
- According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.
- The futility thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to "make a dent."
- Finally, the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.
If we're going to talk about the abolition of monarchies, how is it that some of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world today are constitutional monarchies? Norway, Australia, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Japan, Luxembourg, and Spain all rank within the top 25 of countries by HDI as well as the top 25 of countries by Democracy Index. All of those countries are monarchies.
And you still haven't addressed the historical fact that the styles of radicalism that led to the abolition of monarchies in England, France, and Russia utterly failed to make things better and, in fact, largely made things worse. That doesn't mean it's futile or counterproductive to improve society, but merely removing the existing hierarchy and attempting to install something bespoke in its place has historically been a failing proposition, while reforming and improving an existing system has historically been much more successful.
When I said "mostly gotten rid of monarchies", I include constitutional monarchies in that. The monarchs in at least most of those countries have approximately zero power compared with their historical antecedents.
If anything, they're a fine example of the kind of dealing realistically with our heritage I'm talking about. Actual monarchies have a track record I would generously call mixed, and perhaps more properly call horrific. But being half-evolved primates, humans seem to like having an officially recognized big monkey to rally around. So we keep the Queen of England around as something akin to a hood ornament on the car of that nation. It works, even if it's not particularly rational. But then, neither are we.
Hirschman describes the reactionary narratives thus:
- According to the perversity thesis, any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.
- The futility thesis holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to "make a dent."
- Finally, the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rhetoric_of_Reaction