How can the Inquisition function without any formal hierarchy?

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**gnome_idea_what**

Selym wrote:
Maximus Bitch wrote:
How can the Inquisition function without any formal hierarchy?
It doesn't.

There is an ordo dedicated to uncovering the Emperor's past.
There is an ordo dedicated to destroying all traces of the Emperor's past.

Wait, what?

**jareddm**

gnome_idea_what wrote:
Selym wrote:
Maximus Bitch wrote:
How can the Inquisition function without any formal hierarchy?
It doesn't.

There is an ordo dedicated to uncovering the Emperor's past.
There is an ordo dedicated to destroying all traces of the Emperor's past.

Wait, what?

He's half right. It's not the Emperor's past, it's the Inquisition's past. The Ordo Originatus and the Ordo Redactus respectively. The former hopes to uncover various lost methods, tools, and research that past Inquisitors and their retinues may have benefited from. The latter wants to obscure all sensitive records related to the Inquisition, lest their enemies find some weakness against them.

**SagesStone**

They have a series of different ranks which would provide more weight to help them self police. There's no formal command structure though.

But for ranks you've got explicator, interrogator, inquisitor, inquisitor lord/high inquisitor, master, grandmaster then the inquisitorial representitive who is the inquisition's voice in the senatorum. The grandmaster is basically a lord responsible for the inquisition in a sector while a master is responsible for an ordo in a sector or subsector.

Inquisitor lords/high inquisitors are responsible, or the first rank responsible I'm not sure, for maintaining the integrity of the inquisition. They watch over other inquisitors and provide guidance.

**oldzoggy**

Furyou Miko wrote:
The Inquisition don't need to function as an organisation because each and every Inquisitor has unlimited authority over everyone, including other Inquisitors.

Good to see that the propaganda worked.

The authority of an inquisitor is purely based on his political standing, and his ability to defend and enforce it. Claiming unlimited power and no real power to back it up is one of the best ways to get yourself in an accident. No sane inquisitor would let his most valued assets be seized, or commandeered by some low standing idiot with illusions of grandeur. There is some sort of hierarchy between the different factions, most is the result of some serious nasty politics and showoff of power or outright assassination of opposing agents. It helps not to see the inquisition as a single and all powerful entity, nor to see them as a unified front that they appear to be. They behave more like the city states of ancient Greece.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Psienesis wrote:

The Inquisition? Damned good at their job

Is it really. For it seems that the IoM has slipped further into decay and depravity since they have come into existence.
I doubt if anything or anyone can be truly good at his job and still fit into the 40k setting.

**AndrewGPaul**

Exactly. While in theory an Inquisitor does have the de jure authority over everyone in the Imperium, that's no use if he can't enforce it*. There's stories in the background (the first Codex Imperial Knights, for example, and at least one edition of Codex: Space Wolves) where rival factions have basically implied that if the Inquisitor doesn't shove off quickly he'll ... disappear. The Red Scorpions simply abandoned Solomon Lok to his fate on Beta Anphelion IV when they decided the whole thing was too much trouble. They may have been operating on the orders of a rival Inquisitor there, though.

* Which was basically the case in the feudal era too; otherwise there wouldn't have been such things as Magna Carta or any number of civil wars and revolts.

**Iracundus**

AndrewGPaul wrote:
Exactly. While in theory an Inquisitor does have the de jure authority over everyone in the Imperium, that's no use if he can't enforce it*. There's stories in the background (the first Codex Imperial Knights, for example, and at least one edition of Codex: Space Wolves) where rival factions have basically implied that if the Inquisitor doesn't shove off quickly he'll ... disappear. The Red Scorpions simply abandoned Solomon Lok to his fate on Beta Anphelion IV when they decided the whole thing was too much trouble. They may have been operating on the orders of a rival Inquisitor there, though.

* Which was basically the case in the feudal era too; otherwise there wouldn't have been such things as Magna Carta or any number of civil wars and revolts.

The Red Scorpions abandoned Solomon Lok because they were acting on the orders of a more senior Inquisitor, who was also Lok's boss. Basically Solomon Lok was disposed of by his own boss.

Iracundus wrote:
In a nutshell it all comes down to politics.

In theory, any Inquisitor is answerable to no one except the Emperor. An Inquisitor that has just received their rosette seal could in theory turn around and declare all the High Lords of Terra heretics and traitors and demand their execution. In theory, an Inquisitor could demand all the ships of a Segmentum answer his beck and call. In practice, such demands while perfectly legal in theory would be ignored and would result in the Inquisitor being found by his peers to be either insane or a heretic himself.

In theory, the Space Marines are also answerable to no one except the Emperor. They are under no explicit obligation to answer any call for assistance by any Imperial world or organization. Being autonomous it is up for debate whether they are technically even bound by prohibitions against contact with aliens or Chaos. However any Chapter that just sat around and ignored all calls for assistance or that engaged in private empire building such as Huron did with the Astral Claws, or collected Chaos artifacts like the Relictors, would alienate the rest of the Imperium and eventually result in the Chapter being punished or declared traitor by the combined forces of other Imperial organizations.

The behavior of both these groups therefore is constrained not just by what is technically legal and within their rights, but by what they can get away with by virtue of their political standing and connections.

**locarno24**

Exactly. In theory, Inquisitors outrank anyone and can requisition whatever they need.

In practice, this means they have a lot of authority on paper but relatively few actual resources in practice, because theyre alnost always dependent on someone else - a governor, an admiral, a chamber militant, or a general, say - turfing over the actual troops.

This is especially awkward since they tend to want to operate in secret (the effective ones, anyway), and whilst they have theoretically infinite authority, the imperium is full of plenty of other people who also do (or might as well do).

In practice a lord-governor is answerable to an inquisitors whim. In practice a competent governor has the resources of an entire world at his ready disposal and is (a) well connected enough to contact the ordo's sector headquarters for "clarification" of particularly ridiculous demands from the conclave, and (b) more than capable of having the inquisitor "disappear" in an extremely violent tragic accident which cannot be connected to him, and the inquisitor knows this.

Its not just inquistors. Planetary (and sector) governors, warmasters, cardinals, rogue traders, archmagi, and astartes chapter masters all belong to a tier of individuals referred to as "Peers of the Imperium". In practice, this is a point where the rules break down and it all becomes a game of politics and influence.

**AnomanderRake**

Maximus Bitch wrote:
It doesn't make any fethin' sense. The Imperium largely consists of fairly ordinary humans. People like you and me. The Inquisition too, except that some of them can be extremely stubborn.

Any organisation with a power of the Inquisition's magnitude must have some form of strict hierarchy. Just look at any IRL Inquisition-like organisation, past and present.

Such organisations can still abuse their power, but they can never do without some chain of command. In 40k, there are conclaves, but on whose authority are they called?

No organisation similar to the Inquisition and run by humans like you and me can function with such a loose power structure.

The Inquisition was created, in part, in response to the Horus Heresy, in which corruption at the top of a strict chain of command let a few individuals get major portions of the Imperial military on their side. If there were a strict chain of command Chaos getting at a single Inquisitor could easily yoink a big chunk of the organization with him.

It might be easier to draw parallels between the Inquisition and real life insurgent movements rather than secret police; the organization is designed so that the loss of a single component harms the whole as little as possible, not so that it will operate efficiently with a single unified will.

**slade the sniper**

Jimsolo wrote:

There's a great deal of chaos inherent in the system.

I saw what you did there

-STS

**Maximus Bitch**

AnomanderRake wrote:
Maximus Bitch wrote:
It doesn't make any fethin' sense. The Imperium largely consists of fairly ordinary humans. People like you and me. The Inquisition too, except that some of them can be extremely stubborn.

Any organisation with a power of the Inquisition's magnitude must have some form of strict hierarchy. Just look at any IRL Inquisition-like organisation, past and present.

Such organisations can still abuse their power, but they can never do without some chain of command. In 40k, there are conclaves, but on whose authority are they called?

No organisation similar to the Inquisition and run by humans like you and me can function with such a loose power structure.

The Inquisition was created, in part, in response to the Horus Heresy, in which corruption at the top of a strict chain of command let a few individuals get major portions of the Imperial military on their side. If there were a strict chain of command Chaos getting at a single Inquisitor could easily yoink a big chunk of the organization with him.

It might be easier to draw parallels between the Inquisition and real life insurgent movements rather than secret police; the organization is designed so that the loss of a single component harms the whole as little as possible, not so that it will operate efficiently with a single unified will.

Speaking of corruption, all it takes is a Xanthite to become corrupted, to corrupt the rest of his Xanthites, and to keep inviting more and more corrupted acolytes until you have a huge, large group of corrupted Inquisitors.

Sure, you don't have top-down corruption, but you may have unsupervised rampant corruption instead. It just takes 3 fellas to give another fella tremendous power on paper and they don't even need to seek higher authority or approval.

Also, note that before Horus became Warmaster, he didn't have paper authority over his brother primarchs. Any organisational hierarchy also has many peers at the same level, of the same rank, equal on paper and not beholden to each other. It also has superiors.

You can still have an organisation and have superiors or peers to keep each other in check. A bad guy may push his inferiors. but in a hierarchy, he has peers and superiors to answer to, which may be even more of a roadblock.