>>510
I think the key of any monarchy is the monarch having a quality of prudence that tells him when to act and when not to act. The problem we moderns often have when looking at the monarchies of the past is that we may always be coming at each individual monarchy with the biases of a libertarian or authoritarian perspective. That is to say that we want the monarchy to fit neatly into our ideological frameworks.
Both the advocates and the enemies of monarchism can often suffer from this way of thinking, which prevents us from looking at each monarchy individually in the context of its civilization or environment.
When socialism was very popular among intellectuals in the 20th century, there was a tendency to look back at old civilizations and label them "socialist". Even Marx himself used terms such as "primitive communism". For example, the structure of Incan civilization was of great interest to socialist intellectuals who saw the communitarian policies of the Incan empire as prototype for socialism, as a sign of great progress. But this greatly ignored the aristocratic and religious character of Incan society which might clash with this image of Incan socialism intellectuals had, but certainly was no contradiction for the Incans who structured their civilization according to their environmental and immediate practical needs and according to their understanding of the structure of the metaphysical kingdom of their gods.
When we look at past monarchies, we must keep in mind that monarchy acted according to a totally different framework than many of our modern ideologies, including many of those ideologies that monarchists themselves might follow, and so we may see that where the monarch held direct power and where he did not often varied from dynasty to dynasty and civilization to civilization. It is a matter of whether a monarch has power where he needs to have power at the present moment in his particular context or can assume power when it is necessary for him to do so, and whether he knows when to stay his hand and leave responsibilities to other subjects more capable than himself
As monarchists, I'm not sure if we should focus quite so much on whether a monarch with many direct powers or little direct powers is preferable, but rather it might be more fruitful to focus somewhat more on the justifications for any sort of power, big or small.