Why the Rest Hates the West by Pearse Meic;

Author:Pearse, Meic; [Pearse, Meic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2011-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Personal and Impersonal Rule

Classical Greece and Rome apart, the concepts of the impersonal state and of impersonal authority had their genesis in the early-modern period. We can see this by juxtaposing the central assumptions of its two classic political texts. The first of these, Machiavelli’s The Prince, was produced at the start of the sixteenth century and exhibits premodern assumptions: it is a guide to a man, telling him how to rule. The second, written in the mid-seventeenth century, is Hobbes’s Leviathan and is a theory of the state, which (regardless of who or what is its ruler) must fulfill the first requirement of any conceivable civil society: the maintenance of order. The first book is about persons; the second concerns abstractions.

Hobbes, of course, was writing during the period of the English Civil War, a crisis that forced a number of radical thinkers to locate authority in ideas rather than in persons. Thus it was that Oliver Cromwell, a cavalry commander on the Parliamentarian side in the 1640s, defended himself from accusations that his policy of promoting soldiers on merit—including nongentlemen and religious sectarians—was wicked and subversive with the following: “Sir, the state in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing to serve it faithfully, that suffices.” Such abstractions were something new. Until that time, one man had agreed to serve another; now, men agreed to serve an intangible object.

In the three-and-a-half centuries since Cromwell, the abstractions have won hands down in the West. There is now a sharp division between public and private spheres. Accordingly, the modern conception of the state may be called impersonal; it has an existence regardless of who may be leading its government at a given moment.[2]

The United Kingdom and the United States will continue to exist even if (heaven forbid) the Prime Minister and the President were suddenly to perish or be incapacitated. In the meantime, neither leader is under any illusion that the loyalties and obedience that they command derive in any sense from their persons; rather, they are due entirely to the offices that they happen—at least until the next elections—to occupy. Our sense of belonging to the imagined community of the state is now so strong that we would obey monkeys just as well, if they occupied the same positions. Indeed, those who think them monkeys already do so.

Premodern models of authority, on the other hand, were—are—personal in nature at every level, not just at the apex of power. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, for example, functioned on the patronage system: public office was used, quite deliberately and self-consciously, as a means for promoting the personal ends and influence of the one holding office. Getting things done depended on cultivating the friendship and patronage of those in a position to help you, and building a base of loyal and grateful clients who could bolster your own position from below. Conrad Russell, one of the most respected—and certainly one of the wittiest—historians of the period,

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