Growing out of feudalism and harking back to Roman imperial times, the system of government that appeared in Europe during the years 1337­-1648 was still, in most respects, entirely personal.

The state as an abstract organization with its own persona separate from that of the ruler did not yet exist. Thus, in Italy around 1500 the term stood for ‘‘the machinery of government,” as when Guicciardini wrote of ‘‘the state of the Medicis” and ‘‘those in Florence who seek to change the state.”¹ Thus to say, as many historians have done, that it was the state which overcame church, empire, nobility, and towns is incorrect.

Those same contemporaries also continued the medieval tradition, manifest both in ecclesiastical chronicles and in the chansons de geste, of writing the histories of political communities of every kind and size almost entirely in terms of the personalities who governed them. Not for them institutions evolving, impersonal forces driving, and various factors clus­tering to produce this outcome or that; at most there was the medieval idea of the wheel of fortune, itself geared to the rise and fall of individuals and now often impersonated, as in Machiavelli, by the classical goddess

¹ F. Guicciardini, Ricordi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1951 edn.), series 2, 64.

² See N. Rubinstein, ‘‘Notes on the Word Stato in Florence Before Machiavelli,” in R. G. Rose and W. K. Ferguson, eds., Florilegium Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), pp. 313-26.

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fortuna? Normally the actors were rulers, the members of their families, their opponents, their advisers, and of course their mistresses. Either they allied themselves with each other or else they fought and intrigued against each other.

As late as 1589, according to Justus Lipsius in his hugely successful Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex, personal government meant that revolts might ensue because rulers had no children or because they suffered from a facial disfigurement or an incurable disease. Those of them who depleted the treasury by cultivating some hobby or allowed a love affair to determine the fate of a kingdom might be criticized for frivolity; still, in the end the gains to be made, and the losses to be suffered, were their own and nobody else's. It is true that rulers had long been told that, to save their souls (and prevent rebellion), they had better look after their subjects' welfare. However, the frequent comparison between the latter and a flock of sheep - owned as the latter are by their shepherd and raised for his benefit - speaks for itself. It was only after ascending the throne in 1660 that Louis XIV arrived at the point where he could distinguish between his own glory and the good of the etat that he headed. Or so, at any rate, he claimed in his memoirs.^{[133] [134]}

To put it in a different way, centralization on its own does not the state make. As we saw in chapter 1, from the time of ancient Egypt on many of the political constructs known as empires had been as centralized as possible, at least in theory and as far as the available technological means permitted. Not surprisingly, seventeenth-century monarchs deliberately tried to emulate the Roman empire in particular, which resemblance often extended into details as they Latinized their names (e.g., Louis became Ludovicus), adopted the symbols of the Caesars, and propagated the ideology of resignation and service that is known as neostoicism.^[135] Conversely, the real story of the absolute state is not so much about despotism per se as about the way in which, between 1648 and 1789, the person of the ruler and his ‘‘state'' were separated from each other until the first became almost entirely unimportant in comparison with the second.

That story, which represents an almost purely West European develop­ment and which was exported to other continents only at a much later date, will be told in four parts. First, I shall trace the rise of the bureau­cratic structure and the way in which it emancipated itself both from royal control and from civil society. Secondly, I shall show how that structure strengthened its hold over society by defining its borders, collecting all sorts of information about it, and taxing it. Thirdly, we must examine the way in which bureaucracy and taxes together made it possible for the state to create armed forces for external and internal use and thus establish a monopoly over the use of violence. Fourthly, it is necessary to trace the way in which political theory both accompanied all these developments and justified them.