Hobbes and the Person of the State | Professor Quentin Skinner

well I'm an historian of philosophy as I say not a philosopher but one of the things I'm going to try and persuade you of this evening is that in the case of political philosophy that gap is not actually a very large one there's a Nietzschean thought hovering here which is that as he says in the genealogy of morality some concepts have histories and if a concept has a history then it's not going to have an agreed definition and so your approach to the understanding of that concept will actually have to be historical and will need to focus on the investigation of the changing terminology in which the concept has expressed now a number of our political concepts are clearly of that character and perhaps the central concept of our political lexicon is the state and it's unquestionable that since the early modern period that concept has been subjected to continual contestation and debate so in talking about the history of the concept we're talking about those very contestation about how to understand it and so the two come together so that's the sort of methodological thought that underlies what I'll try and say this evening and then the first historical thought is that I think it would be completely unconscious to say that in the Anglophone tradition the first systematic analysis of how to think about this concept expressed in the terminology that we would now use of state and state power statehood and so forth is the work of Thomas Hobbes but I want to use Hobbes and his view about the state to try to think about the concept itself more generally and to think about how it might be understood and how it has been understood now from having no lectern we've now got three but I'm very happy with this one thank you very much very resourceful most grateful is very good I might just move between them now I want to start not with hubs or with the early modern period when this concept is is philosophically formed for the first time but by thinking about the concept of the state and how we now generally think about it and here I hope also be completely on contentious because it seems to me that two general claims about the concept have come to be very widely accepted in current discourse one is that when we refer to the state what we're really talking about is simply the institutions and cooperative coercive apparatus of political power of government the most celebrated of these completely empirical formulations of how to think about the state is undoubtedly that of Max Weber describing it as you know or rather I might say defining it as you know as the monopolist of legitimate power over some designated territory and by now that way of thinking that purely empirical way of thinking about the state is so widely accepted that I think if you reflect for a moment on how you see the terminology used in every newspaper of the day now the term state and government are in common parlance synonyms the other claim about the state that's come to be widely agreed first being to talk about the state is to talk about the apparatus of government I mean that's what we're talking about is that a number of economic and political developments have undermined and at the same time tended to discredit the power of the state just a word first about the undermining of state sovereignty in our time perhaps the most obvious cause of that has been the rise of multinational corporations of of international economic reach and of course they with the capacity to control terms of investment and employment are visibly able to coerce States into accommodating their designs even when those designs are out of line with the policies of those states so they have greater power especially in the developing world than most states and at the same time of course this is obvious the developing world has witnessed the rise of international legal institutions which claim to have a power to supervene upon the sovereignty of states I mean the international courts in fact schools of justice is the original and most important example but there are many so there's one part of the story but as well as a devaluing of sovereignty there's been a discrediting of it has there not with the increasing prevalence of neoliberal claims about how the use of state power should not be a means to shape a society state power is bad it's the monopolistic enemy of competition and enterprise and the power of the market is instead good for shaping society it's the enabling friend of innovation and enterprise and so on now those two thoughts together have persuaded a number of commentators that the power of the state is now in terminal decline and Foucault as you know famously draw draws the moral in one of his very late interviews that we should learn to cut off the head of the monarch in political philosophy as well as in politics that's to say to liberate ourselves from the illusion that it still makes sense to talk about sovereign states a number of international theories now talk about the death of the state and in recent article on all of these developments professor Frank anchors MIT has concluded let me just quote because he's an eminent authority now for the first time in more than half a millennium the state is on the way out okay I hope that's all unconscious two ways of thinking about the state which are prevalent in our time first that to speak about the state is simply to speak about an apparatus of government and secondly to speak about it is to speak about an apparatus whose day is coming to an end okay what are we to think about those judgments that's going to be the theme of the remainder of this lecture so first what about the judgment the state is in anchor Smith's phrase on the way out I think I mean this is not at all an contentious especially as neoliberalism is so much the story of theory at the moment but I think here I can nevertheless be brief because what strikes me most of all about that contention is how much of line out of line it is with our everyday experience I mean of course it's undeniable that states have forfeited many of the traditional attributes of sovereignty and also it's undeniable that especially in the European Union sovereignty has attached to itself to larger associations the state but to make the obvious point that states are no longer sovereign in the traditional Westphalian sense is hardly the same part shake root vuko as deconstructing the concept and that leads me to want to say something which which I mean I fear but also I hope is going to seem very obvious it's this if you look at International Affairs it's surely not to be doubted that the principal actors on the international stage are nation state the idea of humanitarian intervention has yet to be deployed in a way that challenges any major state and nor will it be so it will not challenge Russia or China or America or the European Union furthermore within their terrains nation states remain in comparably the most important political actors I mean how can this be doubted they're very aggressive at the moment but rolling their boundaries with a shocking degree of exclusiveness and maintaining an equally shocking level of surveillance over their own citizens without their permission they're also very interventionist and in the face of collapsing banking systems they even step forward as lenders of last resort who else was going to do that and to a greater degree than I think it's currently fashionable to suppose due to their major infrastructures they facilitate markets I mean markets would be largely impotent without the infrastructures of states and meanwhile they continue to do things which no other agency in the world does all of these things they print money they impose taxes they enforce contracts they subsidize our cultural lives they provide health and welfare state services and they legislate with an unprecedented degree of complexity all of that is absolutely obvious so what is all this stuff about the death of the state it's just neoliberal ideology we must not allow ourselves to be deceived into forgetting all these obvious facts by the way that right-wing governments talk on the way out I mean that's just inattentive from a political philosopher well that that's as much as I want to say about the death of the state I mean it's an the states are in extraordinarily powerful shape at the moment enough of a powerful shape to be threatening the European Union and that's what we should be worrying about not that they've died okay I want to turn now to the other claim this is far more serious for me to the other claim I began by isolating that when we talk about the state we're talking about an apparatus of an institutions of government at state and government these are synonyms I mean that is of course common parlance but what most strikes me here is not we can't challenge common parlance it's extrordinary important that when we talk about the state we just mean government but what strikes me here is what an extraordinarily strong contrast is between that way of thinking about the state and the way in which the concept was understood when it first became the central noun as cliff Curt says the master noun of our political discourse when it first became that master known because when that happened which I would say is a development recognizably of the late 17th century principally in the work of Hobbes who is the great pioneer here but also in the work of a number of continental European followers especially poof and off and then volve and Tomas and right through to the Hegelian theory of the state and which also solidified in other areas of Europe in the Enlightenment in France most obviously with Vidal and also and in England with Blackstone it's an important discourse about the state that emerges in that two generations but if you think of any of those writers who have now quoted any of them when they speak about the state or later or their start the basic reason they have for for grounding that concept is to try to mark a categorical distinction between States and governments that's the whole point and the whole point for them is that so far from being able to equate States with governments the state is seen as the name of a distinct person separate that is at once from the from the person of the ruler and from the person's of the ruled so what I want to talk about this evening is this idea of state personality because we've completely lost it in current discourse and the question is have we lost something of value well to see if we have a need to turn to the first classic formulation and I think it's not contentious to say that that is in the philosophy of Hobbes and especially in his treatise called Leviathan first published in 1651 in which he informs us at the outset and I'm quoting that in putting forward he says his theory of public power I shall be speaking not of the men but in the abstract about the nature of the Commonwealth or state now Hobbes historically is of course a defender in the course of the English revolution of the 17th century of absolute sovereignty against the republicanism of the age but in spite of those political allegiances he never speaks in the manner common to absolutist writers of the early modern period of any kind of reverence which is owed to sovereigns sovereigns as the Lord's anointed or sovereigns as directly given to us by God he never talks like that although most absolutists if you think of friendship suit ism of the period they all think in these very theological political terms Hobbes doesn't because of two fundamental and connected features of his thinking about the holders of in power and the first is that all lawful sovereigns including absolute monarchs can never be said to have any status higher than that of an authorized representative so he doesn't speak of sovereigns he only ever speaks of sovereign representatives and the second thought is that whether a sovereign representative is a monarch or an assembly of people Hobbes doesn't mind you can have democracy or monarchy thinks it's wiser to have monarchy but democracy is also a form of state power the holders of power have a number of specific duties attached to their office which they must and have an obligation to discharge Hubbs assumes that you would never submit to sovereign power unless you could see that there would be advantage over the way of life that you would lead in conduct in conditions of natural Liberty but if that is so then the sovereign to whom you've submitted must have incurred corresponding obligations I quote in such a way as to produce the peace and security of the people and to do so by way of conducting government in a manner agreeable to the common good there's the duty of the sovereign representative now it is of course true that because the sovereign representative is absolute you cannot remove such you have no right to remove such a representative you can of course do it have no right to do it if he fails in discharging those duties but if the sovereign fails to act for the common good he is guilty under the law of nature and this is iniquitous Hobbes says and if he fails to protect then he is no longer sovereign you only have a sovereign in order to have protection another way of putting it far more dramatically is that if he is a sovereign and fails to protect you are no longer politically obliged political obligation is at that moment at an end so there's a very strong sense of the duties of Representatives attached to this theory of sovereignty so they're just representatives all right that makes the key question of this theory who do they represent sovereigns are just representatives who do they represent and to come that the answer isn't obvious and to come to the answer is to come to the heart of this theory of the state now to see how Hobbs comes to his answer to the question who does a sovereign represent you have to know about his distinctive understanding of the political covenant as he explains when such a covenant is enacted it's an as if way of thinking it's as if everybody agrees with everyone else that some particular person that some man or woman or some assembly shall have the right to speak and act in their name so the formula in which the covenant is introduced in the Leviathan is expressed I quote as I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man or to this assembly on this condition that thou give up thy right to him and authorize all his actions in like manner now in the previous chapter that's chapter 17 in chapter 16 Hobbes has just told you what it means to authorize a representative representatives are classified by Hobbes as what he calls artificial persons and he says I quote that of such persons artificial some have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent and then the person is the actor and he that owners his words and actions is the author in which case the actor actors by authority so you've got author Authority very important piece of etymology there so what Hobbes saying that he's saying that if you authorize your own representation you must be willing to regard yourself as the owner of the actions that are done in your by your representative and the reason is that by your act of authorization you have granted them authority to act in your name so you must be prepared to take responsibility for those actions as your own that's what he means by saying you've got to own the action it's like owning a piece of property as he says you could own a piece of property you own an action what does it mean it means it is your own you must as we still say own up you are responsible so notice underlying this very contentious in contemporary philosophy of course is the claim that an attributed action is a species of action attributed actions which you do not yourself perform that which you're responsible for our actions of yours because you you must own them all right there's the analysis of authorization and that brings Hobbes to his central claim about the implications of covenant him and that is that if you agree to authorize your representation by the artificial person of a sovereign artificial person just means they've taken on a role it's an artifice the artificial person of the sovereign then this act on the part of each one of us of agreeing who shall represent us and authorizing that representation at the same time transforms us from a multitude into one well how have we become one well because we are united by a common agreement which is to live in subjection to a particular representative and therefore by the fact that we now have a determining will one will which is our will because we own the actions of the representative who actually act and so his actions count as those of us all but that's to say that by this act of authorizing representation we have transformed ourselves into one person here's Hobbes a summary a multitude of men are made one person when they are by one man or one person represented for the effect is to produce a real unity of the all in one of the same person made by covenant of every man with every man so you see the act of covenant hing which is the absolute core of this philosophy of the state engenders two persons who had no previous existence in our natural condition of Liberty one is the artificial person to whom we grant authority to speak and act in our name and we know the name of that person that is the sovereign and the other is what Hobbes calls the person by fiction whom we bring into being when we acquire a single will and a single voice by way of having authorized someone to represent us and the name of that person Hobbes says in an epoch-making moment is the state I quote the multitude so United in one person is called a Commonwealth or state now the state you've now just instituted is as Hobbes says a mortal god and we owe under the immortal God to this mortal God our peace and our defence and just as the immortal God is three persons so the mortal God of the state is also three persons or rather three types of person natural persons each one of us natural person in Hobbes just means a sane adult able to take responsibility for their actions an artificial person which is the name of a natural person playing the role I eat in this case the role of the sovereign an effective person the name of the person whom the sovereign represents and that is the state so there is the answer to the question whom when we authorized the sovereign does the sovereign represent he does not represent us he can't because we have floral he can only represent a person but what she represents is our person he represents us as one person and the name of us as one person is the state so the answer to the question who does the sovereign represent is the sovereign represents the state and Hobbes four is able to define the state I quote the state is one person of whose act a great multitude by mutual covenants have made everyone themselves the author while the sovereign is the man or assembly that bears or carries the person of the state so Hobbes gives the state a name of its own he calls it Leviathan and he goes on to describe this person in rather detailed terms he's very interested in how this person can live a healthy life and he's very interested in the fragility of the health of this person and has a complete chapter long chapter chapter 29 on the diseases of this person the diseases of the state of the body politic and how the body politic can die civil war is the death of this person he also stresses that sovereigns are just natural persons in a role they come and go the multitude they are born and die all the time they change every day but the person of the state is immortal it endures and it must endure beyond the life of any imaginable subjects he see he doesn't think it is immortal of course and he thinks that he's witnessed the death of the state in his own time because he lived through a Civil War which is the death of the state because there's no sovereign does dispute over who is sovereign but he insists that the aim of founding a state I quote is to make it live as long as mankind establishing a system of Perpetual security that can be between by us to our remote prosperity and to create an artificial eternity of life ok so that's what you've done you've created this fictional person represented by a sovereign now it is only a fiction this person but it would be a huge mistake to suppose that this fiction is not a mighty force in the real world because that would be to forget what lies at the heart of this theory this view about attributed actions being actions once you grasp the concept of an attributed action it's easy to see Hobbes points out how the fictional a purely fictional person of the state is nevertheless capable of being a person of unsurpassable power and might when the members of a cup a multitude covenant to institute a sovereign they allocate him the fullest possible powers to act for the common good but the sovereign remember is just the representative of the state whatever actions the sovereign performs in his or her official capacity are acts of state as we still say so the true possessor of sovereignty is not the sovereign the sovereign is just a representative the true possessor of sovereignty is the state I quote it is the Commonwealth or state which prescribes and commandeth the observation of those rules which we call laws so that the name of the person commanding is persona key vittatus the person of the state now there's Hobbes his way of thinking about public power but it's been met with the very obvious objection that the state is of fiction and yet the state is a sovereign power but how can a fiction declare war how can a sovereign fiction put you in jail how can fictions have any power well that really is the question and Hobbes his response is yes that looks like a very grave problem for this type of theory but Hobbes has claimed is if you think that's a problem you've got a problem and the problem you've got is a very common problem in political philosophy which is that you don't understand the concept of representation and he would be quite clear that we don't understand the concept of representation now let me talk about that because this really is the point of this theory it's perfectly true that we have inherited from antiquity two different metaphors for thinking about representation one draws on the arts of painting and sculpture and thinks of representation the Latin verb is representing that representation is the re presenting of something absent as if it is present the classic text on this as I'm sure you know is embedded in Plinius great historian naturalist books 34 and 35 are a treatise on painting and sculpture in fact one of the classical statements of classical aesthetics the world is sent to present itself to us and in painting and sculpture we attempt to reprint the world and the finished verb is always represent re Pliny gives a wonderful example which you perhaps know which is of a painting competition which was won by the painters zooks as' luksus painted a pair of curtains and when the judges appeared the judge said could you part the curtains please to see what you have painted that's how he won the competition because he he re presented a pair of curtains so exactly that they appeared not to be an illusion so the essence of representation in this analysis is providing the best possible likeness Reap resented and that gets applied in the early modern period and subsequently to the idea of political representation the representation of the body of the people among the radical writers of the English revolution to whom Hobbes is responding this was the understanding of representation that was put forward and that remained so for a very long time in English voting systems each section of the body politic called the counties return to members of parliament regardless of their population this remains true under the American Constitution this day the Senate of the Americas is of America is elected in that way the reasoning is that these counties or these states in the United States form the limbs of the body politic so that a proper re presentation of the body of the people must represent each of those elements equally so how does Hobbes reply he replies by saying look you've got the wrong metaphor that just is not the right metaphor thinking about representation at all and what he does is to produce a different image from antiquity which draws not on the art of painting but on the theatrical arts and instead of using the verb represent Ari we've inherited two verbs from Latin in thinking about physical representation represent Ari and Gary personam Gary personam is the theatrical phrase which Cicero loves to use which means to play someone else's role and I quote Hobbes on Cicero from the theater as Hobbes says quoting Cicero the metaphor has been transferred to the law cults and comes to be the act of speaking in the name of a client so what that shows Hobbes wants you to understand is that what it means for you to be validly represented is just like being in a theatre or a court of law so there's Hobbes's crucial move political representation he wants to say is nothing more than authorizing someone to play your role that's to say to speak in your name to act in your name of course it's special in the theatre because until I play the part of Hamlet then it's just words on the page I bring him to life by speaking those words analogously in the court of law the judge says who represents you of course you can say it certainly in English law I represent myself in which case the judge will say well I wouldn't do that if I were you but that is possible but then usually you would point to your attorney and say this person represents me doesn't mean he resembles you doesn't have to look like you that's the huge mistake notice that huge implication it's absurd to suppose that representation is anything to do with producing likenesses when you appoint an advocate if you're a man you can appoint a woman you're a woman you can appoint a man anyone can represent anyone that's the crucial claim they just have to be authorized now we've actually ceased believing that but Hobbes thinks that's where we've gone wrong notice also here's the crucial point if authorization is a sufficient condition of representation then anyone can represent not nearly anyone else but anything as Hobbes says so you can represent a thing Hobbes gives us an example the gods of the heathen in his chapter and representation the gods of the heathen did not exist they were mere figments of the brain Hobbes says but in ancient Rome they nevertheless held extensive property which they bought and sold so here is the tough question from the theory of representation how can you sell a house if you don't exist well Hobbes just didn't don't worry about that that's not a problem the Roman state authorized priests to act as representatives of the God who were therefore able to speak in court as representatives of the gods and in their name and therefore to perform perfectly valid transaction so in the Roman court of law the judge says who represents Jupiter now Jupiter doesn't exist but that's a perfectly valid legal question and someone a priest stands up and says I represent Jupiter we're selling his we're selling his statue so Hobbes says now you can see how purely fictional persons can have enormous power and how the state which is just a fiction can nevertheless declare war and put you in jail is because authorization is a sufficient condition of representation so if you've authorized a sovereign the sovereign speaks in the name of the state but the action is attributed to the state and the state acts the state declares war the state puts you in jail so there is Hobbes's theory of the state and it's the first unambiguous theory of state personality in Western political philosophy well I hope that theory is clear it's certainly intricate but I hope it's clear and it's important that it should be because it's fantastically influential for a time there's a big irony here which is that the English had no use for Hobbes absolutism was out of the window with the success of the Whigs in the English revolution in the 1688 revolution but in continental Europe and especially in Germany and later in France this theory of state personality is pervasive it comes to exercise and enormous influence and the general view has been that the Philosopher's through whom that influence actually came to be exercised was not so much Hobbes as Samuel pouf and off in his great treatise de urine naturai of 1672 so it's especially amongst German commentators I mean notably from Gierke originally and then of course Carl Schmitt that proof and off came to be seen as the great disciple of Hobbes Schmidt says he was the man who made Hobbes victorious in continental Europe that's to say as a theorist of the state now that view is I think partly correct foof enough certainly agrees I quote him I'm quoting him in the 18th century English translation that mr. Hobbes has now given us a draft of a civil state he also agrees with Hobbes that the state is brought into existence I quote when a number of natural persons are so united together that what they will or act by virtue of that union is esteemed the work of single person he further agrees that the name of that person is the state and he consequently agrees with Hobbes's fundamental contention that the state is the seat of sovereignty finally he also endorses but also develops Hobbes is account of why it is essential to a satisfactory analysis of public power to think of the state not merely as a person distinct from rulers and rules a separate person but also as having artificial eternity of life that he loves that phrase poof endorser the state indeed has artificial eternity of life one reason why it must have proof endorsed suggests is the final chapter of his analysis of the state is if you take a case like public debt but the main reason why it has to have artificial eternity of life is that this generates a theory of political obligation and that is a really crucial point common to Hobbes and to proof and off that the reason for forming the Union which grants the sovereign representation of the state is to produce the common good and above all to produce the protection of the people Salas properly supreme' Lex is what proof and off continually cites so all of that is in common with Hobbes that is true however it seems to me that by stressing what proof and off takes from Hobbes this German historian historiographical tradition which has been very influential has I think ironically failed to see something very original in proof endorsed thinking about the state which in turn was far more influential than anything that Hobbes had said I just want to add this addendum therefore about goofin off theory first of all poof and off gives a much fuller characterization than Hobbes stars of these two worlds that we inhabit we inhabit in a world of nature which natural objects in it but we also inhabit an artificial world which we've created for ourselves which is the world of civil Association and that contains moral objects now the most important of these moral objects are moral persons because they constitute the substance of this moral world in which we also live we live in the world of nature but we live in the world of morality and the morale that the world of morality has its own substances just as does the world of nature so these moral persons are the names of the roles that the personî that we have the roles we play in civil Association I quote proof and off I can at one in the same time sustain several persons together bear various persons have various personî I am a householder I am a husband I am a senator I'm an advocate I am a counselor at court and all of these are the names of my persona so these persona our moral persona because being a husband or a counselor or a householder these have duties attached to them and an obligation to discharge those duties if you are to fulfill the being of that persona so that much fuller account of that notion of of having personî he would say we all have many persona a Cicero would say if you tell me all your persona all the roles that you have that's your person so that's an account of personal identity but far more important for poof and off is he thinks that Hobbs has skidded off the rails in his analysis of personhood and hence in his understanding of the state because what proof and office you can already see cannot tolerate is the thought that a thing could have personhood why is that because things can't have moral properties they have they have substance of course but they don't have moral substance so the gods of the heathen have no substance at all so how can they have personhood so notice that what Bhuvan love is given up is the idea of the persona Victor the State is not the name of a persona Pictor for poofing dog he introduces a different term my goodness this is extraordinarily influential it's not a persona Victor it's a persona Morales it's a moral person it is what he calls a compound moral person so I think that what we should say is that what emerged in early modern philosophy of politics is two rival theories of the state one is the theory of pure fiction ality and the other is that the state is not a fictional person it is a moral person it's the latter view that has the great influence you find it in Tomas and Volvo Foundation can't of course above all you find it in Hegel in the idea of the rest art but you find it just as clearly in the French tradition invar tells insistence that the state says pass on morale which is picked up in Russo's controversial where litter is always referred to as a person marl and they are explicitly here especially in Vidal and Rousseau although of course they are sort of Hobbes Ian's contesting what Hobbes says I quote they tell the state liquor sitting bass on compounded and now translating obviously out of the understanding and the will of each subject not just the will but the understanding so that the state is a moral person which has an understanding as well as a will peculiar to itself that L is particularly important mean obviously Russo's is the great analysis of moral personality in the Enlightenment but Vidal is probably even more influential because of his insistence that this is what explains the relations between states they are relations between moral persons that's what international relations is all about relations and moral persons so you cannot have a theory of international relations in Vitelli very influential account in the absence of a theory of state personality because as he says all alliances are alliances between persons and they must be persons of the state because otherwise they don't have any continuing Authority okay final thought is that if we're now in the heart of the Enlightenment as we are talking about the German and the French tradition publishes story at last comes to England and it comes to England above all in the most influential of the English common law commentators Sir William Blackstone in the commentaries on the laws of England where he begins with a philosophical disposition on the origins of the state and it's completely Hobbesian that's to say he sees a world of nature which is a multitude of individual people he sees that they cannot institute a single will except by a covenant he sees the Covenant as creating the person of the state and sovereignty as the representation of that person so I think you could say without it being an exaggeration that by that stage in enlightenment thought the idea of the state has become very generally accepted the idea of the person of the state and the only debate is whether it's a purely fictive person or must be a moral person well I want to end this lecture I've got five minutes well I think we started after the I didn't we so have I got five minutes ago I want to end by raising two questions one is that at the end of the 18th century the Anglophone tradition not just the English but the Anglophone tradition skidded off in a completely different direction as a result of which the idea of state personality came to be seen as completely foreign to Anglophone political philosophy and indeed except for a brief near Hegelian revival at the end of the nineteenth century it has effectively disappeared now I just want to ask two questions about the Anglophone tradition then over this period one isn't why did it disappear and the other is did we lose anything that matters so let me just end by raising very briefly those two questions why did it disappear I think most of the answer is to be found Indian or influence from the late 18th century onwards in Anglophone thought of utilitarianism as a moral and political philosophy jeremy bentham's first work is the fragment of government 1776 which you know entirely consists of a vituperative attack on exactly the sections of Blackstone that I have just cited I quote Bentham the season of fictions is over the time has come to ground legal arguments on facts about real individuals and especially on the capacity of individuals for experiencing in relation to political power the pain of restraint and the pleasure of liberty so confronted with Blackstone's Hobbesian stuff about the state of nature freedom the Covenant the creation of effective person that person being represented the name of that person being the state Bentham doesn't say that that's mistaken I quote him again these entire sections are completely meaningless they are a mere sequence of fictions but law must get rid of fictions it's got to be about pleasure pain and that is remarkably influential and of course that propor tadeasi mystification of the state is the origin of the idea that if we're talking about well what could we mean if we're talking about the state except those who have charge of an apparatus of government and that's what you find in the whole of utilitarian classical jurisprudence of which the classic instance would be john austin's province of jurisprudence determined of 1832 i quote my own understanding of the state is that the term simply denotes the individual person or the body of individual persons who are given the supreme power in any independent political society so therein refax and I could certainly talk more about that if you wished in discussion but there is a very powerful legal theoretical ideology which has no use for fictions and above all the supreme fiction the state so finally the other question I'd like to end with is has anything of value been lost in Anglophone and now far more generally in European political speculation as a result of giving up the idea of state personality well Kyle Schmidt the became celebrated infamous for saying yes that has been the gravest loss in modern political philosophy and his extraordinary book about the state person as he calls it the state person in Hobbes Leviathan is that that's that is the way to think about the state and we've lost it and so we've lost what really matters and the reason that it matters according to Schmidt is of course as I'm sure you know that you have to have a union under some will which not only acts as a sovereign power but has the power to determine the exception to determine the emergency and that you have to recognize that that is the power of the state and that it must be obeyed as long as it protects you well there is Schmitz Hobson ISM that is one of Hobbes these arguments as it's one of proof and oral arguments but if I think back to the whole tradition that I've talked about and if you remember what I said about Hobbes and poof endorphins are tell that's not what they really want you to understand matters about the state oh no they have three further things that they really want you to think about and I want to end with them one is this idea that you've got to be able to make sense of the fact that some governmental actions have the intended effect of binding not merely the citizens now but they're remote prosperity as Hobbes says and as we've seen one obvious example food burns off takes it and many later legal theorists took it Maitland has a celebrated essay on it is the phenomenon of what's come to be called sovereign debt of course that's a stupid thing to call it it's state debt we should call it state debt the debts of states who is the debtor well you can hardly answer the government government's come and go but that debt doesn't come and go it'd be wonderful if it did but that debt is still there the only way to make sense of the question who is the debtor poof and off wants you to understand is to say it must be a person with an artificial eternity of life can't be any other person and there's only one such person in our politics don't get rid of it secondly they want you to see that there's analogously a question of the relation of remote posterity in relation to other governments and there's the point that Vidal keeps making he has this category which he calls real treaties a real treaty is not just a sticking-plaster a real treaty is the relationship of moral persons which is designed to endure as long as those persons so the signatories cannot be governments it will have to be understood that the signatories are artificially eternal and therefore must be States that's the second thought the third and for these writers much the most important point is if and only if you make a categorical distinction between States and governments can you use the idea of the state to generate what you really want which is a theory of the limits of political obligation that's for them the really crucial point and how does that work well through you remember proof endorsed mantra let the people safety be the supreme law Salas properly supreme elects so for these philosophers the basic reason for Catholics for categorically distinguishing state from government is that it is a means of holding governments to account to ask are they satisfying their obligations to the person of the state now it's commonly been said especially in recent liberal political philosophy that sounds a bit sinister but the belief that what I've just said is sinister is just a misunderstanding of the theory that I've been laying out and it turns out to be quite a different difficult theory to get across in contemporary political philosophy but according to the theory I've laid out to say that the name of the state is the name of a distinct person is just a way of referring to us that's to say a body of citizens who have authorized their representation so when we speak about the interests of the state that is equivalent to speaking about anything that we could judge to be a public interest now notoriously it's hard to make sense of the notion of the common good in societies which are multicultural but these writers would nevertheless think that you could give a very robust sense of the common good that there are interests that all citizens have for example an interest Hobbs would say in being educated an interest in being given welfare to look after them when they can't look after themselves an interest in being defended if we were to insist that all of those interests were served we would have an extraordinary robust theory of the democratic state but of course that's what we now don't have because our ruling elites most shamelessly in the United Kingdom and the United States have seized them manipulated the apparatus of the state for their own purposes and are continuing to do so we don't have the moral vocabulary with which to contest that but we do because it is the vocabulary of the state which leads me to wonder if our abandonment of that vocabulary may not have been a very serious mistake thank you very much you

Channel: UCD - University College Dublin

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Keywords: UCD, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, UCD - University College Dublin, myucd, ucddublin, Thomas Hobbes, Quentin Skinner, political theory, state, government, power, agnes cuming, philosophy, political philosophy

Id: NKD7uYnCubg

Length: 52min 29sec (3149 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2016