Radiance

The Radiance was a period in the history of Vaestdom, and especially Outer Joriscia, spanning the 18th and 19th centuries characterised by wide-ranging cultural, intellectual and political change. Originating in Zemay in the early 18th century, by the 1780s it had spread throughout the region. It culminated in the High Radiance of the 19th century, fading into the Post-Radiance around the beginning of the 20th century. It was marked by the development of externalism and a widespread flowering of the arts and technology. Beyond this, some of the most important political concepts emerging from Radiance thought include the meritocratic stratification of society, the idea of corporate Knowledge, the development of the Banner into a state form, and the separation of state administration from the person of the sovereign. The period also saw a rearrangement in interordinate relations in Outer Joriscia towards a system of competing Great Powers with significant colonial interests. These changes were accompanied by a decline in the traditional power of the Secote-descended High Nobility and widespread industrialisation.

Political thought

Beginning with the work of Torīs Lorin and the school of 18th-century treatise-writers influenced by him known as the neocratists, political thought was an important field of inquiry in the Radiance. Indeed, the Radiance saw the rise of a field of political life as such, with politics (rukovodstvo), the modes through which Knowledge is maintained and disseminated, becoming distinct from domestic administration, the dissemination and maintenance of Knowledge themselves. Poetic texts known as pragmata, often addressed to the Standard-Bearers themselves, aimed to reason and demonstrate the correct ways in which Banners were to be ruled. Towards the end of the Radiance, the emergence of socialism as a School of Knowledge formalised political inquiry as a type of science.

Three principles of politics

One of the salient political ideas of the Radiance was the theory of the three principles of politics, namely znamęstvo, vladykastvo, and vlastĭstvo, respectively meaning the idea of the Banner, Empire, and the idea of Authority. Though each of these principles originated in the neocratists, the three principles were first formulated as such only at the beginning of the 19th century. Broadly speaking, znamęstvo encompasses the idea of the corporate Knowledge of the Banner as such, separating it from both the sovereign Standard-Bearer and the individuals within it. The principle of vladykastvo, by contrast, elaborates the external aspect of the Banner, terming this Empire and ascribing to it particular forms of organic needs and compulsions, or in Messenian terminology, state interests. Finally, vlastĭstvo focuses on the internal structure of the Banner, extrapolating the principle of authority of Knowledge to postulate that the best-organised Banner is one in which all officials and administrators are appointed on the basis of their Knowledge alone, without respect to class or heritage—that is, meritocracy.