Quentin Skinner 'Visions of Politics'
Series: Interpreting the interpreters of medieval governance
Social Science Files research exhibit focusing on the term ‘status’.
Category type 7 rank over status society.
A book exhibit..
Quentin Skinner*, Visions of Politics: Volume 2, Renaissance Virtues, Cambridge University Press 2002
[*subscriber to Social Science Files since March 2022]
CHAPTER 14
From the state of princes to the person of the state
[Part 1]
The English translation of Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive, first published in 1651, begins by promising to undertake ‘a more curious search into the rights of States, and duties of Subjects’. The Introduction to Leviathan, first published in the same year, similarly announces that the aim of the work will be to anatomise ‘that great LEVIATHAN, called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE’.
Since that time, the idea that the confrontation between individuals and states furnishes the central topic of political theory has come to be almost universally accepted. This makes it easy to overlook the fact that, when Hobbes spoke in these terms, he was self-consciously setting a new agenda for the discipline he claimed to have invented, the discipline of political science.
His suggestion that the duties of subjects are owed to an agency called the state, rather than to the person of a ruler, was still a relatively new and highly contentious one. So was his implied assumption that our duties are owed exclusively to the state, rather than to a multiplicity of jurisdictional authorities, local as well as national, ecclesiastical as well as civil in character. So, above all, was his use of the term state to denote this highest source of authority in matters of civil government.
Hobbes’s declaration can thus be viewed as marking the end of one phase in the history of political theory and the beginning of another and more familiar one. It announces the end of an era in which the concept of public power had been analysed in more personal and charismatic terms.
It points to a simpler and more abstract vision of sovereignty as the property of an impersonal agency, a vision that has remained with us ever since and has come to be embodied in the use of such terms as état, stato, Staat and state. My aim in what follows will be to sketch the historical circumstances out of which these linguistic and conceptual transformations arose.
[Part 2]
As early as the fourteenth century, the Latin term status — together with such vernacular equivalents as estat, stato and state – can already be found in general use in a variety of political contexts. During this formative period, these terms were predominantly employed to refer to the state or standing of rulers themselves.
One important source of this usage was the rubric De statu hominum from the opening of the Digest of Roman law. There the authority of Hermogenianus is adduced for the claim that, ‘since all law is established for the sake of human beings, we first need to consider the status of such persons, before we consider anything else’. Following the revival of Roman law studies in twelfth-century Italy, the word status came in consequence to designate the legal standing of all sorts and conditions of men, with rulers being described as enjoying a distinctive ‘estate royal’, estat du roi or status regis.
When the question of a ruler’s status was raised, the reason for doing so was generally to emphasise that it ought to be viewed as a state of majesty, a high estate, a condition of stateliness. Within the well-established monarchies of France and England, we encounter this formula in chronicles and official documents throughout the latter half of the fourteenth century. …
… Underlying the suggestion that a distinctive quality of stateliness ‘belongs’ to kings was the prevailing belief that sovereignty is intimately connected with display, that the presence of majesty serves as an ordering force. This was to prove the most enduring of the many features of charismatic leadership eventually subverted by the emergence of the modern concept of an impersonal state.
As late as the end of the seventeenth century, it is still common to find political writers using the word state to point to a connection between the stateliness of rulers and the efficacy of their rule. As one might expect, exponents of divine-right monarchy such as [Jacques-Bénigne] Bossuet continue to speak of the état of majesté in just such terms. But the same assumptions survived even among the enemies of kingship … John Milton, for example [in his History of Britain] …
By the end of the fourteenth century, the term status was also in regular use to refer to the state or condition of a realm or commonwealth. This conception of the status reipublicae was likewise classical in origin, and can be found in the histories of Livy and Sallust as well as in Cicero’s orations and political works. It can also be found in the Codex of Roman law, most notably in the opening rubric of the Digest, where the analysis begins with Ulpian’s contention that law is concerned with two arenas, the public and the private, and that ‘public law is that which pertains to the status rei Romanae’.
With the revival of Roman law studies, this further piece of legal terminology likewise passed into general currency. It became usual in the fourteenth century, both in France and in England, to discuss ‘the state of the realm’ or estat du roilme. …
… If we turn from northern Europe to the Italian city-republics, we encounter the same terminology at an even earlier date. As we saw [in earlier chapter] the earliest advice-books for podestà and other city magistrates were produced in the opening decades of the thirteenth century. These manuals already make it clear that their principal concern is with the status civitatis, the state or condition of the city as an independent political entity. …
… Discussing the state or standing of such communities, the advice generally tendered by these writers is that magistrates have a duty to maintain their cities in a good, happy and prosperous state. The ideal of upholding the bonus (or even the optimus) status reipublicae was again Roman in origin; the phrase occurs with some frequency in Cicero and Seneca. The author of the Oculus Pastoralis similarly speaks of the need to preserve one’s city in a happy, advantageous, honourable and prosperous status. Giovanni da Viterbo likewise insists on the desirability of maintaining the bonus status of one’s community, while Filippo Ceffi writes with equal confidence in the vernacular of the obligation to sustain one’s city in ‘a good stato and complete peace’.
These writers also provide the earliest restatements of the classical view of what it means for a city or respublica to attain its best state. Our magistrates must follow the dictates of justice in all their public acts, so that the common good is promoted, the cause of peace upheld and the happiness of the people assured. This line of reasoning is later taken up by Aquinas and his Italian disciples at the end of the thirteenth century.
Aquinas presents the argument at several points in his Summa as well as in his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics. ‘A judge has care of the good of the community, based on justice, which is why he desires death for the criminal, because this has the character of good in relation to the common status.’
The same line of reasoning had already been put forward a generation earlier by the writers of advice-books for city magistrates. Giovanni da Viterbo speaks in very similar vein of the optimus status in his treatise De Regimine Civitatum, while Brunetto Latini reiterates Giovanni’s argument in his chapter Dou gouvernement des cités at the end of his encyclopaedic Li Livres dou trésor in 1266.
This vision of the optimus status reipublicae later became central to [fifteenth century Italian] quattrocento humanist accounts of the well-ordered political life.
When Giovanni Campano (1427-77) analyses the dangers of faction in his tract De Regendo Magistratu, he declares that ‘there is nothing I count more unfavourable to the status and safety of a respublica’. If the right status of a community is to be preserved, all factional advantage must be subordinated to the pursuit of the common good. Filippo Beroaldo (1453-1505) endorses the same conclusion in a treatise to which he actually gave the title De Optimo Statu. The best status, he agrees, can be attained if and only if our magistrates ‘set aside the pursuit of their own advantages and ensure that they act in everything in such a way as to promote the public benefit’.
The Erasmian humanists imported the same values and vocabulary into northern Europe in the early decades of the sixteenth century.
Erasmus himself contrasts the optimus with the pessimus reipublicae status in his Institutio Principis Christiani of 1516, arguing that ‘the happiest status is reached when everyone obeys the prince, when the prince obeys the laws and when the laws answer to our ideals of honesty and equity’.
His younger contemporary Thomas Starkey offers a similar account in his Dialogue of what constitutes ‘the most prosperous and perfect state that in any country, city or town, by policy and wisdom may be established and set’. And in Thomas More’s Utopia the figure of Raphael Hythloday likewise insists that, because the Utopians live in a society in which the laws embody the principles of justice and allow everyone to live ‘as happily as possible’, we are justified in saying that the Utopians have attained the optimus status reipublicae, the best state of a commonwealth.
[Part 3]
I now turn to examine how these early uses of status and its vernacular equivalents mutated in such a way as to give these terms their modern range of reference. Historians who have addressed this question have generally concentrated on the evolution of legal theories about the status of rulers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
It was rare, however, even for civil lawyers to use the Latin word status without qualification, and it was virtually unknown for political writers to employ such a barbarism at all.
Even when we encounter the term status in political contexts, it is almost always evident that what is at issue is the state or standing of a king or kingdom, not in the least the idea of the state as the institution in whose name legitimate government is exercised.
If we wish to trace the origins of this transformation, it seems to me that we need to begin by focusing not on legal writings but rather on the advice-books for magistrates on which I have already commented [above and earlier chapters], and above all on the mirror-for-princes literature to which they eventually gave rise. It was within this latter tradition of practical political reasoning that the terms status and stato first began to be used in new and significantly extended ways. …
… the writers of handbooks for princes were generally preoccupied with two related questions of statecraft. Their loftiest aim was to explain how rulers can hope to attain the goals of honour and glory for themselves while at the same time managing to promote the happiness and welfare of their subjects. But their main concern was with a more basic and urgent question of politics: how to advise the signori of Italy, often in highly unsettled circumstances, on how to hold on to their status principis or stato del principe, their state or standing as effective rulers of their existing territories.
As a result, the use of the term stato to denote the political standing of rulers, together with the discussion of how such rulers should behave if they wish mantenere lo stato, began to resound through the chronicles and advice-books of trecento Italy. … By the time we reach Machiavelli’s Il Principe of 1513, the question of what rulers should do to maintain their political standing had become the chief topic of debate. Machiavelli’s advice is almost entirely directed at new princes who wish mantenere lo stato, to uphold their positions in whatever territories they may have managed to inherit or acquire.
If such rulers are to prevent their state or standing from being altered to their disadvantage, they must clearly be able to fulfil a number of preconditions of effective government. If we turn to examine how these preconditions were formulated and discussed, we shall find that the terms status and stato were employed in an increasingly extended manner to refer to these various aspects of political power.
One precondition of maintaining one’s standing as a ruler is obviously that one should be able to preserve the character of one’s existing regime. We accordingly find the terms status and stato being used from an early period to refer not merely to the state or condition of princes, but also to the presence of particular forms of government. This usage in turn appears to have arisen out of the habit of employing the term status to classify the types of rule described by Aristotle.
Aquinas has sometimes been credited with popularising this development, since there are versions of his Expositio of Aristotle’s Politics in which oligarchies are described as status paucorum and the rule of the people as the status popularis. …
Such usages later became widespread in quattrocento humanist political thought. Filippo Beroaldo begins his De Optimo Statu with a typology of legitimate regimes, speaking of the status popularis, the status paucorum and even the status unius when referring to monarchies.
Francesco Patrizi of Siena (1412-94) opens his De Regno with a similar typology, one in which monarchy, aristocracy and democracy are all characterised as different types of status.
Writing in the vernacular at the same period, Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421-98) contrasts the rule of signori with the stato populare, while Francesco Guicciardini invokes the same distinction a generation later in his Discorsi on the government of Florence.
Machiavelli likewise uses stato in just this fashion in a number of passages in Il Principe, most notably in the opening sentence of the book, in which he informs us that ‘all the stati, all the dominions that have had or now have power over men, either have been or are republics or principalities’.
By this time the term stato was also in widespread use as a way of referring to prevailing regimes. …
… A second precondition of maintaining one’s state as a ruler is obviously that one should suffer no loss or alteration of the territories given into one’s charge. As a result of this further preoccupation, we find the terms status and stato pressed into service as a way of referring to the areas over which a ruler or chief magistrate needs to exercise control. When the author of the Oculus Pastoralis admonishes magistrates to care for the welfare of their cities, he speaks of their duty to maintain suos status.
When the authors of the Gratulatio addressed the people of Padua in 1310 to express the hope that the province will continue to live in peace, they declare that they are praying for the tranquillity of the whole status. And when Ambrogio Lorenzetti explains in the verses accompanying his frescoes in the Sala de’ Nove in Siena that all signori must cultivate the virtues, he gives as his reason that this is how they must act per governar suo stato.
These usages proliferate in the chronicles and handbooks of the high Renaissance. …
[MGH: The chapter goes on to discuss how republican ideas drew on and modified the terms or typologies outlined above, but we will end this ‘status’ exhibit here.]
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