Take your choice where the medieval realm gives way to the modern state: most scholars choose the sixteenth century, but a century is a long time, and historians have often found supposedly feudal features of European life right up to the French Revolution and beyond. The ‘modern state’ is an umbrella term sheltering many different kinds of politics.
Religion is at the centre of the story. A grumbling of heresies in the later Middle Ages turned into fully fledged schism after 1517 when Luther defied the Pope by nailing his theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Religion determined politics because the most important thing in most lives was eternal salvation, and communities were reluctant to tolerate forms of belief unpleasing to God. The Reformation and counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century created immense spiritual enthusiasm, and much of the politics of England during this period concerned the martyrs who tried to save the country from heresy or, alternatively, prevent it from sinking back into popish superstition. And the political significance of these passions lies in the fact that the civil society of the time was conceived of as an association of believers. To reject fundamental communal beliefs was a kind of internal emigration.
The politics of the modern state emerged out of two conflicting movements: kingdoms tended to fragment in some ways, and to become unified in others. Centralizing monarchs acquired the concentrated powers of sovereignty, yet at the same time both individuals and established classes were able to entrench privileges and usages, some coming to be formulated in the emerging vocabulary of ‘rights’.
In the earlier period, the nobles were an increasingly disorderly element. They constituted a warrior class with little to fight except each other, and throughout Europe civil war and local dissension threatened a reversion to primitive conditions. The Wars of the Roses in England during the thirty years before the coming of the Tudor monarchs in 1485 was largely power-hungry aristocratic opportunism, but the French wars of religion in the next century mingled aristocratic ambition and religious enthusiasm. The English civil war after 1642, and the contemporaneous Thirty Years War in Germany, have both sometimes been seen as part of the long transition from medieval localism to the centralized modern state. The common response to civil war is an enthusiasm for absolute government. It takes two or more to fight wars, and it seemed to make sense to concentrate all power in a sovereign ruler, conformity to whose laws would guarantee peace. Just such a ruler, however, might well misuse his power. It is clear that many feared the possibility of despotism. Thus Prince Hal, referring to the death of his father in Part 2 of Shakespeare’s Henry IV reassuringly remarks:
Brothers, you mix your sadness with some fear:
This is the English, not the Turkish Court.
The new politics revolved around a court, and the court itself soon lost its medieval mobility and settled in one or more grand palaces which set the style for luxury and taste. A new kind of creature emerged: the courtier, whose aim was advancement and whose skill was to please. The nobility were assimilated into the court, and found that they had to become educated in order to retain their traditional role as the monarch’s counsellors. It was a dangerous role. Treason laws flourished in the early modern period, and the grandees who played the power game were seldom more than a few steps away from the block. The danger was particularly great for those whose blood line made them possible candidates for the succession. Elizabeth I reluctantly assented to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots because alive she threatened to become a focus for Roman Catholic rebellion. Out in the wider world, public opinion stirred, especially in the cities, stimulated by the pamphlets and broadsheets which printing made possible. By the seventeenth century, this wider public was beginning to play an independent role in politics. Cromwell’s army was full of remarkable men who had thought deeply about God and kings, and could express themselves in direct, pithy sentences, as they did in the Army Debates at Putney in 1647.
We rightly think of early modern court life as a sinister and melodramatic world – remembering those like Thomas More (‘the king’s good servant, but God’s first’), Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, Essex, and many others whose ending on the block has inspired literary recapitulation. Staking one’s life in the game of politics remained a deadly option until the beginning of the eighteenth century, since when only the melodrama of revolution has renewed the risk of death and imprisonment. Politicians in modern liberal democracies confidently expect to die in bed. In the modern world it is only despotisms which have recourse to the firing squad or the noose.
The high-risk politics of the early modern period resulted from the insecurity of rulers. In modern democracies, doctrine falsely suggests that rulers are basically in harmony with those they rule, but the very fact of authority necessarily distances the rulers from the ruled. Total intimacy and frankness is a dangerous indulgence for rulers, who are also in some degree at the mercy of the hopes and fears of those they rule. In a despotism this gulf is often recognized by construing the ruler as a god. The emergence of political activity quite specifically rejects this option, and the history of politics from one point of view is the exploration of expedients which minimize, even though they cannot eliminate, this distance between ruler and ruled. In the Greek polis and in republican Rome, for example, a certain public-spiritedness could be relied upon to give rulers and ruled a common basis for action. Again, in the medieval realm, the king was the leader of his vassals who in turn were responsible for those beneath them. Rule was a moral relationship. Kings engaged in the activity called ‘policy’ (which involved ruthlessness and dissembling) in relation to outside magnates, but in principle, at least, they had no need for ‘policy’ towards their peoples. With emerging modernity, however, it became necessary to practise ‘policy’ in managing one’s own turbulent subjects. Many of these subjects were now literate and had very definite religious and political views of their own, which might well incline them to support a change of regime. The heterogeneity of an individualistic society, combined with the problem of keeping order in a large state by abstract laws, generated ‘the new politics’.
The new politics first became explicit in the Italian cities where civic republics gave way to rule by tyrants – masterful adventurers who kept the peace by the exercise of unchecked power. By contrast with the medieval monarch, relatively secure in his rank and his religious status as the anointed of God, the signore had to be suspicious and wary. His insecure rule was always in danger from conspiracies or alliances that powerful families in his realm might make with neighbouring states. This ‘art of the state’ (as the new politics has been called) came in time to turn the traditional concern with justice into mere façade and to shift the focus to the cynical advice on how to keep power which had always been a part, but usually a subordinate part, of traditional accounts of the skill of ruling. A prince of this sort was now entirely given over to ‘policy’, perhaps the most important part of which were the devices of management to be used to keep his own subjects loyal to his interest. Machiavelli’s Prince is a handbook of this art, and in time its precepts came to be summed up in Botero’s formula as ‘reason of state’.
Here then was an entirely new conception of politics, new at least in the thoroughness with which it was theorized. It was regarded by contemporaries sometimes as a form of realism (‘the effective truth’ of politics, as Machiavelli put it) and sometimes as the sign of corrupt and degenerate times. The standard by which this corruption might be measured was the tradition of the classical republic as defined by Cicero and handed down by many successors both in the later Roman world and in medieval times. In this conception of politics, the ruler’s overriding concern was with justice and the encouragement of virtue throughout the city, for it was on virtue that peace and good order ultimately depended. The idea of a classical republic inspired a tradition of thought which, overtaken by the new politics of reason of state in early modern times, was preserved largely in the writings of philosophers, utopians, and pamphleteers. It survived to become endlessly transformed in the complex history of modern political thought. The ambiguous Machiavelli gave an account of this conception of the state in his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, and it spread. Nostalgia for a lost world of the republic was a counterpoint to the monarchical loyalty of the early modern period, and came to dominate Enlightenment criticism of the ancien régime in the eighteenth century. In republican terms, and in the opinion of many of the prudent middle classes, monarchy seemed wasteful, warlike, and exploitative, an affront to humanity. Indeed, the monarch seemed barely different from a tyrant. Thomas Hobbes had attacked this doctrine in Leviathan (1651), arguing that such idealism caused immense bloodshed in Europe by making young scholars the dupes of ambitious men.
Hobbes was responding to new problems. One of these was that religious dissension or aristocratic ambition could plunge a modern state into civil war. Another problem was the fact of individuality, for even individuals could come into destructive conflict with each other over religion, virtue, policy, and much else. It was indeed this very diversity of modern opinion (along with the fact that modern monarchies were too big to have the same kind of public life as city-states) which made the republican model in its classical form nothing but a seductive memory. The way Hobbes put this together was to argue that the only basic thing on which all men could agree was that death, and especially sudden death, was the supreme evil. His theoretical solution to these problems replicated much that had in fact been developing in practice: in each state, there must be a sovereign power with the authority to enforce the agreement necessary for a peaceful existence. The idea of sovereignty had previously been explored by the French lawyer Jean Bodin in his Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576). Sovereignty, said Bodin, was ‘that absolute and perpetual power vested in a commonwealth which in Latin is termed maiestas’. But where Bodin based his state on families, Hobbes emphasized individuals torn between the passion for glory and the fear of death. The source of the sovereign’s authority lay in the consent of the people themselves; indeed, they only became a people in the proper sense by appointing him as their representative.
The theory of sovereignty highlights one of the central problems of politics. It is universally agreed that freedom consists in living under law. But laws must be made. What then is the position of the lawmaker? If he is under the law, he cannot make it, and if he is above the law, then his subjects lack the security against oppression necessary for them to be free. Hobbes certainly agreed that the subjects of a modern state must be ruled by law, not by despotic caprice, but modern conditions require that rulers should have discretionary powers to deal with special situations. At this theoretical level, the problem cannot be solved. There is, in other words, always some element of risk in giving the necessary power to a sovereign authority. The practical argument is that the alternative is worse, for without sovereign power the subject has no protection against the aggression of others.
This logic reveals the bare bones of the extreme case. More confident peoples, or perhaps those who are merely insouciant about the dangers, might well think that the state might be based on the moral agreement of reasonable people, a package of moral prescriptions called natural law or (later) natural rights. This might solve the problem of the dangers of sovereignty. Hobbes’s younger contemporary John Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government (1689), implicitly criticized Hobbes by deriding the idea of giving to any individual the total power to determine the rights of subjects; to do this would be ‘to think that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions’.
Locke’s confidence that men will agree about natural law made him insensitive to a problem which is at the heart of both the practice and the theory of modern government. The collisions between Thomas More and Henry VIII, between Chief Justice Coke and James I, and between the English parliament and Charles I all exemplify the perennial tension between what the ruler thinks the state needs and what the lawyers say the state will allow. The Watergate case which brought down President Nixon in the United States, and the doings of the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution offer highly disparate examples of the same basic tension. In practice, democracy and the separation of powers are among the ways in which the sovereign power has been transformed so that it may not exploit the power of the state. Concepts of natural law, rights, consent, nationalism, and the general will are theories which in one degree or another offer at least mitigation of the problem. But even in the best regulated of worlds, it has to be recognized that political power is necessary but dangerous stuff. No precautions can guarantee complete safety.
This problem became increasingly acute because modern technology constantly enhanced the actual power available to a ruler. Pen and ink allowed the development of a bureaucracy whose records exceeded the longest memory. Identities and passports could be issued and checked, frontiers drawn with accuracy on maps (as happened first at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648). Explosives had rendered the fortresses of the nobility useless, and censorship and control of printing helped rulers to determine in some degree the ideas available to their subjects. But it will be obvious that the bearing on politics of modern technology ebbs and flows in accordance with our themes of unification and fragmentation. The power of governments may well have been enhanced by the technology of surveillance available during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, but more recently, tourism, computers, and geographical mobility have produced the opposite effect.
It will already be clear that the modern state has turned the whole idea of politics upside down, and that this has happened in response to religious change. Men in classical times found in service to the state what most satisfied their natures. Modern Europeans, as individuals concerned above all about salvation, have often taken the function of the state as merely to ensure the peace necessary for their own projects. The liberal view of the state is just a secular version of this attitude. One might expect such governments to be weak and divided, but in fact the modern state has been remarkably tough and durable. The German philosopher Hegel indulged in hyperbole when in his Philosophy of Right (1821) he characterized the state as ‘the march of God on earth’, but he expressed prophetically the sense of a link between the state and cosmic destiny which has been felt by many Europeans since his time, and has proved itself in the mass wars of the last two centuries.
Out of the ramshackle realms of the Middle Ages, then, there came into being a dazzling new piece of institutional machinery called ‘the state’ – so dazzling that it has swept the world. It represented the nearest thing to omnipotence human beings could construct, and, in a technological world, it soon became the focus of dreams. What faults in the human condition could it not, properly understood, remedy? Two contrasting attitudes reveal the rhythm of modern politics. The first is the liberal view of the state, descending from medieval conceptions of freedom and kingship, as sustaining a civic order to be enjoyed. The second is the art of the state as something repressive, standing over against the aspirations of its exploited subjects, the state as a problem because it is a repressive thing that needs to be humanized. And this second view has given rise to the aspiration to transcend the state altogether and create a perfect republic in which the gap, inevitable in politics, between ruler and subject has been entirely closed. Modern politics is in large measure a dialogue between these alternatives.