Neocracy
The neocracy (High Secote: ⱀⱁⰲⱁⰅ ⰴⱃⱏⰶⰰⰲⰠⱄⱅⰲⱁ, Novoe Drŭzhavĭstvo, roughly ‘the new idea of rulership’) was a diffuse group of early 18th-century Vaestic intellectuals who pioneered the form of writing known as the pragma and advanced a radically new understanding of government in line with the incipient ideas of the Radiance. Vaestic historians typically understand the writers of the neocracy to have constituted the first proper socialists.
The neocracy was heavily influenced by the character and work of the Zemayan statesman and writer Torīs Lorin, to the extent that many of their contemporaries referred to them as Lorinists. Of particular importance was Lorin’s Pragmatics of Rulership, a stylised series of letters addressed nominally to Keumat I published in 1692. The neocratists’ pragmata followed the style of the Pragmatics closely, fundamentally works of public political theory masquerading as private advice. Particularly after the rise of neo-Chotarianism in the 18th century, the neocracy turned also to late Chotarian Peribolasm for inspiration.
As the ideological apparatus of the Neritsovid Empire disintegrated and the unique style of public debating particular to the southern cities was revived in the neo-Tirfatsevid realms, neocratic ideas were given a chance to broadcast themselves across the Vaestic heartland. Many intellectuals from across Vaestdom came into contact with one another, forming a network of letters that became the concrete basis for the neocracy’s unity as a school of thought. The neocratic network served as both a predecessor and a sibling of the—ultimately much more extensive and intellectually wide-ranging—network of Scholars that was responsible for the Forty Purities in the middle of the century.
Other than the pragmata, the neocratists developed a distinctive historiography that aimed to draw practical lessons from the history of Vaestic and pre-Vaestic states. Works in this genre included Yambor Molodai’s inimical Commentary on the History of the Vaestic Empire, Vytautas Razaris’ Epitome of the Earlier and Later Prophets, and Nishu shelVareen’s Compendium of the Heathen Empire of the South, an extensive work that served as both a history of the Tirfatsevid Empires and a utopian plan purporting to describe the administration of Ostromir the Great.
As a self-identifying intellectual school the neocracy died out in most of Vaestdom in the 1760s and 70s, its fate then sealed by the reactionary current called the Great Doubt—though in Agamar it persevered largely unchanged into the 19th century. Molodai's accession to the Prophetic seat in 1783 allowed neocratic ideas to survive, but they were transformed from public theory into a sophisticated form of realist analysis that found private currency among the inner circles of the Vaestic governments. Once the Great Doubt receded towards the end of the century, this form of understanding was taken up in force by a number of rulers and influential statesmen in the post-Neritsovid heartland, prominently Krasimir II of Terophan and Ostrobor IV of Azophin, and over the course of the earlier half of the 19th century the work of the neocracy was refined and systematised by the practically-minded writers of the High Radiance into the three principles of politics.