Social Science Files research exhibit focusing on the term ‘state’.
Category type 7 rank over status society.
I have read a lot of ‘Skinner on Hobbes’ but the final paragraph of this recently published chapter appears to me to be one of culminating synthesis and clarity.
“The state is, in the end, nothing other than ourselves.”
Fragments of a chapter exhibited..
Quentin Skinner*, ‘On the Person of the State’, in State Formations: Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood, edited by John L. Brooke, Julia C. Strauss, Greg Anderson, Cambridge University Press 2018
[*longtime subscriber to Social Science Files]
This chapter focuses on two claims that have gained widespread acceptance in recent discussions about the state. One is that, when we refer to the state, we are simply talking about the institutions and coercive apparatus of government. …
… I turn to the other claim about the state that has recently come to be widely accepted. A number of economic and political developments, we are assured, have undermined and at the same time discredited the power of the state. Perhaps the most obvious of these has been the rise of multinational corporations and other economic institutions of international reach. With their capacity to control investment and employment, they are visibly able to coerce individual states into accommodating their demands even when these may conflict with the social and economic priorities of the states concerned. At the same time, the past generation has witnessed the continuing evolution of international organizations with authority to overturn the local jurisdictions of states, a process greatly reinforced by the widening acceptance of an overarching ideal of universal human rights.
Some powerful currents of recent political thinking have further contributed to the questioning of state power with a series of moral denunciations of its supposed deficiencies. Among conservative writers in the period after the Second World War, the increasing levels of control assumed by welfare states were viewed with hostility and even alarm, and we were forcibly reminded that even democratic states can be totalitarian in character. Marxist critics continue to raise the objection that states amount to little more than the executive arms of their ruling classes, an objection that has gained much ground in the face of our increased willingness to tolerate extremes of inequality. Meanwhile no one doubts that even purportedly democratic states have been, and remain, agents of extensive suffering and injustice.
Of late, a growing neoliberal consensus has partly caused these anxieties about the state to be replaced by contempt. We are now invited to think of democratic states less as sources of oppression than as agents of bureaucratic inefficiency and waste.
Rather than relying on the power of governments to shape our societies, we are urged, we should cultivate systems of “governance”. The revival of this piece of medieval terminology – with its implications of wise guidance as opposed to mere command – appears to have originated with the rhetoric of the World Bank in the 1980s and its desire to impress upon the peoples of the developing world the desirability of making themselves more open to decentralisation and market forces.
“Government” was seen as bad: the monopolistic enemy of competition and enterprise. “Governance” was seen as good: the enabling friend of innovation and initiative. These and other transformations have convinced a number of commentators that, in power as well as reputation, the state is now in terminal decline. …
… What should we think of these two current judgments about the state? Neither of them seems to me at all satisfactory, and I should like to devote the rest of these remarks to explaining my doubts. What most strikes me about the claim that states are “on their way out” is how much this contention seems out of line with everyday experience. It is of course undeniable that states have forfeited many of the traditional attributes of sovereignty, and that the concept of sovereignty itself has become disjoined from its earlier associations with the rights of individual states. But to make the obvious point that states are no longer sovereign is by no means equivalent (pace Foucault) to deconstructing the concept of the state. The world’s leading states remain the principal actors on the international stage, and the ideal of humanitarian intervention has yet to be invoked in such a way as to challenge the sovereignty of any major state. Furthermore, such states remain by far the most significant political actors within their own territories. …
… They have also become more interventionist, and in the face of their collapsing banking systems have even proved willing to step forward as lenders of last resort [more below]. Meanwhile they continue to print money (more and more of it), to impose taxes, to enforce contracts, to penalize errant citizens, to subsidize cultural life, to provide health and welfare services, and to legislate with an unprecedented degree of complexity. To a greater degree than it is currently fashionable to admit, they also facilitate markets and act as entrepreneurs on their own account. …
… Despite the aspiration of neoliberalism to will away the significance of the state, it remains obvious that most of us are living in nation-states, that this is likely to remain the case for some considerable time, and that statelessness remains an appalling prospect for anyone to contemplate. To speak in these circumstances of the state “fading into the shadows” seems one-sided to the point of inattentiveness. It is or ought to be obvious that political theorists still need to concern themselves with the state and to ask about the role of state power.
What of the other claim I began by isolating – that when we talk about the state we are merely referring to an apparatus of government?
What most strikes me here is the starkness of the contrast between this view of the state and the way in which the concept was understood during the period when it first became the master noun of political discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among political writers of this period, the basic reason for giving prominence to the concept of the state was to mark a categorical distinction between states and governments. When these writers speak about the state, they take themselves to be referring to a distinct person separate at once from rulers and the ruled.
The earliest expression of this outlook in Anglophone political theory can be found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan of 1651, in which he informs us at the outset that, in putting forward his theory of public power, he will be speaking “not of the men” but “in the Abstract” about the nature of the “COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE”.
Although Hobbes is a protagonist of the theory of absolute sovereignty, he never talks in the manner of divine right theorists about the reverence due to kings as the Lord’s anointed or as God’s vicegerents on earth. He always maintains that the status of even the most absolute monarch can never be higher than that of an authorized representative. Furthermore, he gives an exacting account of the duties that such representatives must discharge. He assumes that we can never be expected to submit to sovereign power unless we believe that the outcome will be a more peaceful and settled way of life than we could hope to lead in the state of nature. But if that is so, then the sovereign to whom we submit must incur a corresponding obligation to act in such a way as “to produce the Peace, and Security of the people”. It is true that, because all sovereigns are by definition absolute, they cannot be punished or removed from office if they behave iniquitously. When they do so, however, they are in clear dereliction of their duty, which requires them to aim at all times “to procure the common interest” by conducting their government in a manner “agreeable to Equity, and the Common Good”.
If sovereigns are merely representatives, whom do they represent? …
… The formula in which the covenant is expressed [by Hobbes] is … said to be as follows: “I authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.” …
… [Hobbes] classifies representatives as artificial persons, and explains that “of Persons Artificiall, some have their words and actions Owned by those whom they represent. And then the Person is the Actor; and he that owneth his words and actions, is the AUTHOR: In which case the Actor acteth by Authority”.
When, in other words, we authorize our own representation, we must be willing to regard ourselves as the “owners” of whatever is subsequently said or done by our representatives. The reason is that, by our act of authorization, we have granted them authority to act in our name. We must therefore be prepared to accept responsibility for their actions as our own, and indeed to have them attributed to us as actions that we have performed ourselves.
With this analysis Hobbes arrives at his central contention about the implications of covenanting. When we agree to authorise our representation by the artificial person of a sovereign, we transform ourselves from a mere multitude into a unified group. We are now united by our common agreement to live in subjection to law, and by the fact that we have a single determining will, that of our sovereign representative, whose words and actions count as those of us all.
But this is to say that we are now capable of willing and acting as one person.
As Hobbes summarises, “a Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented”. The effect is to produce “a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man”.
The act of covenanting may thus be said to engender two persons who had no previous existence in the state of nature. One is the artificial person to whom we grant authority to speak and act in our name. The name of this person, we already know, is the sovereign. The other is the person we bring into being when we acquire a single will and voice by way of authorizing a man or an assembly to serve as our representative. The name of this further person, Hobbes next declares in an epoch-making moment, is the state.
“The Multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMON-WEALTH”, and another name for a commonwealth is a CIVITAS or STATE. ….
… Hobbes’s theory of state personality had little immediate impact on English political debate. But it quickly captured the attention of continental European commentators on the ius gentium and the law of nature. The first major philosopher to draw heavily on Hobbes’s account was Samuel Pufendorf in his De iure naturae et gentium of 1672. ….
[MGH: I omit a richly detailed and interesting discussion about the agreements and disagreements with respect to claims made by Hobbes among subsequent English and Continental political and legal theorists, especially Pufendorf but also Barbeyrac, Vattel, Blackstone, Bentham, Austin, and Sidgwick. We skip to the final three pages, picking up from the end of Quentin Skinner’s discussion of Utilitarian thought.]
… We look in vain among … early utilitarians … for any sustained discussion of the idea of the state, and insofar as we encounter such discussions in later utilitarian theory they generally echo Bentham’s reductionist account. A classic instance is provided by John Austin’s lectures on The Province of Jurisprudence Determined of 1832. As Austin informs us, his own understanding of the state is that the term simply denotes “the individual person, or the body of individual persons, which bears the supreme powers in an independent political society”. Later we find the same view summarised … by Henry Sidgwick in his Elements of Politics of 1891. Sidgwick explicitly denies that the bond of union underlying the state can be anything other than an agreement by a number of individuals to obey the same laws, and accordingly describes the state as nothing more than an apparatus of government empowered to command the exclusive allegiance of those living under it.
With this contention the story comes full circle, for it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say, as I began by noting, that this reductionist understanding of the state has remained the orthodoxy in Anglophone political theory ever since.
The other question I want to raise is whether anything of value may have been lost as a result of the widespread abandonment of the view that states must be categorically distinguished from governments and recognized as separate persons distinct from both rulers and ruled. Are there any good reasons for thinking about the state in these Hobbesian terms? A growing number of legal and political theorists have begun to answer in the affirmative.
By way of supporting their case, I should like to end by recalling the two main reasons the original protagonists of the Hobbesian view gave for insisting on a categorical distinction between states and governments.
One suggested reason was that we need to make sense of the claim that some governmental actions may have the intended effect of binding not merely the body of the people but their remote posterity. As we have seen, one obvious example, according to Pufendorf and many later legal theorists, is the decision to take on a large burden of public debt. Unless the outcome is a default, we need to ask who becomes the debtor. We can hardly answer that the debt must be owed by the government that incurred it. Even if the government changes or falls, the debt will still remain to be paid. The only way to make sense of the situation, Pufendorf concludes, is to recognize that the debtor must be a person with an artificial eternity of life, and must therefore be the person of the state.
We also need to take note of the analogous possibility that governmental action may affect our remote posterity in relation to other governments. Here the most obvious example was held to be that of international treaties. Any such alliance, as Vattel puts it, is “affixed to the body of the state, and subsists as long as the state”. But for this to be possible, the signatories will once again have to be persons with an artificial eternity of life, and will therefore have to be states.
Finally, according to the Hobbesian theorists, there is a further and more important reason for wishing to make a categorical distinction between states and governments.
The fundamental duty of government, in Hobbes’s words, is “to procure the common interest” by ruling in a manner “agreeable to Equity, and the Common Good”.
“The general Rule which Sovereigns are to proceed by”, Pufendorf agrees, is “Let the Safety of the People be the Supreme Law.” For these and other philosophers of the state, the basic reason for wishing to draw a categorical distinction between states and governments is that this provides us with a standing test of the legitimacy of the actions that governments undertake. The conduct of government, on this view, is morally acceptable if and only if it serves to promote the safety and welfare of the person of the state.
It is sometimes objected that this way of thinking about states reveals them to be distinctly sinister entities. But this anxiety reflects a straightforward misunderstanding of the theory I have been laying out. According to the Hobbesian view, to speak of the state as a distinct person is merely a way of referring to the body of the people united as equal citizens under an authorized form of government. When we speak about the interests of the state, this is equivalent to speaking about the interests of the people as a whole. The state is, in the end, nothing other than ourselves. When we institute states, we do not add any new material to the world; we simply reorganize and individuate ourselves in a new way. To insist that governments have a duty to act for the good of the state is simply to insist on their duty to act in the interests of us all. There are grounds for suggesting, in sum, that the abandonment of this way of thinking may have been a serious mistake.
[END]
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