Why there are only three kinds of government--monarchy, legislative authority, and mob rule--is a good question.
There are only three kinds of government. All the other types are variations of the three however spectacular some of them may be. The three types can be found in Aristotle’s “Politics”. There are governments controlled by the upper classes, and those can be dictatorial. There are those run by the middle class, and those are sensible and responsible. There are those controlled by the lower classes and that results in mob rule. The modern formulation was identified in the seventeenth century by Spinoza who identified there to be monarchies, which rested in agriculture, governments led by legislatjufrers.based on commerce, and charismatic governments led by mob rule.. Consider the basic types and their variations.
Spinoza’s reduction of governments to economic systems goes deeper than Marx’ set of similar reductions, which Marx crafted 150 years later than Spinoza. Agricultural nations such as those in Africa remain under the equivalent of kingships even though their leaders are called presidents and like kins some of them having long reigns. Western civilization becomes democratic as the nations become industrial rather than agricultural and the United States has since its beginning and up to and including today has been in a clash between its agricultural (including extractive) areas and its financial and manufacturing areas.
The nineteenth century era of industrialism and democracy did not fashion an accurate picture of the political landscape. Relying on the division in the French National Assembly, it thought of politics as ranging from left, which meant more liberal and cosmopolitan, to right, which was more conservative and provincial. But that is not the way it works, with a continuum from extreme left to moderate left to centrist to mild conservatives and the far right conservatives. At a pinch and generally elsewhere there is a grand division between the liberals and the conservatives as best exemplified in the Dreyfus Affair where cosmopolitan city people supported Dreyfus and the Army and the country were anti-Dryfeusard. As Barringtin Moore Jr showed in Lord and Peasant, the fate if states has to do with whether the peasantry is abolished before the democratic revolution or whether it lingers on with its reaction against democracy and industrialism. England and America did that early and France did that barely, the peasantry overcame in the late nineteenth century. Eli Halevy, the French historian, made much the same point in his “The Age of Tyrannies” finding totalitarianism the response of the disquieted reactionaries among the world of industrialists. Hitler played it both ways: landing at the Nuremberg Rally from a modern airplane and also applauding guildlike crafts and the customs of female fecundity.
Hannah Arendt, in her “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, published in 1950, attempted to describe a new kind of government that had come under the sun and her idea dominated thinking to the end of the century. She argued that totalitarianism was distinctive in that it conjoined terror with authoritarianism so that the population is reformed into a new kind of person who totally identifies with the regime as well as being intimidated. Not only opponents will be oppressed or killed but randomly any number pf civi;ians just to increase the sense of terror and the refashioning of self. That happened in Nazi German\y, Stalinist Soviet Union and Communist China during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The far left and the far right met while the central lefty and the central right agreed to the democratic process.
The Arendt perspective waned because of the collapse of the three great totalitarian regimes: Germany because it was defeated in a war and molded into a democracy, the Soviet Union because its economic system was collapsing and without sufficient resources to compete militarily with the west and China evolving so its economy became a highly government interference in a corporate economy subject to the usual economic concerns of price stability and consumer demand. These nations were traditionally authoritarian in that elections were manipulated and only political opponents, such as Novotney, were persecuted. The era of totalitarianism was temporary even if deeply unsettling in that it raised issues about the possibilities of human nature..
Actually, totalitarianism as a form of government can be fitted well enough into the Spinoza typology. Totalitarian nations are like the mob mentality Spinoza envisioned in Geneva. It is a cult of religious enthusiasm which allows leadership to violate usual legal and governmental restrictions. The difference is that twentieth century totalitarianism occurred in a very large country with even much more ambitious attempts to restructure personality to which was added prospectus of media influence such as envisioned by George Orwell; and which some suspect can be utilized by soon to be developed Artificial Intelligence. As always, the defense of legislatures depends on the good sense of the electorate.
Moreover, the Arendt invention can be challenged by Franz Neumann’s “Beheamoth”, written during the War, which said that Germany remained a regular nation for most citizens in the Hitler regime. They supported Hitler for the prosperity he brought to Germany and the military successes before and early in the Second World War. They were not unsettled by restrictions of civil liberties and the punishment of racial and sexual minorities, Hitler coming into disfavor only after the loss in Stalingrad and the incessant bombing of German cities by the Allies. They now had real matters to worry about rather than the psychological fears induced by the regime.
Going past Arendt, there are ways to see how legislative bodies envisioned by Spinoza has evolved. In general, as Lipset showed in Political Man in the 1960;s, democracies boil down to two party systems rather than provide a left to right spectrum. There is a liberal and a conservative one, with third parties supporting one or another and so diminishing one or the other of the two parties as happened when Perot brought votes away from Bush in 1992, allowing Clinton to be elected, and Strom Thurmond took votes away from Truman in 1948 but Dewey didn’t win anyway.. The German AdF party, which is neo Nazi, is rejected from either major German party and Marie Pen’s right wing party has become the second party in France, though far behind the leading one. The legislative branch in the United States since Lipset, has become so partisan that it is incapable of passing bipartisan legislation and leaves the executive and the judiciary to exercise day to day power. Whether the Congress will lose its torpor depends on the electorate which blames the Congress for what the electorate sends to the Congress as its representatives..
Look at earlier forms of government, predating Spinoza. Lucretis praises Athens as the cradle of government, a splendid model for the ages. Contemporary classicists idealize Athenian direct democracy as an agrarian society where Jefferson-like freeholders, mostly equal in power, would engage in direct democracy and so was similar to the town hall democracy De Tocqueville described: regular meetings where all could come and trade off technical matters about where to build a road. There was no need for political divisions or, for that matter, politicians. It is not worth calling such a social institution to be a government unless, as Weber stipulated, the government has the legitimate right to enforce coercion to accomplish its ends, whether to go to war or put a drunk into the tank or even put people in jail for tax evasion. But, in fact, Athens was not a primitive or pre-political form of government Rather,.it combined three forms of the governance Aristotle described and which are retained by most governments: a legal system which appeals to the masses in that all citizens can appeal to the courts, an executive drawn from the elites, and a legislative assembly where the middle classes can take sway. That assembly characteristic of the seapower which Athens became.
Spinoza made very clear that he was not talking of this idealization of democracy. He was speaking of a country dominated by a legislature, which was a representative not a direct democracy, and which was led by politicians, which were people by definition who had to convince people to put them into office regardless of their own attributes as wealthy or noble. That has been the case ever since with democracies, people viewing for election whether because they are rich as Rockefeller, heroes like JFK or have personal qualities, as is the case with Trump, that makes him seem just right to be President. The appeal of the voters is what counts in a legislative order even extended to the Chief Executive who also has to be elected.
Look at forms of government early on which are not idealized. Spinoza’s three kinds of government exhaust the types, it being remarkable that human ingenuity has not developed another. Most governments in history were a version of monarchy, which meant a headman surrounded by a council of advisors who would jockey with one another for the headman with favoritism but all having power at the pleasure of the headman even if their independent sources of wealth or prestige made the headman leery of dismissing the supposed subordinate. That is very different from the revolutionary idea that a legislative body can make enactments regardless of the headman. There is no stable constitution whereby, let us say, a council of elders whose head is ceremonial or convenes meetings becomes the government, even if H. G. Wells thought that the way out of the perpetual bickering and vanity of politicians. The Secretary General of the United Nations is an administrator rather than the leader of what is not a government but now or ever a debating society and a conglomerate of NGOs. The Doge in the Republic of Venice was a non-hereditary Duke who was constrained by a legislative assembly, as ios befitting of a maritime republic.
The headman or monarchical system includes the papacy, medieval monarchies, or ancient civilizations. Ancient Sumer had dynastic leaders as well as organized agriculture, a class system, a professional military and therefore the ability to wage war, which is what headmen do, and the ability to declare and enforce war powers shows the government capable of coercing its own people as well as others. Warfare or regular raids on nearby settlements do not have to be about land or the domesticated animals the Israelite nomads contested. They could have been about women or foodstuffs one group had assembled or only to show their bravery. The Israelites who settled in their new found homeland, according to the Book of Judges, was rife with warfare where each kingdom tried to annex some small part of another one. When Samuel said the Israelites needed a king, it did not mean there were no kings before, only that the Israelites wanted a proper king who would consolidate and expand their territory, and David did that.
The pattern in the Near East is also true of American and African tribes which go to war regularly even if the headmen are wary of going too far beyond what their peoples want, the possible exceptions being Shaka Zulu and Tecumseth, the Shawnee American Indian, who could be regarded as inspiring and leading mob rule, Spinoza’s third kind of government because the memberships had become crazed into a frenzy, the headman regarded no longer with just respect but a feeling of adoration which burnt out with defeats in war or having become stale, as may presently the case with Trump, the constitution a more reliable system of government where the executive is checked by the independent legislature as well as an independent judiciary. Why no fourth type has emerged is a good question.
I should add that a technocracy is not really a form of government. That would be a panel of experts who are appointed or self assumed to manage a society because they are knowledgeable about how social services operate and apply their skills in a non-political manner. Sometimes cabinets pof that sort can be hoped for when a nation has become ridden with strife or corruption and was suggested for Haiti and even European countries when the parties are at loggerheads, but these thighs are always temporary because technocracy relies on truths rather than opinion and politics has to do with conflicting opinions that has to be settled by a government that has power. Even city managers are subject to mayoral rule and stay out of politics. People are not experts and the people, like elites, make decisions based on their opinions however those are established.