Nobody does dynasty better than the British royal family. The recent days of pomp and circumstance have not only been a celebration of a life well lived. They have been a celebration of the power of the family to transcend death and to link the past to the present and thence to the future. Individual monarchs may die. The institution lives on because of the fusion of biological and social inheritance. The Queen is dead. Long live the King!
It is easy, particularly after watching days of soldiers in red jackets and bearskins, marching bands and union flags, to see the Windsors as an expression of the peculiarities of the British. To a man and a woman, social theorists have predicted that modernity would mean the end of the dynastic principle in the face of democracy and meritocracy. And they have been able to point to the demise of great royal dynasties such as the Romanovs and the Habsburgs. Queen Victoria’s funeral resembled a…