[HPforGrownups] Re: Wizard government (was wizards and the queen)

[manawydan]

No: HPFGUIDX 84034

Astrofiammante wrote:
>When we first hear about the structure of the Ministry of Magic, it
>seems fair to assume it is constituted along the same lines as our
>own government. There's a minister in charge, who seems quite an
>innocuous chap, and a lot of civil servants who work for him. So far
>so good. It's all a bit bureaucratic, but that doesn't seem anything
>out of the ordinary. He must have a certain amount of respectability
>if the Muggle Prime Minister will deal with him.

The early books seem to stress the similarities with our own world, where we
too notice arbitrary and incomprehensible bits of bureaucracy. But gradually
we are led into an understanding that the WW bureaucracy is entirely
self-regulating and, increasingly, self-aggrandising.

>learn that justice in the wizarding world is not the impartial matter
>that we expect in our own society, despite having the external
>trappings of such justice - a courtroom with a presiding officer, a
>jury in the case of the Pensieve trials.

Though the "tribunal"-like style of judicial proceeding is exactly the sort
of thing you'd expect to see in a bureaucracy.

>Well, the mediaeval model of government was monarchy. Did the
>wizarding world ever have a monarchy of its own? And if not, how was
>it governed? Was there ever any kind of revolution? Or did the
>wizarding population simply come under the auspices of Muggle

My own theory is that wizardry just "opted out" of the muggle world by
degrees, as their own techniques of magic evolved and it became both more
feasible to live seperately and more difficult to live together. But there
would have been a variety of different models for them to try: monarchical,
imperial, conciliar, oligarchic, magisterial, democratic, and so on. In the
end, they have settled on a bureaucratic (though apparently meritocratic
rather than oligarchic) model.

We know that the Ministry was preceded by a Council, but nothing about what
powers that Council had or how it enforced its authority.

(my own, highly fictional and speculative theory is that the WW used to be
one in which there were a number of currents of thought but that the Council
used questionable means to enforce its authority as the single source of
governance and all records of that time were destroyed or hidden. Thus the
transition to the Ministry was just a reorganisation of something that
already existed rather than a new development. As I said, highly speculative
and not at all supported by canon)

>3) The wizarding world saw no reason to bugger about with
>representation and was perfectly content with the concept of an
>oligarchic government run by an appointee like Fudge. Things were
>going along just fine until that nasty Voldemort came along and
>forced him to behave unreasonably.

Bureaucracies can of course work very well in times of stability. Tensions
only arise if either the bureaucracy itself is undergoing changes or it's
not responding to an external crisis (as we have seen with the MoM)

Cheers

Ffred

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