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Proceedings of the British Academy, 162, 325–370. © The British Academy 2009.

BRITISH ACADEMY LECTURE

A Genealogy of the Modern State

QUENTIN SKINNER Fellow of the Academy

I

WHEN WE TRACE the genealogy of a concept, we uncover the different ways in which it may have been used in earlier times. We thereby equip ourselves with a means of reflecting critically on how it is currently under- stood. With these considerations in mind, I attempt in what follows to sketch a genealogy of the modern state. Before embarking on this project, however, I need to make two cautionary remarks about the limitations of its scope. I assume in the first place that the only method by which we can hope confidently to identify the views of specific writers about the con- cept of the state will be to examine the precise circumstances in which they invoke and discuss the term state. I consequently focus as much as possible on how this particular word came to figure in successive debates about the nature of public power. The other limitation I need to signal is that I confine myself exclusively to Anglophone traditions of thought. I do so in part because I need to bring my historical materials under some kind of control, but mainly because it seems to me that any study of the changing vocabularies in which moral or political concepts are formu- lated can only be fruitfully pursued by examining the histories of indi- vidual linguistic communities. To attempt a broader analysis would be to assume that such terms as lo stato, l’État and Der Staat express the same concept as the term state, and this would be to presuppose what would have to be shown. Hence the seemingly arbitrary restriction of my historical gaze.

Read at the Academy, 13 May 2008.

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To investigate the genealogy of the state is to discover that there has never been any agreed concept to which the word state has answered.1

The suggestion, still widely canvassed, that we can hope to arrive at a neu- tral analysis that might in principle command general assent is I think misconceived.2 I would go so far as to suggest that any moral or political term that has become so deeply enmeshed in so many ideological disputes over such a long period of time is bound to resist any such efforts at definition.3 As the genealogy of the state unfolds, what it reveals is the contingent and contestable character of the concept, the impossibility of showing that it has any essence or natural boundaries.4

This is not to deny that one particular definition has come to pre- dominate. As handbooks on political theory regularly point out, there has been a noticeable tendency in recent times to think of the state — usu- ally with a nod in the direction of Max Weber — as nothing more than the name of an established apparatus of government.5 Of late this view has gained such widespread acceptance that in common parlance the words state and government have come to be virtually synonymous terms. The issue that remains, however, is whether our thinking may have become impoverished as a result of our abandonment of a number of earlier and more explicitly normative theories that a genealogical survey brings to light. Can a genealogy of the state free us to re-imagine the concept in different and perhaps more fruitful ways? After presenting my historical survey, this is the question to which I turn in the closing section of this lecture.

II

Within Anglophone legal and political theory, the earliest period in which we encounter widespread discussions about the state, statehood and the powers of states is towards the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of

1 Here I correct the argument in Skinner 2002, vol. 2, esp. pp. 394–5, in which I was still operating with the assumption that there is one distinctive concept of the modern state that historians can hope to uncover. For a critique see Goldie 2006, esp. pp. 11–19. 2 But for a recent attempt see Morris 1998, esp. pp. 45–6. For a more pluralist approach see Vincent 1987. 3 Nietzsche argues that ‘only that which has no history is definable’. For this observation, and a discussion, see Geuss 1999, esp. pp. 13–14. 4 For further considerations along these lines see Geuss 1999, Bevir 2008, Krupp 2008. 5 Forsyth 1991, p. 505; Morris 2004, pp. 195–6. For Weber’s definition see Weber 1984; for discussions in which it is presupposed see Poggi 1978; Jordan 1985; Caney 2005, esp. pp. 149–50.

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the seventeenth centuries.6 This development was in large measure owed to the influence of scholastic discussions about summa potestas,7 together with the growing availability of French treatises on sovereignty8 and Italian manuals on ‘politics’ and reason of state.9 With the confluence of these strands of thought, the term state began to be used with increasing confidence to refer to a specific type of union or civil association, that of a universitas or community of people living subject to the sovereign authority of a recognised monarch or ruling group.

This is not to say that the word state was the one most commonly employed to describe the form of union underlying civil government. Some writers preferred to speak of the realm,10 some even spoke of the nation,11 while the terminology in most widespread use referred to the body politic, generally with the implication that such bodies are incapable of action in the absence of a sovereign head to which they owe their direc- tion and obedience. It was by a relatively simple process, however, that the word state came to be inserted into this lexicon. One of the questions addressed in the Renaissance genre of advice-books for princes had always been how rulers should act to maintain their state, that is, to uphold their status or standing as princes. Machiavelli was only the most celebrated of numerous political thinkers who had emphasised the impor- tance of being able mantenere lo stato,12 and when Edward Dacres pub- lished his translation of Il principe in 1640 he duly made Machiavelli speak about how a prince must act ‘for the maintenance of his State’, how a prudent prince must ‘take the surest courses he can to maintaine his life and State’ and how rulers in general can ‘safely keep their State’.13

The same vocabulary had already become well-entrenched in the English language a generation earlier with the translation of a group of French treatises — by François de La Noue, Pierre La Place, Jacques Hurault and others — on the duties of councillors and other officiers d’état. If we turn, for example, to Arthur Golding’s version of Hurault’s

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6 Here I underline Maitland 2003, p. 38. 7 Brett 1997; Höpfl 2004, pp. 186–223. 8 Skinner 1978, vol. 2, pp. 254–75. 9 Mattei 1979; Borelli 1993. For France see Thuau 2000; for England Baldwin 2004; Malcolm

2007, esp. pp. 30–73. 10 On the realm, see King James VI and I 1994, pp. 138, 189; Hayward 1603, Sig. J, 4v; Sig. O, 3v; Sig. R, 2r. (The pagination of Hayward 1603 is muddled: hence I quote by signature.) 11 On the nation, see Bodin 1962, 1. 2, p. 10; Hayward 1603, Sig. E, 1r; Sig. O, 1r; Downing 1634, pp. 9, 15; Ball 1642, pp. 4, 6. 12 Hexter 1973, pp. 150–72. 13 Machiavelli 1640, pp. 139, 141, 169.

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Trois livres, which appeared as Politike, Moral and Martial Discourses in 1595, we already find him writing about the state or standing of kings and cities,14 and about the best means for a prince to conduct himself if he wishes to guarantee ‘the maintenance of his state’.15 Hurault criticises the emperor Augustus for acting with excessive ruthlessness ‘for the better assuring of his state’, and adds in denunciation of Machiavelli that a prince ‘ought not to do any evill for the maintenance of his state’.16

If we consult the legal theorists of the same generation, we often find them talking in similar terms about the importance of maintaining one’s state or standing as a prince.17 According to these writers, however, there is something of more impersonal significance that rulers must preserve if they wish to avoid a coup d’état, a strike against their state. They must preserve the welfare of the body politic, and they are warned that they cannot hope to maintain their own status unless they keep this body in security and good health. It was at this juncture that a number of legal theorists began to describe this underlying corpus politicum as the state. The linguistic slippage was slight, but the conceptual change was momen- tous: rather than focusing on the need for rulers to maintain their own status or state, these writers began to speak of their obligation to maintain the states over which they ruled.18

For an illustration of these tendencies, we can hardly do better than turn to Jean Bodin’s Six livres de la république, first translated into English as The Six Bookes of a Common-weale in 1606.19 At the beginning of Book I Bodin supplies a definition of what his translator, Richard Knollys, calls ‘the Citie or state’.20 Bodin argues that ‘it is neither the wals, neither the persons, that maketh the citie, but the union of the people under the same soveraigntie of government’.21 To speak of a city or state, in other words, is to refer to a community of people who are subject to sovereign power. Bodin concedes that this power can be that of the people themselves, but he goes on to express a strong preference for monarchy over any other form of government. To institute a monarchy,

14 Hurault 1595, pp. 10, 182, 251. 15 Hurault 1595, p. 89. 16 Hurault 1595, pp. 85, 98. 17 Bodin 1962, 4.1, pp. 415–20; see also 2.6, p. 242; 3.7, p. 384; 6.6, p. 787. 18 On this transition see Mansfield 1996, pp. 281–94; Harding 2002, pp. 252–335; Skinner 2002, vol. 2, pp. 382–7. 19 For Bodin on the state see Franklin 1973; Franklin 1991; Skinner 1978, vol. 2, pp. 284–301, 355–6. 20 Bodin 1962, 1. 2, p. 10. 21 Bodin 1962, 1, 2, p. 10.

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as he later explains, is to create a type of public authority in which ‘all the people in generall, and (as it were) in one bodie’ swear ‘faithfull alleageance to one soveraigne monarch’ as head of state.22 Corres- pondingly, the fact that their basic aim is to regulate their affairs means that their sovereign has a duty to care for ‘the health & welfare of the whole state’.23 Princes and other governors have an obligation not to inconvenience but to protect both ‘the subjects in particular’ and ‘the whole bodie of the state’.24

This way of thinking about the state (which I shall call the absolutist theory)25 was soon picked up in two distinct strands of legal and political discourse in early seventeenth-century England. One arose out of scholastic discussions about suprema potestas, especially as conducted by such luminaries of the Second Scholastic as Vitoria, Bellarmine and Suárez. Although these philosophers allow that the universitas of the peo- ple must have been the original bearer of supreme power,26 they insist that the act of submitting to government always involves what Suárez charac- terises as a ‘quasi-alienation’ of political rights.27 This is precisely the line of argument we encounter in a work such as Matthew Kellison’s Right and Jurisdiction of the Prelate, and the Prince of 1621.28 Kellison writes as a Catholic, anxious to vindicate the independent authority of the Church as ‘the most eminent state’.29 Nevertheless, he is keen to acknowledge the right of kings to be regarded as absolute rulers within their own proper sphere. Explicitly invoking the authority of Bellarmine and Suárez,30 he concedes that the power of any people to govern themselves must origin- ally have resided in the community as a whole.31 As soon as they agree, however, to ‘make choice of a King’, the effect is that ‘the Communitie despoileth it selfe of authority’, and ‘giveth all power and Authority to the King’.32 His standing is now that of an absolute ruler over the entire body of the state.

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22 Bodin 1962, 1. 8, p. 99. 23 Bodin 1962, 1. 8, p. 97. 24 Bodin 1962, 6. 4, p. 714. 25 Here I follow Poggi 1978 and Vincent 1987, pp. 45–76. 26 Höpfl 2004, pp. 204–17, 224–30. 27 Suárez 1975, 3. 4. 2, p. 49: ‘non est delegatio sed quasi alienatio’. Cf. Höpfl 2004, pp. 248–62. 28 On Kellison see Sommerville 1999, pp. 60–2. 29 Kellison 1621, p. 87. 30 Kellison 1621, p. 43. 31 Kellison 1621, pp. 43–4. 32 Kellison 1621, p. 46.

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The other and more influential way in which the absolutist theory was articulated was as part of the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Sir Robert Filmer, the best-known defender of divine right in early seventeenth-century England, begins his Patriarcha33 by stigmatising as a dangerous heresy the belief that ‘mankind is naturally endowed and born with freedom from all subjection, and at liberty to choose what form of government it please’.34 What this argument fails to recognise, Filmer responds, is that rulers receive their authority not from the people but directly from ‘the ordination of God himself ’.35 Kings are the Lord’s anointed, the vicegerents of God on earth, and consequently enjoy supreme and unquestionable power over the body of the commonwealth or state.

King James I frequently talked in similar terms, especially when haranguing his Parliaments about the extent of his sovereign rights.36 We find him assuring the two Houses in 1605 that ‘Kings are in the word of GOD it selfe called Gods, as being his Lieutenants and Vice-gerents’, and are endowed by God with absolute authority over their states.37 He refers to the mass of people who are subject to sovereign power as ‘the body of the whole State’38 and he describes the two houses of Parliament as ‘the representative body of the State’.39 He later adds that, because all rulers are heads of state, it follows that ‘if the King want, the State wants, and therefore the strengthening of the King is the preservation and the standing of the State’.40

The English writer of this period who speaks with the greatest confi- dence in this idiom is the Roman lawyer Sir John Hayward, who first pre- sented his views about state power in his Answer to the treatise on popular sovereignty published by Robert Parsons in 1594.41 Hayward’s rebuttal appeared in 1603, adorned with an effusive dedication to King James I (‘most loved, most dread, most absolute’).42 After an apparently conces-

33 Sommerville 1991a, pp. xxxii–iv shows that, although Patriarcha was not published until 1680, the manuscript was completed before 1631. 34 Filmer, 1991, p. 2. 35 Filmer 1991, p. 7. 36 On James as an ‘absolutist’ see Sommerville 1991b, pp. 247–53 and Sommerville 1999, pp. 107–10, 227–30. 37 King James VI and I 1994, p. 147. 38 King James VI and I 1994, pp. 143, 145. 39 King James VI and I 1994, pp. 147, 149. 40 King James VI and I 1994, p. 195. 41 On Hayward see Levack 1988; Sommerville 1999, pp. 51–2, 68. On Roman law in England during this period see Levack 1981. 42 Hayward 1603, Sig. A, 3r.

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sive opening, Hayward declares that all authority comes not from the people but from God, so that even heathen rulers count as the Lord’s anointed.43 The underlying ‘body politick’ cannot possibly have been the original possessor of sovereignty, for it amounts to nothing more than ‘a heedless and headless multitude’ without direction or government.44

Drawing on Bodin, Hayward concludes that it will always be more natural ‘that one state, bee it great or small, should rather bee commaunded by one person’ as head of state.45

These arguments were picked up by a number of polemicists whose primary concern was to vindicate — against Catholic apologists such as Kellison — the claim that temporal rulers have a right of absolute control over ecclesiastical no less than civil affairs. Hayward also contributed to this debate, and is one of the first to describe this Erastian commitment as an argument about the proper relationship between ‘church and state’. His Report of 1607 on religious policy begins by reminding his readers, with a quotation from Bodin, that ‘the rights of Soveraignty or of majesty’ consist in ‘an absolute and perpetuall power, to exercise the high- est actions and affaires in some certaine state’.46 He then declares that ‘there is nothing in a Common-wealth of so high nature’ as the care of religion, this being ‘the onely meanes to knit and conserve men in mutu- all societie’.47 It is for this reason that it is indispensable to commit ‘the government for matters of Religion, to the Soveraigne power and author- itie in the State’.48 The regulation of religion is the most important means by which a sovereign can display his concern for the well-being of ‘the whole body of the State’.49

Perhaps the most extensive argument along these lines can be found in the work of another Roman lawyer, Calybute Downing,50 whose Discourse of the State Ecclesiasticall was first published in 1632.51

Downing agrees that the king of England is ‘the supreme Soveraigne’ and ‘the Lords annoynted’, exercising ‘chiefty of power over the whole body

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43 Hayward 1603, Sig. G, 3r. 44 Hayward 1603, Sig. B, 3v; Sig. H, 3r; Sig. K, 2v. 45 Hayward 1603, Sig. B, 3v; Bodin is cited to this effect at Sig D, 3r. 46 Hayward 1607, p. 6. 47 Hayward 1607, p. 8. 48 Hayward 1607, p. 14. 49 Hayward 1607, p. 2. 50 On Downing see Levack 1973, pp. 115–17, 187–8; Sommerville 1999, pp. 40–1. 51 Downing’s treatise was reissued in an extended form in 1634; I quote from this version of his text.

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of the Common-wealth’.52 He must therefore be recognised as ‘supreme Civil head’ over the ecclesiastical no less than ‘the Civill State’.53 As in all absolute monarchies, the ‘State is so framed’ that there is one person with unquestionable authority to govern all the ‘distinct and setled societies of that State.’54

III

While the absolutist theory was widely defended in the opening decades of the seventeenth century, it was also subjected to a growing barrage of attack. Critics agreed that, when we talk about the state, we are referring to a type of civic union, a body or society of people united under govern- ment. But they repudiated the metaphor according to which this societas or universitas is a mere headless torso in need of a monarch to guide and control it. It is equally possible, they claim, for supreme power to be pos- sessed by the union of the people. We accordingly find these writers using the term state to refer not to a passive and obedient community living under a sovereign head, but rather to the body of the people viewed as the owners of sovereignty themselves.

Two distinct challenges to the absolutist theory evolved along these lines, eventually giving rise to what I shall call the populist theory of the state. One stemmed from a group of writers who are best described as political anatomists, and whose principal interest lay in comparing the different forms of government to be found in various parts of the world. As they liked to observe, there are many communities in contemporary Europe in which the people are not ruled by kings but instead govern themselves. Focusing on the special characteristics of these polities, they frequently label them as popular states or simply as states to distinguish them from monarchies and principalities. This usage undoubtedly owed something to the fact that such communities were generally governed by legislative assemblies in which the people were represented according to their different social ranks or ‘estates’. These assemblies were usually described as meetings of the Estates, while their members were said to attend them in virtue of some qualifying status or state. But whether the term state was used to refer to the sovereign body of the people, or alter-

52 Downing 1634, p. 49, 57, 69. 53 Downing 1634, pp. 58, 68. 54 Downing 1634, p. 46.

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natively to the assembled bodies of their representatives, the effect was to give rise to a sharp distinction between monarchies and states.

One of the most influential of these taxonomies can be found in Jean Bodin’s Six Bookes of a Common-weale. Bodin is of course no friend to popular states, and always insists that they are ‘an enemy unto wisedome and good councell’.55 As we have seen, his own emphatic preference is for a type of monarchy in which the body of the state is wholly subject to a sovereign head. Nevertheless, in Book II of his Six Bookes, in which he lays out his classification of constitutions, he includes a lengthy chapter on ‘popular estates’. These are polities, he explains, in which ‘every citisen is in a manner partaker of the maiestie of the state’.56 This leads him to introduce a categorical distinction between ‘monarchies’ and ‘states’, a distinction that subsequently echoes throughout his text.57 We are told that ‘in a popular estate nothing can bee greater than the whole body of the people’, whereas ‘in a monarchie it is otherwise’, for ‘all the people in generall’ swear allegiance to a single head of state.58

If we return to the political anatomists, we find them making the same point in emphatic terms. Consider, for example, Edwin Sandys’s Relation of 1605, in which he surveys the religious and constitutional arrange- ments prevailing in different parts of Europe.59 Sandys consistently dis- tinguishes between monarchies and ‘states’, reserving the latter term for those polities, especially in Italy, in which the people govern themselves.60

The same is true of Giovanni Botero’s Le Relationi Universali,61 which was first translated as Relations of the most famous kingdomes and common- wealths in 1601, and thereafter appeared in many English versions in the early decades of the seventeenth century.62 When Botero turns to Switzerland, he describes it as ‘a state popular, and subject to no one Prince’,63 and when he examines the constitution of the United Provinces he likewise calls it a state,64 explaining that it is a community in which ‘the

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55 Bodin 1962, 1. 8, p. 99. 56 Bodin 1962, 1. 6, p. 60. 57 Bodin 1962, 1. 8, p. 101; 2. 1, p. 196; 6. 2, pp. 653–4, etc. 58 Bodin 1962, 1. 8, p. 99. 59 On Sandys’s Relation see Rabb 1998, pp. 21–46. 60 Sandys 1605, Sig. N, 3r; Sig. P, 2v; Sig S, 3r. 61 On Botero’s Relazioni see De Luca 1946, pp. 73–89. 62 On Botero see De Luca 1946; Mattei 1979. I quote from the final, most extensive version of Botero’s Relationi, translated by Robert Johnson and published in 1630. 63 Botero 1630, p. 310. 64 Botero 1630, pp. 200, 206.

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people and citizens have so much voice and authoritie’ that they are able to regulate their own affairs.65

Everyone agreed that the most important contemporary example of such a state was Venice. Botero speaks about ‘the State of Venice’,66 and mounts a comparison between its constitution and that of ‘the Kingdome of France’.67 Publishing his translation of Gasparo Contarini’s De magis- tratibus et republica Venetorum in 1599, Lewes Lewkenor likewise describes the city as a commonwealth and as ‘the state of Venice’.68 Referring to the Venetian laws on citizenship, he adds that it is possible for foreigners to become naturalised ‘if they have done the state some notable service’.69

Othello recalls this arrangement when he draws attention to his own employment by the republic, proudly remarking that ‘I have done the state some service’.70

For many of these writers, there was a fine line between describing republican constitutions and celebrating the alleged superiority of such self-governing regimes. This preference was generally grounded on a view about how we can best hope to retain our natural freedom while submit- ting to government. To live under a monarchy, it was frequently urged, is to subject yourself to the prerogative rights of a king, and is thus to live to some degree in dependence upon his will. As the Digest of Roman Law had laid down, however, to depend on the will of another is what it means to be a slave.71 If you wish to preserve your freedom under government, you must therefore ensure that you institute a political order in which no prerogative or discretionary powers are allowed. If and only if the laws rule, and you yourself give consent to the laws, can you hope to remain free from dependence on the will of your ruler, and consequently free from servitude. The inflammatory conclusion towards which these writers are drawn is thus that, if you wish to live ‘in a free state’, you must be sure to live in a self-governing republic. As a result, they begin to describe such polities not merely as states by contrast with monarchies, but more specifically and more invidiously as free states by contrast with the dependence and slavery allegedly imposed by every form of kingly rule.

65 Botero 1630, p. 206. 66 Botero 1630, pp. 339–61. 67 Botero 1630, p. 597. 68 Contarini 1599, pp. 9, 18, 126, 138, 146. 69 Contarini 1599, p. 18. 70 Shakespeare 1988, Othello, 5. 2. 348, p. 853. 71 Digest 1985, 1. 6. 4, p. 18.

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The chief inspiration for this line of thought can be traced to the Roman historians and their accounts of Rome’s early transition from monarchical to consular government.72 It was a moment of great signifi- cance when Philemon Holland, in publishing the first complete transla- tion of Livy’s history in 1600, described the expulsion of Rome’s kings as a shift from tyranny to ‘a free state’.73 Holland went on to narrate how, when Lars Porsenna attempted to negotiate the return of the Tarquins, he was aggressively reminded ‘that the people of Rome were not under the regiment of a king, but were a free state’ and intended ‘to be free still and at their owne libertie’.74 The body of the people no longer needed a head; they had taken possession of sovereignty themselves.

Livy’s analysis was forcefully underlined when Thomas Heywood published his translation of Sallust in 1608. Sallust had prefaced his nar- rative of Catiline’s conspiracy with a history of early Rome in which he had given an extraordinarily influential explanation of the city’s rise to greatness. He had described ‘how our Auncestors managed the state’, in such a way that it ‘increased and prospered’ while remaining ‘most just and excellent’.75 The early Romans were able to achieve these results only after they repudiated the ‘sole Soveraignty’ of their kings and established a republic, thereby creating a ‘forme of Liberty in Government’.76 As soon as they instituted a regime in which ‘the wisest and most sufficien- test spirits, were most imployed in the affaires of the state’, they rose at once to riches and power, so that ‘by valor and Justice the state flor- ished’.77 Civic glory and greatness, Sallust concludes, can be attained only by free cit

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