The state as it emerged between about 1560 and 1648 was conceived not as an end but as a means only.

During a period of intense religious and civil conflict, its overriding purpose was to guarantee life and property by imposing law and order; anything else - such as gaining the consent of the citizens and securing their rights - was considered secondary and had to wait until peace could be restored.

This explains why, even in England with its relatively well-developed parliamentary tradition and even as late as Hobbes, the choice of the sovereign was irrevocable and liberty, as he put it, merely consisted of the cracks left between the laws which that sovereign enacted.^[198] True, neither Locke nor Montesquieu nor most of their eighteenth-century successors accepted Hobbes' conclusions in this respect; however, in regarding the state as a mere instrument for making a civilized people, they were entirely at one with him. As late as the 1790s Jeremy Bentham in Britain still considered the state in purely utilitarian terms as a machine whose only mission was to secure ‘‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number.'' The prevailing attitude was succinctly explained by another Englishman, Alexander Pope: ‘‘for forms of government let fools contest/whatever is best administered is best.''

In view of these attitudes one should scarcely be surprised to find that the demands that the early modern state made on its subjects were, compared with what was to come later on, fairly limited. From the upper classes it took administrators and officers; from the middle ones, taxes; and from the lower ones both taxes and cannon fodder. Enlistment in the armed forces was, however, voluntary in most cases; moreover, in terms of percentages, neither the number of soldiers enlisted nor the amount of taxes levied by the ‘‘absolute'' state even approached the burdens imposed by its democratic, liberal, twentieth-century successors. During the two and a half centuries after 1700 the former figure approximately doubled: from 5 to a maximum of about 10 percent of the population were drafted in wartime,^[199] while the share of national income drained away by Frederick II’s Prussia, the most heavily taxed eighteenth-century state by far, was almost exactly equal to that levied by the United States as one of the most lightly taxed modern states, in 1989, i.e., before the increases instituted by the Bush and Clinton administrations.^[200] It is of course true that the absolute state denied the great majority of its subjects any form of political participation while demanding obedience from all alike.

However, so long as that was granted - or, at any rate, so long as the state encountered no overt resistance to its demands - it was usually content to leave those subjects to their own devices; it did not make a systematic attempt to tutor them or to influence their views.

Considered from another angle, the relationship between the early modern state and its citizens was based not on sentiment but on reason and interest. The idea of just war having been abandoned by Hugo Grotius twenty years before the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, Enlightenment rulers did not go to war against one another for reasons of personal hatred. The role of patriotism in providing motivation for both soldiers and civilians was limited;^[201] as Austria's Francis I supposedly said of the Tyroleans, ‘‘today they are patriots for me, tomorrow against me.''^[202] The need to prevent the emergence of revolutionary demands did not allow rulers to burden their subjects too heavily, and also caused most of them systematically to recruit foreigners into their armed forces. Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, and certain German states all exported soldiers; Frederick the Great even claimed to wage war in such a way that the local population should not notice it was going on.^[203] When Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Jena in 1806 the governor had posters placed in which he announced that, the king having lost a battle, the subjects' first duty was to stay calm.

Even as the state was reaching maturity around the middle of the eighteenth century, however, forces were at work which were about to transform it from an instrument into an end and, later, a living god. At first the ideas in question, surfacing in the works of French, Swiss, and German intellectuals, were harmless enough. But before long they spread to the masses, causing them to take on an aggressive, chauvinistic tone that boded ill for the welfare of humanity. Partly driven by these forces, partly in an attempt to keep them within limits, the state took them under its own aegis.

This led to the bureaucracy extending its tentacles into fields which had previously been largely free of government interference - such as education, health, and ultimately such fields as sports and social welfare as well. As the twentieth century entered its first few decades, a number of states even reached the point where they themselves took over all those activities and services, prohibiting any that were not state- owned; the outcome was the emergence of the ‘‘totalitarian” regimes of both the left- and right-wing variety. Finally, once the state had become so powerful that it was able to determine what did and did not count as money, the financial restraints which had always limited the actions of previous rulers also dropped by the wayside. The ultimate outcome of all these developments was an increasingly violent series of explosions, beginning with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and culminating in the era of total war between 1914 and 1945.

<< | >>

↑

Source: Creveld Martin van.. The Rise and Decline of the State. Cambridge University Press,1999. - 447 p.. 1999

The state as it emerged between about 1560 and 1648 was conceived not as an end but as a means only.

More on the topic The state as it emerged between about 1560 and 1648 was conceived not as an end but as a means only.: