Inside the Leviathan

Once the state had been brought into being, the very terms in which people thought about government changed. Already during the last quar­ter of the sixteenth century that time-honored form of literature, Mirrors for Princes, began to go out of fashion.

As for religion, the words fidei defensor continued to appear on British coins and Gott mit uns on the belts of German soldiers. Though rulers continued to be instructed in it as a matter of course, more and more it was relegated to private life. Luther, Calvin, and their fellow reformer Beza still had much to say about the institutions of government and the rights of magistrates; but John Wesley, who founded Methodism during the 1740s, was content with the existing regime so long as it afforded him and his followers freedom of religion.¹¹⁵ From the time of the Enlighten­ment on, ‘‘monk-ridden,” said of a ruler, became a term of abuse, one which was applied, for example, to Spain's Philip II and to France's Louis XIV during his declining years. Considered as a basis for government, theology lost most of its influence. This of course did not mean that its replacement, i.e., political science, could not be equally incomprehen­sible and even more long-winded.

Like that of classical Greece, but in contrast to most of its predecessors in other times and places (and also in contrast to some present-day doctrines), modern political science was couched almost entirely in secu­lar terms. For two centuries after 1650 the idea that rulers deserved obedience because they had received their mandate from heaven con­tinued to figure in children's catechisms.

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See J. C. English, ‘‘John Wesley and the Rights of Conscience,” Journal of Church and State, 37, 7, 1995, pp. 349-65.

which itself, Filmer argued, could succeed only because God approved of it.^[193] At the hands of Locke, within less than three decades of his death, Filmer had been turned into a butt of ridicule, which in the eyes of many he has remained to the present day.

During the fifty years leading up to the French Revolution the belief spread that the units in which humanity lived ought to be states - and, increasingly, that people who did not live in states, as was the case outside Europe, belonged to inferior ‘‘tribal” civilizations and were scarcely human.^[194] In France, England, Germany, and the United States inter alia the debate as to the constitutional arrangements that ought to exist within each state was to continue into the nineteenth century and beyond. Where agreement could not be reached, the result was revolution, a seventeenth-century concept which was borrowed from astronomy and which, since previous political entities only knew palace coups, revolts, rebellions, and mutinies of every sort, itself represents a product of the state.^[195] Those, and there were always some, who disputed that man should be subject to the state at all came to be known as anarchists.^[196] To the extent that they took action to realize their views - and, often, even if they did not - they were persecuted with all the power of the police.

In day-to-day life, the question whether one was a citizen of this state or that became one of the most important aspects of any individual’s exis­tence besides the biological facts of race, age, and sex. As late as the end of the ancien regime, Lawrence Sterne, author of A Sentimental Journey, was able to travel from Britain to France even though they were at war with each other; and, having arrived there, to be received with every sign of honor in the social circles to which he belonged. However, the nineteenth century put an end to such civilities. In the words of the US citizenship oath, those belonging to one state had to abjure all loyalty to foreign rulers, princes, or potentates. All states during wartime, and some during peacetime too, imposed restrictions on whom their citizens were and were not allowed to marry; while hostilities lasted, enemy nationals were likely to be interned and have their property confiscated. The time was even to come when not to be accepted as a citizen by one state or another turned into one of the worst of all possible fates. Such people were literally deprived of the right to live; always subject to deportation, sometimes shuttled from one country to another (as notoriously happened to the Jewish refugees abroad the St. Louis in 1939), or concentrated in refugee camps, or left to starve in no man's land. Even if they were graciously admitted and allowed to reside within the stomach of this or that par­ticular Leviathan, usually they were not permitted to take on legal em­ployment and were left to lead a furtive existence.

Having grown out of the instruments that had helped monarchs turn themselves into absolute rulers, the state acquired a life of its own. Like some latter-day monster, it loomed over society; and, in turn, subjected that society to a flattening process unequaled in history until then. Aris­totle, Bodin, and Montesquieu^[197] had all noted the tendency of tyrants to eliminate social differences and privileges of every sort in order to reduce all their subjects to trembling equality in front of themselves.

To look at it in another way, by transforming rulers from owners and masters into magistrates who acted on its behalf, the state did away with the need to endow them with any special qualities or privileges. The first to suggest that all men were equal in respect to their physical and mental attributes - indeed that they did not possess any other attributes, such as strength, special wisdom, or divine favor, which made them fit to rule - was that great iconoclast, Thomas Hobbes. To Hobbes also belongs the credit of being the first political thinker since antiquity to base his system on that belief. In the state that he constructed all men were to be equal; from the sovereign down, whatever power some people exercised over others, and whatever special rights they enjoyed, derived not from their own qualities but solely from their position as government officials.

Later, the idea that men were born equal was taken up by Locke and spread by philosophes such as Voltaire, Thomas Paine, and others. From at least the middle of the eighteenth century on, the pressure for legal and political equality among all citizens could be seen to build up.

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While the flattening process meant that the power exercised by the state within its borders grew and grew, most of the bonds that had linked earlier political communities to each other were either deliberately cut or allowed to lapse. Already Bodin had noted that the concept of sovereignty was incompatible with the existence of feudal ties between rulers on different sides of the border. Either one was sovereign and thus not the vassal of anybody else, or one was not; and indeed his work, representing a French point of view and thus very much concerned with the relation­ship between le roi tres chretien and the Emperor, can be read as a call for such ties as still remained to be abolished. Twenty years after the Six livres were published, Sully, as Henry IV’s loyal servant, floated his scheme for breaking the Habsburg’s overlordship over the German princes, and by the middle of the seventeenth century this feat had in fact been accom­plished. The shift away from feudal ties among rulers was to prove both rapid and permanent. As early as 1667-8, Louis XIV, trying to revive them as a pretext for extending his borders, found himself opposed by most of Europe in the so-called War of Devolution. Later, as the Euro­pean state began reaching outside its original home, the ability to impose direct rule while dispensing with intermediaries was turned into some­thing of an index for modernization.¹²¹

It is true that rulers belonging to different dynasties continued to marry each other’s daughters and sisters, and indeed their exalted status scar­cely left them a choice.

never any question of the two countries being united, and after his death they went their separate ways in foreign policy too. When Louis XIV put his grandson Philip on the Spanish throne by means of the War of the Spanish Succession, he declared that the Pyrenees had ceased to exist. This turned out to be a mere figure of speech, since the two countries continued to be entirely separate and no French king was ever to rule Spain as well. Later in the eighteenth century the fact that Louis XVI of France married Marie Antoinette, daughter of Maria Theresa and sister of Emperor Joseph II, did very little to influence relations between their respective countries. As to Napoleon, within three years of him marrying Marie-Louise he and his father-in-law, Emperor Francis, were engaged in all-out war.

Nor did the collapse of political entities superior to the sovereign state go unnoticed by contemporaries. To the proponents of both church and empire it was, of course, an unmitigated disaster. By contrast, in the hands of both Hobbes and Locke, it was turned into proof that ‘‘the state of nature” was not merely a fiction but existed in reality. The former regarded international relations as the arena in which fear, greed, and the lust for power ruled unchecked and where the war of omnes contra omnium was therefore able to unfold without beginning, pause, or end. The latter saw them in a more benevolent light as a field where states, though occasionally engaging in a quarrel and clobbering each other, on the whole allowed themselves to be governed by enlightened self-interest and behaved sufficiently well to allow civilized life to develop.¹²² Whichever of the two views we adopt, the demise of any authority above that of the state meant that the unity of Europe which eighteenth-century philosophes from Voltaire and Gibbons onward were so fond of talking about was limited almost entirely to the republic of letters. In our own day many authors have argued that ‘‘international anarchy” as it exists among states is the root cause of war. What they forget is that war made its historical debut long before the state; and, to all appearances, is destined to outlast it as well.

¹²² On the views held by thephilosophes on these questions, see E. Silberner, La guerre dans la pensee economique du XVIe au XVIIe siecle (Paris: Libraire de recueil Sirey, 1939), particularly part 2.