Kratos · Psephos · Paper I of V · In Preparation
Holding the Record
Who reads the ledger rules the realm
by James Wolstencroft
Every form of rule keeps a record, and every ruler since the first seal has understood that the record is the rule. The paper walks the forms (king, council, republic, party) and finds the habit they share: power prefers to be unobserved, and the archive has always answered to the archivist.
The history of government is, among other things, a history of who was allowed to read the ledger.
Hands forward to Closing the Loop: the experiment that made the people the auditor.
In preparation, unpublished at the time of writing. This page holds the shape of the argument while the paper is written.