Post-nationalism,sovereignty and the state

The supposed superiority of the human reason story

The supposed superiority of the human reason story is a legacy of the 18th/19th-century European Enlightenment, especially as this enlightenment was practised by Immanuel Kant. For this story, while humans are occasionally flawed, their flaws will cause little or no damage because their natural reason will overcome their lapses. This is to say that this position is prepared to acknowledge human beings’ worst tendencies, but only in insisting that these tendencies will be kept to an acceptable minimum by the power of reasoning. In other words, in rejecting the idea of ruling through the state’s coercive power, in favour of rule by the people themselves – popular sovereignty instead of the sovereignty of the state – this position is tempered somewhat (though only somewhat) by its acknowledgement that some people will have to let their natural superiors do their reasoning for them.

Habermas, with considerable help from Kant, puts this point in these terms:

[T]he principle of popular sovereignty [that is, the sovereignty of the people] could be realised only under the precondition of a public use of reason. . . . Political actions . . . were themselves declared to be in agreement with . . . morality only as far as their maxims were capable of being taken into the superior public sphere. (Habermas, 1989: 107–8)

In this way, Habermas insists, Kant was correct to reject Hobbesian coercion in favour of his own reason/morality-driven account of politics and law. For Kant:

In the framework of a comprehensively norm-governed state of affairs (uniting civil constitution and eternal peace to form a ‘perfectly just order’) domination . . . was replaced by the rule of legal norms – politics could in principle be transformed into morality. (Habermas, 1989: 108)

In other words, this reason-based style of rule by the people is in fact rule by only some of the people – those capable of reasoning at the standard of critical discussion, which in Kant’s time was understood to include mainly – if not solely – the wealthy.

The training given to this inner circle of ruler-reasoners stressed that coercion was to be used only on those who were not members of it. When dealing with each other, Habermas says, they had ‘to begin with an abstinence from the methods of political coercion’ (Habermas, 1989: 109). This soon led to a situation, Habermas acknowledges, by which:

Only property-owning private people were admitted to a public engaged in critical political debate, for [only they] . . . were their own masters: only they should be enfranchised to vote . . . (Habermas, 1989: 109–10)

Those on the outside were to be left to enjoy (or, more likely, endure) their own situation, but only so long as they did not lay the blame for their fate on those who did qualify as ‘property-owning private people’:

He can be considered happy in any condition so long as he is aware that, if he does not reach the same level as others, the fault lies either with himself (i.e., lack of ability or serious endeavour) or with circumstances for which he cannot blame others. (Kant, quoted in Habermas, 1989: 110)

Two hundred years later Habermas offered some words of his own by way of encouragement for these unfortunate losers. Inasmuch as they displayed their own weakness by being incapable of owning property, they ‘were excluded from the public . . . without thereby violating the principle of publicity. In this sense they were not citizens at all, but persons who with talent, industry, and luck someday might be able to attain that status’ (Habermas, 1989: 111).

It is almost certainly the case that not all supporters of this story (especially those represented in this special issue) are so eagerly elitist about how reasoners should go about ruling (either in place of the state or by taking charge of the state), but at the very least elitism is a part of the foundation story of their argument.

The ‘sovereignty and the state’ story

The sovereignty and the state story comes from a different enlightenment to the one dominated by Kant – the earlier, 16th/17th-century enlightenment known as the civil enlightenment (see esp. Hunter, 2001). Particularly important here is the manner in which this civil enlightenment was practised by two of the figures mentioned earlier, Thomas Hobbes in England and Samuel Pufendorf in Germany.

The main legacy of this earlier civil enlightenment is the modern state itself. This is a form of state that emerged in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries as a force strong enough to impose discipline on constantly warring populations (see esp. Cohn, 1970 [1957]). This strength is something the state achieved by holding firmly to its ultimate coercive power – that is, its power of life and death over all the people it rules. This ultimate coercive power is often known as the state’s sovereignty.

In this way, sovereignty involves gaining control of a geographical land mass and imposing upon the people who live on that land mass not only an identity as a member of that land (an identity that later became known as citizenship), but also the demand that they adhere to a public set of rules to live by (a set of rules that later became known as ‘the law of the land’). This set of rules featured (and still features) the idea that the people under the control of a sovereign government must not only obey the everyday legal commands of that sovereign government, by way of keeping the civil peace (often known as ‘obeying the law’), but must also, when the government asks, be prepared to give up their own lives, in war or in other emergencies, in order to protect the state (this might have happened rarely in the West so far in the 21st century, but the First and Second World Wars are occasions within living memory where this type of sacrifice was de rigueur for Westerners).

To put this still another way, the story being told in this part of the article is a story in which the state’s negative view of the nature of humans – a view by which all humans (including the elites) are fractious beings who, if left to their own devices, would destroy one another and ultimately themselves – has led the state to rule these humans in such a way that, paradoxically, it has proved itself capable – albeit not in all places or in all circumstances – of delivering to humans the most enduring peace they have ever enjoyed.

This formulation, especially the ‘not in all places or in all circumstances’ component, is obviously not offered as a ringing endorsement of a perfect arrangement. But it is an endorsement of sorts. Indeed, the state can sensibly be described in the same terms Churchill employed in defending democracy: the state’s record – with wars, slavery, colonialism, famines, etc. on its charge sheet over the centuries – is a long way from perfect, but it is still much better than anything else that has ever been tried by way of delivering peace and freedoms to humans on such a large scale.

Hobbes’s most famous work, Leviathan, was first published in 1651 as part of his contribution to finding a way forward in the wake of the English Civil War, one of a string of religion-inspired civil wars that devastated Europe for over 150 years, killing swathes of the populations in the areas they reached. In his book, Hobbes formulated an account of human nature in direct opposition to the account of humans-as-reasoners that dominated his era (as it had dominated eras before his and still seems to dominate ours).

This was the Aristotelian account of humans as it had been inherited from the ancient world and then Christianised by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. This Christianised or ‘Thomist’ version often goes by the name of ‘scholasticism’.

By the scholastic account, as Hunter summarises it, human nature:

‘shares the rational nature of God’, inasmuch as humans must use their natural reason to seek the perfection that a perfect God has set for them. According to Aquinas, it is through the ‘intellection of the natures of things’ that ‘God imbues . . . [humans] with the law of the “perfection” or completion of their own nascent essences or “goods”’ . . . such that ‘human nature is inclined by the law of its perfection to know the truth about God and to live in society’. (Hunter, 2010: 477)

Hobbes freely acknowledged the importance of humans’ natural capacity for ‘sociality’, that is, their natural tendency to interact with one another for protection and procreation – ‘the inclinations of all men . . . tend . . . not only to the procuring, but also to the assuring of a contented life’ (Hobbes, 1845b: 85) – but he totally disagreed with the scholastics’ view that humans are driven to interact towards perfection.

For the Hobbesian way of thinking, this view is wrong because the natural vanity and quarrelsomeness of humans means that when they are left alone to seek perfection, instead of living peaceably together they too often form into rival communities around rival accounts of perfection and fight to the death. As Hobbes (1845b: 117) famously put it, ‘the condition of man . . . is a condition of war of every one against every one’.

In other words, for Hobbes, humans cannot be left to rule themselves for this will inevitably lead to violence, and possibly to the summum mallum (the greatest evil): civil war. If this is to be avoided humans must adopt (or at least adapt to) the strong rule of the sovereign state.

Before saying a little about Hobbes’s views on just how the state should do its work, it is worth offering Pufendorf’s 1672 development of Hobbes’s argument about the dreadful capacities of all humans, if only for its brutal directness. For Pufendorf, every human is:

a creature whose weakness . . . necessitates sociality for survival but whose ‘vices render dealing with him risky and make great caution necessary to avoid receiving evil from him instead of good.’ Unlike the beasts, man’s appetites for sex and food are limitless and impossible to satisfy. Moreover: ‘Many other passions and desires are found in the human race unknown to the beasts, [such] as, greed for unnecessary possessions, avarice, desire of glory and surpassing others, envy, rivalry and intellectual strife. It is indicative that many of the wars by which the human race is broken and bruised are waged for reasons unknown to the beasts’ . . . Man’s petulance, his capacity for giving and receiving offence, combined with his extraordinary capacity for violence, makes his natural condition a very dangerous one, particularly when one takes into account the great divisions in human beliefs and ways of life. In short: ‘Man, then, is an animal with an intense concern for his own preservation, needy by himself, incapable of protection without the help of his fellows, and very well fitted for the mutual provision of benefits. Equally, however, he is at the same time malicious, aggressive, easily provoked and as willing as he is able to inflict harm on others’ . . . Man’s life in the state of nature would thus indeed be miserable, unadorned, and short. (Hunter, 2001: 171–2, quoting Pufendorf)

Of course all wars are dreadful and the history of war in the 20th century (not to mention the history of war in the first two decades of the 21st century) is depressing, at the very least. Nonetheless, even the most careful histories of the brutality of older wars born of religious passions are likely to shock 21st-century readers. One such history is Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1970 [1957]), first published in 1957. Cohn offers an account of centuries of crusades in which religious passions saw thousands of nominally Christian soldiers march across Europe to kill Muslims, stopping along the way to kill Jews. Cohn argues that from ancient times to the present, strong government has been the only long-term antidote to destructive wars.

In a similar vein, Ian Morris, in his 2014 book War! What Is It Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilization, from Primates to Robots, builds an argument from the historical record that the grim periods discussed by Cohn have in fact been the norm, not the exception.

As if all this were not bad enough, one has also to consider the continuing scourge of irredentism, which is the technical word used for describing all programs that use ancient ethnic, racial, and/or cultural logic to take over, usually by invasion, a supposedly lost homeland. Such programs are often made still worse (which seems impossible but sadly is all too possible) by the spirit of revanchism, which is the technical term for wars undertaken principally for the sake of revenge.

The modern state (at least in some places, during some periods) has been able to limit the capacity of humans to wreak on one another the dreadful violence described in the last few paragraphs. This is a complex and at times puzzling process. Hobbes carefully explains why the necessary first step is for the state to instil fear in those it rules. The state, he believes, must be the ‘Leviathan’, that is, the absolute ruling force, with the power of life and death over all members of the population of the territory it rules. As he describes it:

This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN . . . For by this authority given him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is enabled to perform the wills of them all to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. (Hobbes, 1845b: 158)

Why, you might ask, would the population readily hand over such immense power to the sovereign state? Actually, the answer is quite simple.

When civil war had raged for so long in so many countries that almost as many people in each of these countries had been slaughtered as had survived, it became sufficiently apparent to the great majority of the survivors that a ruler who or which could stop the killing – by being strong enough to threaten all would-be killers with death – was the only ruler capable of delivering widespread, lasting peace.

This moment of realization is effectively the birth of the sovereign state, for it is the moment when the state becomes what Hobbes calls the ‘representative of all and every one of the multitude’ (Hobbes, 1845b: 171, 1845a: 140, 158), the moment when ‘the multitude’ becomes ‘the people’. In other words, the vital idea of ‘the people’ as the entity that governments must serve ‘is not in being before the constitution of government’ (Hobbes, 1845a: 98) and, even more importantly, this is the moment when the state assumes full responsibility for delivering and maintaining what Hobbes calls ‘the common peace and security’ (Hobbes, 1845b: 235).

So much for the fear component of the present article’s account of the state as the best hope for peace. This account has four other important components. The first is the state’s determination to deliver the type of security mentioned by Hobbes immediately above, the second is the special type of law developed to help the state deliver this peace and security, the third is the state’s role in shaping new types of people, and the fourth is the state’s capacity to itself be an effective entity.

Delivering a secure existence to its population is so central to the state’s role that Hunter (2005) has suggested that security is in fact the ‘default setting’ of the modern state. If a state cannot rule in such a way as to deliver to its population an existence in which both internal and external threats of violence are either absent or extremely limited, it must be regarded as a failing or failed state. As Quentin Skinner points out, even the very early form of the state operating in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries (in what are often called the Italian city-states) had at least a putative version what later became a standard feature of state-ruled territories: a recognisable commitment on the part of the state to notions like ‘the common good’, ‘the cause of peace’, and/or ‘the happiness of the people’ (Skinner, 2002: 372).

In establishing its rule in early modern Europe, the state was inspired, at least in part, by the revival of some ancient Greek and Roman techniques for forming certain types of personality, a revival which encompassed aspects of ancient Stoicism and Epicureanism. There is room here only to briefly discuss two influential European contributors to this development and to point to the way in which Hobbes himself made a significant contribution.

The first of the two European contributors was Justus Lipsius, who wrote in the 16th century during a period of intense religious civil war in his native Netherlands, a period that included invasion by the Spanish army on behalf of the Catholic Church. As a witness to the turmoil, Lipsius rejected traditional reason-based Greek philosophy and instead turned to the Roman Stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. There he found what he regarded as invaluable lessons about three particular techniques by which individuals can remain strong and patient in the most troubled times, lessons he wanted to pass on immediately to his country’s rulers, officials, and soldiers (Oestreich, 1982: 5–9, 13–15, 31; see also Lipsius, 2006). As Gerhard Oestreich summarises Lipsius’s efforts:

In the triad constantia, patientia, firmitas (steadfastness, patience, firmness) Lipsius gave to his age, an age of bloody religious strife, the watchword for resistance against the external ills of the world. His . . . philosophy acquired a leading position in European thought. . . . The Neostoic philosophy which it inaugurated became common property. (Oestreich, 1982: 13–14)

David Saunders adds that Lipsius’s ‘neo-Stoic man of constancy was a secular alternative to the contemporary enthusiasm for Christian models’, a crucial ‘contribution to the Dutch achievement of producing personnel for military, juridical and administrative offices, men equipped to set aside their religious beliefs in order to perform official functions for the State’ (Saunders, 1997: 87).

Over a century later, in the wake of the devastating Thirty Years War, during which religious violence claimed the life of nearly half the population of the German territories, Christian Thomasius worked up a triad of his own, featuring honestum, decorum, and justum. While this triad was similar in some respects to that of Lipsius (Barnard, 1971: 236–9) there were important differences.

Where Lipsius had treated his ethic of constantia as a neo-Stoic device for achieving ‘inner-distance’, Thomasius wanted his ethic of decorum to be a form of personal accountability, ‘not to be identified with cold rationality of the calculus . . . [but with] a certain weighing of costs and benefits, and a “reckoning” of consequences’ (Barnard, 1988: 590–1). Saunders summarises Thomasius’s triad in these terms:

The honestum is the sphere of moral conscience and governs our actions by inner piety and the spiritual pangs of conscience. The justum is the sphere of law and governs our actions by public legal sanctions. The decorum is the sphere of manners and politics, governed by social norms. The three spheres did not form a hierarchy in which decorum and justum were steps towards morality or honestum. On the contrary, Thomasius’s aim was to insulate law and manners from the devastation that religious conscience and moral absolutes had wreaked when pursued into reality. (Saunders, 1997: 92)

Thomasius’s notion of decorum, then, was a form of regulation that will be quite familiar to 21st-century citizens of states (like Australia’s) that provide historically impressive amounts of peace and security: decorum, Thomasius insisted, ‘governed actions in accordance with norms of civility and peaceful sociability, a prudent middle way between religion and law’ (Saunders, 1997: 66; see also Thomasius, 2007).

As for Hobbes’s contribution, David Burchell points out (1999: 510) that Hobbes was concerned with much more than the broad outlines of state sovereignty as a means of imposing order. He was also concerned to promote ‘the much wider range of “disciplines” by which human beings are “made fit” for the various social roles which they inhabit as responsible citizens’. As Peter Johnson (2008) puts it, in talking of Hobbes’s commitment to ‘the necessity of manners’:

Hobbes speaks about manners as those qualities which promote peace and unity and he considers them to be distinct from the ‘small morals’ which concern matters such as ‘how one should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company’. . . . Similarly, Hobbes separates manners from mere fashion. . . . So the importance of manners is not found in the way they protect us against petty annoyance or because they embellish an otherwise dull existence. It lies in their contribution to peace. . . . [T]hey are serious matters and, hence, of considerable interest to individuals who are motivated primarily by self-preservation. (Johnson, 2008: 68, quoting Hobbes; for an excellent 20th-century account of the vital role played by personal manners in the maintenance of social peace see Elias, 2000).

Finally, on the matter of the state functioning more as an office than as a natural person, it is again prudent to begin with Hobbes. Right at the start of Leviathan Hobbes makes the point that the sovereignty of the state resides in the office of the state, not in the human individual or individuals who occupies or occupy this office.

Martin Loughlin (2003: 59) offers a 21st-century version of this point in arguing that ‘the sovereign holds an office impressed with public responsibilities and for the realization of which he [or she or it] is vested with absolute sovereign authority’.

Paul du Gay draws on Max Weber’s thinking to develop still another version of this point:

[T]he distinction between an office and the person holding that office became sharper and began to harden as a separate, highly structured domain of offices arose, and associated with those offices a greatly accumulated set of powers developed – resources, and instruments which were (and remain) not really under the effective personal control of those who happened to occupy the offices at any given moment. (du Gay, 2012: 400)

In other words, the distinction between an office as a prescribed set of duties, on the one hand and, on the other, the natural persons who happen to hold the office – the persons charged with performing those duties – is one of the ways the state exercises its authority in a carefully indifferent, detached, impersonal manner. In this, as with its other techniques, the state is working towards its one and only moral goal: an appreciable civil peace for the entire population.

The state, du Gay insists, is thus able to exercise its authority over the population without having to continually remake its power of command for each different context:

The authority of the state is both binding and content-independent: it forms a premise for the subject’s action without that subject considering the merits of what it requires. The authority of the state cannot be seen as the authority of the people who constitute the subjects of the state, either individually or collectively. Therefore the state cannot be seen as the power of its citizens under another guise. . . . Rather, the emergence of the state indicates a situation in which an alternative view predominates; one where the ends of civil or political association make it indispensable to establish a single and supreme sovereign authority whose power remains distinct not merely from the people over whom it is exercised, but also from whichever office-holders may be said to have the right to wield its power at any particular time. (du Gay, 2012: 400)

Finally, in her book The State and the Rule of Law, Blandine Kriegel puts the whole issue more poetically: ‘public offices belong neither to lords nor to a prince, nor to a state, for they are the state itself’ (1995: 26–7) (for a different slant on the material in this section, with a focus more on the notion of civility, see Wickham et al., 2017).

Conclusion

Sovereignty and the state, as they have been described in this article, are engines of modern life. While the spirit of rule under which they operate is undoubtedly at odds with the spirit of reason that drives other articles in this special issue, this is the sort of ‘at odds’ that should be welcomed at a time like this, when a pandemic has been threatening lives and futures, in both health terms and economic terms. Surely an argument that insists people could and should be trusted to manage their own health and economic well-being because their reason gives them the capability to do so is no match for an argument that insists that agents of sovereign states are best equipped to deliver (albeit not always smoothly) both the necessary health measures to limit the risks presented to whole populations by the COVID-19 virus (such as social distancing for all citizens, quarantining of at-risk groups, closure of borders and regions, etc.) and the necessary economic measures to fund the crucial business closures early in the pandemic (including providing funds for all those who have lost their jobs) and, as the pandemic is brought under control, stimulating business activity, returning students to education, and encouraging safe travel and other economic behaviours to help nation-states return to as close to the medical and economic health they were used to before the pandemic.