State

Plato proposes that the nature of justice is more readily examined in the state than in the individual, because the larger figure makes visible what the smaller conceals. The city, on this view, has the same three principles that are found in the soul: the rulers correspond to reason, the guardians to spirit, and the producers to appetite. Justice in the state, as in the soul, is the condition in which each part performs its proper function and does not meddle with the others. The philosopher-kings rule because they alone have knowledge of the Good; the guardians enforce their decisions; the producers supply material needs. The analogy is not a mere illustration. Plato holds that there appear to be as many forms of the soul as there are distinct forms of the state, so that the constitution of the city and the constitution of the person are mutually explanatory.

The Republic draws from this principle certain institutions that have long been noted for their severity: the common ownership of property and families among the guardians, the rule of those who know rather than those who merely hold office, and the regulation of poetry and music. These proposals are not offered as concessions to expediency. If the state is to be just in the full sense, it must be governed by knowledge rather than opinion, and every institution must be ordered to the rational whole. The happiness sought is not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the city as a whole. Whether this places the good of the community above the good of its members, or rather finds the individual's good only in a well-ordered whole, remains a point of dispute in the later tradition.

In the Laws, Plato softens these requirements. The best practicable state relies on written law rather than on philosopher-kings, because human beings as they are cannot be trusted to rule without fixed constraints. The purpose, however, is not abandoned. Political life is still ordered so that it cultivates virtue in the citizens. The question of the state's end, whether it exists for the happiness of individuals or whether individuals exist for the good of the whole, is thus already open in Plato, and is taken up under the ideas of Justice, Citizen, and Government.

Plato opens questions on which much of the later debate proceeds. Aristotle will accept the analogy of whole and part but will deny that the state must be constructed as a magnified soul. Augustine will ask whether any earthly city can achieve the justice that Plato demands. The moderns will reverse the priority and treat the state as an instrument for securing the rights or interests of individuals rather than as the larger image of the soul.

Aristotle opens the Politics with a claim that has shaped the subsequent treatment of the subject: man is by nature a political animal. The state, on this view, is not an artificial construction of the sort later attributed to a social contract, but the natural culmination of human association. The family exists for the supply of everyday wants, the village for something more than daily need, and the state for the good life. The state is prior to the individual in the same sense that the whole is prior to the part: if the body is destroyed, there will be no foot or hand except in an equivocal sense. The individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing, and is therefore like a part in relation to the whole.

Aristotle distinguishes the state from other communities by its self-sufficiency and its aim. A household provides for survival; a trading association provides for exchange; only the state aims at the complete good of its members. It comes into existence for the bare needs of life and continues in existence for the sake of a good life. Justice, he writes, is the bond of men in states. The difference between human and animal societies is treated here as well: man alone among gregarious creatures is endowed with speech by which he can communicate concerning the expedient and the inexpedient, and therefore the just and the unjust. The comparison of human and animal gregariousness, and of the family with the state, is taken up more fully under the ideas of Animal and Family.

The best state, for Aristotle, is one governed by the best citizens for the common good. He catalogues six constitutions: monarchy, aristocracy, and polity as the good forms, and tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy as their corruptions. The difference in each case is whether the rulers govern for the common advantage or for their own. He also remarks that even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems greater and more complete, whether to attain or to preserve. Yet he also holds that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily. The tension between the preeminence of the whole and the happiness of its parts is not resolved by a simple formula.

The questions Aristotle opens, whether the state is natural and what end it serves, recur throughout the tradition. Augustine will press the claim that no earthly city can achieve genuine justice. Aquinas will take over the naturalness of the political community and place it under the order of natural law. Hegel will renew the organic comparison and push it beyond analogy. The modern contractarians will accept the end of civil peace or the preservation of rights while denying that the state is a creation of nature in Aristotle's sense.

Cicero's On the Republic gives the tradition the definition of the commonwealth that will be cited, modified, and argued over for the next fifteen hundred years. A commonwealth, he writes, is the property of the people; and a people is not any collection of men drawn together in any manner, but an association of many joined together by agreement in justice and a shared pursuit of the common advantage. The definition is framed against rival formulations: against those who would make the state merely a device for the mutual security of its members, and against those who would identify it with whatever association happens to hold power. A state on Cicero's conception is not constituted by force, nor by mere numbers, nor even by the fact of a shared territory. What makes a state is the agreement of its members on a conception of justice, and their willingness to pursue a common good under it.

From this definition Cicero draws several consequences that will shape the later treatments of the subject. First, a body which holds power without agreement in justice is not properly a state. The tyrant who has seized the city is not its ruler in the full sense, and what he presides over is not a commonwealth but something that falsely wears the name. Second, the state so understood is compatible with several forms of government: the rule of one, the rule of the few, and the rule of the many are each capable of serving the common good, and none of them is ruled out in principle. Cicero's preference is for a mixed constitution combining features of each, on the Polybian model, and he takes the Roman republic in its best days to have approximated this form. Third, the state is limited by its own definition: its authority extends only to what the common good requires, and does not abolish the private rights of its members to the extent that these are compatible with the public order.

The questions raised belong also to the treatments of Government, Constitution, Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy, and Law. Under the idea of State what is distinctive in Cicero's contribution is the insistence that justice is not an ornament of the state but is constitutive of it: a body that lacks justice is not a state though it were larger, wealthier, or more enduring than any true commonwealth. The claim is controversial, and will be taken up in different senses by both his friends and his opponents in the tradition.

Augustine in the City of God will test the Ciceronian definition against the facts of Roman history and will conclude that, on Cicero's own terms, Rome was never a commonwealth, because it never agreed in a justice that included the rendering to God of what is God's. The argument is not a refutation of Cicero so much as a recasting: Augustine grants that the definition is the right one, and then asks whether any earthly city can satisfy it. Aquinas will take over the definition in a form closer to Cicero's original intention and will treat the commonwealth as a natural association ordered to the common good under reason. The later writers on the foundation of the state, from the medievals through the modern contractarians, are almost all in conversation with this definition at some remove, whether to accept it, to modify it, or to substitute another.

The Aeneid is among the Great Books the only work in which the founding of a state is itself the matter of an epic poem. Aeneas is not a hero whose deeds belong incidentally to the history of his people; his deeds are the people, and what he does from the fall of Troy to the final single combat with Turnus is the putting in place of what Rome will eventually be. Virgil treats this founding as a providential undertaking, laid upon its hero as a task he did not choose. The state so understood is not a voluntary association of its members but something into which those members are received and by which, over many generations, they are shaped.

Two passages give the poem's conception its clearest expression. In the sixth book, Anchises, showing Aeneas the souls of the future Romans, declares the vocation of the imperial state: others will shape bronze more gracefully, and plead a case more eloquently, and measure the movements of the stars, but the Roman is to rule the peoples with his government, impose the ways of peace, spare the subject, and break down the proud. In the eighth book, the shield of Aeneas displays the scenes of Roman history yet to come, from Romulus and Remus through the wars with Carthage to the battle of Actium. The state in the Aeneid is not yet what Aeneas sees about him; it is something he is carrying within himself, which history will over time unfold. His task is to make room for it.

This conception raises questions that the tradition takes up under several heads. Whether a state may have a historical vocation assigned to it by providence, and, if so, what the relation of such a vocation is to the liberties of its subjects, is a question that belongs also to the treatments of Liberty, of Law, and of God. The bearing of the imperial vocation on the justice of conquest is considered under War and Peace. The Virgilian picture of the state as a destiny received rather than a contract made will stand as one of the alternatives against which later treatments are formulated.

Augustine in the City of God will accept the Virgilian picture as a true account of what the earthly city can be and what it cannot, and he will subordinate it to his own account of the city of God. Dante will place Virgil in a position of authority on matters of civic as well as moral order, treating the Aeneid as the great text on the providential function of the Roman state. In the later tradition, from the medievals to the writers on the foundation of modern states, the question of whether a state can be said to be founded rather than constituted, and whether its founding is the work of a hero or of a people, owes part of its shape to the Roman poet's treatment.

Augustine introduces a distinction that divides the classical account of political community. There are two cities: the earthly city, founded on love of self carried to the point of contempt for God, and the city of God, founded on love of God carried to the point of contempt for self. These two cities are intermingled in history. Their members live side by side, and no visible institution corresponds perfectly to either. The cities of God and man, in Augustine's conception, are not to be identified with either the Church or the State as ordinary institutions. The problem of the spiritual and the temporal power, and of the rivalry between the idea of God and the idea of the state for ultimate allegiance, is treated also under the ideas of Religion and God.

The earthly state is necessary because of sin. Without the Fall, human beings would have lived in harmony and would not have needed coercive government. As things stand, the state is a remedial institution. It restrains wickedness and maintains a kind of peace, but it cannot achieve the true justice that Plato and Cicero demanded. True justice requires rendering to each what is due, and this is impossible in a city that does not render to God what is due to God. Applying Cicero's definition of the commonwealth to the facts of Roman history, Augustine concludes that, on Cicero's own terms, Rome was never a true commonwealth, because it never agreed in a justice that included the worship of the true God.

This does not make political life worthless. Augustine acknowledges that the earthly peace maintained by even imperfect regimes is a genuine good, and that Christians may participate in political affairs so far as conscience permits. The state remains a temporary arrangement, useful for the pilgrimage through this life, not to be mistaken for the final destination. The relation of the family to the political community, and of both to the religious community, is discussed from another side under Family and Religion.

After Augustine, theories of the state must account for the tension between temporal authority and a higher allegiance. Aquinas will argue that the political community is natural and would have existed even without the Fall, while retaining Augustine's insistence that the state's justice is incomplete without reference to God. Hobbes will treat the sovereign as a mortal god whose authority admits of no appeal to a higher law. The moderns who ground the state in consent alone must still face the question whether political loyalty is absolute or subordinate.

Aquinas brings together Augustine's theological account of political life with Aristotle's claim that the state is natural and ordered to the good. The political community, on his view, is not merely a consequence of sin. It would have existed even in the state of innocence, because human beings are naturally social and require coordination in order to live well. Government exists to direct the community toward the common good. The Fall does not abolish this purpose; it makes the need for order more urgent. The state is thus natural in Aristotle's sense, while remaining within the order of providence that Augustine insists upon. The relation of the political community to the family and to the religious community is treated also under Family and Religion.

The central concept is law. Aquinas defines law as an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated. Human law derives its authority from natural law, which is the rational creature's participation in the eternal law, that is, in God's providential plan for creation. A human law that contradicts natural law is not a law in the full sense and does not bind in conscience. The theory of law and of justice is developed more fully under those ideas; here what is distinctive is the claim that the state's authority is itself under law and is measured by the common good.

From this framework follow both obedience and limits to obedience. Citizens owe obedience to legitimate authority because political order serves the common good. Unjust laws, those that serve the ruler's private interest rather than the welfare of the community, lose their binding force. Aquinas does not encourage rebellion as a regular remedy, but he provides a principled ground for the claim that the state is under law rather than above it. The distinction between government as an organ of the political community and the community itself, and the question of the ends for which political power is instituted, connect his account with the later treatments of Government, Constitution, and Justice.

Aquinas leaves the tradition with the idea of a natural political community ordered to the common good under natural law. Hobbes will reject that framework and ground the commonwealth in fear and covenant alone. Locke will retain something of the natural-law limit on government while relocating its origin in consent. Both write in relation to the position Aquinas helped to fix.

Hobbes turns the analogical conception of the state in a new direction. The commonwealth is a work of art, not a creation of nature. By art, he says, is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State, which is but an Artificial Man, of greater stature and strength than the natural man for whose protection it was intended, and in which the Sovereignty is an Artificial Soul, giving life and motion to the whole body. The multitude is united in one person as the generation of that mortal god to which, under the immortal God, men owe their peace and defence. The state is artificial because it is the product of a covenant of every man with every man. Yet Hobbes does not deny the natural necessity that drives men to create it. Man quits the state of nature, which is a war of every man against every man, in order to achieve self-preservation and the security of civil peace.

The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of things necessary to commodious living, and hope by industry to obtain them. Reason suggests convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement. The commonwealth is therefore natural to the extent that man's needs require it and man's reason recognizes certain natural laws for constructing it. The final cause of men in introducing that restraint upon themselves in which they live in commonwealths is the foresight of their own preservation and of a more contented life. Without a common power to keep them all in awe, there is no justice and no property in the full sense. The comparison of human and animal societies is used to the opposite effect from Aristotle: the agreement of bees and ants is natural, whereas that of men is by covenant only and requires a common power to make it lasting.

The sovereign thus instituted is absolute. Division of power invites the return of civil war, which for Hobbes is the greatest evil. Subjects cannot appeal against the sovereign to a higher law as if the sovereign's word were not itself the measure of civil right. The state does not perfect human nature in Aristotle's sense, nor does it remedy sin in Augustine's; it contains a permanent threat through superior force. The relation of sovereign states to one another remains a state of nature: kings and persons of sovereign authority are, in relation to one another, in the posture of war. That external relation is treated also under War and Peace.

Hobbes raises a question that later writers cannot ignore: whether the state is natural or artificial, and what limits, if any, the original covenant imposes on the sovereign. Locke and Rousseau accept the contract while restricting the powers it creates. Hegel rejects the contractual foundation altogether and defends an organic conception of the state against the artificial man of the Leviathan.

Locke accepts the premise that political society is formed by consent, but he reaches conclusions different from those of Hobbes. In the state of nature, individuals already possess natural rights to life, liberty, and estate. They form a commonwealth not primarily to escape a war of all against all (for Locke's state of nature is less grim than Hobbes's), but to provide an impartial judge and an effective enforcer for rights they already hold. God designed man for a sociable creature, with an inclination and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind. Yet even the first society, that between man and wife, is made by a voluntary compact. Political society begins when men, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, put themselves under an obligation to submit to the determination of the majority.

That which begins and constitutes any political society is nothing but the consent of free men capable of a majority to unite into such a society. Absolute monarchy, on this view, is inconsistent with civil society and can be no form of civil government at all. The reason men enter into society is the preservation of their property, by which Locke means not only economic goods but life, liberty, and estate. The government so created is limited by the purpose that called it into being. It may not take the citizens' property without consent, nor rule by arbitrary decree. It must govern through established, published laws applied equally. If the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people. The people then have the right to dissolve the government and constitute a new one.

Locke also insists on a separation of legislative and executive power. The legislature makes the laws; the executive enforces them. Concentrating both in the same hands invites tyranny, because the ruler would be both lawmaker and enforcer without external check. Government, for Locke, is primarily the legislative power and is an organ of the whole body politic rather than identical with it. The distinction between the dissolution of government and the dissolution of society, and the relation of civil law to natural right, connect his account with the treatments of Government, Constitution, Law, and Justice. Independent princes and rulers, he holds, remain in a state of nature with respect to one another; the problem of the external relation of states is shared with War and Peace.

On Locke's account the commonwealth is a trust for the protection of natural rights rather than an absolute Leviathan. Rousseau will press the idea of popular sovereignty further while rejecting Locke's emphasis on private property as the chief end. Mill will extend the concern for limited government to the protection of individual liberty against society as well as against the magistrate.

Montesquieu shifts attention from the single question of what the state ought to be to the variety of forms it actually takes in different times and places. The Spirit of the Laws examines political institutions as products of geography, climate, religion, commerce, and national character. There is no single best form of government for all peoples; there are forms appropriate to circumstances. Republics suit small commercial nations; monarchies suit large territorial ones; despotisms arise where conditions weaken the habits of political resistance. The empirical survey does not make Montesquieu a relativist about liberty. He treats liberty as a good that political arrangements may secure or destroy, and he asks how the structure of the state affects that outcome.

Liberty, he argues, requires the separation of governmental powers into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person or body, there can be no liberty. When the judge is also the legislator, the citizen faces arbitrary power without recourse. England's constitution, with its imperfect but real division of powers, earns his admiration as a working example. Liberty is defined as the right of doing whatever the laws permit. The analysis of forms of government and of the separation of powers belongs also to the chapters on Government and Constitution; under the idea of State what is distinctive is Montesquieu's insistence that the political community cannot be understood apart from the physical and social conditions in which it is placed.

Montesquieu also stresses intermediate institutions: nobility, clergy, provincial authorities, and commercial associations. These bodies stand between the sovereign and the individual and prevent power from concentrating in a single point. A state without intermediate powers tends toward despotism, whatever its formal constitution. On the external relation of states, he observes that princes who do not live among themselves under civil law are not free; they are governed by force. For security among small republics he proposes a confederate republic, a convention by which several petty states agree to become members of a larger one, combining the internal advantages of republican government with the external force of monarchy. The question how far political society may be enlarged by federal union is taken up again by Rousseau, the American Federalists, and Kant.

Montesquieu adds to political theory a comparative and sociological dimension. After him, inquiry turns as much to what kind of state a people under given conditions can sustain as to what the best state is in the abstract. Rousseau, Hegel, and Mill each work with that broader field of inquiry while returning, in different ways, to the problem of liberty and the organization of power.

Rousseau accepts that the legitimate state is founded on a contract, but he rejects Hobbes's conclusion that subjects surrender their freedom to an absolute sovereign. The social contract does not alienate liberty; it transforms it. Individuals exchange natural freedom, the power to do whatever force permits, for civil freedom, the right to do whatever the law permits. The law is legitimate only when it expresses the general will, the common interest that citizens share as members of the political community. Rousseau has several names for the moral and collective body formed by association: it is called State when passive, Sovereign when active, and Power when compared with others like itself. Primary emphasis falls upon the personality of the state as a corporate person, a moral person whose life is in the union of its members.

The general will is not the same as the will of all, the mere sum of private interests. It aims at the common good and, Rousseau holds, is always right and always tends to the public advantage. Citizens may be mistaken about what the general will requires, but the general will itself cannot err. Unanimity is required to create the sovereign body politic; majority voting is itself established by convention and presupposes unanimity on at least one occasion. The sovereign is the people acting collectively as a legislative body; government is the supreme administration, the legitimate exercise of the executive power, and is the minister of the sovereign rather than one with it. Rousseau thus distinguishes the body politic from government more sharply than writers who identify the two. The dissolution of government is not the same as the dissolution of the social compact itself, which remains revocable if all the citizens assembled of one accord should break it.

The state so conceived demands much of its citizens. They must participate in legislation, subordinate private interest to the common good, and accept the authority of the general will even when it conflicts with individual desire. Whoever refuses to obey the general will is to be compelled by the whole body, which means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. On the end of the state, Rousseau is wary of making the security of private property the sole purpose of civil association, observing that the advantages of society may fall disproportionately to the rich. Bodies politic remain, in their external relations, in a state of nature among themselves and suffer the inconveniences that obliged individuals to quit it. He contemplates a confederation of the states of Europe for internal peace, while regarding the great city of the world as something less than a full political society under civil law.

Rousseau states the modern idea of popular sovereignty and of the state as a corporate moral person. The paradoxes of being forced to be free and of an infallible general will remain points of dispute in democratic theory. Kant will treat the original contract as a juridical idea rather than a historical fact; Hegel will reject the contractual foundation and absorb the general will into a stronger organic account of the state; Marx will press the question of class and property that Rousseau already raises.

Hegel gives the state a claim that goes beyond those of Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau. The state is not a necessary restraint against violence, nor a convenience for protecting property and personal freedom, nor merely a vehicle of the general will. It is the actuality of the ethical idea, the concrete realization of rational freedom. In the state, the individual's freedom is not limited but completed, because freedom is not doing whatever one pleases but willing what is rational, and what is rational is expressed in the institutions of the political community. Many of the analogies that earlier writers used as metaphors become for Hegel elements of a literal definition. The state is an organism. Life is present in every cell; separated from that life, every cell dies. As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as the divine on earth. The march of God in the world, he declares, is what the state is. The basis of the state is the power of reason actualizing itself as will.

Against the social contract theory, Hegel argues that it is far from the truth to ground the nature of the state on the contractual relation, whether of all with all or of all with the monarch. Contract belongs to the sphere of private property. The intrusion of the contractual relation into the relation between the individual and the state has produced the greatest confusion in constitutional law and public life. It does not lie with an individual's arbitrary will to separate himself from the state, because we are already citizens of the state by birth. The rational end of man is life in the state. Permission to enter or leave must be given by the state; membership is not optional. Historical questions of origin are, for Hegel, no concern of the Idea of the state. The family and civil society are earlier logical moments in the development of that Idea. Civil society is the sphere of individual interest and complete interdependence for selfish ends; only when the state is confused with civil society does membership seem optional and the security of property become the ultimate end of association.

The unity of the state, unlike that of civil society, is an absolute unmoved end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right. This final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state. Yet Hegel also says it is perfectly true that the end of the state is the happiness of the citizens: if all is not well with them, if their subjective aims are not satisfied, the footing of the state itself is insecure. Since the sovereignty of a state is the principle of its relations to others, states are to that extent in a state of nature in relation to each other. The distinction between external and internal sovereignty, and the place of war among states, connect his account with War and Peace as well as with Government and Constitution.

Hegel's identification of the state with rational freedom and with the divine idea on earth draws the critique of Marx, who treats the state as an instrument of class, and the protest of Mill, who insists on limits to political authority for the sake of individuality. The organic and ideal claims he makes remain among the positions against which later liberal and socialist theories of the state are formulated.

Mill writes against expansive claims for the state of the sort associated with Hegel, and for a strict limit on political authority. In On Liberty his central principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. The state may prevent harm to others, but it may not compel citizens to act for their own good or to conform to prevailing opinion. Over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. The question whether the state is made for man or man for the state, which runs through the whole tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel, is answered by Mill firmly on the side of the individual. The state is an instrument for securing the conditions under which persons may develop their capacities; it is not an end that absorbs them.

Mill's concern extends beyond the formal tyranny of government to the informal tyranny of society. Democratic majorities can oppress minorities through social pressure, stigma, and conformity as well as through law. The tyranny of the majority leaves fewer means of escape and reaches further into daily life than many forms of despotism. A free political community therefore requires just laws and, with them, habits of tolerance and individuality. The problem of the citizen's liberty against both the magistrate and the mass is treated also under Liberty and Democracy; under the idea of State what is distinctive is Mill's refusal to identify the good of the political community with the suppression of dissenting individuality.

In Considerations on Representative Government, Mill argues that the best form of state is representative democracy, provided certain conditions are met: an educated electorate, arrangements that protect minorities, and institutions that check the rule of mere numbers. Democracy without safeguards, he holds, tends toward the rule of mediocrity. The purpose of government is to develop the capacities of its citizens, and a chief test of a political order is whether it succeeds in making people better than they would otherwise be. A state which dwarfs its men in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished. The relation of form of government to the character of the people connects his discussion with Constitution and Education as well as with the classical concern for the virtue of citizens.

Mill states a liberal limit on the claims of the state against both ancient and Hegelian theories that give the political community preeminence over the individual. The harm principle remains a standard point of reference in debates about the proper bounds of political authority, and about the relation of the state to the private sphere of opinion, taste, and self-regarding conduct.