Roles

An analytical series based on Physis: A Theory of Power (Öztürk, 2026)

The series comprises three sections, and each section operates the Physis framework at a different depth. Present sees the current paradigm through the eyes of the theory. Future derives the trajectory of the structure from what is seen, using the mathematics of the theory. Beyond extends this trajectory one step further: it is extrapolation, bound to the internal logic of the framework.

This article belongs to the Present section.

This section is the application of how the Physis framework sees the present. The current paradigm — its phenomena, actors, strategic moves, discourse and interaction, technological developments — is examined through the perspective of the theory: through the effects on the framework's components, the operating mechanics of these components, and the present-day manifestations of the dynamics within these components — and the resulting view is applied to current reality. The application is bidirectional: live data is translated into the framework; conversely, a concept or chapter of the theory is taken as a frame, and current reality is examined through that frame's questions. Each article may engage a single concept in depth or work with multiple concepts together; in plural use, the concepts interact according to the internal logic of the framework, forming a view with logical coherence. Findings are open to interpretation but stand on a structurally nameable ground. The evidence regime is the description of current reality through the eyes of the theory.

Methodology Note

The framework presented in this article emerges from the same methodologically distinct research program described in Article 1 of this series (Paradigms, Öztürk, 2026). Rather than beginning with the canonical literature of Western political theory (Hobbes, Marx, Weber, Foucault, Bourdieu, Mills) and constructing a synthesis through engagement with these traditions, the author deliberately abstained from systematic engagement with classical political philosophy during the framework's construction phase (2020–2026). This was a conscious methodological choice: to develop the framework's core conceptual structure independently — from historical observation and structural inference — before encountering the framing categories of established traditions. The risk of premature anchoring to existing categories was judged to outweigh the benefit of canonical grounding during the inductive phase.

The historical claims advanced in this article — the structural limitation of upper-class roles, the transformation from aristocratic to bourgeois paradigm, the three historical moments of the politician role's structural emergence, the contemporary maturity of the bourgeois paradigm — rest on the author's multi-volume historical research conducted between 2020 and 2025. This work — The Reign of Aristocracy (2021–2024) and The Rise of the Bourgeoisie (2024–2025), both unpublished — constitutes the empirical bedrock of the present article. Research on The Reign of the Bourgeoisie (covering the second half of the nineteenth century to the present) is ongoing.

The methodological orientation is descriptive rather than normative. The framework does not propose a "good society" or a "right politics"; it proposes a structural diagnosis of how power-conflict mechanics produce paradigm-level outcomes at the level of roles. The bureaucracy–upper class tension, the merchant–politician asymmetry, and the V3–V4 orientation are presented as structural diagnoses, not as value claims. Falsifiability is built in: each of the 93 core hypotheses (Öztürk, 2026, SSRN Abstract ID 6595318) specifies its own conditions for refutation, and this article adds further specific falsification conditions in its own scope (the "fifth family of hegemonic capacity" test, the "full mutual swallowing" test, the "successful bureaucratic control" test).

A self-positioning is also called for here. The author is not a professional historian; he is someone who looks at history through a particular theoretical framework — Physis. What is presented in this article is not deep historiographical knowledge of the field but a method of reading history. Events, dates, and actors are nourished by the long work of historians; the contribution is limited to re-reading this material through a particular conceptual framework. Historians retain the right to object to this reading; the objection itself is also valuable as a test of the Physis framework.

Engagement with classical traditions of class theory and political sociology is reserved for the forthcoming book, Physis: A Theory of Power (Öztürk, 2026). This methodological strategy carries both advantages and limitations, which are explicitly addressed in the Limitations section.

Position in Existing Literature

The framework of this article distinguishes itself from major existing traditions in class theory and political sociology along several dimensions. Unlike Marx's class analysis, which grounds class in the relation to the means of production and treats the bourgeoisie as the historically progressive class destined to be superseded by the proletariat, the present framework grounds class in positional rather than economic terms — class is defined by one's position in power conflict (governing, governed, aspiring to govern), not by relation to the means of production. The bourgeoisie's structural distinctiveness in this framework lies not in its relation to capital as such but in its hegemonic position relative to the politician role within the bourgeois paradigm; the lower class is defined as the absence of the will to govern, not as the working class.

Unlike Weber's tripartite framework of class, status, and party, the present framework treats the corporate entity as ontologically prior to the institutional structures Weber described. Where Weber analyzed bureaucracy as the institutional embodiment of legal-rational authority, the present framework reads bureaucracy as the fourth governing class — a class with its own temporal asymmetry vis-à-vis the upper class, structurally distinct from both aristocrat-warrior-cleric coalitions and from politician-bourgeoisie coalitions, and capable of becoming a structural power center when its temporal accumulation is not successfully controlled.

Unlike Mills's Power Elite, which described the existence and circulation of an American power elite without articulating the structural mechanics of its reproduction across paradigm transitions, this framework explains the mechanism of upper-class reproduction across paradigm shifts (aristocratic → bourgeois) through the three-layered model of power conflict (Article 1) and the structural identity of the upper and middle classes. Mills documented the elite; this framework specifies why an upper class is structurally inevitable, what its motivational signature is, and how it reproduces itself even when actors are entirely replaced.

The closest historical-sociological neighbors are perhaps Wallerstein's world-systems analysis, Charles Tilly's work on state formation, and Michael Mann's Sources of Social Power — works that attempt structural-historical syntheses across long durations and address the role of merchants, warriors, and clergy in the formation of states. The present framework departs from these by placing the corporate entity (as ontological hybrid) at the center of the analysis, by formulating explicit falsification conditions for its core claims about role-limitation and paradigm-transformation, and by treating the contemporary V3–V4 orientation as an internal product of the bourgeois paradigm's own mature-phase logic rather than as an external technological development.

This brief positioning is not a substitute for full engagement with the canonical literature, which is reserved for the forthcoming book. The intent here is to clarify where the framework stands in relation to existing traditions, not to defend it against them.

Terminological Note

The following key terms from the original Turkish text are rendered in English throughout this article. Hypothesis codes (PHY, NOM, VAR, TAN, GÜÇ, İLK, LİD, YÖN, TÜZ, HAY, HEG, MEŞ, etc.) are retained in their original Turkish abbreviations to preserve cross-reference consistency with the foundational hypothesis paper (Physis: A Theory of Power – 93 Falsifiable Hypotheses, SSRN Abstract ID 6595318) and the registered work (Öztürk, 2026, Registration No: 2026/17534).

Frame Summary

This article rests on the framework of Physis: A Theory of Power (Öztürk, 2026). The upper class changed; the structure did not. The actors changed; the struggle flowed in the same direction. This article shows why the roles that compose the upper class are limited in number, why they have been reproduced throughout history with the same structural logic, and why the rise of the merchant role is the sole exception in this five-thousand-year continuity.

I. Introduction

Physis (Öztürk, 2026), as a theory of power, explains human history through the interactions of the classes that govern, want to govern, and are governed. Of these, the most decisive is the governing class — because the decisions that draw the direction of history are made there. Throughout history the governing class has consisted of a limited number of roles and countless actors. In this article we will trace the history of those limited roles and offer several observations on the structure of the actors who played them.

The historical thesis advanced here is the following: the roles composing the governing class have remained limited throughout history and have changed only once, radically; even as actors and paradigms changed, the struggle flowed with the same structural dynamics in a definite direction. This thesis rests on two observations on which the Physis framework is built.

First, these roles have the capacity to constitute the upper class because they generate hegemony; even where other hegemony-generating roles exist, those producing the most dominant and the purest power have been these. As a result, what we see in history as the upper class are most often these roles — though if other upper-class roles exist (for example, the bureaucrat), they may be added here as well. By power, what is meant is this: the capacity to realize one's will, and to that end, to direct the wills of others.

Second, in the historical flow these roles can be seen to have built strategies in causal sequence and pursued definite aims. But humans are mortal, and throughout history the actors who played these roles did not move with a shared class or role consciousness — on the contrary, they fought one another for thousands of years, both within their own role (kings against kings) and across roles (kings against clergy), to constitute the upper class. In every geography, in every period, the opposite of cooperation was at work. Yet their struggles flow toward a definite outcome — while they pass the baton to the next actor. Physis theory (Öztürk, 2026) defines the reason for this: it argues that the leadership struggle proceeds with definite dynamics and the same structural logic, transforming in a definite direction within the framework of power dynamics.

Within this historical flow, three principal roles carried the upper-class struggle for thousands of years: aristocrat, clergy, and warrior. Despite ruptures and interruptions, the merchant — as a role — gained strength wherever and whenever the paradigm permitted, by virtue of its hegemonic capacity; it built alliances with each of the three actors and, in each alliance, weakened that role's rivals one by one. Finally, the liquidation of the aristocracy was completed by the French Revolution. The era of the old triadic governing role thus closed; in its place opened a new era in which the politician and the merchant share the upper class. The main artery of millennia of human history — running through the governing classes and their roles — can be summarized in a single paragraph in this way.

These roles share another, more important property. Each of them — both themselves and the institutional structures they govern — is a corporate entity. The corporate entity (Öztürk, 2026) is a hybrid form born from the symbiosis of human and idea, carrying the potential for immortality, possessing rational decision-making capacity, and operating by the power dynamics of Physis. To evaluate power struggles only through individuals confines attention to a narrow time-frame, pushes the reading of history toward normative criteria such as personal morality and individual values, and ignores the systematic, continuous nature of corporate entities.

Bringing corporate entities into the picture is critical, because only through them can we explain why the historical struggle operates within Physis rather than Nomos. The corporate entity operates as pure Physis; by its very structure it does not admit a Nomos framework. In an individual, Nomos and Physis can coexist — a human can show empathy, make sacrifices, choose against their own interest. The corporate entity has no such capacity. Other corporate entities pose an existential threat to this species of potentially infinite life. This is why its tendency to "remain" is built around the elimination of others. This is why, when the corporate entity is on the stage, Physis hardens, power conflict purifies, Nomos weakens (because the human framework introduces fragility), and the process dictates a temporally linear singularization tendency.

This is why the continuity and one-directional flow of the struggle does not change. However much actors are part of the corporate entity, however much they share a common singularization tendency, human singularization is built on producing a leader; the corporate entity's singularization is built on eliminating others. In this paradigm of ours — a universe of corporate entities — actors die, dynasties fall, paradigms within the framework change; but the corporate entity, by its existential structure and by the nature that lets it see benefit only by working in a single direction, continues to advance in the same direction and to push civilization that way too.

In our age, although all hegemony-generating roles are still visible, the age now belongs to the two later-formed roles: the politician and the merchant. Behind these two roles stand two distinct types of corporate entity: behind the politician, the will-centered entity; behind the merchant, the capital-centered entity. They need each other existentially — but this need should not be read as the absence of struggle between them. On the contrary, between the roles, the actors, and the corporate entities — both within their own kind and across kinds — a relentless power conflict operates, as in every period of history. But this is not yet an existential power struggle; it takes the form of a continuous tension born from the existential mutual necessity of the two types.

For now, this is a hierarchical rivalry for dominance played out on ideological, economic, and governing planes — at least so long as their existential mutual necessity persists. As we noted in the first article, this interaction appears to advance toward a "structural convergence." But theoretically one can also say this: when this mutual necessity ends — if it ends — the conflict will transform from a rivalry for dominance into an existential power struggle.

Indeed, throughout history, the interactions of decision-makers, the decisions they have made, the power conflicts among actors, and the dynamics among governing classes have shaped the direction of civilization. Physis theory (Öztürk, 2026), with its singular perspective uniting power conflicts, leadership, governing classes, and corporate entities, offers the possibility of evaluating today, yesterday, and tomorrow within a different frame.

The observations of this article — the geography of the paradigm break, the structural rise of the merchant role, the line of transformation running from the Magna Carta to the French Revolution — rest on the author's multi-volume historical work conducted between 2020 and 2025 (The Reign of Aristocracy) and currently in progress (The Rise of the Bourgeoisie). The period from the aristocratic paradigm to the bourgeois revolutions is the author's domain of in-depth study; the subsequent period (from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present) is the subject of ongoing research (The Reign of the Bourgeoisie). The Physis framework has been built upon this historical ground, and the historical flow has been re-read within this framework. The article presents this synthesis; observations directed at the contemporary period draw the structural lines, while detailed historical grounding lies in the works themselves.

To understand how this framework looks at history, one must first look at how history is read otherwise.

II. How Physis Reads History

The methodological choice of this article must also be made clear here. The Physis reading is phenomenon-centered, not geography-centered. That the aristocratic paradigm is examined across a wide geography — from Ancient Egypt to Han China, from Gupta India to the Ottomans — and that the focus tightens onto Europe when the paradigm break is narrated, are expressions of the same logic: wherever the trace of the role and the paradigm leads, that is where one goes. The merchant's rise and the paradigm break occurred in fact in European geography, because the necessary structural conditions — intra-paradigm competition, scale, openness of field — came together there; they did not come together elsewhere. This is a structural observation, not a claim of cultural superiority. Wherever the phenomenon flows, the article flows there too.

History can be read through different phenomena, and every reading works as a filter: it makes some things visible and pushes others into the background. A distinction is needed here. The same phenomenon can be examined with two different attitudes: a descriptive attitude examines the phenomenon in order to understand it — without judgment, without ascribing direction. A normative attitude places the phenomenon within a framework — ascribing a direction, a morality, a goal. The history of religion can examine religious phenomena historically; theological history reads history as the unfolding of a sacred plan. Economic history can trace the evolution of economic structures; Marxist history ascribes to that evolution a direction toward a classless society. The first versions are disciplines; the second versions are frameworks.

The table below structurally summarizes four normative historical narratives. Each was born of a particular historical need, produced a particular reader-positioning, and proposed a particular "right side."

Comparison of nation-state, Marxist, theological, and Enlightenment-liberal historical narratives along originating need, what they reveal, what they conceal, and reader-positioning.

The shared feature of these four readings is that they load the phenomenon with a direction and a moral framework. Each of them states the "right side" from the outset and calls the reader to that side.

The Physis reading. It is not normative; it adopts a descriptive attitude. As phenomenon, it traces power conflict, the governing classes, and the roles that compose them. It describes human history not as a process moving toward a moral goal — freedom, salvation, a classless society — but as the uninterrupted struggle of different roles and actors for hegemony. But this description is not directionless. The Physis reading argues that history flows in a definite direction, and that this direction is not a moral goal but a structural tendency.

What this tracing makes visible is the following. Governing classes exist in every period; only who plays which role changes. Even as actors, instruments, and ideologies change, the power conflict itself continues. Money, capital, democracy, freedom, religion, nation — these phenomena are not ends in themselves but instruments of power conflict. The capacity to establish hegemony is gathered in a limited number of roles — aristocrat, clergy, warrior, merchant, politician — and these roles are reproduced independently of geography and period. Corporate entities sustain their own orientation independently of the deaths of individuals, and push civilization toward singularization — toward the gathering of power in fewer and fewer wills.

This visibility opens the way to particular questions. Instead of "Is this development good or bad?": "How did this development change the balances of power?" Instead of "Who is right?": "Who won, and how?" Instead of "Where is history going?": "Which structural tendency is locking onto which point?" These questions seek not moral judgment but structural diagnosis.

The framework does three things at once. First, it removes the phenomenon from the moral frame; in place of "good" and "evil" categories, it observes "strong" and "weak" positions, "winning" and "losing" strategies, "durable" and "fragile" structures. Second, it makes structural consistency visible: when actors change, does the structure change, or are the same dynamics reproduced under different names? Third, it diagnoses where this structural consistency is flowing — not as a moral judgment but as a structural tendency. By examining the aristocratic and bourgeois paradigms with the same analytical tools, it tests the question: when actors, rules, and ideologies change, does the structure also change, or does it stay the same — and where is the unchanging structure carrying us?

The following questions can be kept in mind as one reads: Who is the upper class, and where does its power come from? How does the middle class continue to exist? Is the lower class entirely passive? When the paradigm changes, what actually changes?

III. The Aristocratic Paradigm

Where, then, does the capacity that carries these roles into the hegemonic struggle come from? Have these roles always been the contenders for governance throughout history? And who are the actors who play these roles, and how are they selected for them?

In the long period running up to the French Revolution — from antiquity to the early modern era — the governing classes operated within a particular paradigm. This paradigm endured for thousands of years, across different geographies and different religions, with the same logic: from Ancient Egypt to Han China, from Gupta India to the Ottomans, the pairing of aristocrat (pharaoh, king, mandarin, kshatriya, sultan) and clergy (priests, ulema, scholars, brahmins, şeyhülislam) was universal. Its foundational element was the aristocracy.

Within the Physis framework, classes are defined positionally: the upper class governs, the middle class wants to govern, the lower class is governed (Öztürk, 2026). This distinction is not income, status, or lifestyle, but position in power conflict. In the sections that follow, the terms "upper class," "middle class," and "lower class" are used in this positional sense.

Before examining these roles one by one, it is necessary to bring out the structural property they share. The hegemony-generating roles — aristocrat, warrior, clergy, then merchant, then politician and bureaucrat — are not formed before or after the system, but together with it. When a human community organizes at a certain scale, certain functions are structurally necessary: coordination and decision-making, defense, the production of meaning and legitimacy, the circulation of resources, enforcement. These roles are the carriers of these functions — their existence is not random, because for the community to survive at scale, these functions must be carried by someone. And precisely because they carry these vital functions, hegemonic capacity accumulates in their hands; this capacity becomes the structural ground that drives them into power conflict with other roles for control of the system.

This structure makes intelligible the paradox we marked in section I — that history flows in a definite direction even though the actors share no awareness of the race they are running. Actors and roles, of course, pursue aims; every aristocrat wants to remain, every warrior wants to rise, every cleric wants to enlarge their influence, and they build strategies in causal sequence to do so. But these aims are individual, or at most dynastic; a class consciousness like "we as aristocracy" or "we as clergy" has been largely absent throughout history. Actors have constantly fought with the actors of their own role (kings against kings, popes against popes) and with the actors of other roles (kings against clergy, warriors against aristocrats). Conflict, more than cooperation, is the norm of history.

At this point the critical structural property comes into play: roles and the system are corporate entities. Actors are mortal, bounded by the frame of their own lifetimes, alive only as long as they carry their role; but the role they carry — dynasty, military order, church, state — carries the potential for immortality as a corporate entity, operates on a time-scale that exceeds generations, and is oriented by the logic of Physis: the will to remain, the singularization tendency, the elimination of rivals. This corporate-entity logic operates independently of any actor's intent; the actor changes, the orientation of the corporate entity stays. This is why history, even without a shared actor-intent, appears to operate as a linear process in causal sequence: the dispersed and aimless struggles of actors are channeled in the same direction by the shared logic of the corporate entities they carry. The visible flow is not the actors' intent but the structural orientation of the corporate entities; and while actors fight their own wars in their own time, corporate entities continue to advance in the same direction with a timeless logic.

Roles do this work not as isolated individuals but through these corporate entities. The aristocrat operates in symbiotic relation with the dynasty, the warrior with the order or legion, the cleric with the church or religious order. The individual dies, the corporate entity remains; the corporate entity cannot operate without individuals, it requires bearers. The individual reaches the role through the corporate entity, is authorized and protected by it; the corporate entity is fed, renewed, and carried by individuals. The role's continuity over thousands of years — its capacity to be reproduced from paradigm to paradigm under different names but in the same structural position — is owed to this ground.

The Dual Nature of the Aristocracy

The aristocracy was both a role and a class. As a role it was dynamic — different actors and different dynasties came and went. But as a class it remained fixed — for thousands of years, the upper class meant the aristocracy. Like the other two hegemony-generating roles, the aristocracy too was institutionalized through a corporate entity that exceeded the mortality of the individual — dynasty, lineage, royal institution; even as the bearer-individuals of the role changed, the role itself acquired continuity.

The formation of the aristocracy was the institutionalization of the will to remain (Öztürk, 2026). Someone became upper class, wanted to remain, and anchored their remaining to lineage — to blood — and then sacralized that blood by binding it to the divine. Thus the theological infrastructure of the upper class was formed; the ideology of "divine right" was the product of this formula. This theology can be observed in geographies independent of one another, as a near-universal anthropological phenomenon. The formulation was so powerful and useful that many who wanted to become upper class, or who took the place of the upper class, used the same formula; they emphasized the connection of their blood with previous aristocrats — even when the connection was not real.

Upper Class (Governing): The Aristocracy

The aristocracy was the governing (upper-class) position. Its function was the coordination and direction of the system: decisions of war and peace, the distribution of resources, the establishment of justice — fundamentally, ensuring the healthy operation of the system. Its power drew on two sources. The ideology of divine right provided unquestionable legitimacy — a discourse that worked against the lower class, but was not a phenomenon that prevented power conflicts within the upper class. Power transfer through blood ties produced continuity and predictability, and to a certain degree prevented the formation of serious power vacuums.

But although the aristocracy was at the top in status, it was dependent on others as a role. Coercive hegemonic capacity reached it through the warrior; religious legitimacy reached it through the clergy. This dependency created a critical fragility: when the warrior or the cleric became more powerful than the aristocrat, the leader's claim to strength could in fact be tested. Here the system experienced an ontological tension — the bearer of status was without power, the one with power was without status. And this tension did not have to resolve itself: status calls for the powerful, power seeks status; but the two do not always meet. Sometimes the system, unable to bear the tension, transfers status to the powerful; sometimes it stays out of balance for long stretches; sometimes it breaks entirely. The ebb and flow of this process shapes the whole system.

Middle Class (Wanting to Govern): The Warrior

A distinction is needed here. Not everyone who plays a role is middle class. The ordinary soldier does his duty; he carries no will to govern, he is the object of power conflict, not its subject. The village imam performs religious service but bears no claim to govern. Even the great merchant may possess wealth, but if he merely accumulates capital without a will to govern, he does not become middle class. What constitutes the middle class is not the role itself, but those who carry within the role the will to govern: generals, the military elite; the şeyhülislam, cardinals, abbots; great merchants who establish political influence, capital holders who lobby. A role is a field of hegemonic capacity, carried by a person or a corporate entity. Classes are governing positions differentiated by function; the will to govern is what decides who, within those functions, occupies the upper and middle positions.

Moreover, this position is dynamic. An actor may not begin as middle class — as conditions and will change, the class position changes too. The Medici began as bankers; they entered the middle class when they entered politics, and the upper class when they produced three popes and two queens. An ordinary soldier may stay within the role for his entire life; but when he is promoted to general and begins to command his army in his own name, he passes into the middle class, and into the upper class when he founds his own dynasty. The role-as-capacity stays with its bearer; the class position shifts according to whether that capacity is wielded with the will to govern.

With this distinction in place: in the aristocratic paradigm, the first of the two principal capacity fields carried by the middle class was military capacity — the capacity of coercive hegemony. The military elite, who carried this capacity with the will to govern, was one of the system's principal middle-class actors. Its function was three-layered: defense against external threats, the armed guarantee of internal order, and the actual enforcer of the aristocracy's authority. Physical force, in other words, was in this elite's hands — the most fundamental of all hegemonic capacities.

This placed the warrior structurally just at the edge of the upper class. When the aristocrat was strong, the warrior served, obeyed — because status and power were matched. But when the aristocrat weakened, the ontological tension defined in the previous section came to the surface: the bearer of status (the aristocrat) was without power, the bearer of power (the warrior) was without status. And the system resolved this tension in different ways. Sometimes the warrior stayed loyal to his role beside the aristocrat and did not touch status; sometimes he overthrew the aristocrat and founded his own dynasty, marrying status to power — Roman emperors, the Mamluks, countless military dynasties were the products of this dynamic; sometimes, in long periods of imbalance and weakened central rule, the warrior became the real determiner of the system without bringing down the upper class. The Janissaries in the Ottoman Empire are the classic example of this third scenario: as the force that decided which prince would take the throne, deposed sultans (Osman II, Selim III), chose grand viziers, directed foreign policy, and shaped the tax system, they operated for centuries. Being outside the dynasty, they did not touch the bloodline of the sultanate, but they became the real determiner of the system.

This third scenario — armed or procedural force becoming the real determiner of the upper class without itself transforming into the upper class — is an archetype. The warrior and the bureaucracy have shared this position and potential to varying degrees in every period; often they have been entangled — the Janissary corps, the Roman legions, the Persian administrative army are classic examples of "military bureaucracy." In Ancient Egypt, scribes and temple administration also mattered; but the relative weight of bureaucracy became far more decisive in the modern period, when the state apparatus grew complex. The mechanism has not changed today: armed or procedural force is always there, in the form of roles charged with the actual direction of the upper class but also carrying the potential to govern. This is why every paradigm sees the upper class regard this role as a double-edged sword. It is an important structural mechanism, but a potential threat; this is why, within the framework of power dynamics, the upper class aims to keep it under control.

Middle Class (Wanting to Govern): The Clergy

In the aristocratic paradigm, the second principal capacity field carried by the middle class was the clergy — the capacity of knowledge, bond, and ideological hegemony. The clerical elite, who carried this capacity with the will to govern, was the system's other principal middle-class actor. Its function was the monopoly of sacred knowledge, the production of community and belonging, the guardianship of the divine-order ideology, and the production of legitimacy — coronation, blessing, divine sanction.

But the cleric's power was structurally different from the warrior's. The warrior was the carrier of direct power — physical, visible, testable. The cleric was the carrier of indirect power — operating through influence, persuasion, meaning, voluntary acceptance. And this power worked in two directions at once. Upward: it was the cleric who anchored the aristocrat's blood to the divine, who crowned, who produced legitimacy; the cleric was in a position of both supporting and conditioning the upper class. Downward: the cleric had direct contact with every human — in every village, every place of worship, at every birth, death, marriage, famine. While the warrior stayed in the barracks, the aristocrat in the palace, the merchant in the market, the cleric was present at every point where the meaning of daily life was produced. This social penetration — direct and continuous contact with the entire population — gave the cleric a depth no other role carried.

Its relationship with the aristocrat operated by a logic parallel to the warrior's. When the aristocrat was strong, the cleric produced legitimacy, crowned, lubricated the system; status and power were matched. When the aristocrat weakened, the ontological tension surfaced again, and the system resolved this tension in different ways. Sometimes the cleric moved into the position of guiding and controlling the aristocrat; the aristocrat made the decision, but the cleric shaped it. Sometimes — much more rarely — the cleric directly seized power; the high priest Herihor's use of the pharaonic title in Egypt's 21st Dynasty is the classic instance of this exceptional scenario. Sometimes the cleric built his own structure outside and above the aristocracy — the third model, to be detailed in the following paragraph, which was the most powerful manifestation.

But compared with the warrior, there was an asymmetry: the number of actors who passed from the clergy into the upper class was far smaller. Most Roman emperors were of military origin; the Mamluks were a wholly warrior-origin dynasty; cases of dynasties founded from a clerical origin are few. The reason for this is that the cleric's power was insufficient for direct rule. The warrior gives an order, his army moves, he uses what is in his hand at the moment of conflict. The cleric, by contrast, generates power by mobilizing the lower class — through sermon, excommunication, sacred discourse; but this mobilization takes time, requires persuasion, and the power produced is not the cleric's but the mobilized crowd's. When the cleric sits directly in the seat of power, he confronts this fragility; the warrior facing him is fast while the cleric is still trying to move the crowd. This is why the cleric's structural tendency has not been direct rule but the steering of rule.

The cleric's tendency to control power from outside rather than to occupy it directly has manifested at different scales throughout history. In Ancient Egypt, the Amun priesthood rivaled the pharaonic treasury through the temple economy in the New Kingdom period; Akhenaten's attempt to ban the Amun cult failed, and the old order returned after his death. In the 21st Dynasty, the high priest Herihor in fact seized power, and his successors used the pharaonic title — the full manifestation of the exceptional scenario mentioned above. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Church operated a similar position at a different scale: not as a national institution but as an international structure. Through excommunication, the authority of legitimacy, and the power to crown, it could press down upon the aristocracy from above; but its main strategy was not to be the decision-maker, but to manage and control the decision-maker. This is a role that more often used the pattern subsequently named, in Physis, the shadow upper class (Öztürk, 2026) — the full definition of the concept and its modern counterpart will be addressed in the bourgeois paradigm.

Lower Class (Governed): Peasants, Artisans, Slaves

In the aristocratic paradigm, the lower class was the whole of the governed position — peasants, artisans, slaves, servants. This stratum carried the economic and physical foundation of the system: the land was worked, goods were produced, taxes were paid, congregations were formed in places of worship. They were present in wars too, but not as decisive military force — the real fighting force was the military elite (knights, sipahis, janissaries, samurai). The lower class served in wars as logistical support, service personnel, light infantry. Mass national armies in which the people themselves are direct soldiers are a product of the modern period. In short, the lower class then as now is the pool that supplies the system with resources — in war and peace. (This question of resource — the lower class as the structural source of energy and time — is the subject of the next article.)

A conceptual clarification is needed here: the lower class is a structural definition, not a periodic one. In the aristocratic paradigm it was the peasantry; in the bourgeois paradigm it became workers, white-collar employees, professionals, and so on; the form changed, but the structural position remained the same. The lower class is the whole of those who do not carry the will to govern and do not possess the structural capacity to back that will. Actors change, paradigms transform; the lower class is structurally always there.

The lower class was not a direct party to the upper class's internal power conflict; it was not at the table in the struggles among aristocrat, warrior, and cleric. But this does not mean there was no tension between the lower class and the upper class — on the contrary, a far deeper, existential tension has operated in every period than the upper class's internal conflict.

This is the fixed tension between governing and governed. The governing makes decisions on behalf of the governed's will; the subject of these decisions is fundamentally social survival. The governed monitors these decisions; both because the survival of the system is its own survival, and because its will is existence itself — to surrender the will is to surrender existence. The governing, meanwhile, has already become and wants to remain; the will to remain (Öztürk, 2026) drives it toward greater control of the will along the singularization trajectory. Singularization, in other words, does not operate only between the middle and upper classes; hegemony is oriented toward the source. But both sides know that neither can exist without the other; this mutual structural dependency operates as a constant tension.

Because it has no role in power conflict, the lower class's response to this tension does not proceed by the methods of the other classes — that is, by actor-centered means. The structurally dispersed lower class responds to the tension through everyday practices of resistance: foot-dragging, false compliance, sabotage, tax evasion, gossip, hidden mockery — the historian James C. Scott examined these practices in Weapons of the Weak as an unchanging part of peasant life. But these are informal, dispersed, personal forms of resistance. They have only rarely reached critical determining weight from the upper class's vantage point. For most of civilization's history, the lower class did not have the capacity to formally approve or disapprove of the upper class; because legitimacy did not come from the will of the people, but from divine right and the system's capacity. The upper class prefers obedience over consent for governance, with or without the lower class's consent. The opening of formal channels of approval — suffrage, citizenship, popular sovereignty — would be the product of bourgeois revolutions.

The deeper structural reason for this relative passivity lies further down. Governing classes and the roles that generate hegemony are directly tied to the anthropological and ontological structure of the human species — they should be thought of not as institutions invented after the fact but as the species' ways of generating power. Physical force, the production of meaning, status and command of resources: the capacities that lead to hegemony come in these three fundamental forms, and no other. The warrior was the carrier of armed force; the cleric, of ideological force; through these capacities, an elite carrying the will to govern could emerge from within them, and could even play for the upper class. The aristocrat was already born into capacity — blood, status, command of resources. These three roles, in their institutional forms, have been there for thousands of years; because the human species' ways of generating hegemony are these three.

The lower class has no such capacity, because the very concept of "lower class" defines those who fall outside these capacities. Even if someone within the peasantry carried the will to govern, what instrument would they use to prevail? They had no weapon, no discourse, no resource, no education — or rather, all of these existing capacities had already been claimed and institutionalized as the hegemony-generating roles standing against them. Potential leaders from the lower class have appeared throughout history, however rarely — from Spartacus to Wat Tyler, to the leaders of the 1525 German Peasants' War, there is a list. But the problem was not the absence of individual will; the problem was the forces these leaders found arrayed against them: the aristocracy (status and resource), the warrior (weapon and discipline), the cleric (legitimacy and discourse). Bringing down these structures was theoretically possible; but the new structure put in the place of what was brought down, in time, had to turn into one of the same three capacity-families, because the human species had no other way of producing hegemony. This is why, throughout the history of civilization, the lower class was condemned to face these three roles ontologically.

The sole exception to this structural lock is the merchant — and the depth of this exception lies here: the merchant emerged not by capturing one of the three existing capacities, but by opening a fourth way of generating hegemony — capital, economic organization. This capacity proved so effective that it could transform the existing paradigm. Other roles, of course, have arisen from the lower class throughout history — guilds, artisans, local leaders, even, from the early modern period onward, scientists. But none of these could enter the upper-class leadership struggle, nor reach a role-capacity that could trigger a governing paradigm change. The scientist is an interesting example: a new capacity — rational and testable knowledge — was produced, a capacity that even directly rivaled the cleric's monopoly on knowledge. But science could not open a field of hegemony on its own; in every period it remained tied to another actor and was at times instrumentalized — by the king's academy, the merchant's laboratory, the state's institute, the corporation's R&D. The merchant was different, because the merchant did not merely exist as a new role: it transformed all the other roles and the standard of the system. The warrior began to fight in armies financed by the merchant; the cleric became dependent on the merchant's donations; the aristocrat had to take credit from the merchant, and the system gained power against the others through the income the merchant generated. Capital, profit, calculability, contract — these standards the merchant brought eventually spread to the entire system. The merchant, in other words, did not establish a role: it established a new game, creating a reality capable of shaping the dynamics of power between systems. This is why it transformed the paradigm.

The depth of this event deserves a moment of pause. The aristocratic paradigm lasted from the Sumerian city-states to the French Revolution — roughly five thousand years; throughout that period the three hegemonic capacities remained constant, and the dominant three roles were reproduced under different names and forms but in the same structural positions. These three capacities, derived from the ontology of the human species, operated as if they were an unchanging law of the world. The merchant's emergence broke this five-thousand-year structure: it showed that the human species possessed a fourth way of generating hegemony. This is no ordinary historical event; it is something like the disclosure of a new truth about humanity itself. It is one of the direction-changing threshold moments of civilizational history — like the discovery of fire, the invention of agriculture, or the birth of writing — but it is different, because it is not a technical discovery but a new way of organizing the human species. And perhaps most strikingly: this event happened only once in history. The paradigm the merchant opened was so encompassing, so universal, that staying outside of it became impossible.

A note must be added here on the modern politician role, the details of which are the subject of subsequent sections. The politician is not a role that creates a new hegemonic capacity in the way the merchant did; it is a structural consequence of the bourgeoisie's paradigm-building process. Because the bourgeoisie, unlike other upper-class roles, came out of a lower-class position, it could not derive the legitimacy of its paradigm from birth as the aristocracy did; it had to carry Enlightenment principles such as freedom, equality, and justice in order to preserve and expand its own existence. But because these principles were legally general, they spread to the lower class as well — and the rights that enabled lower-class mobilization were an important catalyst of the paradigm change. In the new paradigm, the legitimacy of the upper class became tied to the lower class's approval. This produced two outcomes: it endowed the lower class with source-hegemony capacity, and it brought the politician role to the fore for the management of will-centered corporate entities. The politician did not establish a new paradigm; it rose as the structural necessity of the bourgeois paradigm. The merchant–politician tension that constitutes the contemporary form of modern power conflict can be understood on this ground: the two were born within the same paradigm, and as the paradigm has matured they have come into conflict with each other. But this is a matter for later sections.

IV. The Paradigm Break: The Structural Rise of the Merchant Role

The merchant could not establish a presence within the paradigm at first. The warrior carried coercive hegemony, the cleric carried ideological hegemony; the merchant lacked both, possessing only economic capacity — a fragile position the other roles could trample over. But the nature of this capacity mattered. The merchant was not merely an actor who bought and sold goods: with money and credit, he could control, move, and multiply economic resources; trade fed the population and made taxation possible; while transporting goods, he simultaneously transported technology, ideology, and ideas — gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press flowed along trade routes; and most importantly, while the aristocrat was bound to the land, the cleric to the church, and the warrior to the dynasty, the merchant was the only role capable of building networks across cities, countries, and continents. All of these capacities were present; but for hegemony to emerge from them, the system itself had to become dependent on the merchant.

City-states — Venice, Genoa, Florence — offered a different picture as exceptions. In these structures, where the economic source was trade, the population was small, and the aristocracy was relatively weak, the merchant entered decision-making processes at an early date. In this environment, what the merchant's structural capacity could lead to was visible — but it remained local and limited. In Song-period China, too, trade developed and merchants grew rich; but the centralized imperial structure and the Confucian hierarchy prevented the translation of economic power into political power. For the merchant's rise, both the structural field had to be open and the scale had to grow.

Europe satisfied both conditions at once. At the end of the Middle Ages, trade revived, the money economy began to replace the peasant economy, and cities grew as centers of commerce and production. And here the dynamic of intra-paradigm power conflict changed: aristocrats, clerics, and warriors, while struggling with one another, discovered a new instrument — money. "If I take the merchants before you do, I will be much stronger than you." The merchant was not yet a player but had become a resource the players needed. The aristocrat pulled the merchant to his side; the merchant in return gained safe roads, legal protection, tax exemptions. A symbiotic relationship — not yet equal, but no longer one-sided either. In this process, the merchant's needs began to transform the system: trade required keeping accounts, writing contracts, knowing foreign languages, and a Church education was no longer enough — secular schools were born, literacy escaped the cleric's monopoly. The printing press (the 1450s) accelerated this process, universities developed secular knowledge, and humanism placed human reason at the center. The merchant was both the financier and the beneficiary of these developments; he became a partner in the hegemony of knowledge.

With the geographical discoveries and mercantilism, the scale changed. The merchant was now a global actor; corporate entities such as the VOC and the British East India Company (1600–1602) could issue stock, sustain their own armies, declare war, sign treaties, and mint currency — corporate entities carrying all the functions of a state but not themselves a state. The merchant was now an actor at the scale of empires. And here the critical transformation occurred: the relation of dependency reversed. The aristocrat's need for the merchant had grown so great that inter-state competition now required protecting the merchant — the Netherlands, England, and France launched wars and built navies to protect their merchants and their companies. But the bond was not symmetrical. The merchant's fate was no longer tied to the aristocrat; the aristocrat's was tied to the merchant — the will-centered corporate entity was becoming dependent on the capital-centered corporate entity. The merchant could move from one country to another, carry his capital, rebuild his networks; the aristocrat was bound to the land, immobile, recognized borders. Status was still with the aristocrat — crown, title, divine right — but the source of power was now with the merchant.

This was not merely a question of mobility. The merchant was now producing and managing the very infrastructure that sustained the modern state's operation. Corporate entities such as the VOC and the EIC effectively conducted the geographic and economic expansion of empires — the crowns carried the flag, the merchant carried out the operation. State financing was tied to the merchant's bond, debt, and credit mechanisms; the Bank of England (1694) was born directly from this need, on merchant initiative. Without finance capital like the Rothschilds, England's continuation of the Napoleonic Wars would not have been possible. Modern taxation, capital markets, the know-how of crisis-time market intervention — all this infrastructure on which the state's existence rested was the merchant's creation and expertise. The aristocrat had neither the knowledge to build it nor to manage it. The actual operation of the state now ran on the merchant's infrastructure. The aristocrat could not exist without the merchant; the merchant could exist without the aristocrat. What was at stake here was not a tension; it was an existential asymmetry. The condition of one side's existence was the other side, while the condition of the other was itself. One-sided dependency automatically produces an existential-level superiority. The moment this threshold is crossed, the break has structurally already occurred; the rest is the arrival of the time to put on the crown.

At this point three cracks deepened simultaneously. First, a natural alliance of interest formed between the merchant and the lower class. The merchant had come from the lower class, had risen, but the door of the system was closed to him as well. He had three fundamental demands: equality (to compete on equal terms, because he was strong), justice (so that his capacity would not be arbitrarily expropriated), freedom (to grow without his hands and feet bound). These demands — especially freedom, justice, and the brotherhood that accompanied them — were not new inventions; they corresponded to the biological trigger points of the human and were the tension points of the constant tension between governing and governed. As the sovereign singularized, these points sharpened, and they were felt in every period of history. The merchant's distinctive move was not to invent these concepts but to bring them forward again in a way that aligned with his own structural demands. The critical point was this: the merchant articulated these concepts in the same words as the lower class but not with the same meaning — the merchant's "freedom" was the freedom of capital movement, the lower class's "freedom" was liberation from oppression; the merchant's "justice" was the security of contracts, the lower class's "justice" was the end of arbitrary taxation and forced labor. The same word, different content — homonymous but not synonymous. This overlap was not accidental: the merchant was not the sovereign, and the biological triggers applied to him as well; but he was also aware of these words' mobilizing power. There is no doubt that these concepts were used by the merchant as sincerely as they were for the lower class — only the motivations differed, while the discourse was shared.

Second, the clergy split in two. The Reformation broke the clergy's own monopoly: there was no longer a single ideological authority but multiple interpretations, multiple churches, multiple sources of legitimacy. The Protestant ethic was compatible with the merchant (work, savings, worldly success); the Catholic ethic with the aristocracy (tradition, hierarchy). The clergy was no longer a single bloc; it was experiencing power conflict within itself and was being weakened by scientific developments as well. Third, the aristocracy entered a responsibility-control paradox: the economy had become a system that no one fully understood or could fully control — finance, trade, market logic were not part of the aristocrat's education, networks recognized no borders, bubbles burst (the Tulip Mania in 1637, the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles in 1720). But the divine-right ideology assigned the aristocracy not only the right to rule but the responsibility to rule. The capacity had vanished, but the responsibility continued — and the right to rule was legitimated in part by the capacity to rule. When the capacity vanished, the questioning and erosion of the right increased.

The Enlightenment placed these cracks within a single ideological frame and sealed the aristocracy's collapse with its own hand. Reason, natural rights, the social contract, progress — the function of these principles was structural: they opened to the merchant the door that divine right had closed (competence in place of blood ties, achievement in place of lineage, popular sovereignty in place of divine right). But the critical point was this: the aristocracy supported this process. In the Reformation, in secular education, in the support of the scientific revolution, the aristocrat and the merchant were on the same side — the common enemy was the clergy. Aristocrats found the Enlightenment prestigious, invited philosophers to their courts; the fashion of "enlightened despotism" spread. But every move that weakened the clergy was in fact weakening the ground of the aristocracy's own legitimacy: the clergy was the guardian of the divine-right ideology, and when the guardian was weakened, the ideology itself became open to question. Only the aristocrat and the merchant remained as roles. This process is a historical manifestation of the three-layered power conflict defined in Article 1 (system defense, intra-paradigm position, new position competition during paradigm change): the aristocracy, while seeking to weaken its intra-paradigm rival (the clergy), lost sight of system defense; this is why the merchant found an open field for structural rise. And as we noted in Section III's discussion of the aristocracy as upper class, status calls for the powerful, power seeks status; but the two do not always meet. Sometimes the system, unable to bear the tension, transfers status to the powerful; sometimes it stays out of balance for long stretches; sometimes it breaks entirely. The ebb and flow of this process shapes the whole system.

When the spark struck in France in 1789 — the royal treasury was bankrupt, the lower class was hungry after the 1788 harvest, the bourgeoisie was paying taxes but not represented, and the Enlightenment had been translated into concrete demands — the paradigm was already cracking. The Bastille was not a beginning but the visible surfacing of accumulated structural fragility. Within three months feudal rights were abolished, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was proclaimed; within the following decade the estate system ended, church lands were nationalized, and the king was executed. The five-thousand-year paradigm broke, and globally, in every geography, the transformation unfolded stage by stage, chaotically, and at times very painfully — even in France, considered the center of this transformation.

V. The Bourgeois Paradigm

The paradigm broke; a new structure emerged. Now we must look at the anatomy of this new structure — how it diverged from the aristocratic paradigm and what internal dynamics it operates by.

The Dual Nature of the Paradigm

In section III we established the dual nature of the aristocracy: the role dynamic, the class fixed. To be aristocrat was a status; the warrior who reached that status could found a dynasty, the strengthened cleric could direct — but the upper-class position belonged to a single definition. The governing was always the aristocrat; what changed was only the path by which that aristocrat had arrived.

In the bourgeois paradigm this clarity is lost. The upper-class position is contested. There are two candidates: the bourgeoisie and the politician. Both have decision-making capacity, both bear the claim to govern, both can use the instruments of hegemony. By geography and historical context, one is on top, the other in the middle — but neither can be expelled from the paradigm, because each corresponds to an internal necessity of the structure.

Beneath this contention runs, naturally, the tension between two distinct types of corporate entity (Öztürk, 2026). The bourgeoisie is the role supported by the capital-centered corporate entity — it draws its power from the fluidity of capital, from networks of production and exchange, from economic-scale capacity. The politician is the representative of the will-centered corporate entity — drawing its power from the source of legitimacy, from the authority of legal regulation, from coercive hegemony. These two types of corporate entity are bound to each other within the existential asymmetry we saw in Section IV (The Paradigm Break): the capital-centered cannot operate without the will-centered structure (the state protects property rights, contracts, borders), and the will-centered cannot stand without the capital-centered (the tax base, economic dynamism, source production are there). The dependency is mutual; but this mutuality does not eliminate conflict, only ensures that the conflict cannot break the paradigm and prevents — or postpones — singularity.

In the aristocratic paradigm, upper-class contention was within roles — the warrior, the cleric, the aristocrat shared the same ground with different capacities, and the winner became aristocratized. In the bourgeois paradigm, the contention is between these two distinct types of corporate entity, and the winner cannot aristocratize the other. On the surface only the politician can be the upper class, but in practice the bourgeoisie finances the politician, directs him, and in some conditions even takes his place directly; yet the roles do not generally merge, because the sources of their power cannot fuse. The two are tied to different structural sources, and these sources are ontologically impermeable (Öztürk, 2026): a capital-centered structure cannot really become will-centered, a will-centered structure cannot really become capital-centered. Form-seizure, content-takeover, indirect control are possible between them; but transformation of essence is structurally impossible. This difference is determined at existence and remains until existence ends.

The politician role itself is a product of this paradigm. In the aristocratic paradigm there was no role called "the people's representative"; legitimacy came from God; the king or the aristocrat did not represent the people, he stood above them. In the new paradigm, when the source of legitimacy changed — with the shift from divine right to popular sovereignty — a new role emerged to operate that source: deciding on behalf of the people, elected by the people, governing with the claim of defending the people's interests. We will return later in this section to the historical origin of this role — whether it really represented the people or carried another function from the outset. First, however, we must complete the structural anatomy of the paradigm.

Two Variants: Liberal and Statist

The dual headship manifests historically and geographically in two main variants. Which type of corporate entity is on top, which in the middle — the answer to this question does not break the paradigm; it is determined within the paradigm and continues as a dynamic process.

Liberal Variant: The Bourgeoisie on Top

The liberal variant's origin is Western Europe; its mature form is the United States. Here the upper class is the bourgeoisie; the politician falls into the middle-class position within this frame.

Even so, in a two-party system the formula does not stay this simple. The United States, within the Physis distinction of governing classes, presents a distinctive picture: the middle and upper classes are largely defined within the frame of capital; the politician, over time, has shifted to a gray point closer to a politician–bureaucrat hybrid. Whether this shift came from the system's original design or was shaped over time is a separate debate; here it is enough to make the observation.

But today the mechanism is concrete and institutionalized. Election campaigns require capital; the bourgeoisie finances them, and effectively determines which candidate stays in the race. The lobbying apparatus translates the bourgeoisie's demands directly into law — tens of thousands of registered lobbyists in Washington, billion-dollar annual budgets, sector-by-sector dedicated representation. The revolving door is systematic: Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan executives move to the Treasury, defense industry executives to the Pentagon, technology executives to regulatory agencies; the same names return to those sectors after leaving public service. With the Citizens United ruling (2010), corporate political spending was made a constitutional right. While passive investment funds such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street steer global capital flows — the structural concretization of Article 1's V2 thesis (the corporate-entity-owned corporate entity) — political decision mechanisms are structurally reluctant to take positions against these funds' portfolios.

The clearest indicator of this structure is the content of "national security." In the liberal variant, national security has been largely equated with corporate interests: Apple's production line in China, Lockheed's arms exports, Exxon's global oil access, the dollar-dominance of the financial sector — each is framed as "national interest." This is not a rhetorical preference but a structural expression: the continuity of the capital-centered corporate entity has become the condition of the continuity of the will-centered corporate entity. The interest of one is the interest of the other — because the ground each rests on is the same.

The Trump phenomenon carries a twice-confirmed message of this variant: the lower class's diagnosis "America is no longer Great" was a reality carried to the ballot box in the first election, and is now a confirmed reality after the second. America does not see itself as a World Leader; as the upper class, it has lost its internal legitimacy test. But seen from the Physis frame, the event has a deeper structural dimension: the fusion of roles.

Whether this is an exception specific to this period or a lasting tendency, time will tell. When the structural disadvantages of the politician class — declining popularity — meet the opportunity for high-popularity capital leaders to convert that advantage into status, it will be seen whether capital can over time render the politician unnecessary. In fact, it is structurally plausible that the politician role in the United States — like the aristocrat, the cleric, and the warrior pushed aside by paradigm changes throughout history — will meet a similar fate in the maturity phase of the bourgeois paradigm; whether a ground for halting this transformation can be found is doubtful.

Returning to the structural position of capital over the politician: another manifestation of the same logic appears in the hierarchy of information flow. In early April 2026, Anthropic announced a new AI model code-named "Mythos" as a limited preview. The model demonstrated performance in finding and exploiting previously unknown security vulnerabilities ("zero-days") that surpassed most human experts; its discovery of a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD was a concrete sign of this capacity. Because of the magnitude of the risk, Anthropic did not release the model to the public; under the name "Project Glasswing," it gave limited access to Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, JPMorgan, and forty selected institutions.

On April 7, 2026, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell held an urgent, closed-door meeting at the Treasury building — not with the public or with Congress, but with the CEOs of the largest Wall Street banks: Citigroup's Jane Fraser, Morgan Stanley's Ted Pick, Bank of America's Brian Moynihan, Wells Fargo's Charlie Scharf, Goldman Sachs's David Solomon (Bloomberg, FT, CNBC, NYT, April 2026). The official rationale was the preparation of the banks' cybersecurity infrastructure against possible threats. There is no report of Congress receiving a separate briefing; on the contrary, some legislators later issued public statements such as "we want a classified briefing too," reinforcing the perception of "first the market, then the people's representatives."

This situation is a concrete manifestation of what the Physis framework foresees about the liberal variant. Whatever the official rationale, the structural outcome is this: within the system, position is taken according to the source; in the liberal variant, the politician first addresses the threats directed at the source of the variant's power, in order to protect the variant's survival. This is a question of priority — actual priorities matter more than appearances. In emergencies, market positions take precedence over bureaucratic procedure; the value losses or gains of crypto assets, cybersecurity firms, and encryption-dependent sectors must be foreseen, and the information advantage of capital holders must be preserved. The people's representatives and the people themselves are second in the flow of information; an informational flow may be provided after the problem is resolved. This priority is not concealed; it is taken as natural.

In the aristocratic paradigm, the king's decision went first to the royal council, the barons, the clerical body — not to the people. The democratic discourse of the bourgeois paradigm carries the claim of "informing the people"; but in the mature form of the liberal variant, information again follows a class hierarchy. Who the class is has changed; the direction of information flow has not. This does not make the United States an authoritarian state; but it shows that the operation of the system flows not according to an ideal democratic utopia, but within a frame of structural priorities.

There is a critical chasm between perception and structure here. From the outside, the United States appears as a politician-on-top country: the president, Congress, the constitution, democratic discourse. But the structural reality is the inverse. This chasm is a structural feature of the liberal variant.

Statist Variant: The Politician on Top

China and some authoritarian regimes represent this variant. Here the upper class is the politician — or, more precisely in China's case, the singularized and institutionalized form of the politician class, the party — and the bourgeoisie falls into the middle class.

The mechanism, again, is concrete. The party controls capital — it permits, prohibits, and when necessary expropriates. The Jack Ma case is the typical example of this structure: the founder of Alibaba, perceived to have crossed the party line, was erased from public view, his company broken up, he himself marginalized. That capital moves within the area the party permits is the norm; crossing the line is an exceptional move with foreseeable consequences. The bourgeoisie can grow rich, companies can expand, can open to global markets — but this wealth cannot be directly converted into political power. The door to the upper class is not capital but party membership and intra-party rise.

Yet the statist variant does not produce a democratic dream as the liberal variant does. It has no structural need to do so; because it draws its legitimacy from different sources, it is not forced to carry democratic discourse. This is a structural feature of the variant: the system is clear, everyone knows what kind of structure they live in. Who the leader is, how the party operates, where authority comes from — these are not concealed. While in the liberal variant the chasm between perception and structure is a systemic feature, in the statist variant such a chasm is largely absent — or much narrower.

In both variants, the system is stable as long as economic growth continues; when performance falls or internal cracks deepen, it faces structural testing. But the impact of this testing is more severe in the liberal variant; because the liberal variant's legitimacy rests largely on a single source — capitalism's claim to produce welfare — and because the structure is multinational, crisis spreads systemically. The statist variant, on the other hand, can mobilize parallel sources of legitimacy — nationalism, developmentalism, the narrative of ideological revolution — and can therefore tolerate a performance crisis for relatively longer.

Yet in both variants the fundamental structural orientation is the same. The upper class — whatever the structure — moves toward singularization; while making continuous structural investment to keep the middle class under control, to crush it when necessary, and to keep the middle class's "will to be" within the system's bounds, it seeks ways to secure its own "will to remain." This conflict continues in both variants; only the instruments used — open repression, economic dependency, ideological channeling, identity division — operate at different intensities according to the variant's character.

The two variants are also in power conflict with each other. This conflict is not merely a hegemonic rivalry between two states — the United States and China — but the encounter of representatives of two different structural models. The United States is the mature form of the multinational, capital-centered liberal variant carrying capitalism as its main ideology; China is the classic form of the statist variant, with the will-centered corporate entity dominant on a nation-state foundation. The conflict between the two variants is the global externalization of their internal middle–upper class contention: each state seeks the implicit confirmation of its own structural model, because the model's defeat means the variant's defeat. This is why the US–China tension is not merely a classic hegemonic competition between two great powers; it is a structural reckoning between the two variants of the bourgeois paradigm over which will mark the maturity phase of the paradigm.

Historical Oscillation

The contention between the politician and the merchant — or between the will-centered and capital-centered corporate-entity types behind them — is not static; even within the same geography, it oscillates historically. In the 19th-century West, the bourgeoisie was openly on top — the state was in the role of "night watchman." In the mid-20th century the politician strengthened: the welfare state, Keynesian management, planning mechanisms entered. Post-1980 neoliberalism brought the bourgeoisie back to the top — privatization, deregulation, global financialization. After the 2008 financial crisis a period of uncertainty began: populism, state intervention, pandemic management, and most recently the technology–capital–state fusion (Article 1, TAN-025).

This oscillation shows that the contention is structural and that temporary balances do not produce permanent solutions. The capital-centered and will-centered corporate entities are existentially dependent on each other (Article 1); the tension between them does not resolve, it only shifts the balance one way or the other. Periods in which one variant dominates accumulate their own internal contradictions and eventually swing back the other way — this movement stays within the paradigm.

Even so, in the West and especially in the United States — the mature form of the liberal variant — the character of the oscillation takes a specific form. Because the structure was built from the outset on capital dominance, the tension operates not on the politician–merchant axis but on the axis of whether capital itself produces an upper class. The United States in this frame is a country whose DNA is, so to speak, coded; it has a structurally different founding from other states of the world. Here the politician has never, at any period of history, been a real upper-class candidate; the structural logic of the variant has been kept closed to this from the outset.

This is at the same time an existential condition for the leaders of both variants. In the liberal variant, the politician's taking the leader's seat does not transform the variant's paradigm; likewise, in the statist variant, the rise of a merchant-oriented actor to leadership does not break the party's dominance. Even if the leader wills it, the resistance the paradigm offers against the will of a single actor is like the fate of someone who imagines they can stand before a flooding river and stop it. To slow the flow or partially shift its direction may be possible; but the flow does not stop. The leader must move within the structural logic of the variant; otherwise the end is not the paradigm's but the leader's. This is why a change of leadership is not merely a change of decision-making actor; it is a transfer of position operating within the variant's existential codes.

Structural Asymmetry

Why does the contention of two candidates not end with a winner? First, power is a dynamic phenomenon; it oscillates with conditions and time, and even the power of the same actor or role rises and falls within a spectrum. But in the case of these two roles, the matter goes beyond dynamism: the parties have different structural capacities; each has something the other does not. This asymmetry makes the contention permanent — neither can defeat the other, because what each needs in order to defeat the other is the structural property of the other.

The asymmetry operates on two axes: capacity for the will to remain, and capacity for the instruments of hegemony.

The Bourgeoisie's Asymmetry

The bourgeoisie is structurally advantaged in the will to remain. Capital passes from father to son — inheritance law protects it. Legitimacy transfer is automatic: "I am taking over my father's company" is unquestioned, even taken as normal. Forming a dynasty seems natural — the Rockefellers, Fords, Waltons, Kochs have been transmitted for nearly a century. The presumption of competence travels through inheritance: an individual from a wealthy family is socially counted as "successful," and proof of success is not demanded. What blood ties do in the aristocratic paradigm, capital ties do in the bourgeois paradigm — one legitimated by the divine-right ideology, the other by the property-right ideology.

Against this, the bourgeoisie is disadvantaged in the instruments of hegemony. Coercive hegemony is not directly in its hand; the army, the police, the judiciary pass through the state — the bourgeoisie has no armed force of its own. Ideological hegemony is built through media and intellectual apparatus, but this apparatus can show relative independence and produce critique. Even so, the capital-centered corporate entity has its own ideology — capitalism; but this ideology does not translate directly into a claim to "the right to rule," only into the secure ground of capital's legitimacy. It has no power of legal regulation; the bourgeoisie cannot make decisions on taxation, expropriation, or regulation, only seek to influence them. In legitimacy production it is indirect: there is the recognition of "the successful businessman," but it cannot structurally claim the title of "the people's representative."

The representation of capital creates difficulties in directly transitioning to a political position; at minimum, a kind of status transition is required. But this transition itself can adversely affect business success — political position politicizes the perception of the company, opens it to claims of conflict of interest. This carries the risk of harming the very source of the bourgeoisie's status existence: economic success.

This is the fundamental fragility of the bourgeoisie: solid in the will to remain, dependent on the state in operational scope and in the instruments of hegemony.

The Politician's Asymmetry

The politician is in the inverse position. He is directly advantaged in the instruments of hegemony: coercive hegemony is in his hand — army, police, judiciary, enforcement. Legitimacy production is direct — the claim of being "the representative of the people's will" structurally belongs to him, and no other actor can make this claim. Legal regulation is his authority; he can impose taxes, expropriate, regulate sectors.

But he is structurally disadvantaged in the will to remain. Legitimacy comes by election — it must be won again at every election. Father-to-son transfer is difficult; the charge of nepotism creates legitimacy erosion. Forming a dynasty contradicts democratic discourse, so it must be either concealed or carried at a legitimacy cost. Party dynasties (the Kim family in North Korea, the Assad family in Syria, the Bush and Kennedy lineages in the United States, the Gandhi–Nehru line in India) are established as exceptions but do not become the norm. Each generation must largely reproduce its legitimacy anew.

This is the fundamental fragility of the politician: solid in the instruments of hegemony, under continuous reproduction pressure in the will to remain.

The Outcome of the Asymmetry: The Permanence of Contention

These two asymmetries require each other. The bourgeoisie, to preserve its advantage in the will to remain, needs the politician's instruments of hegemony — the law, the borders, the order that protect its capital come through the politician. The politician, to compensate for his fragility in the will to remain, needs the bourgeoisie's capital — campaigns, prestige, the revolving door, post-retirement positions all flow from there.

The same conflict, when carried from the level of roles to the level of corporate-entity types, appears in starker form. At the level of actors — between politician and merchant — alliances, the revolving door, and crossings of interest bend the relationship into gray tones. At the level of corporate-entity types — between capital-centered and will-centered — the tension is more direct and clear; because corporate entities have no Nomos capacity, they operate as pure Physis, and this is observable cleanly as power conflict.

The conclusion is this: the two sides are structurally dependent on each other; this is why neither can fully swallow the other. To attempt to swallow is to risk one's own condition of existence. The contention, at both the role level and the corporate-entity level, operates as a permanent tension, not resolved. In a given variant, whichever is on top, the other falls into the middle class but stays there structurally, indissolvable. Even if the politician falls into the middle class in the liberal variant, the politician role does not disappear; even if the bourgeoisie falls into the middle class in the statist variant, the bourgeoisie is not eliminated. Because each of the two corporate-entity types supports the other's existence. The condition of existence of the capital-centered corporate entity is the system — the state, legal order, the security of property. But today the operation of states, and the operation of economic systems, is also sustained at the economic level through capital-centered corporate entities. The dependency is not one-sided; the two have come to produce each other's condition of existence (Article 1, the capital–will constant tension).

A nuance is needed at this point. Mutual dependency operates, in both variants, as the upper class producing the middle within its own structure. In the liberal variant capital is on top; but the politician is still required, so the system produces the politician from within itself — finances him, trains him, deploys him to the field. In the statist variant the party is on top; but capital is still required, so the system produces the capitalist from within itself — approves, opens space, draws boundaries. Both structures, even when not on top, make room within their own conditions of existence for the role whose existence must be sustained. This cooperation will continue as long as the two sides need each other visibly and functionally; at a point where this need diminishes or is structurally met in another form, the contention may be freed from the obligation of preserving the balance born of necessity. This possibility is the direction the Endgame Principle points to (Article 1, İLK-013).

The Shadow Upper Class

The asymmetry's manifestation in the liberal variant is striking; it is the result of a deliberately designed break from the classical state structure — the line running from Europe's absolutist monarchy tradition to the nation-state form. The bourgeoisie is the upper class, but legitimacy must appear in the politician. The system operates so as to support the bourgeoisie; but the bourgeoisie does not stand at the front of the stage, it works in the background — financing, lobbying, media control, the revolving door.

This structure is a defined category in the Physis frame: the shadow upper class (Öztürk, 2026). The visible decision-maker is one entity, the real control is elsewhere. It manifests in two forms. The external form is positioned outside the system but directs the decision-maker — the medieval Church's position over the aristocracy is the classic example of this form; the institution outside the system, but governing the decision-maker. The internal form operates inside the system, lawfully, legitimately, but invisibly — the bourgeoisie's position over the politician in the liberal variant is the modern example of this form.

The shadow upper-class structure is not a structural necessity but a structural possibility: when the source of legitimacy and the source of real power lie in different corporate-entity types, one holds the stage, the other manages the background. In the maturation process indicated in the previous section — in the Trump phenomenon, in the open prioritization of capital in information flow — this shadow structure is becoming visible. The merger of the role on stage with the role in the background may be a sign that the shadow no longer structurally needs to conceal itself. But even when the shadow upper class becomes visible, the structure does not change; it is simply no longer veiled. This can be read as a more advanced phase of upper-class hegemony. Hegemony that no longer needs a veil displays a structural confidence that it can neutralize the capacity of being questioned. It is also an energy-saving form: concealment is costly, and not having to conceal is economical.

The New Position of Old Roles

The three middle-class roles of the aristocratic paradigm — the warrior, the cleric, and the lower strata of the aristocracy — did not disappear in the bourgeois paradigm, but none of them could preserve their old positions either. All three experienced a structural retreat; each in a different way, at a different speed.

The new paradigm did not erase the old roles. The reason was structural: these roles had been born from systemic needs — defense, the production of legitimacy, coordination — and some of these needs continued in the new paradigm as well. Rather than eliminating the roles, the paradigm repositioned them, instrumentalized them; and brought one of them to the fore.

The fourth class that emerged in the aristocratic paradigm as scale grew — bureaucracy (Article 1, YÖN-001) — rose, in the bourgeois paradigm, for the first time to a position capable of generating upper-class capacity. Moreover, this became such an upper-class role that its structural responsibility dictates entering into power conflict with the politician; this is not a conflict born by accident but the product of a balance mechanism designed by the paradigm through the doctrine of separation of powers. Judicial independence, regulatory-agency autonomy, central bank independence, constitutional review — all are structural arrangements that establish bureaucracy as a balance to the politician. This is why the conflict has become not the exception but the norm.

The Aristocrat

The aristocracy ended as a paradigm, but aristocratic individuals and families adapted to the new paradigm in different ways. The will to remain (Article 1, PHY-008) operated precisely here: the paradigm changed, but actors who wanted to keep their position within the paradigm had to manage the transition to the new one.

Some were liquidated — in revolutions, in wars, in land reforms. The French aristocracy went to the guillotine, the Russian aristocracy to exile and execution, the Ottoman aristocracy melted as the empire dissolved. Some merged with the bourgeoisie — through marriage, capital union, joint enterprise. The marriages of the British aristocracy with American wealth are the classic examples of this fusion: title in exchange for money, money in exchange for title. Old lineage united with new money, both staying in the upper class of the new paradigm. Some withdrew to the symbolic level — constitutional monarchies (Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Japan), titles of nobility, ceremonial roles. Not power but prestige; not decision but stage. Some converted directly into capital — land was sold, companies were founded, investments made, families moved to wealth management. The aristocrat as a person adapted to a new role — changed class but stayed in the upper class.

The paradigm broke; the actors did not vanish with it. A significant portion of aristocratic individuals took places within the upper class of the new paradigm. This is a historical confirmation of Article 1's third-layer power-conflict thesis (the new position competition during paradigm change).

The Warrior

In the aristocratic paradigm, the warrior was a critical middle-class role. He was the carrier of coercive hegemony, could be an independent power center, and had an open door to the upper class — a successful warrior could found a dynasty, become an aristocrat. The Mamluks, the Janissaries, Rome's soldier-emperors were concrete examples of this mechanism.

In the bourgeois paradigm, the warrior was structurally instrumentalized. Coercive hegemony entered the state's monopoly: national armies, professional officers, salaried civil servants. The warrior ceased to be an independent power center; he became an instrument under the politician's command. The claim to govern was suppressed — the norm of civilian control settled in.

The structural reason for this instrumentalization is the legitimacy foundation of the paradigm. If legitimacy comes from the people, governance by armed force is structurally not legitimate. To win an election is legitimate; to stage a coup is not. The norm of civilian control is the natural product of this paradigm, not an external moral choice.

In addition, the rising upper class regarded the warrior's being an independent power as a structural threat. An independent warrior could threaten capital — through expropriation, seizure, arbitrary intervention. The warrior was made dependent on the state, and the state was made dependent on the two upper-class candidates (the bourgeoisie or the politician). The warrior thus turned into an instrument passing through a double filter.

There are exceptions: in places like Pakistan, Egypt, Myanmar, and historically Turkey, the warrior can still be a determining power center. But these are places where the paradigm has not fully settled — hybrid structures, transitional periods, systems carrying remnants of the aristocratic paradigm. The global norm has evolved toward civilian control; military coups have grown shorter, harder to gain international legitimacy, and post-coup regimes have been quickly forced to produce a "democratic" appearance. The exceptions themselves confirm the norm.

The Cleric

In the aristocratic paradigm, the cleric was the sole carrier of ideological hegemony. As we saw in Section IV (The Paradigm Break), this monopoly was shattered by the Reformation; the scientific revolution and the process of secularization deepened that shattering.

In the bourgeois paradigm, the cleric did not shrink institutionally — in many countries the church, the religious community, and religious education still carry large structures. But its structural function changed: it is no longer the source of legitimacy of the upper class but a support of legitimacy. It is part of the lower class's world of meaning, and its carrying potential has not been exhausted — but no longer to the same extent; secularization, popular culture, and digital media gradually erode the cleric's monopoly on meaning.

Its relationship with the upper class is instrumental — the politician may resort to religious discourse during election season, the bourgeoisie may gain legitimacy through philanthropy, but these relations are not continuous and constitutive. In the aristocratic paradigm the cleric crowned the king; in the bourgeois paradigm the politician uses the church in the election campaign. The direction has reversed.

The depth of this directional change deserves attention. Once the church chose the pope and the pope legitimated the king; today it can even be said that centers of power indirectly determine the pope. Disciplinary instruments such as excommunication and indulgences once carried capacities that could march kings to Canossa; today these instruments have lost their deterrent effect, because society's structural fear of religious dogma has largely eroded. Add to this the general climate of distrust toward institutional structures, and the church could not remain immune; intra-Vatican political contention, debates over financial transparency, structural ethical issues — the church has become an institution that can no longer protect its own sacred shield, both an instrument and an object of power conflict.

The new carriers of ideological hegemony — the education system, science, media, the academic apparatus, popular culture — took over the cleric's old function in fragmented form. None of them alone holds the cleric's monopoly position; each carries a different fragment. This fragmentation is itself a feature of the paradigm: not a single ideological authority, but a multi-channel ideology-production apparatus.

The limits of this structural diagnosis must also be marked. The neutralization of the church and the cleric in the upper-class struggle is not a development that kills the human's mysticism or dimension of belief. The human capacity for belief is as present today as ever. That is, secularism did not kill belief; one can say it reduced belief's effect on power dynamics.

In some regions the cleric continues to carry a political role as well — in Iran directly, in some Muslim countries indirectly, in the United States through evangelical influence. But these are manifestations from the periphery of the paradigm, not from its central pattern.

Bureaucracy

The striking thing in the bourgeois paradigm is in fact not the retreat of the old roles but the emergence of the fourth class. Bureaucracy, which emerges in the aristocratic paradigm as scale grows (Article 1, YÖN-001), became, for the first time in the bourgeois paradigm, a definitionally significant actor. Almost all of the modern state is bureaucracy; almost all of the modern large corporation is a bureaucratic apparatus.

The structural reason for this rise rests on two fundamental properties of the paradigm. First, scale: modern states and corporations are far beyond the scales of the aristocratic paradigm. To manage millions of people, billions of transactions, global networks is impossible without a bureaucratic apparatus. Second, continuity: while the bourgeois paradigm limits individual power (constitutional limits, electoral terms, separation of powers), it strengthens institutional continuity. The politician leaves; the bureaucracy remains. The corporate CEO leaves; the institutional structure remains. The individual's time is limited; the bureaucracy's time is institutional.

An important distinction is needed here. The structural positions of corporate bureaucracy and state bureaucracy are not the same. Within a corporation there are two classes: ownership and everyone within the system. The lower class experiences power conflicts within itself — between ranks, between departments, within ranks — but does not experience structural power conflict with ownership. Bureaucracy is dispersed across everyone's role in a company; support departments such as accounting, human resources, and legal work alongside the production line, but they do not carry the structural weight comparable to state bureaucracy. State bureaucracy, by contrast, is designed within the will-centered corporate entity to enter into structural power conflict with the upper class — the doctrine of separation of powers establishes this conflict as the system's balance mechanism. This is why the bureaucracy–owner tension is structurally impossible in a corporation, while the bureaucracy–politician tension is structurally normal in the state.

Returning to the will-centered structure: the temporal asymmetry the individual lives against the institutional memory of bureaucracy and the corporate entity is critical. In the aristocratic paradigm, a king remained on the throne for 30–50 years, could transform the bureaucracy over years, place his own people, rewrite institutional memory in his favor. If this struggle did not fit into a single king's lifetime, it continued through the dynasty — the dynasty itself, as a corporate entity, carried the capacity to surpass temporal subjectivity (Article 1). In the aristocratic paradigm, the contention operated at the level of the corporate entity: the dynasty corporate entity and the bureaucracy corporate entity struggled at equal time-scales, and the outcome of the struggle was open.

In the bourgeois paradigm this balance was disturbed. The politician is in position for 4–8 years, the bureaucracy for decades. Forming a dynasty is structurally not legitimate — it conflicts with democratic discourse. Party dynasties are exceptions; not the norm. The result: the contention now operates between governments compressed into shorter time slices and bureaucrats who preserve their grade and a bureaucratic apparatus that carries a certain inertia and institutional memory.

This temporal asymmetry is one of the internal tensions of the bourgeois paradigm. The upper class cannot fully control the bureaucracy. This capacity existed in the previous paradigm too — a vizier's conflict with the sultan was possible; but such a conflict counted as exception, not norm. Today the situation is the opposite: bureaucracy is far more competent, far more powerful, far larger; entering into power conflict with the politician has become the norm. Bureaucracy produces its own class existence, carries its own institutional memory, sustains its own internal dynamics.

A nuance must be underscored. The bureaucracy–upper class tension is a structural diagnosis; it carries no value judgment. This article is not building a hierarchy of "authoritarian power is effective, institutionalization is an obstacle"; institutionalization is a structural feature of the paradigm, and the existence of this conflict is the natural consequence of that feature. What is diagnosed is the internal dynamic of the paradigm — the question of which structure is "good" and which is "bad" is not a question of the Physis frame.

What the cleric's potential to direct the aristocrat (the shadow upper class) was in the aristocratic paradigm, the bureaucracy's potential to direct the politician–bourgeoisie is in the bourgeois paradigm. The background of why the structural position of bureaucracy is being redrawn in the contemporary orientation of this paradigm — especially in the integration of artificial intelligence into the institutional apparatus — is precisely this. But this orientation is the subject of subsequent articles.

The Structural Origin of the Politician Role: Three Historical Moments

The three cracks we saw in Section IV (The Paradigm Break) — the alignment of the change-demands of the merchant and the lower class, the cleric–aristocracy paradox, and the discursive apparatus of the Enlightenment — broke the paradigm and made the bourgeoisie's rise structurally possible. But for the paradigm to fully form, one more thing was required: when the source of legitimacy shifted from divine right to the people, a new role emerged to operate that source. Although the politician's origin did not in fact operate through a job description such as "to represent the lower class," the politician role today must operate within this structural frame. We must now look at how this role was historically born — because its origin says much about the structural character of the claim of "the people's representative."

The First Moment: Magna Carta (1215) — A Bargain Within the Aristocracy

Magna Carta is presented as the canonical starting point of the modern politician role. It is recounted as the founding document of democracy. When one looks at what actually happened, the picture diverges: faced with King John's intervention into the barons' traditional privileges, the barons united, cornered the king at Runnymede, and had him seal the document. The document was valid for "free men" (liberi homines) — a term that, in 13th-century England, covered a small minority of the population. Serfs, peasants, and the urban laboring population were entirely outside.

The official narrative of the British Parliament confirms this reading: the Magna Carta page on parliament.uk states clearly that the document was designed not as a universal declaration of rights but to protect the barons' own rights against the power of the king. The majority of modern historiography agrees with this reading; the reading of Magna Carta as a universal rights document is a myth produced in the 17th century by jurists like Edward Coke as a political instrument against the king's claim of divine right. This myth had effect not only in England, but also among the American colonists and subsequently in the founding of the US Constitution — that is, even the discursive ground of the liberal variant rested on a later-produced reading of history.

The document protected the barons' rights against the king's power; it is structurally a bargain document within the aristocracy. Power was broken — but in whose favor? In favor of the aristocracy. Structurally, this is a moment in the internal contention of the aristocratic paradigm — the structural resistance of the barons against the king's singularization tendency over them. Not a new paradigm; a redrawing of the old paradigm's internal balance.

The Second Moment: The Shaping of Parliament — The Aristocrat–Merchant Coalition

In the following centuries, the structure expanded. In 1265, in his effort to seize power, Simon de Montfort added city representatives for the first time alongside the barons — not a proto-democratic representative organ, but a search for partisan support. In 1341 Parliament split into two wings: the House of Lords (aristocrats and high clergy) and the House of Commons. The name "House of Commons" is misleading; those who sat there as "knights of the shire" were landowners holding the title of knight, and the "burgesses" were merchants and wealthy townspeople. From 1430 onward, suffrage was restricted to men holding property worth 40 shillings annually (a stratum constituting only a few percent of the population at the time); the great majority of the population remained outside.

Structurally, Parliament was the arena where the aristocracy and the rising merchant class bargained with the king. The structural rise of the merchant we saw in section IV — making the state dependent on merchant capital — made the demand for political representation structurally inevitable. The first politicians were the representatives of this coalition: they did not represent the people, they were the representatives bargaining with the king on behalf of the upper classes' internal balance.

The Third Moment: The English Civil War (1649) — The First King Falls

The first king to be executed was not the French Louis XVI but the English Charles I. The English Civil War (1642–1651) was the armed turn of the conflict between Parliament and the king; Parliament won, the king was executed, Cromwell's Republic was established.

The structural conditions of this regicide are striking. England at that date was the rising financial and trading center of the world; merchant corporate entities like the East India Company had become actors at the scale of empires; the contention between king and merchant was at its peak. The fall of the king at the height of the merchant's rise is no coincidence; Cromwell's post-power decisions clarify the causal sequence of the process: trade liberty expanded, the Navigation Acts protected English merchants, colonial expansion accelerated.

This early experiment "failed" — the monarchy was restored in 1660. But the seeds had been planted. The 1688 Glorious Revolution made the supremacy of Parliament permanent; the king now governed together with Parliament, no longer alone. The politician role gradually developed in England: the Whig and Tory parties formed, Parliament professionalized, elections became regular. The bourgeoisie gained power within this system — without a revolution as violent as France's, by a bloody evolution.

The Lower Class's Belated Awareness: The Chartist Movement

In the 19th century in England, the Chartist movement was one of the lower class's first structural mobilizations. Its demand was the "People's Charter." Its argument pointed to a structural pattern: the nobles had taken their rights in 1215, the middle class had taken its rights with the 1832 Reform Act; what about the lower class? Since Magna Carta, every breaking of power had largely resulted in favor of the upper classes. The Chartists saw this pattern and produced a systematic demand. The movement largely failed; the demands were partially accepted only decades later. But the observation was correct: throughout the historical construction of the paradigm, the lower class was not at the table at any stage but under the table.

But here a deeper structural question arises. What kind of class structure did the Chartist movement carry? Looking at its leadership cadre — Feargus O'Connor (a lawyer of aristocratic origin) and William Lovett (a self-educated carpenter) — the movement did not belong to any of the classical middle-class roles. Not from the warrior, the cleric, the merchant, the lower strata of the aristocracy, nor the rising bourgeoisie — roles that had legitimate place within the paradigm — but the birth pang of a wholly new kind of middle class: the political professional, fed by lower-class source-hegemony, speaking in lower-class discourse, but structurally carrying the will to govern. The industrial workers who formed the base were the lower class; they mobilized, held meetings, signed petitions, moved with their own agency. The movement was the symbiosis of these two layers — a new type of leadership in the process of rising into the middle class, with a mobilized lower-class base.

This structural novelty made systemic resistance inevitable. The bourgeoisie had taken suffrage in 1832 by bargaining; because it was already a class with legitimate place within the paradigm, with capacity recognized. The Chartists were trying to establish a role the paradigm had not yet recognized: "the professional politician speaking on behalf of the lower class." This role did not fit the categories of the existing paradigm, and the system responded with coercive hegemony — the Newport Rising was suppressed, the petitions rejected, the leaders imprisoned.

The temporal asymmetry from Article 1 finds concrete manifestation here. Change does not happen in a day; within the temporal subjectivity of corporate entities, evolution stretches over time-spans exceeding human lifetimes. Individuals transform — Lovett rises from carpenter to political leadership — but when transformed, the system he encounters has not yet transformed. The reflexes of the old paradigm, the resistance of formed power dynamics, are still actively at work. The individual is ahead within his own temporality; the system is behind within its own temporality. This gap produces a tragic structural outcome: the transforming individuals are subjected to the response of the not-yet-transformed system. Lovett died in 1877; the full suffrage they demanded came in 1918. Actors transform, but the corporate entity operates within its own temporality and eventually — when the structural logic of the paradigm makes it inevitable — must recognize the new role. The system could not prevent the role from being born; it only controlled the birthing process within its own temporality.

This double-layered character is the prototype of today's democratic infrastructure. All modern political parties — independent of their ideological color — are continuations of this chain. Right or left, conservative or liberal, populist or centrist, all rest on the leadership of middle-class professionals speaking "on behalf of the people," with a mobilized lower-class base. From the Chartists to today, the discourse has stayed the same; the structural position has stayed the same. The only thing that has changed: professionalization has grown, campaign machines have been built, the base has moved away from real agency into a vote pool. The double-layered character between discourse and real structural position is the historical birth certificate of the modern politician role.

The Structural Character of the Politician Role

All this historical flow clarifies the structural origin of the politician role. The first politicians were not the people's representatives — they were the representatives of power-holding classes bargaining with the king. First the spokesmen of the aristocracy, then of the aristocracy–merchant coalition, then of the bourgeoisie. The concept of "the people's representative" came much later — and even when it came, whether it really represented the people or carried other interests under the claim of representing the people remains, today, an open structural question.

This historical origin connects with contemporary patterns. In the liberal variant, the running of election campaigns on capital, the legalization of lobbying, the institutionalization of the revolving door — these are not deviations from the structural character of the politician role but manifestations faithful to its origin. The role was from the outset a bargaining instrument of the upper classes; the contemporary operation is the form this origin has matured into over centuries.

The discourse of "the people's representative" is a structurally necessary apparatus of legitimacy — because the source of legitimacy evolved from divine right toward the lower class, the transformation into a role bearing the claim of representing the people is a structural necessity. But the discourse need not align with its structural origin; the gap between discourse and real function is part of the paradigm's ordinary operation. As this gap widens, the legitimacy test (Article 1, MEŞ-012) directed at the bourgeois paradigm and its actors turns negative — but this test affects the two upper-class candidates asymmetrically. Because the bourgeoisie does not anchor its legitimacy to the lower class, it is little affected by the negative test; the politician, who derives legitimacy directly from the claim of "the people's will," is heavily affected by this erosion. Even so, the test's slide into the negative does not break the paradigm; it remains an intra-paradigm expression of the tension between discourse and structure.

Who Is the Lower Class?

The lower class is not a homogeneous mass. In terms of income, status, working conditions, and security, it covers a wide spectrum: unskilled workers, day laborers, the unemployed, service-sector employees, skilled workers, low-level civil servants, professionals (lawyer, doctor, engineer, bureaucrat, teacher), the petit bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, small business owners, artisans). The income gap between them can be vast; the difference in lifestyle between a surgeon and a daily cleaner is incomparable.

But the structural criterion is the same: no claim to govern. The lawyer enters cases; he does not govern. The doctor heals patients; he does not govern. The engineer builds bridges; he does not govern. The bureaucrat applies; he does not decide. The small business owner operates his shop; he does not attempt to govern the system. High income, prestigious status, professional success — none of these carries these people into the upper or middle class, because they are not actors of power conflict; they continue to be its objects. Class is defined not by income or status but by position in power conflict (Article 1).

The Open-Door Myth

In the aristocratic paradigm, the door to the upper class was structurally closed for the lower class. There was no blood tie, no claim of divine right; nobility, in exceptional cases aside, could not be bought. The individual from the lower class would stay in the lower class until death; so would his children.

In the bourgeois paradigm, this door was theoretically opened. "Anyone can be rich," "anyone can be president," "the individual rising by his own labor" — these claims are among the ideological foundations of the paradigm. The myth of the self-made man, the American Dream, the narratives of "the entrepreneur who came out of the village to build the world" — all serve the same structural function.

In practice, the door is very narrow. Transition into the bourgeoisie requires the accumulation of capital; the accumulation of capital is structurally impossible for the great majority. Transition into the politician class requires financing and networks; these are either already possessed or supplied by those who possess them. Individual success stories exist — Bezos, Zuckerberg, politicians from nowhere — but these are statistically the exception, not the rule. Moreover, the origin stories of these exceptions are debated: behind the "self-made" narrative, traces of military research programs (for example, DARPA's role in the technologies behind the internet/GPS) or institutional investment networks have been suggested. This need not be read as a deliberate design; but the underlying mechanism is structural. The strong defend in order to preserve their power — this is the structural manifestation of the will to remain (Article 1, PHY-008). This defense operates in two directions: neutralizing existing threats, and controlling the birth channels of yet-unformed potential threats. The open door is a refined form of this control: the door appears open, but the capacity to pass through it — capital, network, cultural code — has already been distributed within the system. Those who start strong, and those who are strong within the system, automatically preserve their positions in newly opened channels as well. Social mobility research consistently shows how narrow the door is in practice.

The structural function of the open-door myth is, in practice, not to open the door; it is to keep the lower class within the system, to transfer the responsibility for failure from the system to the individual, and to make the structural causes of success in the system invisible. The same mechanism operates on the political plane: the responsibility for the bad policies of elected candidates is also placed on the individual — "you elected him." This double transfer makes the paradigm resilient against the lower class. Because if the door is perceived as open, individuals interpret their own systemic disadvantages not structurally but individually: "I did not work hard enough," "I could not seize opportunities," "I was unlucky." It is the individual, not the system, that is questioned. This is one of the most powerful mechanisms of hegemony; it is far more effective than the aristocratic paradigm's openly structurally inequal ideology, because it consumes resistance from within. Whether or not it is open to conspiracy theory or speculation, what cannot fundamentally be denied is one thing: the existence of the mechanism, and its consequences.

Filtered Participation and the Capacity for the Legitimacy Test

The position of the lower class is systematically different in the two paradigms. In the aristocratic paradigm it was outside; legally unequal, without political representation, with low mobilization capacity, with the door to the upper class structurally closed; the system operated above them, the lower class was positioned as the system's object — not its subject. In the bourgeois paradigm this picture changed radically: the lower class is within the system, legally equal, possessed of political representation, with high mobilization capacity, with the door to the upper class theoretically open. Legal equality was recognized — before the law, not aristocrat against peasant, but everyone a citizen. Political rights were granted: suffrage, the right to petition, the right to organize; gradually, through struggle, but recognized nonetheless. Unions, parties, civil society institutions became legitimate; the lower class became able to mobilize, voice its demands, bargain. Yet the structural position — bearing no claim to govern, not controlling means of production, lacking access to decision mechanisms — did not change. What changed is not the definition but the form of the lower class's relation to the system.

The structural character of the lower class's political participation must be looked at more closely. The bourgeois paradigm grants the lower class suffrage, political representation, and capacity to organize. These are real capacities; they integrate the lower class into the system, and they constitute a structural improvement on its aristocratic-paradigm position. But the character of this capacity must be defined correctly. The improvement, while not the main leap that breaks the paradigm, is the rendering of the lower class more functional within the paradigm.

First, let us clarify the structural limit. No one can "lift" the lower class to the upper class — this is not a practical difficulty but a conceptual impossibility. If a group could be structurally lifted, it would not be lower class to begin with; the lower class is by definition the whole of those who do not carry the will to govern and the structural capacity to back that will (section III). Individual transitions are possible and do not change the ontological reality of the class.

The modern political process operates within a mechanism that carries this structural limit. The candidate-determination layer — who can be a candidate, which parties can enter the race, which policies can be on the discussion table, how campaigns are financed, who has access to the media — is structurally outside the lower class. The actors who determine this layer are in the upper or middle class. The lower class's "democratic participation" operates at a subsequent layer: choosing among pre-determined candidates. But the choice layer itself is also unreliable: leaving uninformed, misinforming, agenda manipulation, fear production, framing imposition — all of these can largely determine the structural orientation of choice. Sometimes two candidates, neither of whom will act in the lower class's interest, are placed before the lower class; in this case the concept of "election" becomes empty of content, but the mechanism still appears to have produced democratic legitimacy.

This observation should not prevent us from correctly understanding what the lower class gained in this paradigm. During the founding of the bourgeois paradigm, the lower class's will had to be officially recognized as the system's source of legitimacy. The three cracks we saw in Section IV (The Paradigm Break) — the alignment of the merchant's and the lower class's change-demands, the cleric–aristocracy paradox, the discursive apparatus of the Enlightenment — created this necessity. The result is this: the lower class's power in this paradigm is officially recognized source-hegemony.

The structural foundation of source-hegemony is this. The lower class's numerical existence, productive labor, conscriptability, status as the tax base — these are necessary resources of the system. No system, and therefore no upper class, can stand without the lower class; the constant tension between governing and governed (Article 1) is the consequence of this structural dependency. The bourgeois paradigm openly recognizes this resource dependency — constitutional order, suffrage, citizenship, legal equality are the institutional expressions of this recognition. In the aristocratic paradigm, this dependency existed but was not recognized; the lower class was used as a resource, dismissed as a will. The bourgeois paradigm had to lift this veil.

Moreover, the power of lower-class movement in the paradigm break — the French Revolution and the waves that followed are the clearest examples — served as a structural warning to the upper class. Recognition is not only the consequence of necessity; it also operates as an integration strategy that makes the lower class a partner in the system — even if not a deliberate design, this is the structural outcome. The essence of the mechanism: when you make everyone a partner in the system you build, resistance against the system becomes harder. Legal equality, citizenship, suffrage — these are on the one hand the official recognition of source-hegemony, and on the other hand instruments for forging a partnership bond: making the lower class part of the system's legitimacy in order to make structural opposition more difficult. In the aristocratic paradigm the lower class was outside the system; the legitimacy of revolt was clear. In the bourgeois paradigm the lower class is partner of the system; when it positions itself against the system, it must also undermine its own consent.

The contemporary manifestation of this mechanism can be observed everywhere: voters' continuing partisanship for leaders and parties making decisions against their own interests — even while seeing those decisions — shows how this partnership bond works in practice. Recognition and defense are two faces of the same movement.

The structural outcome of source-hegemony is the placing of the legitimacy test at the center of the system. In this paradigm, the system theoretically accepts the continuous testing of its own legitimacy. Elections, freedom of the press, courts, audit mechanisms, civil society, the right to protest — these turn the legitimacy test from an external threat into an institutional flow. In the aristocratic paradigm the test was external; it erupted as revolt or revolution. In the bourgeois paradigm the test operates internally, continuously, and institutionalized. The lower class does not govern, does not determine the governance, cannot even always make a free choice among what is placed before it — but it can continuously transmit the legitimacy test into the structure.

This may look like a small difference but it is a vast structural gain. It embodies, by translating it to the systemic scale, the ontological status of the lower class. Scott's concept of "weapons of the weak" (Scott, 1985) describes the hidden, indirect, everyday techniques of resistance of those without power. But in the bourgeois paradigm the lower class's capacity is not hidden or indirect; it is officially recognized source-hegemony, institutionally embedded, constitutionally protected. The structural consequences of this capacity are concrete: periods of legitimacy crisis, waves of populism, periods of institutional distrust, intra-paradigm reform pressures — all are manifestations of this lower-class hegemony.

The structural threshold of this hegemony must be made clear. The concession granted is not an ordinary feedback capacity. The lower class can communicate, on the individual plane, dissatisfaction with a policy or a leader; this is intra-paradigm pressure. But the structural outcome of recognition is deeper: when the lower class reaches its limit, it can carry through the same channel a signal of legitimacy refusal directed at the totality of the system. When this signal rises to a high level, everything that gives the upper class its upper-class status — institutional power, economic position, cultural legitimacy — comes under tension, because all of it is structurally tied to the recognized source of legitimacy. Here the structural weakness of what looks strong comes to light: the upper class cannot exist without the lower class, but the lower class can live with different upper classes. This asymmetry turns the lower class's unchannelable signal not into an ordinary political reaction but, from the upper class's standpoint of necessity, into an ontological threat. Historical and contemporary observation confirms this: politicians and systems fear not the organized, controllable crowds, but the unchannelable crowds. It is less a question of numbers than a question of channelability; because an uncontrollable crowd means a potential to carry a signal of legitimacy directed at the totality of the system.

For this very reason, this hegemony is a structural problem for the upper and middle class. Within the frame of inter-class power conflict, continuous structural investment is made in order to neutralize this capacity of the lower class. This investment cannot be open repression — open repression directly produces legitimacy loss and shakes the foundation of the paradigm. This is why the strategy operates in the direction of channeling. Through agenda setting, the lower class's real demands are made invisible, replaced by debates the media imposes. Through identity division, the lower class is set against itself; recognition of its shared structural position is made difficult. Information manipulation — disinformation, confusion, unreal frames — prevents structural diagnosis. Fear production suppresses the prefrontal cortex, eroding Nomos capacity. The economy of consumption and attention diverts political energy to other channels. Even when resistance movements succeed, they are taken into the system, their demands softened, structural change substituted by symbolic gains.

There is a structural reason these strategies are so effective on the lower class: the lower class's own internal duality eases this work from within. The lower class is the only class that can use Nomos capacity without instrumentalization — capacities such as empathy, solidarity, sacrifice are most authentically experienced here. But it does not apply this capacity to the evaluation of leaders; in choosing leaders it uses the Physis frame. This frame is internalized both intuitively (from one's own survival intuition) and through teaching (from the system's continuously produced definition of "good leader"). Because its own material existence is tied to the power of the corporate entity that governs it, when it says "good leader" it measures by Physis criteria (power, effect, durability); even during its own mobilization, it moves not with the goal of breaking the structure but of taking a better position within it. That is, the lower class is the carrier of Nomos but the evaluator of Physis. It cannot use the capacity it possesses to change its own situation; because the conditions of survival do not allow it to do so. This paradox is not the expression of the lower class's structural passivity but of its structural compression — and one of the deepest manifestations of paradigmatic hegemony. Hegemony tries to break resistance to its own expansion by leaning also on this duality.

The combined effect of these strategies and the internal duality is that the lower class's source-hegemony is rendered effectively powerless in practice. This hegemony belongs structurally to the lower class, is constitutionally recognized, operates institutionally — but its structural effect is continuously kept within the frame of the middle and upper class. The system does not silence the lower class's voice; it manages the structural effect of that voice. This management operates with similar apparatus in both variants through different ideologies: in the liberal variant the myth of "equal opportunity," in the statist variant the discourse of "collective progress" — different instruments, the same outcome.

Compared with the aristocratic paradigm, this mechanism is a far more refined form of hegemony. In the aristocratic paradigm the lower class's power was not recognized; in the bourgeois paradigm it is recognized, but the effect of the recognized power is structurally dissolved. Visible equality and official recognition are the most powerful veil that structural inequality can wear; the double-layered character between placing the lower class at the center of discourse and structurally keeping it underneath is the characteristic feature of the paradigm.

Falsification Note

If it can be systematically shown that the hegemony-generating roles throughout history did not expand within a particular limit but by continuously producing new families of capacities — that is, if a paradigm-transforming fifth family of capacities, beyond the four families this article identifies (force, meaning, capital, institutional operation), is demonstrated to exist — then the "limited roles" thesis is invalid.

A narrower falsification: if historical or contemporary examples are found in which the structural asymmetry of the bourgeois paradigm (the bourgeoisie in the will to remain, the politician in the instruments of hegemony) is resolved by one side fully swallowing the other, the thesis of the structural permanence of intra-paradigm contention is called into question. Another narrow falsification: if it is systematically shown that bureaucracy, through temporal asymmetry, does not become a structural power center in contemporary democracies — that it is continuously controlled successfully by the politician — then the thesis "bureaucracy as the rising actor" becomes invalid.

Contemporary paradigm analysis (the V3–V4 orientation, the becoming-visible of the shadow upper class, the dissolution of the lower class's source-hegemony) is presented at the level of structural diagnoses; concrete historical cases and detailed mechanism tests are the subject of subsequent articles.

VI. Conclusion: The Last Word on Structure

The pattern we saw repeating itself along the spine of this article was this: actors changed, rules changed, ideology changed, the source of legitimacy changed — but the structural positions themselves continued. The upper class exists; who it is changes, its existence does not. The middle class exists; those who carry the claim to govern but are not yet on top. The lower class exists; everyone who carries no claim to govern. Power conflict exists; its rules change, it itself does not. Hegemony exists; its instruments change, its function is the same.

But the structure did something more than "remain": it deepened. In the aristocratic paradigm the lower class's inequality was visible; in the bourgeois paradigm it was made invisible. In the aristocratic paradigm ideological hegemony passed through a single channel — the cleric; in the bourgeois paradigm it became a multi-channel, continuous, institutionalized apparatus. In the aristocratic paradigm individual power was decisive; in the bourgeois paradigm the corporate entity took the place of the individual, and with the V3–V4 orientation, artificial intelligence is about to take the place of the human. The structure is not merely continuing — it is evolving.

The Paradigm at Maturity

Today's world is living through the maturity period of the bourgeois paradigm. This maturity shows itself through several structural signs.

In the liberal variant, the shadow upper class is becoming progressively visible. For a long time the politician stood at the front of the stage, the bourgeoisie managed the background; the intermediary tier was preserved as the legitimacy apparatus. The Trump phenomenon, the direct merchant–politician fusion, the open institutionalization of lobbying, the open equation of national security with corporate interest, the flow of critical information first to capital — all show that the shadow has lifted its veil. The structure is not changing; it simply no longer needs the veil.

In the statist variant, a similar maturity manifests in different form. China's party–state–capital fusion (Article 1, TAN-025), the party's direct control of technology giants and capital flows, the unified deployment of foreign policy and economic influence through the Belt and Road — these are the maturation of the will-centered upper class's capacity to draw the capital-centered structure into itself.

The surface of the two variants is different; the structural logic is the same: the upper class — whatever the structure — is making continuous investment in the direction of strengthening its own structural position, and this is appearing as momentum.

Corporate Entities Are Governing Corporate Entities

In addition to all these observations, one further observation can be made. When we look at the present from the Physis frame, what we see is that we have reached a new stage in the governing dominance of corporate entities. In the past — in the aristocratic paradigm, and even in earlier phases of the bourgeois paradigm — corporate entities existed (the state, the dynasty, the church, the company), but the good governance of these corporate entities depended on the individual. The good king, the good president, the good CEO, the good party leader were hoped for; it was assumed that the individual's Nomos capacity could leave its mark on the orientation of the corporate entity.

Today, corporate entities are governing corporate entities — companies are governed by investment funds, the funds by algorithmic systems, the state by bureaucracy, the bureaucracy by institutional processes, the media by algorithms, the algorithms by AI systems. And the fact that this is so is no longer merely a reality; it is an expected and preferred condition. "Corporate governance" has become the definition of good governance; "personal governance" is structurally counted as problematic.

This temporal asymmetry also shapes the contemporary orientation of the paradigm. For the upper class, the institutional resistance of the bureaucracy — its decades-long temporal accumulation, its class autonomy, its being a channel of upward movement for the middle class, the potential resistance carried at every node of the human intermediary chain when applying force against the lower class — is a structural problem for singularization. The structural solution to this problem is the replacement of the human bureaucrat by artificial intelligence. This orientation is not merely a technological choice; it is a structural pressure coming from the internal dynamic of the paradigm. An apparatus that applies the upper class's flow of will without dilution, that does not produce its own class existence, that carries temporal continuity on the upper class's behalf — the V3 (AI-steered) and subsequently V4 (AGI-symbiotic) corporate-entity types (Article 1) are the concrete orientations of this pressure. This orientation is the direct product of the internal dynamic exhibited in the article: the temporal asymmetry of bureaucracy, the investment in dissolving the lower class's source-hegemony, the upper class's need to apply the flow of will without dilution — when the three come together, the race in the V3–V4 orientation becomes not merely a technological race between states but a structural necessity for the tensions among classes within the system. (This thesis will be addressed in Article 8 of the Nomos series, The Transformation of the Four Classes.)

This is a wholly different historical moment. We live in a universe of corporate entities governed by corporate entities; the corporate entity's taking the place of the individual was a phase of the paradigm; the artificial intelligence's taking the place of the human within the corporate entity itself is the next phase.

VII. The Bridge

In this article we mapped out the structure: which roles, which structural positions, which historical flow, which contemporary manifestations. But the structure is only half the picture on its own. Within the structure, the actors who operate — leaders, bureaucrats, individuals at the head of corporate entities — by which structural mechanics are they shaped, by which internal dynamics do they move?

In the next article — Actors — we will pass from the map of the structure to the ontology of the actors who operate within it: by which structural mechanics they are shaped, by which internal dynamics they move. Later articles will then address how the mature-phase structure of the paradigm may move toward a new ontological break through the V3–V4 orientation — the direction the Endgame Principle (İLK-013) of Article 1 points to lies on the horizon of this deepening.

Limitations

The framework presented here is subject to several explicit limitations that bear on its scope and force.

First, the historical material on which this article draws is predominantly Western and Eurasian in scope. The aristocratic paradigm is examined across a wider geography — Ancient Egypt, Han China, Gupta India, the Ottoman Empire — but the paradigm break, the structural rise of the merchant role, and the three historical moments of the politician role's emergence (Magna Carta, the shaping of Parliament, the English Civil War) are heavily anchored in European, and specifically English, historical material. The author argues that this geographic concentration reflects a structural fact — the necessary conditions for the paradigm break converged in European geography and not elsewhere — but the empirical adequacy of this claim depends on detailed comparative analysis of why analogous structural conditions did not produce paradigm breaks in other civilizations (China's commercial revolutions of the Song period, the Indian Ocean merchant networks, the Ottoman âyân class). The present article advances the structural thesis without supplying that full comparative apparatus; the multi-volume historical works on which the article rests provide more extensive grounding, but they themselves remain unpublished, and the comparative material is unevenly distributed.

Second, full engagement with classical traditions of class theory and political sociology (Marx, Weber, Mills, Wallerstein, Tilly, Mann, Bourdieu) is reserved for the forthcoming book. The "Position in Existing Literature" section above is necessarily compressed and does not constitute systematic comparison. Scholars working closely within these traditions — particularly those whose central commitments lie in the Marxist analysis of the bourgeoisie or in the Weberian analysis of bureaucratic rationalization — may find the brief framing inadequate. Readers seeking that engagement should consult the book upon its publication.

Third, the framework was constructed by a single independent researcher without the corrective pressure of peer review during its formation. The historical narrative advanced here — that the merchant role's rise is the sole radical role-transformation in five thousand years, that the politician role originates as an aristocratic bargaining instrument and only later acquires its "representative of the people" cast, that the bourgeois paradigm has matured into corporate-entity-governed-by-corporate-entity — is a synthetic reading of long historical durations conducted without the formal disciplinary checks that academic historians and political sociologists routinely apply. The author has sought to mitigate this through systematic self-falsification; this article specifies several falsification conditions of its own (the "fifth family of hegemonic capacity" test, the "full mutual swallowing" test, the "successful bureaucratic control" test). But the absence of formal peer review during the inductive phase remains a methodological cost that must be acknowledged.

Fourth, certain core claims — particularly those concerning the contemporary V3–V4 orientation, the structural pressure toward AI-replacement of bureaucracy, and the dissolution of the lower class's source-hegemony — are forward-looking and necessarily speculative. They are presented as structural inferences from the framework's principles, not as empirical predictions. Their falsification will be possible only as the trajectories they describe either materialize or fail to materialize. The article also reserves detailed mechanism tests of these contemporary diagnoses for subsequent articles in the series; what is presented here operates at the level of structural diagnosis, not mechanism-level demonstration.

Fifth, the methodological strategy of deferring engagement with canonical theory carries its own risk: independent reinvention of concepts already developed by others. The "structural identity of upper and middle classes" thesis, the politician-merchant convergence analysis, the bureaucracy-as-fourth-governing-class formulation — each of these may overlap, in part, with formulations elsewhere in the literature. Where the framework's terminology or claims overlap with existing traditions, the overlap is acknowledged as a structural convergence rather than as borrowing. Whether such convergences strengthen the framework (by independent confirmation of similar observations) or weaken it (by suggesting the framework adds little to existing work) is a judgment readers will make.

These limitations do not, in the author's view, undermine the framework's central contributions. They do, however, define the scope within which those contributions should be evaluated.

Concept Glossary: The Physis Concepts Appearing in This Article

Part A: Concepts Drawn from the Framework

Core Concepts

• Physis (Öztürk, 2026): The default state. The universal dynamic that dictates the distinction of strong and weak and governs power conflict. Carries both destructive (aggression, dominance, competition) and balancing (empathy, justice, reciprocity) mechanisms.
• Nomos (Öztürk, 2026): A capacity born within Physis. It rises in linear time-consciousness from the combination of memory and death-awareness. Produces three things: choice, scale, temporal symbolic selfhood. Can be constructive or destructive; morally neutral.
• Structural Friction Differential (Öztürk, 2026): The balancing mechanism works in close proximity and ceases to operate as scale grows; the destructive mechanism operates independently of scale. This difference is the fundamental asymmetry that carries the entire structure of the theory.
• Legitimacy Test (Öztürk, 2026): The continuous testing process of power. It has two phases: the instrument test ("is the sword in hand?") and the will test ("is there intent to bring the sword down?"). The test is bidirectional; the leader seeks legitimacy, the lower class evaluates.
• Being / Remaining (Öztürk, 2026): The two fundamental claims of existence. Being — to exist now; remaining — to also exist tomorrow. They take new meaning in the governing classes: the middle class wants "to be," the upper class wants "to remain," the lower class wants "to survive."

Power Dynamics

• The Will to Be (Öztürk, 2026): The drive that pulls into power conflict. Biologically grounded. In the leadership context, it aims at passing through power conflict.
• The Will to Remain (Öztürk, 2026): The drive that establishes hegemony. The motivation to preserve the current power position. For the individual, biological remaining; for the leader, statusal remaining; for the corporate entity, institutional remaining.
• Singularization Principle (Öztürk, 2026): The orientation of power toward concentration in a single will. From tribes to states, from companies to monopolies — at every level, power tends to centralize. The Will to Be pulls the individual into conflict (biological); the mechanics of conflict push the system toward a single will (structural).
• Continuity Principle (Öztürk, 2026): Power conflict continues in every interaction, condition, and scale. The dynamic operating between two individuals operates between two companies as well, between two states as well.
• Endgame Principle (Öztürk, 2026): Power conflict continues until a single will remains. From the moment two wills exist, the potential is present, and it vanishes only when a single will remains.
• Phase Change (Öztürk, 2026): Not a class change but a change of motivation and position. The revolutionaries' shift, upon taking power, from the motivation of "being" to the motivation of "remaining." What changes is the actors, not the dynamic.

Governing Classes and Corporate Entity

• The Four Governing Classes (Öztürk, 2026): Structural categories reproduced in every system. Upper class (remaining), middle class (being), lower class (surviving), bureaucracy (position protection). Its difference from Marxist class theory: defined according to position in power conflict, not relation to the means of production. Has a fractal structure — repeats at every scale.
• Structural Identity of the Upper and Middle Classes (Öztürk, 2026): The distinction between the upper and middle class is not structural but positional. They carry the same motivations, the same reflexes, the same singularization dynamic. The explanation of why revolutions do not produce lasting structural transformation lies here.
• The Lower-Class Paradox (Öztürk, 2026): The lower class is the only class that can use Nomos capacity without instrumentalization, but in evaluating leaders it looks through the Physis frame — conquest, power, expansion are read as success. The potential of hegemony is born from this paradox.
• Class Hegemony Motivations (Öztürk, 2026): Remaining for the upper class, being for the middle class, literal survival for the lower class. This motivational differentiation makes class behavior in power conflict predictable.
• The Corporate-Entity Paradox (Öztürk, 2026): The human survives with others; the corporate entity through the absence of others. The human carries Nomos capacity; the corporate entity does not — operates as pure Physis. The human can switch between two modes; the corporate entity is locked into one mode.
• Hybrid Species (Öztürk, 2026): The ontological status of the corporate entity. The symbiosis of human and idea. Three fundamental properties: rational decision-making, will capacity derived from scale, the potential for immortality.
• Opposite Survival Formulas (Öztürk, 2026): The human's formula requires cooperation and solidarity; the corporate entity's formula requires the disappearance of rivals — the human included.
• Capital-Centered Entity (Öztürk, 2026): Companies, banks, holdings. Corporate entities focused on profit maximization and capital accumulation. Conduct their conflicts through economic value.
• Will-Centered Entity (Öztürk, 2026): States, political parties. Corporate entities focused on power, authority, and social legitimacy. Conduct their conflicts through territory, influence, legitimacy.
• V1 / V2 Corporate-Entity Versions (Öztürk, 2026): V1 — human-managed corporate entity; the source is the human, possible to the extent the competitive pressure of Nomos permits. V2 — corporate-managed corporate entity; companies are managed by funds, states by parties; the door of Nomos narrows.
• Temporal Subjectivity (Öztürk, 2026): The mismatch between the long-term decision processes of corporate entities and the limited attention span and lifespan of the individual. Centuries-long doctrines — like the Monroe Doctrine — are products of this temporal difference.
• Fusion (Öztürk, 2026): The integration of the upper class with the bureaucracy. Two forms: full fusion (party–state — China, the Soviet Union) and permeable fusion (the revolving door — the US model). Its structural outcome: the source of the system shifts from the lower class to the upper class.
• Paradigm (Physis definition) (Öztürk, 2026): Unlike Kuhn, defined not epistemologically but ontologically and politically. It answers not the question "How do we produce knowledge?" but "How is power distributed?"

Hegemony

• Hegemony (Physis definition) (Öztürk, 2026): The answer given to the question "Why should I rule you?" Differentiates along three axes: real/manipulative, internal/external orientation, types of source. Operates at every scale — from individual to state.
• The Six Types of Hegemony (Öztürk, 2026): Coercive (physical force), source (economic dependency), knowledge (information asymmetry), bond (social network), institutional (structural power), ideological (worldview control). Ideological hegemony operates above the other five.
• Full Hegemonic Breakdown (Öztürk, 2026): Requires the accumulation of five conditions: fusion with the system, the shifting of source-hegemony, the dysfunction of the legitimacy test, ideological singularity, the concentration of types of hegemony.
• Source Hegemony (Öztürk, 2026): The only hegemonic capacity the lower class possesses. The system's existence is tied to the lower class — without the source, the system, the bureaucracy, and the governing class cannot exist. "If I am not, you are not" — the hegemony of a truth born from ontological necessity.
• Target Displacement of the Legitimacy Test (Öztürk, 2026): The legitimacy test always operates — but its target can shift. If the real decision-maker is elsewhere, the wrong target is tested; the real upper class escapes accountability.
• Shadow Power (Öztürk, 2026): The real decision mechanism behind the visible authority. A structure that bypasses the legitimacy test. While responsibility is directed at the visible leader, the real decision-maker stays outside the test.

Paradigm and Contemporary Orientation

• Capital-Centered / Will-Centered Convergence (Öztürk, 2026): The convergence of the two paradigms. The capture of the state by capital-centered structures, or the corporatization of the state.
• The Capital-Centered Takeover (Öztürk, 2026): When a capital-centered corporate entity takes control of a will-centered structure, it assumes social governance but remains as the upper class's source. The base is not seen as a source.

Part B: Positional Class Definitions Formulated in This Article

The application of the formal Four Governing Classes concept distinctive to this article defines class not by income, status, or lifestyle, but as position in power conflict:

• Upper class: The governing. Those who carry the will to govern and the structural capacity to back that will.
• Middle class: Those who want to govern. Those who carry the will to govern but are not yet on top; those who carry the capacity of a role with the will to govern.
• Lower class: The governed. The whole of those who do not carry the will to govern and do not possess the structural capacity to back that will. A structural definition, not periodic.

This definition is the fundamental point of departure from Marxist class theory: not according to means of production but according to position in power. The same individual can be located in different classes in different contexts; classes can contain large income gaps (between a lawyer and a daily cleaner the difference can be vast), but the structural criterion is the same: is the will to govern present, or not.

Series Note

This article is the second piece of the Nomos Paradigm Series, which looks at the world through the lens of Physis: A Theory of Power (Öztürk, 2026) and conveys the observations. The series comprises twelve articles plus two appendices, structured across three sections (Present, Future, Beyond). It is the book's showcase—it does not take the place of the book; it applies the framework the book establishes to the contemporary world.

Article 1: Paradigms (published — SSRN Abstract ID 6680818)

Article 2a: Roles (this article)

Article 2b: Actors (forthcoming)

Articles 3 through 12: Subsequent applications of the framework, addressing source and source displacement, capital-will convergence, AI and robotics, the first autonomous corporation, the transformation of the four classes, the productivity paradox, full hegemonic breakdown, Universe 25, and the final paradigm (forthcoming)

Appendices 1 and 2: The Prison Without a Warden and The Final Simulation — speculative epilogues following the book's publication.

References

Öztürk, E. (2026). Physis: A Theory of Power. Registered work, Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, General Directorate of Copyright. Registration No: 2026/17534, dated March 5, 2026. (Forthcoming as published volume.)

Öztürk, E. (2026). Physis: A Theory of Power – 93 Falsifiable Hypotheses. SSRN Working Paper, Abstract ID 6595318.

Öztürk, E. (2026). Paradigms. Nomos Paradigm Series, Article 1. SSRN Working Paper, Abstract ID 6680818.

Öztürk, E. (2026). Triade Motor. Registered work, Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, General Directorate of Copyright. Registration No: 2026/18239, dated April 17, 2026.

Öztürk, E. (2026). Almanak: Structured Power Chronology Recording Method. Registered work, Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, General Directorate of Copyright. Registration No: 2026/18228, dated April 17, 2026.

Öztürk, E. (unpublished, 2021–2024). The Reign of Aristocracy. Multi-volume historical research.

Öztürk, E. (unpublished, 2024–2025). The Rise of the Bourgeoisie. Multi-volume historical research.

Öztürk, E. (in progress). The Reign of the Bourgeoisie. Multi-volume historical research, ongoing.

Note on classical literature: As stated in the Methodology Note and Limitations section, systematic engagement with the classical political-theoretical and class-theoretical canon (Marx, Weber, Mills, Wallerstein, Tilly, Mann, Bourdieu) is reserved for the forthcoming book. References to these traditions in the present article are positional rather than substantive. The British constitutional history referenced in Section V (Magna Carta, the shaping of Parliament, the English Civil War) draws on standard historiographical interpretations including those reflected in the official UK Parliament historical materials.

Author Note

The author is an independent researcher and theorist based in Turkey, working outside formal academic affiliation. The Physis framework is the product of fourteen years of independent work (2012–2026), drawing on a decade of structured chronological observation of power dynamics (2012 onward, later systematized as the Almanak method) and on multi-volume historical research conducted between 2020 and 2025 (The Reign of Aristocracy — completed; The Rise of the Bourgeoisie — in progress; The Reign of the Bourgeoisie — in research).

Disclosure of AI assistance. In keeping with emerging norms of research transparency in 2026, the author discloses the following regarding AI use in the production of this work. A more extensive methodological account of AI use across the entire fourteen-year program is provided in the introductory essay The Physis Theory: A 14-Year Journey and the Story of Encountering AI (2026); the present note summarizes what is relevant to this article.

AI was incorporated into the work in three distinct phases. Phase 1 (2012–2024): solitary. All historical research, all chronological recording, all pattern recognition, and the entire spine of the framework — including the foundational concepts and the structural observations on which this article rests — were developed without AI. Phase 2 (February 2025 – early 2026): AI as auditor. During the writing of Physis: A Theory of Power, AI was used for consistency-checking across the network of 633 mechanisms, gap detection, argument-stress-testing (Socratic counter-argument generation), and structural arrangement of hypotheses. AI did not produce concepts; it tested concepts the author had already formulated. Phase 3 (2026 onward): AI as translator, formatter, and editorial assistant. In the publication phase — including the present article — AI assistance has been employed for translation from Turkish to English with terminological consistency-checking against the registered Turkish manuscript and Article 1 of this series; for academic formatting (SSRN structure, Pandoc commands, abstract and section conventions); for editorial refinement (sentence-level readability, transition-smoothing); and for indirect dialogue with classical traditions (in the forthcoming book), where AI served as a comparative-mapping tool to help position the framework against literature the author had deliberately not engaged during the framework's construction phase.

What AI did not do is as material as what it did. AI did not produce the framework's original concepts (Physis-Nomos distinction, corporate-entity ontology, four governing classes, structural identity of upper and middle classes, three-historical-moments analysis of the politician role, V3–V4 paradigm orientation, the 93 falsifiable hypotheses); these came from the human mind across fourteen years. AI did not perform the historical synthesis on which the article rests; tracking power dynamics from Sumer to the present is human labor. AI does not produce conceptual novelty when prompted to; in the author's experience it either renames existing concepts or produces superficial recombinations.

The author's approval process: every AI suggestion was treated as a proposal, none as a finished output. Arguments were passed through the author's own logic; sentences through the author's own voice; references were independently verified. Academic citations and historical claims were checked against primary sources where verification was material. This article was co-written with Anthropic Claude (Opus 4.7) in the editorial and translation capacities described above; all ideas, arguments, historical claims, and structural analyses belong to the author; all AI suggestions were reviewed and approved by the author.

The author's reason for full transparency, rather than minimal disclosure, is theoretical as well as ethical. Physis defines knowledge hegemony as one of six types of hegemony — the maintenance of an asymmetry of knowledge as a power resource. The lower-class position of the independent researcher carries less hegemonic incentive to conceal method; this asymmetry opens a space of freedom for full methodological transparency, which the author chooses to occupy.

Funding. This research received no external funding. It was conducted entirely on the author's own time and resources.

Conflicts of interest. The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Independent researcher position. The author has chosen the position of independent researcher deliberately. This position carries known costs: absence of institutional credentialing, absence of formal peer review during the inductive phase, limited access to academic networks, slow diffusion of work. It also carries certain advantages: freedom from disciplinary boundaries, freedom from the framing pressures of canonical traditions during the construction phase, and the capacity to work at a scope (432 pages, 93 hypotheses, 633 mechanisms across a multi-decade research program) that academic incentive structures typically discourage. The reader should evaluate the work on its own merits within the limitations specified above.

The author welcomes critical engagement, including formal falsification attempts targeting the explicit refutation conditions specified in the 93 hypotheses paper and in this article. Correspondence regarding this framework may be directed through the author's published channels.

Related Resources

Foundational hypothesis paper: Physis: A Theory of Power – 93 Falsifiable Hypotheses — SSRN Abstract ID 6595318

Previous article in series: Paradigms — SSRN Abstract ID 6680818

Comprehensive concept reference: Physis Terminology — A Comprehensive Concept Reference

Web: physisproject.com

Registration, Copyright, and Attribution

The framework presented in this article is drawn from Physis: A Theory of Power (Öztürk, 2026). The work was officially registered on March 5, 2026 by the General Directorate of Copyright, Republic of Turkey Ministry of Culture and Tourism, under Copyright Registration No: 2026/17534.

The historical framework underlying this article and the Physis theory itself rests upon the author's multi-volume historical research conducted between 2020–2025. This research — comprising The Reign of Aristocracy (2021–2024) and The Rise of the Bourgeoisie (2024–2025) — is unpublished but constitutes the empirical foundation for the historical observations presented here. Research for The Reign of the Bourgeoisie is ongoing.

The full work comprises 432 pages, 93 core falsifiable hypotheses, and 633 core mechanisms. The theoretical ecosystem of which this article constitutes an applied extension has been constructed as an original, independent framework for the structural analysis of power dynamics.

All citations to hypotheses, mechanisms, or arguments from this framework must include attribution as: Öztürk, E. (2026). Physis: A Theory of Power. [Registered work, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Registration No: 2026/17534.]

Registered works:

• Physis: A Theory of Power — Registration No: 2026/17534 (March 5, 2026)
• Triade Motor — Registration No: 2026/18239 (April 17, 2026)
• Almanak: Structured Power Chronology Recording Method — Registration No: 2026/18228 (April 17, 2026)

Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, General Directorate of Copyright

SSRN Preprint: Abstract ID 6595318 (DOI pending)

© 2026 Evren Öztürk. All rights reserved.

Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or derivative use of any portion of this work without explicit written permission from the author is prohibited. For academic citation, attribution as specified above is required.