A Genealogy of the State: Quentin Skinner

well hello welcome welcome back to a wonderful series of presentations this is the third in a series of four by Quentin Skinner I won't give the full introduction I gave him on Monday but he is currently a professor at the University of London and he as you know has written fully and brilliantly about various aspects of political thought I think there's various ways to measure the success of a speaker one is the size the audience and I appreciate your support another way is to overhear ernest undergraduate conversations around the halls now you expect undergraduates to talk about many things some of which i cannot repeat but i overheard one this morning of a young man telling his friend now look this there's two strands republicanism and liberalism and you have to understand how they evolved so you've touched the lives of these undergraduates i want to remind you of the ground rules for Quentin's lecture he will not entertain questions after the lecture there will be a reception in the next room 108 harris hall and all of you are invited to attend that and you can of course talk to Quentin but questions questions are for Thursday at 4 o'clock in also in 108 Harris Hall and while the lecture that he gave on money was terrific in every way I can tell you that the seminar on Tuesday afternoon was positively wonderful for all of us and I was frankly want to commend the graduate students various disciplines for stepping forward and really coming up with some marvelous interventions so tonight the second lecture Quentin Skinner will tell us about the genealogy of the state welcome yeah it is yeah well welcome back and thanks very much for your patience and so I spoke on Monday about the freedom of citizens but in the modern world we are all citizens of specific States and so today in a connected talk it's methodological II as well as substantively connected I'm going to talk about the state and but before I can get going I do need to make three remarks as quickly as possible of a methodological kind first it seems to me that the best way not the only way but the surest way of getting at concepts is through their verbal expression and that's what I'm going to do so I'm very specifically going to I mean this is really important to my talk and very specifically against talk historically about just those writers who talk not about the concept of the state but who talk about the state who use that term to express a concept of course you could be in possession of the concept without being in possession of the term that raises large questions and I'm evading them very deliberately I'm talking about those people who talk about the state so as you can see second point at obviously means as on Monday and this is to keep them virile under control I'm going to concentrate exclusively on the Anglophone tradition and this happens to be a story in which the Anglophone tradition especially the contemporary American tradition is of supreme importance again as on Monday I'm going to talk a genealogical and if you ask why I feel yet more strongly than I did on Monday and I've got into so many models about this and genealogy has been a method that's really helped me here I want to say it's not a choice that with certain concepts and the state is one I'll try to show you that this evening there's no option but to proceed genealogically and the reason that this method is I think forced upon us is that there has never been any concept any agreed concept to which the term state has referred just isn't an agreed concept and that's really one of the things I'm going to try to show this evening it continues to be an aspiration in political science to provide neutral operative definitions of the state this is an illusion it that cannot be done everything you'll turn out to have done is ideological and the danger of critical science becoming ideology is ever-present and a way to avoid it is by genealogy so what I'm really saying is that what genealogy shows you is that there's no essence to the concept of the state it doesn't have natural boundaries it's been in continuous contestation how we should think about this concept no less than the closely associated concept of political Liberty now that's not at all to say that one understanding of the term and thus of the concept hasn't come to predominate because of course it has and there's a very strong tendency in recent times and I think especially in Anglophone talk to accept that the term state is simply a synonym for government I mean look at any newspaper I was reading the New York Times at breakfast there it is the Italian state they're about to lose their prime minister Irene thank God I mean that's um that's no part of my talk but I mean look at any newspaper and you'll find the state used as a synonym for the apparatus of government now the issue that remains is whether our political thinking has become impoverished as a result of that a genealogy of the state will bring to light a number of other understandings of the state highly normative understandings for the state is there any loss in our having abandoned those or does genealogy free us to reimagine the state in more fruitful terms than the ways that we currently talk about it I think the answer to that has got to be yes and I'm going to return to that explicitly at the end but let me first turn to my genealogy now I have to say I'm very aware that the strands of thinking that I'm going to talk about for much of this afternoon are in origin in the early modern world and they are by origin mainly European traditions the political theory we reach an international stage and we reach the shores of the United States about halfway through the lecture but I hope I can win your patience to talk about the origins of these traditions that just happened to be in the in the Anglophone story within European traditions of thought okay as I said on Monday I have to say it again genealogies don't have clear beginnings but the nearest to a clear beginning I mean of course they go into the mists of time but the nearest to a clear beginning in talking about the genealogy of the state the earliest moment I as far as I can see in which you come upon widespread discussions of statehood the state the powers of the state that whole vocabulary is at some time around the very end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries I mean I could be wrong and I couldn't be wrong about that I mean I'm the that that that I think that's more or less firm I mean it's not clear quite how it works generationally and then you have rode terms which you you can't get a context to make them sufficiently clear but where the context can make it clear that's where we begin and where we begin is that the term state in this first period is used to refer to a specific type of civil association that's one in which there's a community of people living subject to the sovereign authority of a recognized ruling group usually a monarch who is designated as head of state now that's not to say that in this period the term state is the only or even the most usual one used to refer to this kind of civil Association some writers prefer to speak about realms some even talked about nations in this context yeah using the nation the concept of the nation as a kind of synonym for the state but eventually the concept of the state and its expression in those terms wins out and it does so by quite a simple process which is a kind of semantic drift this is very common in terms which have very strong normative content and in this case the semantic drift I think works as follows in Renaissance discussions about advice to princes which is a very large-scale genre international political philosophy the most famous example being of course Machiavelli's the príncipe 1513 what these books are about too late this includes Machiavelli is how a ruler a prince the Principate should act in order to maintain his state this phrase echoes through Machiavelli for example mantenere lo stato but what it means of course is your status how should you act in order to maintain your status your standing your start or your state as a prince now it's generally agreed that one of the things you've got to do as a prince if you're going to maintain your standing or spacious your your stato as a prince is to look after the body of the people and even Machiavelli is extremely keen on that if you don't do that you'll be hated if you're hated you will lose your starter you'll lose your position as a prince as the French have it you'll there'll be a coup d'etat a blow against your state ie your state as a ruler your condition as a ruler it's a start or just meaning your condition status okay but if you can't hope to maintain your status as Prince unless you keep the people in the body politic in good health the people in security and in prosperity then there is something that you have to maintain in order to maintain yourself you have to maintain that body politic in good health and prosperity and but the semantic drift is that Montanaro started to maintain your state comes to mean well I mean it becomes ambiguous as between your maintaining your position and your maintaining opposition by maintaining this thing the state I think it's Hanan language is the first one in which starter which of course is what the Italian still uses their word loss title meaning the state as we would say it's the first European language I think in which you see that semantic drift it then happens very quickly in French and in English and in German later much later in German start okay so the term is originally used as a head body metaphor there's a head of state and he's head of a body of the state now there's a very celebrated work of history that we come upon it exactly this moment and kantorovich his masterpiece the king's two bodies kantorovich saw himself in this great workers tracing the emergence of the modern idea of the state and he traced it in the idea which you find in late 16th century English discussions and specifically English law discussions of the idea that the Kings have two bodies they have the natural body but they also have an official body as head of state I'm going to call this view the absolutist view of the state because it is the idea that the proper metaphor for thinking about the state is that it's the head of a body the body is the state the head is the head of state and that's the ruler now this this develops this is the first way of thinking about the state that develops in European political speculation and it develops in two strands of absolutist thought in the early modern period on the one hand writers on sovereignty Suva want a swimmer potestas whichever language or in sovereignty we would say of whom the pioneer is rumba da in the six books of the Common Wealth published in 1576 first translated into English as early as sixteen six in the sixteen sixteen station bowdown begins by asking and I quoted what makes a city or state the English translator is just translating it are what makes a city or state and bada answers it is not the walls and not the subjects that make a city or a state but the union of the people in submission to a single sovereign as head of state so absolutely unambiguous and an extremely influential statement there the other strand of thinking in which this head body imagery is taken just as seriously is in the theory which we've tended to call the Divine Right of Kings for example in the speeches of some monarchs themselves and most notably King James the first of Great Britain who was very fond of harangue in his Parliament on his role and he tells his Parliament in a speech of sixteen five and I quote Kings are appointed by God himself with supreme authority over their states over the whole body of our the Royal we notice the whole body of our state so you got that semantic drift but it's moved hasn't it because he's head of our state and that's what gives him the state of being a king now kantorovich supposes that that's it with that those two strands of absolutism we have the modern concept to the state the idea of a head of state and the body of which he is the head well the absolutist view is certainly one view I mean Gant orbits was of course writing in Germany in the 1930s and that is certainly one view of the state and of course in our current McAlary we still speak of people as heads of state don't we but I'm bound to say although this is to criticize a masterwork of history that kantorovich should have continued he stops just around 1600 and if you do that then this is indeed the only concept of the state that was current in political spectrum he would only have had to go on two generations to find it vehement it announced by a completely different and rival view about the state to which I now want to turn what I'm going to call this rival view is I shall call it the populist view of the state as opposed to the absolutist view populist s' agree that when we speak about the state we are referring to a civic Union that's to say a union of people under a government but what it is to be a populist in my terminology is to repudiate the head body metaphor you want to say the people isn't this kind of torso without a head so that it can't act with that head because that's the persuasive force of the medve without the head the body can't act what the populist wants to say is that sovereignty they're all talking about sovereignty and the state is sovereign this sovereign power is possessed not by the head but by the body the body of the people is itself the sovereign there's the rival claim you don't have to have a head the body is the sovereign power so you find the term state being used in this rival way to refer not to a sovereign head of a body but to a sovereign body well who speaks in those terms we need to single out I think here two completely distinct but convergent views about the state which I'm calling populist first although early modern Europe is largely monarchical and it's amazing how Europe is still minar kacal I mean Scandinavia Britain Netherlands there it all is they don't mean much nowadays victim early modern Europe was largely one article but the were republics there were some very important Republic's and they have their own tradition of critical speculation especially of course in Florence and in Venice in the 16th century not merely describing the institutions of Republic's but vindicating the idea of the populist theory of the state and I suppose the most important of all these treatises in the sixteenth century is Machiavelli discourtesy written in and about discourses on Livy about the idea of the Florentine Republic now just to say a word about Machiavelli he grounds his preference for self-governing Republic's which is very strong although he wrote a book about the prince really his major work is a vindication of self-governing republicanism he grounds that on a view which is one of the views I talked about on Monday about how it's possible to remain free as a subject of course not of course a subject a citizen of a self-governing state and the view of freedom that he puts forward it's written all over the discourses is the one that I talked about at the end of my lecture on Monday according to which you lose your freedom if you become dependent upon an arbitrary will but of course what Machiavelli wants to say discourse to the two opening chapters that's the crucial passage is if you live under a monarchy you do live in dependence upon somebody's arbitrary will so all monarchies enslave if you want to live Aviva daily burrow as he wants to say in the Italian if you want to live a free way of life what is it to live freely then you must live without dependents politically and that can only be achieved if you rule yourself so what is the Constitution under which you can rule yourself only a very broad-based republicanism and because that story becomes fantastically important in its Anglo thrown version in Harrington and then in Sidney in for the founding fathers of the United States so that's why in early modern political discourse republics are called free states to contrast them with monarchies the vive le borough you because you can live free if and only you live in a state by contrast with a monarchy ie a free state so there's another very important part if you want to live in a free state you've got to live in a free state secondly and yet more important as a challenge to the absolutist view of of the that I began with it is the challenge that arises actually out of the religious wars in France and then you could think of the English revolution of the 17th century maybe as the last of the great religious wars of early modern Europe in which the attempt is being made to stop the forcible imposition of just one religion upon bodies of people now the way in which that politics was challenged first in France and then in Great Britain was to insist that although governments may be invested with sovereign power such sovereignty was originally the property of the people so you get this contract Aryan tradition emerging in which what's envisaged it's an as if story of course but there's the thought experiment here which is that if if you envisage us without government how are we well actually you would have a body of the people a society a sakyo types of people and they would of course have all power to dispose of themselves as they wish now they can set up any form of government they want but the governments they set up a mere delegates of their sovereign authority and if they find that those delegates are not acting for the good of the sovereign body they can remove them so there you have the whole structure of radical contract Arianism running right through to john locke at the end of the 17th century in the Anglophone tradition where tyranny is the usurpation of the sovereign power the original sovereign power of the people that's granted for good use to the common good to a government if they don't so use it so the property of sovereignty is here seen as the property of the people and the people are equated with the state now that's what you find in the most important founding text of this tradition the so called vindication against tyranny live in dickey i canta Tyrannis published at the height of the revenge religious wars as an attack on the french monarchy in 1579 and it's in the light of those same arguments and of course that travels to Great Britain and becomes the foundation of the parliamentarian case against the Stuart monarchy in the 1640s and in 1649 when the British not only execute their King but abolished the institution of monarchy by an act of Parliament they abolish monarchy forever in Great Britain that only lasted 11 years but they had a republic the great exponent of this exact view is John Milton whom we know as one of the greatest poets in the English language but who was also secretary to Oliver Cromwell and who was employed to write propaganda in favour of this radical image of the need to live in a free state and he publishes only a couple of months after the execution of the King his amazing tract called the tenure of Kings and medics here we really do come to some of the texts which the founding fathers treated with such reverence especially this one the tenure of Kings immense because it's joking and American University because the point is Kings Majesty don't have tenure you can get rid of them whenever you want so that tenure just means that it's a tenant's their tenants they're not free holders who is the freeholder well we are the freeholders and I quote sovereign power is held at all times by the body of the people or state notice that equation the body of the people or state nor can it be taken from them without a violation of their natural birthright and it leaves them the authority to remove from power any ruler they judge to be a rebel to law and an enemy to the state so there's the populist theory of the state but what I want next note is that no sooner has that vindicated the revolutionary movement in from and then the revolutionary movement in England then it in town is vehement ly attacked and we move into a third phase of the genealogy now there are two prongs to this attack one is that a number of writers just go back to the story about the Divine Right of Kings the greatest exponent of that ideology Sir Robert filmer in the Anglophone tradition has a final burst of energy after 1649 and writes his most important treatises between 1649 and 51 not of course the one that John Locke replies to Patriarca that's not published until much later but a number of his treatises denouncing the Republic from the position of divine right theory but I am more interested in the fact that there are some writers who denounce both the absolutist theory and the populist theory they will have nothing to do with either of these rival views about the state and the most important of those writers writing in the immediate aftermath of the English revolution and think of this extraordinary conference was John Milton is his archenemy Thomas Hobbes and I want to talk about Hobbes his theory of the state it is his greatest contribution to Anglophone political philosophy and it turned out to be fantastically influential it's somewhat intricate and it will take me a few minutes to give you an exposition of it because curiously it's not part of his philosophy that I think has been well-handled in the voluminous literature Hubbs opens his leviathan 1651 you see he writes it at breakneck speed he doesn't begin writing it until 1649 after the regicide he has it published he writes it in a year he has it published by April 16 51 so it comes out in 1651 he begins leviathan as perhaps you know the political part of Leviathan chapter 13 by reflecting on what he calls the natural condition of mankind and what that chapter is this isn't often enough said is a scathing attack on the populist theory of the state the populist theory of the state says by origin of course there was a society of people who had all sovereignty his way of attacking that is to say well it can't be the Society of people with all sovereign power because there wasn't a society the natural condition of mankind is not a social condition it's an anti-social condition and he uses that vocabulary he says of course he's famous for saying that it's nasty brutish and short it's a condition of war but he also says it's a non social condition it's a social so what's wrong with the populist theory of the state it's grounded on an illusion according to Hobbes there's no such thing as the body of the people that's just a construction there's no such thing in nature in nature there's just each one of us at war with everyone else so there was no original possession of sovereignty by the body of the people because there's no original body of the people so complete enemy of the populace theory of the state but also a complete enemy of the Divine Right of Kings I mean he doesn't like anyone because what Hobbes wants to say about sovereigns is they're just representatives you will never find in Hobbes any of this Jenya flexion towards monarchs indeed he accepts the Republic that you find in theorists of divine right four hubs there's no lawful authority unless you consent to it he's a radical thinker no lawful authority unless you've given your consent and it has to be explicit consent you have to covenant before you can become a subject so the notion that your subjection is owed to God having placed a political apparatus from heaven upon earth filmers kind of story Hobbes thinks that's the merest superstition politics is artifice we make it is not god-given it's man-made that fundamental distinction that we're seeing in the mid 17th century so Hobbes repudiates both series of the state that were cropped prominent at the time and he has a rival view let me now try and say what it is his fundamental view is that a sovereign is just an authorized representative that's what he wants you to understand sovereigns they're very important he's an absolutist no question but sovereigns are just authorized representatives so he has to begin by telling us what he means by an authorised represented what does it mean to be a representative well he has a very good answer he's not interested in the visual notion of representation at all for Hobbes a representative is just like a court of law a representative is someone whom you have authorized to speak in your name not just on your behalf but in your name and the importance of the distinction is that when I also you know I'm in a court of law and I've actually committed to murder and this is a fiction by the way and I say - I say to my counsel I say look I don't know get me off you know I don't know how to do this you speak for me get me off that's representation and the judge says to me who represents you that's what happens called a law who is your ex I say you know he's them her you listen to him that's representation it's as simple as that for Hobbes and it has to be an authorization I have to say he is my representative now what's crucial about the notion that he's not just speaking on my behalf he's speaking as me he's speaking in my name is that his actions are attributable to me I am the author of his actions so I authorized them I can only authorize them if I'm their author so his actions as a representative are attributable to me as the represented person okay that sovereignty the sovereign is an authorized representative and we do the authorizing now here's the question if if sovereigns are authorized representatives what's the name of the person they represent I mean it's very clear in the court of law the judge says who do you represent and he points to me is a sovereign as a representative who does he represent well you can't say he represents the body of the people because there's no such thing as the body of the people so Hubbs wants you to see that it's a big puzzle now to solve the puzzle you have to focus on Hobbes this idea of the political covenant now what he denies is the traditional idea of the brittle government which is the body of the people on the one hand and a designated and agreed sovereign on the other and they contract with each other so you contract on terms you say you can be the king on condition that and in the famous Spanish oath which they gave to their kings it ended our and if not not so you you can do this if you're the King but but if you do this then you're not the king so you can't do that it's not not and that was the form of the oath that contract Hobbes set is just based on an illusion that the people is a legal entity of course it's not so how can there be a covenant well Hobbes says there can be a covenant between each of us this is how you get a representative you agree that way on a representative you covenant with you and you with you and you with you that it's some one person or it could be some group of you or you could covenant that is us all of us are sovereign that's called democracy that you can do Hobbes thinks that's not a very clever idea because there's too many of us but there's nothing wrong with having a democracy it's just it's very hard to operate but that's the covenant we covenant with each other as to choose and designate someone to be our representative now that analysis brings Hobbes to his central contention about the implications of the political government and that is here's the implication when we do that we you know we each agree with the other that it's me all right that's one possibility probably not very wise but you know you might do by the way hamsa my own preference for sovereigns being women because he says women are more prudent than men and that's what you want in a sovereign but men are stronger so that's why you get Kings um here's what happens when you make that decision man or woman you know if it's a molecule you've now decided in in making that person your authorized representative you do something to yourselves from being a multitude you adjust the multitude while you did all this in each agreed with the other but now you're not just a multitude you're you're you're one a pluribus unum you were you were a multitude and now you are one well what does that mean it means you have one will because there's one person here but his will now counts as your will because you authorized him to speak in your name and act in your name so his will in action is yours but that means that you now have one will but if you're if you have one will then you're one person I quote Hobbes a multitude of men are made one person when they are by one person represented so now I can go back to my original question if the sovereign is a representative what's the name of the person he represents because you've got a it's got to be a person you're representing you've got represent a multitude because they have a multitude of wills you can only represent one will one person now Hobbes gives an epoch-making answer to this question he says the person whom the sovereign represents is the person of the state I quote the multitude so United in one person is called a Commonwealth or state in Latin kavita's so the sovereign represents the person of the state and that's what Hobbes calls it the person of the state quoting system translating Cicero persona key vittatus now this person Hobbes says is a fiction he's not real person the state is not a real person the state is a person as Hobbes says by fiction but nevertheless this fictional person is the sovereign is the seat of sovereignty the sovereign the person we call the sovereign is just the representative of this person so Hobbes categorically dissed the state not merely from the sovereign who is their representative of the state but also from the unity of the people which changes all the time sovereigns come and go individual members of the multitude or even the unas of the people are born and die that's never unified but the person of the state is always there we have created Hobbes says a person with an artificial eternity of life he says it doesn't actually work states are not eternal but you want them to be eternal you want them to be an artificial eternity now can't our elites would say and he does mention Hobbes that this is precisely what he claims about Kings in virtue of their having two bodies so control of its wants Hobbes to be in his story he thinks it's a two-body story but if you've been following me kantorovich is completely wrong here because it's we've got three bodies and that's what's so crucial this is why it's a separate theory the first is the body of the sovereign the man or woman in his or her natural person that's to say of a certain age of a certain demeanor and that's actually quite important because Kings should look like Kings problem which Arthur first was he was only four forty eleven did you know that it was a bit of a problem Van Dyck had to be brought in with these enormous horses and then he was on top of the horses make him look alright that was quite important so there's the king in his natural person but the king is sovereign of course so he has not what Hobbes calls an artificial person that's to say he's a representative but he's a representative of a third person it's a three person story and because the person he represents is the person of the state now I'm going to call this the fictional theory of the state and before I leave it Hobbes is is great founder it's a very important moment in early modern political philosophy massively taken up as we're about to see in continental European public law I want just to underline two points about it before I leave it notice that if you ask what is the seat of sovereignty on this account the answer is the seat of sovereignty is the state not the sovereign although we call him sovereign or her sovereign secondly notice that sovereigns are people with offices their representatives and just like in the court of law my counsel has the duty to try to get me off so that there are clear duties if you are the sovereign Hobbes has a whole chapter on the duties of the sovereign and what is the duty of the sovereign the duty of the sovereign is to look after not the people you can't look after all the people because they have different worlds and different aspirations but you can and you must look after the person of the people that's to say the duty of the sovereign is to look after the common good amongst the multitude that is this person there are things we will as citizens there is a common good as a public interest and the fundamental duty of the sovereign is to act in government such that all government actions are for the common good if they're not they're not acts of state because they do not procure the good of the person of the people so this is a view about what makes governments legitimate and that's what's crucial about it government actions may or not be legitimate they're legitimate if and only if they are for the benefit of the person of the state ie for the common good of the people what Hobbes calls the commodity of the people and he said by commodious life I do not just mean safety I mean all the benefits that life together can bring that's the duty of the sovereign representative all right there's Hobbes is fictional theory I'll call it it has very little impact it's quite difficult to understand it's quite intricate I think I think it's been poorly understood in literature but it was extremely well understood in European public law and a group of absolutely crucial European writers on the u.s. Kent ium come forward with this theory the first of them and in some ways the most important most original is Samuel pouf and off in his great treatise on international law the de Ouray gentium 1672 in which he says my study is based on mr. Hobbs's ingenious draft of the person of the state I'm translating from the English I'm quoting from the English translation of 1717 I quote proven Dorf again the state exists as one person endowed with its own understanding and will and performs particular apps distinct from those of the private members who make up its subjects it is true that the state is just a moral person what Rousseau is going to call a pass on morale quoting proof enough it's just a moral person so cannot act in its own name and stands in need of being represented but the duty of the representative that's a sovereign is to preserve the safety and tranquillity of the state which is not merely the bearer of sovereignty but guarantees the legitimacy of government over time thus poof and off yet more important in the theory of international relations indeed an absolute founder of the theory of international relations and the greatest according to Kant and Hegel was Emma Deva tell in his book on the US gentium published in 1758 english as quickly as 1760 a quote that L the state is a distinct moral person possessed of an understanding and a will peculiar to itself this person is a fiction and may not act if it is to speak and act some agreed form of public authority must represent it but the duty of that authority is to preserve the state that is the good of the people as a whole and that view of Putin dorva tell comes into English law into English common law and thus into American law with the extraordinary important date 1765 beginning of the publication of Sir William Blackstone s commentaries on the laws of England there's a philosophical preliminaries to that work which entirely take up this fictional theory of the state the idea of a political contract as Blackstone calls it which issues in the creation of a sovereign state and he uses that vocabulary of course by that time everyone is using this vocabulary so there's the fictional theory and we've come to the mid 18th century but what happens now and this is continuous dialogue I'm talking about just as I was on Monday about the theory of freedom the towards the end of the 18th century this fictional theory which holds the stage and it's vital to Hegel's philosophy of right in fact it it sort of is Henkel saw throughout the state as the name of a person was a real will of its own that's the whole point taken of course from the tradition I've been talking about but in the Anglophone tradition it branches out very suddenly towards the end of the 18th century and an almost lethal attack is mounted on the fictional theory of the state and the attempted murder is committed by Jeremy Bentham who is a pivotal figure in both these lectures as you see Benson's first published work as perhaps you know was an extraordinary violent attack on Blackstone and this whole tradition that Blackstone stood for in Bentham's mind now the attack on the fictional theory of the state I I want to say rolls forward in two successive waves they overlap with each other but let me for heuristic purposes try to separate them out from each other and the first is associated with just not just Bentham but with the rise of classical utilitarianism Bentham's first work the fragment on government of 1776 is his scornful critique of the whole discussion in Blackstone philosophical preliminaries about the state of nature the contract the forming of the the person of the state what does Bentham want to say about this I quote the season of fictions is over the time has come to ground legal argument on observable facts about real individuals and especially in their capacity for experiencing in relation to political power the pain of restraint and the pleasure of Liberty so Bentham's response to this discussion of the state of nature the the body of the people the creation of the state is to say he says it's not that I disagree with that it is completely meaningless there's nothing to disagree with it's just complete an extraordinary violent attack on this whole tradition to say fictions have no place in the law that's the whole burden of utilitarian jurisprudence no fictions in the law and of course the greatest fiction in law in public law at the time was the fiction that the state is a person now that attack has an incredible influence on early utilitarian thought and here's a here's something you can try for yourself try this at home I defy you to find in any of the early utilitarians in James mill in Godwin even in the early John Stuart Mill any discussion of the theory of the state they think of it as a fiction they think they've got to keep away from it the the exception is john Austin's lectures on jurisprudence a classic text of utilitarian legal philosophy published in 1832 very influential on the development of English common law in the ninety nine in this country in the nineteenth century but Austin mentions the state in order to dismiss it and I quote when we speak of the state we must understand that we are merely referring to the actual bearer of sovereign power so the state and the sovereign are just the same thing and sovereign might be the people or it might be a monarch or whatever you like but notice that he's already saying what the New York Times was saying this morning that's to say the word state in the world government they're just synonyms so don't get yourself tied up with anything fancy is what they telling you as strongly as possible now it's true that in the generation after the high tide of utilitarian legal philosophy in the mid nineteenth century in England there's an interesting moment of reversal and that comes with something which also preoccupied me a very interesting moment I think in Anglophone political philosophy the sudden insurgence of hegelian not Marxist but Hegelian theories of the state into Anglophone discourse at the end of the 19th century this suddenly becomes rather important and but by a curious irony a theory which was Anglophone origins Hobbes's theory of the state as the name of a person which had become central to Hegel series of Esch that is brought back into Anglophone discourse as a Hague alien theory and the leading exponent of it is Bernhard Posen ket in his book the philosophical theory of the state 1899 the philosophical theory of the state according to Boden care is as dual and this is where of course he is a real big alien and not a Hobbesian the state is the name of a person a separate person it's separate from the sovereign it's separate from the people but it is not the name of a fictional person it is the name of a real person the state is a real person with a real will of its own and the will of the state is your rational will so it gets very sinister at this moment if you're thinking rationally you will obey the state because you will thereby be obeying your own true will now that of course in German philosophy it's very interesting that Schmitt who uses this way of thinking as a defence of Nazism in his book on the state and in the 1930s his hero is Hobbes he's quite right about that this is Hobbes his theory but of course it's seen as a Hegelian theory the distinction is that Hobbes is quite clear that the state is a fiction whereas this tradition is quite clear that the state is a real person by the way what do we mean by a real person Phillip Pettit has just written an amazing book on the identity of corporate persons in which he thinks that corporate persons are real persons and that the state is a corporate person and is there a real person we really have to think what we mean by a person before we dismiss too easily the notion that the state might be the name of a real person well what happened in Anglophone political discourse as I'm sure you knew is that this was regarded as kameen really obvious nonsense and very sinister nonsense as well and there's a huge reaction in especially after the first world war against his view Hobhouse in his book the metaphysical theory of the state which is kind of satire on those and kate says i wrote this book in london and as the bombs dropping I heard myself real I saw myself realize that the folly of the Hegelian theory of the state there's the idea of the state is a real person and look what it did to London well I mean it is positively sinister and not quoting Hobhouse to think of the state as anything more than the name of a governmental organization and it's apparatus of power when we speak of the powers of the state we are simply referring to acts of government so there it is clear all that out a sensible view so - with Lasky Harold Laski very influential in the early 20th century his major work authority in the modern state I quote when we speak about the state we are merely referring now he's been reading Weber listen to this - a prevailing system of sovereign Authority together with an Associated apparatus of bureaucracy and coercive force which force operates over some determinate territory so there's Labour's definition of the state an attempt to insulate it and make it purely operational so there's the first wave of the attack on the idea of the state as a person the second wave of the attack that I want to talk about was already well underway by this time notice that Laskey 1919 he's writing is still content to assume something that no series of the state that I've talked about so far ever doubted which is states of sovereign bodies but by the time Lasky was writing it was exactly that union of the notion of the state and the notion of sovereignty which was beginning to be cast into serious doubt if you think of early modern theories of sovereignty now in relation to the theory of the state what is the theory of sovereignty that vada initiates that Hobbes takes up quite explicitly from Baden it is that what it is to be sovereign is to be able to command without being commanded that's moderns epigram that's sovereignty so its unitary and it's absolute and it is lodged with the state the eat art the state but you the state commands but it is not commanded within its territory and that is sovereignty well it began to be noted after the first world or that if that is sovereign tip then stakes are not sovereign and I suppose the the best example and here the United States plays an extraordinary important role is the establishment by the League of Nations in 1922 of the in the court of international justice because that court of course after the first world war in a way had been sort of a civil war and was there in order to question the sovereignty of individual States and to insist that there was a legal authority that had the right to infringe the legal sovereignty of states which it with its own superior jurisdiction and reflecting on these changes what you then find is that a growing number of political theorists in the 20s and 30s dis join the notion of sovereignty from the state there may be states but they can't be sovereign is what saying I quote for example ad Lindsay very influential programmatic statement of this in 1920 I quote the first thing to be said about this doctrine of the independent sovereign state is that political facts have obviously outrun it we have lived on into a world in which the state as the be-all and the end-all of political theory is finally out of date we now stand in need of a theory focused instead on the international arena and on the prospects of a world state so thus the opening decades of the 20th century if you think of the closing decades of the 20th century you find that decline and fall of the sovereign state as an absolute cliche of political theory and international relations theory alike and in the last decades of the 20th century a large literature especially in international relations theory emerges some very notable figures Richard Volk for example repeatedly drawing our attention to the discrediting of the idea of state sovereignty well what discredited it well there is obvious things appointed to the most obvious being the rise of multinational corporations and other institutions of international reach and multinational corporations especially in the develop in world with power to control investment and conditions of employment are visibly able to coerce local states into doing what they want and regularly demand special deals in relation to employment and indeed nowadays in relation to laws about the conservation of the local environment because if these special deals are not given they will withdraw their capital so the state is powerless in the face of these in the developing world so the notion of sovereignty has completely evaporated in the face of such international agencies but as well as these agencies what we are continually observing now in our world and here the extraordinary development in my lifetime of an overarching ideal of human rights has played a very important role in the increasing development of international legal organizations the United States has rather resisted these and you are not actually signatories to the Convention on Human Rights and to the law that underpins that because well let's not go into that but all other civilized states are so that's all I can say but the crucial thing about this is that this is a jurisdiction which totally supervenes upon the legal jurisdictions of the Member States and that's why the United States will not join it totally supervenes upon it and so the International Convention on Human Rights for example totally supervenes upon the common law of the United Kingdom and they're regularly in collision it's very important that it's it's a highly reformist thing having a Convention on Human Rights because the Convention on Human Rights forbids discrimination for example on grounds of sex or age or religion age so you can't have compulsory retirement sex so and of course minimum wages all of this all of these are scheduled as human rights all of this is a jurisprudence which is international so what has become of the sovereign state it looks as if it has evaporated and so so grace rodgers richard falk and i quote him the old status categories that have informed diplomacy and statecraft for centuries are now so evidently superseded that we shall soon cease to describe political life in these terms at all the power renewals imperative individual states is in terminal decline the state is shrinking retreating fading into the shadows and the concept has lost any theoretical significance Frank anchor Schmidt in an article last year extremely influential Dutch political theorists concluded and I'll coach him just to to round off before I draw the moral of this tale now for the first time in more than millennium the state is on the way out so that was written last year and my genealogy comes down to today now I've got five more minutes and in that five minutes I want to turn from genealogy to critique genealogy is always critique so what is the relationship in this case isn't it striking that we have an extremely complex intellectual heritage in talking about the state and we've chosen to confront it in this extremely elated way in which what we want to say is well it's just the way of talking about government it's nothing else this seems to meet deeply unsatisfactory I mean of course states are not no longer sovereign but don't you feel that this announcement of the death of the state is a little bit premature I mean the world's leading states remain the principal actors on the international stage how can that be denied furthermore they are unquestionably the most significant political actors within their own territories at least in the developed world for very different matter and a less developed world but here the states are they're more aggressive than they used to be they're patrolling borders with increasing attention and they're maintaining unparalleled levels of surveillance and information about their own citizens they're also interventionist in interesting ways and I was in the United States in under the bush regime in September 2008 when the state although he didn't call it that he called it the Republic stepped forward as the lender of last resort to save capitalism it had to be done meanwhile these states they continue to print money I mean more and more of it they continue to impose taxes to enforce contracts to engage in Wars a lot of wars to imprison and otherwise penalize errant citizens they legislate with an unparalleled degree of complexity what other institution in the world accepts States does any of those things legally none so what is all this stuff about the death of the state I mean it's pure inattentiveness I mean where are these people living okay the state exists my friends but the question that remains for my closing minute is are we operating with the the right understanding of the state have we lost something serious in political reflection by simply equating state with government what about the absolutist area today what about the populist view of the state what about the fictional view of the state okay let me end by saying a word about that I'm quite clear that the absolutist in the populist views although the populist view is a kind of Marxist view isn't it but I'm quite clear that they they're of no conceptual interest for us here and now but the fictional view of the state now that in my view should never have been set aside and that's a point that's being made now by a number of legal and political philosophers Janet McLain brilliant work David ransom on the personality of the state philip Pettit's recent work brand trainers work on on the person of the state a number of legal and political philosophers just in these last four or five years have started to say that we really cannot do with the out the idea of the state as a fictional person I completely agree and I'll take my closing moment to say why let me just make two points one arises from the fact that as we saw a key contention of the fictional theory is that the person of the state is by intention at least immortal it's possessed remember Hobbes was an artificial eternity of life now it seems to me that in the present state of contract law we could imagine contract law very different but in his present condition I see how you can coherently do without that idea in talking about the actions of states let me take the most obvious example it's very interesting how this example is now being talked about it's only three years old this example but it's of overwhelming importance to all of us now something that's now being called sovereign debt interesting sovereign debt who owns this debt that's the question we have these unbelievable burdens of debt in Europe and in the United States and who is the debtor okay you can't say well it must be the body of the people perhaps the most important fact about 2008 in the Western world was that the people were not asked there was no contract with the people we cannot be the debtor furthermore if it's claimed that we are the debtor then it's very important that we can't pay the level of debt is such that it will have to be repaid over the lifetime of our children's children the people cannot pay but also they didn't enter into this debt so who is the debtor not the people so all right we say it's government debt obviously it's government debt well that would be nice because if the government was the contracting force then when the government changes the debt goes hmm that would be good but that's ridiculous that's not going to happen changes of government do not produce changes of debt that's why they're calling it sovereign debt but sovereign debt is a very stupid way of thinking about it it states debt that is the debtor the state is the only person who can claimed to be the debtor because the state has artificial eternity of life we're all going to be dead long before this money is paid back if it's ever paid back so there must be a debtor who's there to be doing the paying that can only be the person of the state but there's another point and it's far more important than that and I'll come to a close with it remember that the fictional theory did not equate government with state because the reason it wanted to hold those apart was that it wanted to be able to judge the legitimacy of the actions of government the state when we talk about the state as a fiction we're not introducing any new material into the world we're seeing ourselves a special description we're seeing ourselves as a union who have many different interests within the union but who have certain common interests those common interests of the people as a union are the interests of the person of the people the person of the people is the name of the state government action is legal if and only if it is for the benefit of that person and that is a view about how to judge the legitimacy of democratic governments which is so powerful that I simply can't imagine why we ever gave it up thank you very much and turnout thank you

Channel: NorthwesternU

Views: 28,210

Rating: 4.9060054 out of 5

Keywords: Skinner

Id: d-bcyHYNxyk

Length: 62min 30sec (3750 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/AtlanticCreation]

This is Quentin Skinner's only other genealogy lecture and it really throws into question how we think of what we call a state.

Abstract:

Nowadays when we speak about the state we generally use the word simply to refer to an apparatus of government; in common parlance, ‘state’ and ‘government’ have become virtually synonymous terms. My first lecture traces the emergence in early-modern political theory of the strongly contrasting view that the state is the name of a distinct person. Hobbes is seen as the major contributor to this way of thinking about public power. The central section of the lecture analyses his claim that the state is a ‘person by fiction’, as well as examining Pufendorf’s rival but closely associated view that the state ought to be conceived as a moral person. My lecture ends by attempting an assessment of the idea of state personality. Has anything of significance been lost as a result of our abandonment of the belief, central to so much early-modern and Enlightenment discourse, that the state is the name of a person distinct from both government and the governed?

(abstract taken from skinners Dublin lecture)

[u/[deleted]]

the states are the cheaper to buy out part of the government.

[u/xXPostapocalypseXx]

Thank you, finally some discourse with substance!

[u/attnskr]

I can’t find liberty lecture. Can someone post the link here