Pre- and post-Enlightenment governance, the changing face of elites, and why modern freedom of critique coexists with modern confusion
The Enlightenment did not abolish power—its re-packaged it. It changed where legitimacy comes from, how authority is justified, and how coercion is administered. In doing so, it also changed power’s “user interface.” Before modernity, power was often personal, theatrical, and legible—a crown, a priesthood, a local lord, a judge speaking in the king’s name. After modernity, power becomes increasingly impersonal, procedural, networked, and distributed—administered through laws, bureaucracies, markets, parties, corporations, media, professional guilds, and technical systems.
That shift produces the paradox:
- Pre-Enlightenment: many ordinary people had a clear sense of “who rules,” but limited legitimate channels to criticize or resist.
- Post-Enlightenment: ordinary people gain formal rights to criticize, but lose a stable mental model of “who rules,” because power hides inside shifting institutional webs and technical complexity.
Note: Even pre-Enlightenment power was more complex than the folk picture suggests, and even modern power has visible faces. The real story is not “simple → complex” but “personal → systemic,” and “forbidden speech → permitted speech with low leverage.”
1) What “pre-Enlightenment power” looked like from the street
1.1 Legibility through hierarchy: the crown and the altar
In much of pre-modern Europe, governance presented itself as a sacred hierarchy:
- The aristocracy possessed land, armed retainers, legal privileges, and a hereditary right to command.
- The Church possessed literacy, moral authority, education, and a monopoly over key rites and afterlife narratives.
- The monarch (where strong enough) fused coercion and symbolism: the king’s peace, the king’s justice, the king’s coin.
Even when local life was messy, the story of power was simple: God → king → nobles → subjects, with clergy mediating meaning and legitimacy. That story made power feel knowable. You didn’t need to read policy papers to understand that your world was ruled by a small set of named estates.
1.2 Criticism existed, but it was structurally dangerous
It’s not that nobody criticized. People gossiped, complained, satirized, petitioned, rioted, and sometimes rebelled. But criticism was constrained by:
- legal danger (heresy, sedition, lèse-majesté),
- economic dependence (your livelihood tied to patrons),
- social surveillance (tight communities),
- lack of alternative platforms (limited print and access).
So the system could be criticized, but the cost of criticizing the wrong way was existential. That created a culture of “private truth, public compliance,” especially in periods of intense confessional conflict.
1.3 The hidden complexity behind the “simple” façade
Even then, power wasn’t merely “king + church.” It was also:
- court factions,
- dynastic marriage politics,
- city oligarchies,
- guild systems,
- tax farmers and financiers,
- provincial estates,
- and overlapping jurisdictions.
The difference is that this complexity lived above the average person’s informational horizon. The average person didn’t need to understand court finance mechanisms to know who had the whip hand locally. Power was visible in direct extraction (rent, tithes, corvée labor), direct violence, and direct status hierarchy.
2) The Enlightenment’s core move: legitimacy migrates from sacred authority to public reason
2.1 The new claim: authority must justify itself
The Enlightenment isn’t one event; it’s a long shift. But it carries a shared impulse: authority should be explainable in human terms, not only sacred terms. Legitimacy starts to migrate toward ideas like:
- rights,
- constitutionalism,
- representation,
- equality before law (at least in theory),
- and public argument.
This doesn’t mean “the people” suddenly rule. It means elites must increasingly perform responsiveness to reason and public opinion, because legitimacy becomes less automatic.
2.2 The printing press and the public sphere: criticism becomes a social institution
Once mass print culture expands, criticism becomes less like a private sin and more like an emerging social role:
- pamphleteers,
- journalists,
- philosophers,
- opposition politicians,
- later mass parties and labor organizations.
The “permission to criticize” grows unevenly, often after bitter conflicts, but it becomes part of the new political aesthetic: rulers come to be seen as answerable—at least rhetorically—to the public.
2.3 The crucial trade: critique rises as direct clarity declines
As politics becomes more “public,” it also becomes more mediated. Once policy is made through parliaments, ministries, committees, and legal codes, power is less a person issuing commands and more a system producing outputs.
So the Enlightenment opens the door to critique, but it also begins the transformation that makes power harder to locate.
3) Post-Enlightenment power: from personal rule to the administrative-market state
3.1 Bureaucracy: power becomes procedural
Modern states govern through institutions designed to outlive any leader:
- civil services,
- regulatory agencies,
- courts,
- police,
- central banks,
- public procurement systems,
- and standardized statistics.
This is the “administrative state” reality: a president or prime minister is the tip of a machinery that has:
- internal rules,
- professional norms,
- inertia,
- and expertise barriers.
That’s why heads of state regularly get presented with a menu of pre-prepared options to choose from. Leaders select among options shaped by professional pipelines.
3.2 Capitalism and corporate organization: power expands beyond formal government
Pre-modern elites were often territorial (land, titles). Modern elites can be:
- corporate executives,
- finance networks,
- industrial lobbies,
- platform owners,
- philanthropic foundations,
- think tanks,
- and consulting ecosystems that move between government and private sector.
This creates a new kind of opacity. The sovereign is no longer the only “command center.” Decisions are shaped by:
- investment flows,
- supply chains,
- standards bodies,
- insurance and credit,
- and employer power over livelihoods.
If pre-modern extraction was often visible (tithes, rents), modern extraction can be diffuse and technocratic (fees, inflation dynamics, regulatory favor, tax-code complexity, data monetization).
3.3 Parties and media: the new intermediaries
Modern democracy runs on intermediaries:
- parties translate voters into policy bundles,
- media translate events into narratives,
- and bureaucracies translate laws into implementation.
Each intermediary is also a power center. And each imposes a cognitive tax on the citizen: to “understand politics,” you must understand the intermediary’s incentives, not just the stated content.
4) Why modern citizens can criticize “everything” yet understand less
4.1 The cognitive overload problem
A single person today faces:
- thousands of policy domains,
- rapidly changing facts,
- competing expert claims,
- global interdependence,
- and information streams optimized for attention rather than comprehension.
Even if you’re intelligent and diligent, you have limited:
- time,
- working memory,
- domain expertise,
- and ability to verify sources.
So most citizens rationally outsource: they rely on trusted interpreters (party, community, media personalities, professional class). That is unavoidable. The weakness is that outsourcing is also how manipulation works.
4.2 “Rational ignorance”: why deep analysis is often not worth it individually
In mass politics, a single vote has tiny marginal impact. That makes it rational (in a cold economic sense) for many citizens not to invest heavily in complex analysis—especially when the “reward” is small and the effort is huge.
Modern democracy therefore runs on low-bandwidth signals:
- identity cues,
- moral narratives,
- party brands,
- and symbolic conflicts.
Those can be sincere, but they also become the battleground because they’re easier to mobilize than policy detail.
4.3 Criticism as a safety valve: permitted speech with limited leverage
In pre-modern society, criticism could be physically dangerous; in modern society, criticism is often absorbed.
You can criticize endlessly online, in protests, in op-eds—yet institutions can continue functioning with minimal change because:
- outrage cycles are short,
- coalition-building is hard,
- and policy change requires navigating specialized chokepoints.
So modern systems can tolerate huge volumes of dissent speech while still protecting structural continuity. That can feel like being “allowed to complain” without being able to steer the ship.
5) Power becomes “shapeshifting” because it is now a moving coalition, not a stable estate
5.1 Pre-modern elites were stable brands
Aristocracy and church were long-lived categories. Even when factions fought, the basic estate structure remained. That gave ordinary people a stable concept of “who’s on top.”
5.2 Modern elites are cross-institutional networks
Today’s power often operates through rotating roles:
- regulator ↔ industry executive,
- politician ↔ lobbyist,
- think-tank fellow ↔ administration staff,
- media figure ↔ political operative.
This creates the impression of a highly complex web constantly shifting, because it is. The same individuals and ideas can reappear in different institutional costumes.
From the citizen’s view, this is maddening: the face changes, the language changes, but the underlying agenda sometimes looks continuous. That fuels cynicism—and sometimes primitive conspiracy thinking—because the system is genuinely hard to map.
6) The “visibility trade”: from obvious rulers to invisible constraints
A crisp way to summarize:
- Before: power had visible owners; constraints were social and violent.
- After: power has visible representatives, but constraints are systemic and technical.
Examples of modern constraints that feel “invisible”:
- bond markets reacting to fiscal policy,
- central bank interest rate regimes,
- court doctrines that set boundaries,
- regulatory capture and revolving doors,
- platform algorithms shaping attention and identity,
- and global supply-chain dependence limiting national autonomy.
None of this requires a hidden cabal. It requires only that complex systems produce outcomes through many interacting parts—and that those parts are legible mainly to professionals.
7) The irony: modern freedom of critique can increase confusion
When criticism was forbidden, social reality was “settled” by authority. When criticism is permitted, reality becomes contested:
- multiple narratives compete,
- trust fragments,
- and the citizen must adjudicate between claims.
That’s cognitively expensive. Many people respond by:
- retreating into tribal narratives,
- delegating to charismatic interpreters,
- or adopting fatalism (“it’s all rigged”).
So the Enlightenment ideal—public reason—creates a genuine burden: it asks average citizens to perform epistemic labor that modern life makes nearly impossible at scale.
8) Conclusion: the Enlightenment didn’t remove elites; it changed their operating system
- Pre-Enlightenment power was more personally legible (throne and altar), but criticism was constrained by coercion and sacred legitimacy.
- Post-Enlightenment power is formally criticizable, but it is distributed across bureaucratic, economic, and informational systems that exceed the average individual’s capacity to map.
- The result is a modern paradox: more expressive freedom, less practical comprehension, and often less perceived agency.
The deep question this raises isn’t “were things better before?” (they weren’t, for most people). It’s: how can mass democracy remain meaningful when the cognitive load of understanding the system exceeds human bandwidth?
That’s the real post-Enlightenment governance problem: not the absence of critique, but the mismatch between citizen capacity and system complexity.
