Chapter 107
The state and political community; its origin, ends and relation to the individual.
207 passages · 96 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
The idea of the state takes in a cluster of questions that political writing has never settled. What kind of thing is a political community? How did such communities come to be? What are they for? What may they rightly ask of the men and women who compose them? Why do some grow great while others decay? Milton’s plan of education treats politics as the study of the beginning, end and reasons of political societies, and he means it to make students steadfast pillars of the state1. Carlyle thought the actual condition of society the most urgent question a thinking man could face2. Burke warned that a state is a multifarious thing, to be judged only with a comprehensive view of its interests3. Ruskin, reading the word itself, found in “state” the notion of standing and stability, resting on eternal law4. These books return to the state again and again: Greek tragedy and Roman letters, scripture and Stoic meditation, Renaissance utopia, the political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the founding documents of the American republic. Few ideas are so plainly present in them.
The oldest and most persistent answer to the first question is that the state is a kind of body. Aesop’s fable of the interdependent members makes the community an organism5. Plutarch speaks of sedition as diseased matter to be discharged from the body politic6. Dante traces a city’s malady to the confusion of persons within it, as a body sickens from mixed foods, and he holds that cities decay as families fail7. Hamlet’s prince is bounded in his choices by the voice of the body whose head he is8. Bacon carries the figure into policy: a body politic, like a natural one, needs exercise to stay healthy9. Macaulay pictures a dying country as a patient whose liberty is extinguished and whose commerce decays10. Lowell’s nation draws strength from all its people and returns it to them11. Burke uses the image against the French revolutionaries. To carve France into independent republics with neither coherence nor subordination, he argues, is to destroy a body politic, unlike associations that necessity has formed12.
Hobbes keeps the figure but changes its meaning decisively. The commonwealth is an artificial man, made by covenants, with sovereignty as its soul and magistrates as its joints13. Even the power to stand for things that lack reason exists only under civil government14. Winthrop’s governor likewise acts not as a person but as the State, a body politic corporate15. Once the state is understood as something made, its makers may judge their work, and Schiller does so with mixed feelings. Man finds himself in a state before he chooses one, but as a moral being he founds an ideal state by reason16. He must reform society while keeping it going, like mending a watch while it runs17. Schiller laments that the modern state has become a mechanism. It has split the living Greek polity into parts, separated church from state and laws from customs18, measures men by their function, and remains a stranger to its citizens19. His remedy is a state that represents ideal humanity in each individual and respects individual variety rather than crushing it20,21. Its highest form is an aesthetic state, which alone makes society real through the nature of the individual22.
A third line of thought treats the state as an enlarged family or an inheritance. Taine calls it an expanded, artificial family held together by the sentiment of obedience to a chief23. Pascal speaks of a nation as one family24. Burke turns the image into a doctrine. The commonwealth is an inheritance that its present tenants do not own25. It is a partnership in all science, art and virtue among the living, the dead and the unborn, and no mere commercial contract26. Carlyle goes further and finds in every polity a spiritual Idea of loyalty, the Soul of the State, working beneath consciousness27,28. Beyond family and nation lies the widest community of all. Epictetus makes man a citizen of the city of gods and men29, and Marcus Aurelius makes the whole human race one political community30. Kant’s kingdom of ends, a systematic union of rational beings under common laws, with members and a sovereign, carries this Stoic thought into moral philosophy31,32. Burke instead consecrates the particular state. Religion, he says, makes rulers regard their office as a sacred trust33, and civil society is willed by God as necessary to the perfection of man’s nature34.
On the origin of the state, the ancient view comes down through Dante’s citation of Aristotle: man lives in fellowship, and a state needs differing members with differing duties35. Pope has societies arise by nature, joined through love or fear, with commerce turning foes into friends36. For Shelley, social sympathy begins as soon as two human beings exist together37. For Emerson, men make states as naturally as caterpillars make webs38. Hume observes how mutual dependence ties each action to others, including the protection of the magistrate39. Hobbes refuses this comfortable picture. The natural condition is a war of all against all, and only coercive power makes covenants binding40. Speech is needed for any commonwealth at all41, and property and the validity of contracts begin with the state42. Rousseau then turns on all his predecessors. The philosophers never reached the state of nature, he says, but projected social ideas onto savages43. He traces political society to the institution of property44 and to a specious compact by which the rich turned their enemies into allies45,46. The result fettered the weak, strengthened the rich, and multiplied societies over the earth47. Rousseau prefers this account to one founded on conquest48. Pascal is blunter still: society began in force and was later held together by cords of imagination49.
Yet these books also record actual foundings by agreement, in which the philosophers’ compact becomes history. Virgil’s Carthage rises with laws ordained and senates elected50. The Mayflower colonists combine into a political body by mutual compact51. The Connecticut towns associate as one public state52. Vane locates sovereignty in the whole body of the people, represented by deputies, who cast themselves into a civil incorporation53,54. In the interim he would trust the armed body of the good party to order itself for the common defence55. Against all contract theory, however, Mill denies that society is founded on contract, while still holding that those it protects owe it a return56. Burke refuses to treat the partnership of generations as a trading agreement26. Lincoln, as we shall see, denies that the Union is a contract any one party may dissolve57.
What, then, is the state for? Burke calls civil society an institution for man’s advantage, from which his real rights derive58. Hobbes makes a man’s dignity the public worth that the commonwealth assigns him59. The moderns increasingly insist that the state has no good apart from its members. Macaulay finds Machiavelli’s defect precisely here: he separated the good of the body from the good of its members, whereas states exist only to increase private happiness60. Jones’s ode declares that a state consists not in walls or ports but in high-minded men who know their rights and duties61. Mill concludes that the worth of a state is the worth of its individuals, and that dwarfing men to make them docile instruments defeats its purpose62. The state should spread experience abroad rather than monopolize it63. Emerson grounds states on character rather than fear or craft64 and asks the state to give every poor child a fair chance65. He ends in a paradox: the State exists to educate the wise man and expires when he appears66.
The ancients put the opposite claim with great force. In the Crito the laws argue that the country is holier than parents, and that no man may destroy the state that begot and nurtured him67. Yet the same Socrates casts himself as the gadfly to a great, sluggish steed68, so that obedience and criticism are joined in one life. Marcus Aurelius holds that what does not harm the state does not harm the citizen69, and that the state is harmed only through harm to law and order70. The discontented man, for him, is a piece torn from the community71. The later claims are humbler and more concrete. Penn counsels not affronting a state that intends no affront72. Smith asks individuals to support the state that protects their property73, and Burke goes so far as to say that the revenue of the state is the state74. Mill marks the historical change: ancient commonwealths in constant peril regulated private conduct, while larger modern ones interfere less75. Even so, the state must keep vigilant control over the powers individuals hold over others76. Milton notes that no well-ordered state that valued books ever licensed them77. Lincoln, at Gettysburg, measures the claim by the lives given so that the nation might endure78.
Religion complicates the claim. The Gospel separates what is owed to Caesar from what is owed to God79. Bacon holds that atheism never disturbed states, though superstition has confounded many80. Hume weighs whether a magistrate should fear the Epicurean denial of providence, and how far a state may tolerate philosophy81,82. Burke finds church and state inseparable in the English mind83. He calls the state guardian, not proprietor, of church estates84. Mill, against him, treats endowments as national property the government may control85.
Bacon is the great analyst of how states grow great. Greatness can be measured in territory and revenue, he says, though power is hard to judge rightly86. Natural subjects must stay in proportion to stranger subjects87. Rome grew by colonies and naturalization88. Above all, greatness rests on martial institutions and customs89, and princes, unlike men, can add to their stature by ordinances90. Macaulay thinks small Italian states taught men to overrate national strength and undervalue internal prosperity91. Thoreau finds the vigor of every eminent state drawn from a wild source92.
Decline, by contrast, is a theme from the beginning. Aeschylus praises the council as a bulwark of the state93, and Aristophanes sends Aeschylus back from the dead to save the city with good counsel94. Cicero sees faction destroying both families and states95. He insists that the Republic demands harmony with its leading men96, and he quotes Plato’s view that citizens take their character from their chief men97. Dante mourns Florence’s lost peace and Italy’s unnatural divisions98,99. Bacon compares public envy, when it taints the best actions, to an infection in the state100. Browne sees commonwealths rise and fall like men101, and Pascal holds that states survive only by bending their laws to necessity102. Burke would steady the state through a nobility that connects the ages of a nation103. Ruskin denies that any money-making mob can last as a nation104, and Blake sees the state’s licensing of vice sealing a nation’s fate105.
More’s Utopia answers all this with a model. It alone deserves the name of commonwealth, since elsewhere men seek private wealth106. The whole island is managed as one household107, and its institutions secure concord and endurance108. Browne objects that a commonwealth without poverty misreads Christ’s prophecy109. Schiller calls true political freedom the most perfect work of art110. He judges political reform premature until harmonious humanity exists to found it111, a judgment that marks his distance from More’s confidence in institutions.
In the modern period the state also becomes a nation among nations. Freeman traces the state from the union of gentes into tribes and nations112. He finds in the Swiss Confederation an artificial nation, defined neither by blood nor by speech113. Austria-Hungary, by contrast, is not even an artificial nation114. The American documents conduct the most sustained argument about sovereignty in the collection. The Articles leave each state its sovereignty within a league115. The Federalist insists on one united people116,117. Marshall divides sovereignty between Union and states, each supreme in its own objects118,119. Washington warns that geographical parties threaten the Union120,121, and Longfellow makes the Union the ship on which humanity’s hope rides122. Lincoln calls it a perpetual community whose sections cannot physically separate57,123. Burke, asking what principle of coherence could hold France’s confederated republics together, poses the same question from the other side124.
The treaties show sovereignty as something that can be transferred. Britain acknowledges the states as free and independent125. Louisiana, the Floridas, Russian America and Hawaii pass in full sovereignty126,127,128,129, and boundaries are surveyed by commissioners130. Panama grants a zone to the exclusion of its own sovereignty131. Burns’s lament for Scotland sold into union132 and Sydney Smith’s warning that the weaker partner risks being outvoted133 recall what such transfers cost.
The open questions remain sharp. These texts do not decide whether the state is grown or made, whether it rests on nature, contract, force or inheritance, or whether its worth lies in itself or only in its citizens. The ancients bind the citizen to the city. The moderns increasingly measure the city by the citizen. Between Socrates’ obedience and Emerson’s withering state, the relation remains in dispute.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Education 10a · Liberty 6c
See also: Religion 13b
See also: War and Peace 5a
See also: Wealth 8b
See also: Race and Nationality 8a · Language 9c
See also: Judgment 7d · War and Peace 10b
See also: Law, Liberty, Citizen, Constitution, Government, Patriotism