Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies by Brooke Christopher Wokler Robert Garsten Bryan

Author:Brooke, Christopher, Wokler, Robert, Garsten, Bryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

MANUFACTURING THE NATION-STATE

No less than modern social science, the modern state is also an invention of the French Revolution, in this case bred not out of Thermidor but from the National Assembly of 1789, whose destruction of the ancien régime heralds the self-creation of modernity in its political form. In a notable series of writings, Quentin Skinner has traced the origins of our conception of the state to transfigurations of the language of status, or the condition of the members of a civitas, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe into the modern terminology of état or state to signify the civitas as a whole.17 The development of such new terminology and the institutions of government which it articulates are of profound importance to an understanding of the modern state, as are the theories of sovereignty of Bodin and most especially Hobbes in the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth century, which encapsulate some of the central features of states today as ultimate repositories of political judgement and founts of all authority, exercising uncontested rule within defined territorial limits. Foucault himself, in addressing what he took to be a shift in the art of government from control over lands to control over the conduct of subjects, also came to hold the view, albeit from a quite different perspective, that the character of the modern state began to crystallize around the theme of its own rationality—its raison d’état—towards the end of the sixteenth century.18

But however much prefigured by Hobbes’s doctrines of sovereignty and representation in particular, the modern state required for its formation a principle which is absent from the political philosophies of both Bodin and Hobbes, and which is missing as well from the vast number of tracts on the practice of government that were produced even earlier in the Renaissance. In addition to superimposing undivided rule upon its subjects, the genuinely modern state further requires that those who fall under its authority be united themselves—that they form one people, one nation, morally bound together by a common identity. With some notable exceptions, the modern state is of its essence a nation-state, in which nationality is defined politically and political power is held to express the nation’s will. Hobbes had conceived a need for a unitary sovereign in his depiction of the artificial personality of the state, but he had not supposed that the multitude of subjects which authorized that power could be identified as having a collective character of its own. Joined together with his conception of the unity of the representer, as outlined in the sixteenth chapter of his Leviathan, the modern state generally requires that the represented be a moral person as well, national unity going hand in hand with the political unity of the state.19 While it speaks with only one voice in the manner imputed to absolutist monarchy, the modern nation-state cannot take the form of a monarchical civitas along any lines set forth by Bodin or Hobbes. It is instead, as it has been known since the late eighteenth century, a democratic republic.

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