The growth of political theory

With the exception of the classical city-states and their magistrates, none of the political communities which existed until 1648 distinguished bet­ween the person of the ruler and his rule.

⁹⁰ C. von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), book 1, chs. 1 and 2; M. van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991), ch. 2.

⁹¹ The Hellenistic king’s top officials were known as their haeterioi (companions), orphiloi (friends); on them and the courts that they formed, see G. Herman, ‘‘The Courts Society of the Hellenistic Age’’ (unpublished paper, History Department, Hebrew University, Jerusalem). of high-ranking officials as the ‘‘slaves” of this or that king.^[181] Nor was this merely a figure of speech. As late as the first half of the nineteenth century, the subjects of the Ottoman Porte were, legally speaking, his slaves for him to do with whatever he pleased; private property that could not be confiscated at any moment and for any (or no) reason simply did not exist.

Another outcome of the age-old identification between ruler and rule was that the idea of a conflict of interest stopped short at the steps of the throne. Officials of every rank might - and often did - receive bribes; these might come either from people subject to their authority or else from foreign rulers who hoped to influence policy or even to foment a revolt. Such cases might be detected and, if they seriously affected the ruler's interests, punished. The annals of all monarchical governments are full of such cases, often falling under the rubric of lèse majeste or of treason. However, the same did not apply at the very top. Not only were king or emperor beyond human judgment in practical terms, but in their case the distinction between their person and the government did not exist and, of course, neither did corruption. Throughout history monarchs large and small were accustomed to receiving presents both from their own subjects and from foreign rulers in search of alliances or favors. By definition, they could not accept bribes.

Reflecting the fact that most rulers attributed their positions to the gods that be, political theory, to the extent that it existed at all, tended to be a subdivision of theology. This was the case, for example, in ancient Egypt, where it is hard to say whether certain hymns were written in praise of Ra or Pharaoh (who, after all, was himself a god);^[183] so also during the Middle Ages at the hands of Thomas Aquinas, Jean Gerson, and others, all of whom followed Augustine in that they saw government not as an artificial entity established by him and for his own benefit, but as part of the order that had been created by the Lord. Depending on how centralized, powerful, and intrusive government was - in other words, whether it was an empire or a feudal system that we are talking about - doctrines of this kind might well elaborate on the structure of the community; the nature of the bonds that held it together; the rights and duties of both rulers and ruled; and even on what either side was entitled to do in case the other violated its god-mandated obligations.

Another traditional approach to what we today would call the science of politics consisted of handbooks for rulers. Some were mere literary exercises and were written without any particular person in mind; others were produced in the service of, and often dedicated to, individuals from whom the author hoped to receive some kind of favor in return. One of the earliest known works of this kind is the Cyropaedia, composed by the Athenian Xenophon around 364 BC. It is an idealized account of the education and career of a Persian pretender to the throne, Cyrus the Younger, with whom Xenophon took service as a mercenary commander and whom he presents as a paragon of virtue. In antiquity, and through­out the Middle Ages, Xenophon’s example was followed by a very large number of works by secular and ecclesiastical writers.^[184] All alike tended to emphasize the importance of good breeding and a sound education in instilling such qualities as piety, wisdom, temperance, and clemency (the foursome which Emperor Augustus claimed to possess). More to the point, the ruler is invariably treated as if he were a mere private individual. Though his station may be more exalted and his responsibilities more onerous than those of others, the code he is urged to follow is no different from that recommended to anybody else in the society in question. And indeed one reason why such treatises were written in the first place was not merely to educate princes - whose numbers, after all, were limited - but to enable ordinary people to model themselves upon their betters’ supposed virtues and live accordingly.

One of the last, and best, works of this genre is the Institutes Principis Christianis (best translated as The Ways of a Christian Prince) written by Erasmus while in the service of the future Charles V and published in 1517.

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While it cannot be shown that Charles V was directly influenced by Erasmus - he probably never read the work, which was dedicated to him - the two were entirely at one in regarding government as a personal affair. A glimpse into the emperor's world is offered by the two great testaments that he wrote for his son Philip, then sixteen years old, in 1543. Paradoxi­cally the one that deals with the prince's person, the way he ought to behave (also in regard to his relations with women), and the qualities he ought to adopt is semi-public in character; it consists of pious advice concerning the need to trust in God, exercise sexual restraint, take one's responsibilities seriously, etc.

In the eyes of Charles and his contemporaries, provinces, money, armies, ministers, and princesses were simply assets. They belonged to rulers, and were freely passed from one to another by means of diplomacy or war. All alike were pawns in the vast game of chess whose ultimate aim was to maintain ‘‘our'' inheritance undiminished, if possible while keeping the subjects happy but if necessary even at the cost of taxing them heavily and putting other burdens on them. In this world-view there was no government in our sense of the term, only people who served the emperor in this capacity or that; no civil society, but only subjects great and small who had to be treated differently according to their different stations in life; and no foreign states to deal with, only rulers belonging to other dynasties who either allied themselves with Charles or stood in his way.

An even more interesting example of the inability to distinguish bet­ween government on the one hand and the ruler's private affairs on the other is that of Machiavelli. As a student and admirer of ancient Rome - he probably never mastered Greek - he must have been aware that the great men to whom, in his own words, he looked for political wisdom⁹⁶ were magistrates and not kings who ran the city as their private property; yet when he produced his masterpiece, The Prince, he wrote as if that distinction did not exist.

Seen in this light, Machiavelli, far from being a revolutionary, was entirely a man of his times. Neither in the type of book that he wrote nor in his confusion between the private and the public spheres did he differ from his contemporaries. Like Erasmus he was incapable of distinguish­ing between the prince's personal life and his political role, to the point that he included a paragraph on the need to leave the citizens' daughters alone." In an Italy whose cities were for the most part ruled by ferocious, often self-made tyrants, what set him apart was merely the secular tone of his work. Considered as an individual, Machiavelli's prince might well go to hell after his death. Considered as a ruler, he is neither appointed by God nor, in any practical sense, responsible to Him. Though he would be well advised to maintain an outward show of piety, there could be no question of a ruler maintaining his government by kindliness of the sort advocated by Erasmus and many of his predecessors; instead it was necessary to play the game of politics, which for the first time since antiquity was given a separate identity by a set of rules to be known,

⁹⁶ Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 10 December 1513, in Lettere (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), vol. V, p. 305.

⁹⁷ For the expression il nuovo principe and its special significance, see S. de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (New York: Harvest Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 232ff.

⁹⁸ Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 90.

⁹⁹ Ibid., p. 102.

shortly after Machiavelli, as raison d’etat.¹⁰⁰ Since men are at heart base, cowardly, and treacherous, those rules cannot be the same as those which apply inside the house or family (although little is known about his personal life, Machiavelli seems to have been a good husband by the standards of the times). The qualities most required are not piety and clemency but force and guile.

By putting God to one side, Machiavelli also knocked away those twin pillars of government that were closely dependent on Him, i.e., justice and right. The success of political action as reflected in the greatness and prosperity of the country became its own reward. Rulers owed their positions not to any kind of heavenly mandate but to their prowess or virtù, which in this way was turned into the cardinal pillar on which everything else rested. Yet Machiavelli was also aware that outstanding virtù is seldom attained by persons whose only goal in life is to advance themselves; as Napoleon, who knew about such matters, once put it, the pleasure an emperor derives from a duchess in her boudoir is no greater than that which a farmboy gets out of a shepherdess in a barn. Virtù can reach its own heights only provided it is inspired by an ideal which, in Machiavelli’s case, was represented by his much beloved patria (whether he meant his native city of Florence or Italy as a whole is moot): hence the famous last chapter of The Prince where he calls upon the reigning Medici prince to take the lead in expelling the barbarians from Italy. Modern scholars have often argued that this text represents either a careless afterthought or gross flattery to the ruler. In reality it constitutes the justification both for Machiavelli’s own work and, even more importantly, for the prince’s existence and the nature of the methods that he employs.

Given that he set out to strip political life of hypocrisy, it is no wonder that Machiavelli met with a frosty reception, to the point that his most famous work remained unpublished while he lived. A mere four years after The Prince was written (1513), Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door at Wittenberg; this act marked the beginning of a period which lasted for over a century and which was largely dominated by religious strife as to who was the trùe God on whom society, and with it the system of government that keeps order within it, could be based. The course of the struggle varied from one country to the next. In some, such as Italy, Spain, England, and Sweden, the established authorities prevail­ed quite easily. Either they confirmed the established religion or they changed it in the direction they considered desirable - with the result that the number of victims, in the form of heretics who were condemned and executed, came only to hundreds or, at worst, thousands. In other, less

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See F. Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History (London: Routledge, 1957), particularly pp. 25-48. fortunate countries, the outcome of the Reformation was nothing less than the disintegration of government. This left the way open to decades of civil war, as happened in France, Germany, and what is now the Czech Republic.

It was against such a background that the next great political author, Jean Bodin, did his work in France. Bodin, whose personal life is some­thing of a mystery (even the religion he professed is uncertain), was probably around thirty years old when civil war broke out in 1561; no wonder much of his career consisted of an attempt to find a solution. Neither the old theological approach nor the Mirrors for Princes had much to offer, given that the former was anchored in a God whose identity had become a matter for dispute and that the latter had manifest­ly failed to help French monarchs carry out their task of imposing order and justice. Accordingly, Bodin turned his back on both traditions. Starting at the beginning, he focused neither on the way God had con­structed the universe nor on the education of princes but on the nature of the republique as such - a problem which both Machiavelli and Erasmus (let alone Charles V who, though he was an astute and conscientious ruler, was anything but a theorist) had entirely ignored. Naturally Bodin's model was Aristotle's Politics, which he followed very closely even as he criticized some of the detailed arrangements which it proposed. Seeking a new, nonreligious basis for government, Bodin in Les six livres de la republique became the first writer in modern history to discuss the dif­ference between government within the household, as exercised by the husband over his dependants and by the master over his slaves, and political power which prevailed between people who were, if not yet equal, at any rate born free and possessed of a legal persona of their own.¹⁰¹

Trained as a lawyer - at one point in his career he was active as an avocat to Henry III - Bodin rejected Machiavelli's argument that force and guile, rather than law, rule political affairs. Instead he adopted Cicero's definition of a res publica as a community of people governed by law; from this he derived the proposition that the most important duty of any ruler was precisely to lay down the law. However, if order was to prevail then law alone was not enough. He who is responsible for legis­lating should also decide on war and peace, appoint the most important officials, mete out the principal rewards and punishments, act as the supreme appellate justice, and determine the currency of the land (Bodin was very interested in political economy, on which he wrote a separate treatise). In principle there was nothing to prevent these functions from ¹⁰¹ J. Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, M. J. Tooley, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), pp. 40-9.

being exercised either by a single person or by an assembly of people; the point was that, to prevent conflicts and disorder, they should be united in the same hands. As Bodin points out, sovereignty - a term which he did not invent, but which owes much of its popularity to him - should be one, indivisible, and perpetual. When there are two sovereigns neither is truly so; where sovereignty is not perpetual anything that has been done by a sovereign can be undone by his successor.

In a world where God is no longer capable of providing a consensual basis for political life, Bodin wanted to endow the sovereign with His qualities and put him in His place, at any rate on earth and as pertained to a certain well-defined territory. Aristotle had inquired into the justifica­tion of government, finding it in the free consent of family-heads; to Bodin the question did not matter and nowhere in his massive work did he pay much attention to it. What did matter was the sovereign’s ability to create order out of chaos by instituting good laws and governing through them. Bodin, however, was unable to disassociate himself from the medi­eval idea of law as something that existed independently of the human will. Accordingly, good laws meant not simply those that served the community best but those that were based on, or at any rate did not conflict with, divine law on the one hand and the law of nature on the other. The former had been laid down in the Bible and, in Bodin’s view, also dictated that the form of succession should be by primogeniture. The latter were really little more than the rules of equity which dictated, for example, that a person should not be deprived of his property without cause (Bodin has often been portrayed as an early defender of capitalism). What means were to be used in order to make sure that the sovereign, whose power came closer to absolutism than that of any of his predeces­sors, should indeed abide by the principles of natural and divine law Bodin failed to say, nor, given the extreme weakness of the French monarchy in his day, did it matter.

Another problem which was implicit in Bodin’s work, but to which he did not really provide an answer, was how the sovereign’s position was to be maintained over time. Speaking of sovereignty as perpetual was all very well; but humans, including kings, did die and at no time were people more aware of the fact than during the sixteenth century when paintings were constantly showing how death swept away emperors and com­moners alike. For dealing with the problem, the late Middle Ages had invented the doctrine of the ‘‘king’s two bodies.’’¹⁰² The king’s physical body was manifestly as mortal and as perishable as that of anyone else. However, he also possessed a ‘‘mystical body’’ (corpus mysticum), an idea

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See E. H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 128ff., 336ff., 401ff., 446-7, 501ff. whose origins are disputed but which may have grown out of Christianity where God, after all, is believed to possess no fewer than three different bodies. It was to this mystical body, rather than to the physical one, that the king's dominion, prerogatives, and duties were attached. As a result, far from having to be renewed each time a monarch died and was replaced by another (which was standard practice in all premodern empires), they were passed on automatically. To close the hiatus between the death of one king and the coronation of another the formula le roi est mort, vive le roi was devised and sounded for the first time at the funeral of Louis XII in 1512. Another way of expressing the same idea was to prepare an effigy that would continue the reign until a new king could be crowned. This ceremony was in use from the death of Charles VI in 1422 and was carried out for the last time following the death of Henry IV in 1610.^[185]

By the last quarter of the fifteenth century the notion that there existed (in Germany, Italy, and sometimes France) a ‘‘state'' or (in England and also in France, a ‘‘crown'') was slowly emerging out of the no-man's-land between the ruler's private property and his public responsibilities. At­tempting to make a subordinate carry out an unpalatable order, France's Louis XI was capable of writing that ‘‘you are a servant of the Crown as well as I.''^[186] Nevertheless, usage remained unsettled and the modern meaning of the term did not yet exist. When Bodin wrote the Six livres, he was at a loss to find a word for the kind of entity he had in mind, with the strange result that, though his preferred form of government was monar­chical, he was compelled to use the old Latin expression res publica. As late as 1589, Giovanni Botero defined the stato as ‘‘a stable rule over a people'' and ragione di stato as ‘‘the knowledge by which such a dominion may be founded.''^[187]

From this point things developed quickly. By the third decade of the seventeenth century, Cardin le Bret, a collaborator of Richelieu's, found it possible to distinguish between treason directed against the king's person and that which, affecting the state, deserved to be punished much more harshly.^[188] Hard on le Bret's heels came Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan; to him belongs the credit of being the first to define the state as an ‘‘artificial man'' separate from the person of the ruler. Like Bodin, Hobbes lived at a time when his country was swept by civil war (his last book, Behemoth, was written in order to explain its causes). Like him, Hobbes' goal was to restore order by putting in place an extremely powerful sovereign whose attributes he took over almost unchanged from his predecessors' great work.^[189] But Hobbes differed from Bodin in that his model was not Aristotle, but Galileo whom he had met during his travels on the Continent and whom he much admired. Hobbes' aim, discussed in the first nine chapters of Leviathan and, at much greater length, in his De corpore, was to endow politics with the kind of precision hitherto attained only by physics - in other words, to do away with all factors except those which, like bodies and motions, could be sensed and measured in an objective manner. This ‘‘scientific'' approach led him to define man as a machine, mere matter acted upon by the motion of various bodies which triggered off this reaction or that. Bodies were divided into two kinds, i.e., ‘‘natural'' (such as man himself), and ‘‘feig­ned'' or ‘‘artificial'' ones. Artificial bodies also fell into two kinds, private and public. The former were formed by individuals on their own initiat­ive, whereas the latter were created by the state. In this system the state was simply the most important public body of all. It authorized the rest (in the sense of determining whether or nor they were lawful) but was authorized by none.^[190]

In this way Hobbes deserves the credit for inventing the ‘‘state'' (or, to use his own synonym, ‘‘commonwealth'') as an abstract entity separate both from the sovereign (who is said to ‘‘carry'' it) and the ruled who, by means of a contract among themselves, transferred their rights to him. As with Bodin, Hobbes' chief‘‘magistrate'' could be either an assembly or a single person; if the latter was preferred, this was merely a matter of convenience designed to ensure unity of government and prevent con­flict. However, Hobbes' wish to dispense with ‘‘immaterial bodies'' and ‘‘transubstantiate'' influences other than those that could be objectively perceived also made him do away with those twin pillars of Bodin's theory, divine and natural law. Carrying positivism to extremes rarely attained before or since, Hobbes saw law as something that exists solely within the commonwealth and is enacted by it; in the state of nature, where no organized community existed, ‘‘covenants without swords are but words.'' Bound by no law except that which he himself laid down (and which, of course, he could change at any moment), Hobbes' sover­eign was much more powerful not only than the one proposed by Bodin but, a fortiori, any Western ruler since late antiquity. In Rome and elsewhere, emperors were to some extent bound by religion, even if it was one of which they themselves were the heads, and even if they themselves were regarded as living gods. Not so Hobbes' sovereign. Following a train of thought already developed by Machiavelli in the Discourses, this sovereign dictated his subjects' beliefs in the way best calculated to maintain public order and thus became the most absolute ruler in all history.

Against the background of the seventeenth-century struggle between king - later, lord protector - and Parliament, the draught prepared by Hobbes proved too strong for most of his countrymen to swallow. Like Machiavelli he saw man as basically evil; unlike Machiavelli he did not even endow him with virtU or love of country. Man's greatest quality, his reason, also enabled him to peer into the future; motivated by fear of the latter, he spent his entire life seeking power after power vis-à-vis his fellow men, the struggle ceasing only in death. It was in his attempt to restrain this creature that Hobbes had set up the sovereign. However, before long it became clear that the sovereign in question was so powerful as to present as great, or greater, a threat to his subjects than they did to each other.

This problem preoccupied the English philosopher John Locke (1632­1704). Though he seldom mentions his illustrious predecessor by name, much of Locke's work in the field of politics can only be understood as a direct reply to Hobbes. At the bottom of Hobbes' system had been the assumption that even the worst government was preferable to its absence, i.e., the state of nature; accordingly Locke's first step was to take another look at that state in order to find out whether it was really as bad as its reputation.

As an early representative of the Enlightenment, Locke in the Second. Treatise on Government (probably written just before the Glorious Revol­ution but published only when it was over) discarded the assumption, which had guided Western thought since Augustine, that man was basi­cally an evil creature who needed to be restrained by government. For him as for Hobbes, man's essential quality was his rationality; but, whereas Hobbes saw that quality leading to the war of all against all, Locke thought it would translate into enlightened self-interest which, most of the time, would enable people to live in peace with each other, even in the state of nature where there was no common ruler. The latter's most important task was not so much to constrain men as, on the contrary, to safeguard the rights with which they had been endowed by nature - i.e., the trio of life, liberty, and property. The thing to be avoided at all costs was absolute (the emphasis occurs repeatedly in the original) government. Government was to be based on consent: not such as had been given once and for all and was irrevocable, as with Hobbes, but such as was repeatedly confirmed by means of elections. Just who was to possess the vote Locke did not explain but, good bourgeois that he was, if pressed he would probably have proposed some kind of property qualifi­cation such as actually existed in most European countries until the early years of the twentieth century. Another way of preventing the rise of absolutism was to divide the sovereign’s power between a legislative, an executive, and a ‘‘federative’’ authority charged with the conduct of war and foreign policy, an idea which was in the air at the time and whose form was much influenced by the English political system as it then existed.¹⁰⁹

Having devoted the entire First Treatise on Government to showing that paternal and political power were not the same, Locke wasted little time on working out the distinction between the ruler and the state which, following Hobbes, he took very much for granted. Equally beyond ques­tion was the distinction between civil society and state; not only did Locke proclaim that the former preceded the latter, but it had actually created the state in a deliberate attempt to defend itself both internally against disturbances of the peace and externally against all comers. As Bodin had been the first to point out, and as Locke again explained at length, subjects were emphatically not members of their ruler’s household. Therefore the principles applying to their government were not the same as those used to rule married women, children, or sheep.¹¹⁰

Insofar as he abhorred absolute rule, Locke’s goals were opposed to those of Hobbes; still, together they ended up at the point where the only remaining constraint on the power of the state (as distinct from that of each of the three authorities separately) were certain rights which a benevolent nature had bestowed on man - a flimsy barrier, as Hobbes had already pointed out, but one which Montesquieu now set out to demolish in The Spirit of the Laws. Paradoxically, the background to Montesquieu’s work was formed by the reaction to absolutism that grew up among the French nobility, to which he belonged, after the death of Louis XIV.¹¹¹ Like Locke, whom he much admired - he also spent a couple of years in England studying that country’s political system - Montesquieu’s chief goal was to discover ways to protect civil society against the arbitrary power of the sovereign, without which protection despotism would ensue and any kind of civilized life would become difficult if not impossible.¹¹²

¹⁰⁹ See H. C. Mansfield, Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 161-4.

¹¹⁰ See Second Treatise on Government, in Locke, Two Treatises on Government, pp. 301-48.

¹¹¹ See N. Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 15-33.

¹¹² C. de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (New York: Harper, 1949), ch. 17.

While Montesquieu was mulling over his great work during the twenty years before its publication in 1748, the philosophical foundations of the belief in the law of nature were being knocked away by David Hume (1711-76). Unlike Locke, who was active as a largely self-trained phys­ician, Hume was unfit for any occupation except that of philosopher and, as such, in a constant anguished quest for first principles. Locke blithely assumed that such a thing as objective reason (by which, of course, he meant the reason of an enlightened Englishman of his age) existed; furthermore, that it was identical with the laws laid down by a benevolent nature. To Hume, on the contrary, reason was subjective and, in the last resort, merely a servant of the passions which dictated the ends toward which it should be directed. Not only was it manifestly untrue that such a thing as ‘‘objective” reason capable of being shared by all people existed, but even if it had existed any connection between it and the intentions of nature would have been completely undemonstrable.^[191]

Montesquieu, accordingly, definitely relegated the law of nature - which Hume had deprived of its support, ‘‘reason” - to the back seat. To avoid tyranny, it was still necessary that government should be based on law - not such law as had been laid down once and for all by some external force or authority, however, but such as man (Montesquieu was fond of speaking of ‘‘the legislator”) himself made for himself and wrote down in accordance with the kind of community he had in mind. In this way Montesquieu completed the process, which had been going on since the late Middle Ages, in which the force of laws other than those made first by the ruler and then by the state was whittled away and finally abolished. As had already been the case with Hobbes, from now on law, good or bad, was simply that which the state enacted and put on the books in due form.

Montesquieu, to be sure, was careful to qualify his words. The kind of law he had in mind was not to be enacted arbitrarily. On the contrary, it should be made to fit the varying climatic and geographical circumstances in which each community found itself, the need to do so being Montes­quieu's special hobbyhorse and the part of his work that earned him the greatest fame among his contemporaries. Even more important, the standard whereby various political communities were to be judged was liberty. ^[192] To guarantee the latter, the absolute power of the state over the members of civil society was to be vitiated by dividing sovereignty among three authorities. Besides Locke's legislative, there was an execu­tive branch and a judiciary one; this was the first time in history when such a separation was established, so that no magistrate who possessed authority over a person or group was also in a position to act as their judge. Thus the absolute power of the state to pass such laws as it saw fit was compensated for by the way in which its various organs balanced each other. Though applauded, so long as Montesquieu himself lived and the ancien regime persisted, the idea remained without influence in his native France. As destiny had it, the first country in which it was realized was the USA.

Between Hobbes and Locke, the theoretical structure of the modern state was substantially complete. Basing themselves on the separation between public rule and private authority - a distinction that had escaped both Erasmus and Machiavelli, and whose real founder in modern Euro­pe had been Bodin - they set it up as an abstract entity separate from both ruler (the sovereign) and the ruled (civil society) but including them both. Louis XIV might boast that I'etat (not, significantly, the res publica or civitas or communitas or some similar expression) c'est moi; however, the very fact that he, unlike any of his royal predecessors at any other time and place, could make that claim itself shows that the two were no longer the same. Surprising though it may seem to those who remember him prin­cipally as a liberal, that state was made all-powerful by Montesquieu who, completing the demolition job already begun by Hobbes and continued by Hume, tore up its roots in any kind of law except its own. Divorced from both God and nature, and no longer bound to observe custom except insofar as it had been ratified by itself, the state as envisaged by Montesquieu and his successors was capable of doing anything. The only remaining condition was that the three authorities among which sover­eignty was divided should coordinate their actions with each other; and that they should follow the laws which, of course, they themselves enact­ed and interpreted and carried out.

Following four and a half centuries of development that had started around 1300, the state found itself perhaps the most powerful political construct ever. Relying on its regular armed forces - first the military, then the police and the prison apparatus as well - it imposed order on society to the point that the only organizations still capable of challenging it were others of the same kind. Those armed forces themselves rested on unprecedented economic muscle; steadily improving statistical - the word itself comes from ‘‘state” - information about every kind of resource available within the state's borders; and a bureaucratic machine capable of extracting those resources, husbanding them, and wielding them with­out any need for intermediary bodies. No longer identical with the person of the ruler, and liberated from the religious, legal, and quasi-legal con­straints that had hampered most previous forms of government, the state stood poised at the beginning of a spectacular career. Before we can trace that career, though, it is necessary to examine some other aspects of life within the Leviathan.