Being able to lock-up or kill your opposition, and having a near monopoly over the media might help. Ditto providing for a wide range of social needs. But one-person rule itself might have a good deal to do with it. I found the following, which seems relevant, in Bertrand Russell's peculiar book _Power: A New Social Analysis_:
Bagehot's _English Constitution_ -- a book still well worth reading -- begins the discussion of the monarchy as follows:
'The use of the Queen, in a dignified capacity, is incalculable. Without her in England, the present English Government would fail and pass away. Most people when they read that the Queen walked on the slopes at Windsor -- that the Prince of Wales went to the Derby -- have imagined that too much thought and prominence were given to little things. But they have been in error; and it is nice to trace how the actions of a retired widow and an unemployed youth became of such importance.
'The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other. It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say that they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.'
This is both true and important. Monarchy makes social cohesion easy, first, because it is not so difficult to feel loyalty to an individual as to an abstraction, and secondly, because kingship, in its long history, has accumulated sentiments of veneration which no new institution can inspire. Where hereditary monarchy has been abolished it has usually been succeeded, after a longer or shorter time, by some other form of one-man rule: tyranny in Greece, the Empire in Rome, Cromwell in England, the Napoleons in France, Stalin and Hitler in our own day. Such men inherit a part of the feelings formerly attached to royalty. It is amusing to note, in the confessions of the accused in Russian trials, the acceptance of a morality of submission to the ruler such as would be appropriate in the most ancient and traditional of absolute monarchies. But a new dictator, unless he is a very extraordinary man, can hardly _quite_ the same religious veneration as hereditary monarchs enjoyed in the past.
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Of course, the problem of loyalty to individuals over loyalty to abstractions is a problem for democracy.
-- Shane
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