State

Plato constructs the state as an analogy. The city has the same three parts as the soul: rulers correspond to reason, guardians to spirit, and producers to appetite. Justice in the state, like justice 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 Republic is famous for its radical proposals: communal property and families among the guardians, the rule of philosophers, the censorship of art. These are not concessions to practicality but consequences of principle. If the state is to be truly just, it must be governed by knowledge, not opinion, and every institution must serve the rational order. The ideal city is a thought experiment about what would follow if political life were fully rational.

In the Laws, Plato softens these proposals. The best practicable state relies on law rather than philosopher-kings, because actual human beings cannot be trusted to rule without written constraints. But the purpose remains the same: to order political life so that it cultivates virtue in the citizens.

Plato establishes the central question: does the state exist for the sake of individual happiness, or do individuals exist for the sake of the state? Aristotle will accept the second option; the moderns will insist on the first.

Aristotle opens the Politics with a claim that shapes the entire tradition: "Man is by nature a political animal." The state is not an artificial construction (as the social contract theorists will later argue) but the natural culmination of human sociability. The family exists for daily needs, the village for broader needs, 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: a hand severed from the body is not really a hand.

Aristotle distinguishes the state from other communities by its self-sufficiency and its aim. A household provides for survival; a trading post provides for exchange; but only the state aims at the comprehensive good of its members. It exists "not merely for the sake of living but for the sake of living well." This means the state has a moral purpose: to make virtue possible and to create the conditions under which citizens can flourish.

The best state, for Aristotle, is one governed by the best citizens for the common good. He catalogues six constitutions: monarchy, aristocracy, and polity (good forms) versus tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy (corrupt forms). The difference in each case is whether the rulers govern for the common good or for their own advantage.

The fault line Aristotle opens is between the state's naturalness and its moral purpose. If the state is natural, it commands loyalty on the same ground as the family — it is what we are. But if the state exists for the good life, then a state that fails to produce the good life loses its claim on citizens. Augustine will press that fault line by arguing that no earthly state can achieve genuine justice, and that the political animal's deepest nature is satisfied only in a city not built by human hands.

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 fractures the classical unity of political thought. There are two cities: the earthly city (civitas terrena), founded on love of self carried to the point of contempt for God, and the city of God (civitas Dei), 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 earthly state is necessary because of sin. Without the Fall, human beings would have lived in harmony and needed no 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 state that does not render to God what is due to God.

This does not make politics worthless. Augustine acknowledges that the earthly peace maintained by even unjust states is a genuine good, and Christians should participate in political life as far as conscience permits. But no earthly regime deserves ultimate loyalty. The state is a temporary arrangement, useful for the pilgrimage, not to be mistaken for the destination.

Augustine relativizes political loyalty. After him, every Western theory of the state must account for the tension between temporal authority and a higher allegiance.

Aquinas reconciles Augustine's theological skepticism about politics with Aristotle's confidence that the state is natural and good. The state is not merely a consequence of sin; it would have existed even in the state of innocence, because human beings are naturally social and need coordination to live well. Government exists to direct the community toward the common good, and this purpose is not corrupted by the Fall but made more urgent by it.

The key 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 eternal law (God's providential plan for all creation). A human law that contradicts natural law is "no law at all" and need not be obeyed.

This creates a framework for both obedience and resistance. Citizens owe obedience to legitimate authority because political order serves the common good. But unjust laws, those that serve the ruler's private interest rather than the community's welfare, lose their binding force. Aquinas does not encourage revolution, but he provides a principled basis for the claim that the state is under law, not above it.

Aquinas gives the tradition the idea of the state under natural law. Hobbes will reject the framework entirely; Locke will secularize it; both work in Aquinas's shadow.

Hobbes breaks with the entire tradition by denying that the state is natural. In the state of nature, there is no political authority, no law, and no justice. There is only the war of every man against every man, in which life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The state is created when individuals, driven by fear of violent death, agree to surrender their natural liberty to a sovereign who will keep the peace.

The sovereign thus created is absolute. Hobbes calls the commonwealth a "Mortal God," an artificial person whose will represents the will of all. Subjects cannot appeal against the sovereign to natural law, divine law, or any other authority, because the sovereign's word is the only law. Division of power invites civil war, which is the greatest evil. Better an unjust sovereign than a contested one.

This argument rests on a picture of human nature as fundamentally competitive and fearful. Without a common power to overawe them, human beings will fight over resources, reputation, and security. The state does not perfect human nature (as Aristotle claimed) or remedy sin (as Augustine claimed); it contains a permanent threat through superior force.

Hobbes forces the tradition to choose: is the state natural or artificial? Every later thinker responds to his challenge, either accepting the social contract and limiting the sovereign (Locke, Rousseau) or defending the organic state against his mechanism (Hegel).

Locke accepts Hobbes's premise that the state is created by agreement but reaches radically different conclusions. In the state of nature, individuals already possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property. They form a commonwealth not to escape universal war (Locke's state of nature is not as grim as Hobbes's) but to provide an impartial judge and an effective enforcer for rights they already hold.

The government so created is limited by the purpose that called it into being. It may not take the citizens' property without consent. It may not rule by arbitrary decree. It must govern through established, published laws applied equally. If it violates these conditions, the trust is broken, and the people have the right to dissolve the government and constitute a new one. Locke calls this the right of revolution, and it becomes the theoretical foundation of the American and French revolutions.

Locke also insists on the 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, subject to no external check.

Locke transforms the state from Hobbes's Leviathan into a trustee of the people's rights. Rousseau will radicalize the idea of popular sovereignty; Mill will extend it to individual liberty.

Montesquieu shifts the question from what the state should be to what it actually is 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; there are forms appropriate to circumstances. Republics suit small commercial nations; monarchies suit large territorial ones; despotisms arise in hot climates where lethargy weakens political resistance.

This empirical approach does not make Montesquieu a relativist. He defends liberty as a universal good and argues that its preservation requires the separation of governmental powers into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. When the same body makes the laws and enforces them, liberty is lost. When the judge is also the legislator, the citizen faces arbitrary power with no recourse. England's constitution, with its imperfect but real division of powers, earns Montesquieu's admiration.

Montesquieu also insists on the importance of intermediate institutions: nobility, clergy, provincial authorities, and commercial guilds. These bodies stand between the sovereign and the individual and prevent power from concentrating in a single point. A state without intermediate powers becomes despotic by default, regardless of its formal constitution.

Montesquieu gives political theory a sociological dimension. After him, the question is not merely "What is the best state?" but "What kind of state does this people, in these conditions, require?"

Rousseau accepts that the state is founded on a contract but 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 their natural freedom (the power to do whatever they can) for civil freedom (the right to do whatever the law permits). The law is legitimate only when it expresses the general will (volonte generale), the common interest that all citizens share as members of the political community.

The general will is not the same as the will of all (the sum of private interests). It aims at the common good and, Rousseau insists, "is always right and always tends to the public advantage." Citizens can be mistaken about what the general will requires, but the general will itself cannot err. The sovereign is the people acting collectively as a legislative body; the government is merely an executive agent carrying out the sovereign's decisions.

Rousseau's state demands a great deal of its citizens. They must participate actively in legislation, subordinate private interest to the common good, and accept the authority of the general will even when it goes against their individual desires. "Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free."

Rousseau creates the modern concept of popular sovereignty. His paradoxes (forced to be free, the infallible general will) will haunt democratic theory ever after. Kant will moralize the general will; Hegel will historicize it; Marx will radicalize it.

Hegel makes the most ambitious claim for the state in the modern tradition. The state is not a necessary evil (Hobbes), a convenience for protecting rights (Locke), or even a vehicle for the general will (Rousseau). 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.

Hegel's argument unfolds dialectically. The family represents the first ethical unity (love and immediate belonging). Civil society represents the sphere of individual interest and economic competition (the market, courts, police). The state synthesizes both: it preserves individual freedom while directing it toward the universal good. Unlike Hobbes's Leviathan, Hegel's state does not coerce from outside; it educates and forms its citizens so that they will the common good as their own.

This means the state is prior to the individual in a stronger sense than Aristotle intended. For Hegel, the state is not just a condition of the good life; it is the medium through which Spirit (Geist) comes to know itself. The history of the world is the history of states, and each great state represents a stage in the self-realization of freedom.

Hegel's identification of the state with rational freedom provokes Marx's materialist critique and Mill's liberal protest, but the ambition of his claim has never been matched.

Mill writes against Hegel's expansive state and for a strict limit on political authority. In On Liberty, his central principle is clear: "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 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.

Mill's concern is not only the formal tyranny of government but the informal tyranny of society. Democratic majorities can oppress minorities not through law but through social pressure, stigma, and conformity. "The tyranny of the majority" is as dangerous as any despotism, because it leaves fewer means of escape and penetrates more deeply into daily life. A free society requires not only just laws but a culture of tolerance and individuality.

In Considerations on Representative Government, Mill argues that the best form of state is representative democracy, but only if certain conditions are met: an educated electorate, proportional representation to protect minorities, and plural voting for the more competent. Democracy without safeguards degenerates into the rule of mediocrity. The state's purpose is to develop the capacities of its citizens, and the best test of a government is whether it succeeds in making people better than they would otherwise be.

Mill defines the liberal position against both ancient and Hegelian claims for the state. His harm principle remains the touchstone of every debate about the limits of political authority.