Talk:Camarilla

Yet to be filled?
This article was started and apparently abandoned. It seems to be a topic worthy of an article, but it needs to be completed. --Metropolitan90 04:56, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Proposed merger of Power behind the throne with Camarilla
As the "See also" sections show there are a great many terms with more or less the same meaning which have evolved in history and literature.

Not all of them would probably need an article of their own. I should suffice to deal with each in a separate section under a shared lemma.

Maybe we could begin by merging power behind the throne and camarilla since these two seem to be just too similar.

thanks,

KaiKemmann (talk) 10:41, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Oppose. While nuanced, there seems to be enough distinction that they are truly distinct concepts and not merely synonymous terms. "Power behind the thrown" implies actual power to get things done, but "camarilla" seems to involve a close circle of softer influence that may or may without any actual power as such (in the later case, it is a model merely with explanatory power but not the predictive power one would expect in the former). Morgan Riley (talk) 02:26, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Closing, given the uncontested objection and no support. Klbrain (talk) 22:41, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

Terminology
In the first para, is "traditional governance practices" quite the right phrase? I see what's being attempted here, but few things are more traditional than a camarilla.

There's form for this kind of complaint going back to the middle ages and beyond- the attacks on royal favourites giving behind the throne advice and having more influence than the senior court office holders, let alone the nobles who "should be the king's chief counsellors"- as well as modern examples from constitutional polities, to be sure. On the other hand, modern constitutional monarchs are bound to act on the advice of ministers because it's the only way to secure democratic backing, but like monarchs once were, office holders who have the legitimacy of constitutional appointment can't help but be advised from all over. What office holder has not been? And if the monarch's favourite has been given a court office, or the president's favourite been named a special advisor, suddenly they become officials.

To get people's backs up enough to be called a camarilla, or warrant the name by real influence, the group has to have something more special in terms of cohesion, distance from official public status, secrecy, and influence. And even then, it's very traditional. Arguably the restriction against camarillas is the non traditional, relatively modern innovation.

Even "conventional", while much closer to the intent, suffers from some similar conceptual weaknesses. "Formal", "official", "legal", "public", "constitutional", or "structured" might be better adjectives. Public is the weakest- even normal government isn't always public. Random noter (talk) 21:18, 27 July 2020 (UTC)