in an early chapter,riggs even contributes a deductive reconstruction of the organization structure of traditional siamese government-one more appealing than that of the leading western historical authority on the subject, H. G. Quaritch wales.
But history per se is not the object of the work. Riggs aims to explicate the thesis of bureaucratic thanscendence of traditional politics. He wants to explain how the take-over of the political system occurred; to show how and why the contemporary elitist pattern works; and to assess the implications of this experience in terms of a concern with political modernization.
The essential argument of the book goes like this: a host of forces combined in the nineteenth century to modify the traditional thai political system. One of them was the monarchy itself, for two great kings did the things that cause the creation of an extensive, functionally specialized bureaucracy. Along the way the fundamental character of the kingship itself was changed, as-for example-familiarity eroded charisma and the king became an object of expectations as well as self-justifying veneration. The incumbency of the kingship also changed, and not for the better. And a new bureaucratic class grew up, a class including members imbued in some cases with alien ideology, and in others with perhaps a more elemental interest in power and its rewards.