Abstract
The idea of state personality lurks just beneath the surface of modern politics. When we blame states for historical wrongs, admonish them to keep their promises, or talk about their identities and interests, we presuppose that they are, in some sense, persons. Sovereign debts and treaty obligations persist through generations because they attach not to individual persons, but to the corporate person of the state. Although the idea of state personality fell out of fashion in the mid-twentieth century, in large part because of its associations with Fascism and Idealist metaphysics, it has been the subject of renewed interest over the past two decades. Ben Holland’s The Moral Person of the State is an outstanding study of the idea of state personality and of Samuel von Pufendorf’s role in developing it.
The publisher describes the book as “the first detailed study in any language of the single most influential theory of the modern state.” While most readers will take the publisher’s word that it is “the first detailed study,” many will doubt that Pufendorf’s is “the single most influential theory.” Some will balk at the idea that Pufendorf, who is often thought to be a rather marginal figure, developed a theory of the state more influential than that of Hobbes. The book makes a very bold claim indeed.
Holland sets himself two aims. His first aim is to reconstruct Pufendorf’s theory of the state and the political and theological context in which he developed it. His second aim is to explain how subsequent writers have interpreted and appropriated this theory. Holland writes as a historian of political thought, and intellectual historians are his primary audience, but the book will also be of interest to political theorists, philosophers, and International Relations (IR) scholars.
The Introduction situates Pufendorf in the long tradition in Western political thought of drawing analogies between political communities and human beings. Plato compared the just city to the just soul; medieval philosophers developed the metaphor of the “body politic”; and Hobbes famously described the state as an “Artificial Man” and as “one person.” We then arrive at Pufendorf, who described the state as a “persona moralis” or “moral person” (p. 10). According to the prevailing interpretation, which is exemplified by Quentin Skinner, Pufendorf was little more than a “conduit for the transmission of [Hobbes’] doctrine,” 1 and “moral person” was just another way of saying “fictional person.” Holland’s central argument in the book is that this portrayal of Pufendorf is deeply mistaken. Far from being a Continental parrot of Hobbes, Pufendorf developed a theory of the state that turned out to be even more influential than Hobbes’ own. Hobbes scholars will find much of interest in the Introduction, as well as in Chapter 2 and the Conclusion.
Part I of the book explains how and why Pufendorf developed his idea of the state as a moral person. Chapter 1 explores the Molinist or Jesuit conception of freedom, which was developed by Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez, that Pufendorf later adopted. Scholars of political theology will find a great deal of interest in this chapter, but it will be the most difficult chapter for most readers to grasp. The difficulty is simply a feature of the subject matter, which is, after all, scholastic philosophy. Although the content of this chapter is by no means extraneous, readers who are most interested in Pufendorf’s theory of the state could get away with skipping over some of the finer details. The main point is that, according to the Molinist conception of freedom, a free person has two “faculties”: a will and an intellect. The will is the “formally free” faculty that allows the person to either act or not-act in any set of circumstances—in effect, to resist external causes (pp. 32–34). But the will requires reasons for action, and the objects of the will must first be “cognized” by the intellect (pp. 35–37). The intellect is thus a necessary condition for a free act.
Chapter 2 explains how Pufendorf used the Molinist conception of freedom to develop his theory of the state. This chapter, like the last, requires some patience from readers who are primarily interested in Pufendorf’s political thought. Holland does not get to Pufendorf’s theory of the state until the fourth section, but the main course is well worth the wait. What makes Pufendorf’s state a “moral person” is that it has not only a will—the will of the sovereign—but also an intellect, which, he argues, should be located in a “council” that is separate from the sovereign. As Holland points out, this separation of will and intellect gives Pufendorf’s state a constitutionalist character, in stark contrast to Hobbes’ absolutism: the sovereign “cannot decide to act if the council considers that there is no reason to act” (p. 92). Pufendorf developed this theory of “facultative sovereignty,” as Holland calls it, to explain how a composite polity—in particular, the German Empire—could act as one person. While the will of the Empire resided in the Emperor, the council of each community within the Empire constituted a separate intellect. Pufendorf’s theory of facultative sovereignty thus ensured “that the sovereign will in the German Empire could be identified, while allowing Protestant communities, in extremis, to resist their [Catholic] sovereign” (p. 102).
Part II turns to three traditions of thought that have taken up Pufendorf’s idea of the state as a composite moral person. Chapter 3 discusses “Continental appropriations” of Pufendorf, which used his theory of the state to develop theories of international law and visions of international order. Christian Wolff, Emer de Vattel, and Immanuel Kant each, in different ways, used the idea of the state as a moral person to develop a theory of international law according to the model of natural law. One conspicuous omission from this chapter is Rousseau. Holland begins the section on Kant with the claim that he “was the next major writer [after Vattel] to describe the state as a moral person” (p. 130). But more than three decades before Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795), Rousseau described the state as a moral person, or personne morale, in The Social Contract (1762). 2 In addition, in his own Perpetual Peace (1761), Rousseau put forth his own vision of a European composite polity, or “Confederation.” 3 This is less a criticism of Holland than a gesture toward another major writer whose work supports his central claim in the chapter: that Pufendorf set the terms for subsequent Continental thought about international law and international order.
Chapter 4 discusses “Atlantic appropriations” of Pufendorf, which used Pufendorf’s theory of the state to conceptualize the structure of the British Empire and of the new American federation. Holland makes a compelling case that Pufendorf’s idea of the composite moral person directly and indirectly influenced American thought around the time of the American Revolution. His most striking claim is that, “via certain commentators on Pufendorf’s political philosophy associated with the Scottish Enlightenment, Pufendorf’s argument that the state is a composite moral person whose sovereignty has a facultative basis exerted a considerable influence over the authors of The Federalist Papers” (p. 144). This chapter will be of great interest to scholars of federalism, imperialism, and American constitutional thought.
Chapter 5 discusses “Anglo-German interpretations” of Pufendorf, which identify Pufendorf’s moral person of the state with a mere legal person or a Hobbesian fictional person. This chapter explains why Pufendorf is so consistently misinterpreted and, in part, why he has fallen out of the canon since the nineteenth century. Holland argues that the source of these misinterpretations is Otto von Gierke, who was the first to identify Pufendorf’s state with Hobbes’ state. Gierke’s aim was to resurrect an authentically German way of thinking about group personality and to purge the concept of Roman influences. According to the Roman view, of which Hobbes is the exemplar, a group person exists “only through a fiction of the law, only able to will and act when represented by some natural person” (p. 191). According to the Germanic view, which Gierke favours, a group person or Genossenschaft is “a real, organic person” (p. 193). Gierke claims that Pufendorf was tempted by Germanism but, under the influence of Hobbes, succumbed to Romanism. Since Pufendorf’s state depended on contracts between its subjects and on the will of its sovereign, not on any organic unity, it was ultimately just as individualistic and insubstantial as Hobbes’ state. Pufendorf’s moral person of the state was, according to Gierke, only a pseudo-Germanic replica of Hobbes’ fictional person of the state.
Holland decisively refutes Gierke’s interpretation of Pufendorf. For one thing, Pufendorf’s moral persons were not merely fictional or legal; he sharply criticized Hobbes’ claim that inanimate things, such as bridges and hospitals, could be made persons by legal fiction. For another, Pufendorf was not the “enlightened absolutist” that Gierke made him out to be (p. 205). Although the only will of the state was indeed that of the sovereign, the state also had an intellect that limited the will of the sovereign. Pufendorf’s moral person of the state was not Gierke’s Genossenschaft, but it was a real person nonetheless. It was certainly not Hobbes’ fictional person, which was no more real than “An Idol, or meer Figment of the brain.” 4
The Conclusion revisits the concept of personhood and the contrast between Pufendorf and Hobbes. One of the takeaway points is that the modern concept of the state is due more to Pufendorf than to Hobbes: “If the abstraction from territory, population and government is what gives rise to the concept of the modern state that we have inherited, then it is to Pufendorf that we owe the concept” (p. 219). Hobbes’ state is more or less an epiphenomenon: “the Common-wealth is no Person, nor has capacity to doe any thing, but by the Representative, (that is, the Soveraign;).” 5 But Pufendorf’s state, as Holland argues, “could not be absorbed into the person of its sovereign” (p. 218). The personality of the state was due to its internal organization, which gave it an intellect and a will; it was not parasitic on the personality of any man or assembly.
Holland’s argument that Pufendorf’s is “the most significant theory of the modern state” (p. 221) is as persuasive as it is bold. His claims of Pufendorf’s influence are well-supported, and he is careful not to overstate his case, or “to flatten history into a Pufendorfian pancake” (p. 181). But after reading The Moral Person of the State, it is hard not to see the traces of Pufendorf’s influence all over political theory and IR. Although describing states as “moral persons” has fallen out of fashion, describing them as “moral agents” is commonplace. The idea of corporate moral agency seems thoroughly Pufendorfian, depending as it does on an analogy between the faculties of states and the faculties of human beings. For instance, as Erskine argues, “the state has a capacity for reasoning and decision-making that is akin to that of the human individual.” 6 Like an individual moral agent, it has “the capacity for both moral deliberation and moral action.” 7 This is strikingly reminiscent of Pufendorf’s claim that a moral person must have both an intellect and a will, though Pufendorf does not appear to have had any direct influence on contemporary ideas of corporate moral agency. Yet it is hard to believe that the similarities are entirely coincidental. In addition to making a great contribution to the history of political thought, Holland’s book helps us to better understand the concept of the state that we have inherited.