|
Excerpts from The Development of the Modern State Gianfranco Poggi Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978 with some definitions and other annotations for undergraduate students The "Modernity" of the State For all its structural complexity and the vastness and continuity of its operations, the modern state—like any other institutional complex—resolves ultimately into social processes patterned by certain rules. One may thus gain some conceptual purchase on the nature of the modern state—as against that of other large-scale systems of rule—by inquiring into what is distinctive about its patterns. The institutional profile of the modern state obtained in this way emphasizes, by and large, its "modernity," since its patterns appear to be the products of an advanced and sophisticated process of social differentiation. To begin with, the modern state appears as an artificial, engineered institutional complex rather than as one that has developed spontaneously by accretion. It is a deliberately erected framework. As the previous chapters have suggested, the development of particular states—however protracted, and however different in tempos, sequences, and concrete stages from place to place—on the whole bears out well our contemporary image of state-building, with its connotations of purposive effort and conscious arrangement to a design. Conceptually speaking, the state of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular, often owes its existence to an act of (collective) will and deliberation, sometimes embodied in explicit constitutional enactments. But even over the previous centuries, the formation of various Western states appears imputable to something German scholars—even the less fanciful-minded, like Hermann Heller—are fond of calling Wille zum Staat, the will to put a state into being.15 In other words, the modern state is not bestowed upon a people as a gift by God, its own Geist, or blind historical forces; it is a "made" reality. [end of page 95] Once "made," moreover, a state constantly operates with reference to some idea of an end or function to which it is instrumental. It is not a contrivance only in the sense that purposive action lies behind it, as it were, in the process of its emergence; ahead of it, too, lies a distinctive though complex task that constitutes the justification for its existence and the reason for its operations. Now this imputation of a teleological basis to the state is controversial, if only because if used to define the state, it would follow that a state ceases to be one to the extent that it does not in fact direct its activity to its particular goal. Thus it is often suggested that the definition of a "modern state" should refer not to any finite set of ends the state might possess but only to its structural features (among which the most distinctive has often been seen to be the monopoly of legitimate violence).16 Alternatively, it is sometimes suggested that the state in fact does by its very nature possess a telos, [an end or final goal] but that this is wholly internal to the state itself, consisting exclusively of the continuous expansion of its own power However, we are seeking here not to define the state, but simply to characterize the institutional patterns governing its operations; in this respect, it seems plausible to agree with Heller that the "function" of the state is "the autonomous organization and activation of the social process over the state's territory, grounded in the historical need that some modus vivendi [‘a mode of living’; a working arrangement between contending parties, pending the settlement of matters in debate (Oxford English Dictionary Online)] be achieved among the contrasting interests operating in a given section of the globe."17 Note that this statement leaves open the question of which among the "contrasting interests" are, or may be, systematically favored by the "modus vivendi" the state upholds. A further characteristic of the state, closely connected with its "engineered" and teleological nature, is its "functional specificity": that is, the state does not claim or attempt to encompass and con-trol the totality of social existence. The latter is contemplated (and served, according to the functional argument above) from a specific viewpoint, with reference to some discrete, abstract, differentiated aspects of it. The state presupposes and complements a manifold social reality (encompassing, for instance, the social standing, [end of page 96] religious affiliations, and economic resources of individuals) that under previous arrangements directly and immediately affected and was affected by the activities of rule; now, however, a set of filters of significance, of standards of mediation, of codings and decodings blocks off such direct mutual effects.18 No longer, as with the Greek politeia, [ancient Athens, for example] is the state directly identified with the society at large. The citizens' commitment to the welfare and security of the state is no longer activated by personal loyalty to a chief. Posts carrying specific political responsibilities and faculties are no longer assigned directly on grounds of wealth, rank, or religious standing. The state's increasingly vast and expensive operations are financed from a distinctively public store of wealth, one that is replenished by levying taxes impersonally on the citizens' incomes and expenditure—not by extorting donations from them, selling them offices or shares in the proceeds of the state's military or colonial ventures, or drawing on their private wealth.19 The state, as we shall see below, lays down frameworks for the pursuit by its citizens of the most diverse private interests.20 Its demands on individuals may be heavy (often extending to military service in murderous wars); but again it addresses individuals in their differentiated, abstract capacity as citizens. As this last point suggests, there is a distinctively universalistic tone to the typical relation of the state to its citizenry. Citizenship '" itself is acquired chiefly by virtue of an individual's birth within the state's territory; it is in principle an equal, nonparticularistic capacity. The laws, which as we shall see are the language in which the state chiefly addresses citizens, are typically general commands taking no account of individual conditions other than those they themselves abstractly constitute as relevant.
Finally, the state is internally structured as a formal, complex
organization. It is composed of organs—that is, of interdependent,
never wholly autonomous loci for deciding, controlling, and
executing policy—whose spheres of competence, whose resources,
and whose modalities of operation are determined from outside by
other, superordinate organs (until one is attained that carries ultimate
[end of page 97] authority). Each organ is in turn
constituted as a set of differentiated and complementary offices, mostly
hierarchically arranged. The occupancy of these offices is regulated by
universal-istic criteria that in turn assign the occupant nonappropriated,
impersonal, "public" powers and responsibilities. The competition for
and exercise of political power within a society constituted as a modern state
typically involve the seeking and manning of "offices" and the
exercise of influence on their operation. (Note that "influence" can
hardly, by its very nature, be distributed and brought to bear according to
universalistic terms.) Offices normally operate by referring to publicly
sanctioned decision criteria and standards of execution, not by relying on ad
hoc justifications.
In sum, the state is designed, and is intended to operate, as a machine whose
parts all mesh, a machine propelled by energy and directed by information
flowing from a single center in the service of a plurality of coordinated tasks.
This machine imagery is more plausible when applied to the state's
administrative apparatus than when applied to other parts of the system of rule.
Yet the time-worn image of "checks and balances" applied to the
division of powers among all higher constitutional organs is quite as
mechanical. The state is not just a contrivance: it is a complex and
sophisticated contrivance, made up of multiple, minute parts, each of which, in
operation, delivers resources to or places constraints upon the operation of
another. So far, we might summarize the argument in this section by suggesting that,
if set against Tönnies's Gemeinschaft [community]/Gesellschaft [society] dichotomy,
the modern state appears to lie very much at the Gesellschaft end of it.21*
Yet this obvious (if not very useful) characterization raises some objections,
the import of which might be summarized by arguing that there is something gemeinschaftlich
[communal] about the state! To begin with, how plausible is the notion of the state's being
"made" or being "built"? Who would be doing the
"making" or "building"? One might answer, "a national
society"—that is, a geographically, linguistically, ethnically, and
culturally distinctive [end of page 98] Furthermore, the concrete historical processes leading to the emergence of a state have typically been protracted, tentative, and circuitous, and have presented a wide discrepancy between undertakings and outcomes. Similar aspects or phases of these processes have received, in different circumstances, widely different justifications and interpretations by the participants—an appeal here to dynastic interests, there to national integrity, there again to the need to create larger markets. All this makes doubtful the "state-building" imagery, the notion that the historical events involved actualized a conscious purpose, an explicit design. More significantly, both the processes whereby the state emerges and the state-in-being often evoke in the individual participants emotional resonances, depths of commitment and involvement, that are more gemeinschaftlich than gesellschaftlich. They seem to involve, from time to time, a rejection of instrumental, utilitarian, "engineerlike" reasoning; a search for self-transcendence; a surrender to an elevating, spiritual, supraindividual identity. Even Hermann Heller—for a German, an unusually matter-of-fact scholar —argues that "by his will or otherwise the individual finds himself implicated in the state with vitally significant levels of his whole being. . . . The state organization reaches deep into the personal existence of man, forms his being."22 And Max Weber, whose "Politics as a Vocation" well conveys (often to the dismay of his liberal-minded readers) the fascinosum et tremendum, the titanic and demoniac aspects of political experience, goes so far as to attribute to the larger political entities, including of course the modern state, an ability they share only with religion—to impart meaning to death. The warrior's death on the battlefield, Weber suggests, is a consecrated one, a consummation vibrant with elevating [end of page 99] feeling.23 Has not the nineteenth-century state appealed all too often and all too successfully to such motifs in order to send young men willingly to die (and to kill)? The view, too, that the state is gesellschaftlich because it is "functionally specific," the product of a process of differentiation that in the end focuses all state activities on only one aspect or dimension of social life, cannot easily be squared with some implications of the notion of sovereignty insidiously developed by Carl Schmitt. If the state is seen as attending to the paramount, ultimate social interest (preserving the collectivity's very existence and integrity), and if in the pursuit of this interest the state can even send its citizens to untimely and painful death, surely there is something conditional, not to say fictional, about its "functional specificity"? Is not the total destiny of the collectivity constituted as state, and thus the totality of its members' interests, directly affected by the state's demands and fortunes? Furthermore, the modern state's relation to its citizenry may well appear universalistic, but what of the irreducible particularism deriving from the fact that the world is totally made up of sovereign states, each sharply discriminating between its own citizens and all...other human beings, and each binding the former into a fiercely exclusive and demanding bond to itself alone? Finally, the conception of the state as a machine is but a variant of the traditional Anglo-Saxon view of it as merely "a convenience," that is, as a gesellschaftlich [societal] reality. But what of the Continental [European, (as opposed to Anglo-American)] conception of the state as "an entity," as The State? There is little gesellschaftlich [societal] about that. I see no reason to draw from these objections the conclusion that the state is a Gemeinschaft [community] after all. Perhaps all they do is emphasize the inherent limitations of Tönnies's dichotomy, particularly when applied to the larger social forms. An alternative conclusion can perhaps be drawn from something Weber wrote in 1916: "When one says that the state is the highest and ultimate thing in the world, that is entirely correct once it is properly understood. For the state is the highest power organization on earth, it has [end of page 100] power over life and death.... A mistake comes in, however, when one speaks of the state alone and not of the nation."24 This passage suggests that the state is indeed gesellschaftlich [societal], and that those aspects appearing to refute this characterization are best taken as referring not to the state as such but to a wider reality (whether or not one wants to follow Weber in designating that reality "the nation"). In this argument, the state is a purposefully constructed, functionally specific machine, but one appealing to and mobilizing deeper and more demanding feelings and emotions to the extent that it serves a more inclusive and less artificial reality. Legal-Rational Legitimacy As a system of rule, the state confronts the problem of legitimacy. That is, it wants citizens to comply with its authority not from the inertia of unreasoning routine or the utilitarian calculation, of personal advantage, but from the conviction that compliance is right. To this end, each system of rule must put forward understandings that, once shared by the citizens, will impart to its commands a quality of moral obligation. As Max Weber has it, there are three basic types of such understandings, characterizing traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational legitimacy, respectively. Only the last of these is appropriate to the modern state. In this type, a claim to morally motivated obedience is attached to individual commands by virtue of the fact—ascertainable through juristic reasoning—that they are issued in conformity with valid general norms. In turn, the validity of the norms is based on their having been produced according to procedural rules vested in the state's constitution.28 Thus, the moral ideal that ultimately legitimizes the modern state is the taming of power through the depersonalization of its exercise. Where power is generated and regulated through general laws, the chance of its arbitrary exercise is minimized; correspondingly minimized is the element of personal submission in the relations of individuals at large to those exercising faculties of rule, since the latter only exercise rule as occupants of specified and [end of page 101] legally controlled positions. At bottom, in their political relations individuals obey not one another but the law. In the modern state the relation between the state and the law is particularly close. The law is no longer conceived as an assemblage of immemorially evolved, customary jural [law-related or law-like] rules, or of corporatively held, traditional prerogatives and immunities; nor is it conceived as the expression of principles of justice resting on the will of God or the dictates of "Nature" to which the state is simply expected to lend the sanction of its powers of enforcement. Modern law is instead a body of enacted laws; it is positive law, willed, made, and given validity by the state itself in the exercise of its sovereignty, mostly through public, documented, generally recent decisions.26 In fact, according to some nineteenth-century (and early twentieth-century) constructions, there is a relation of near-identity between the state and its law. Law-free areas are allowed in a few of the state's activities, particularly with reference to strictly political interests (external security, the keeping of public order), or to narrowly matter-of-fact, nonnormative considerations of necessity or convenience in administration; but these areas themselves must be enumerated and circumscribed by law. In any case, within the system of rule the law is the state's standard mode of expression, its very language, the essential medium of its activity. One can visualize the whole state as a legally arranged set of organs for the framing, application, and enforcement of laws, Continental [European] legal theory and practice see this latter aspect of the state's relation to law as embodied in the first half of the conventional partition of state law into public and private law (though all law is state law). As I suggested in the last section, the state is constituted and operates as a formal organization; within it individuals and their decisions represent and actualize the competences and faculties of organs and offices. But for this to be the case, general rules must establish and regulate such competences and faculties, and the operations expressing them. The state's constant preoccupation with the coordination and direction of its own actions [end of page 102] requires again the formulation and enforcement of general rules defining standards for such actions, stating the considerations relevant to them, and so forth. A vast body of public law comes into being as a result of this indispensable process of making rules, laying down directives, establishing criteria, dictating orientations of action: "Law is technically (not always politically) the most accomplished form of domination, since typically and in the long run it makes possible the most precise and effective orientation and ordering of political activity, and the most secure calculation and imputation of the conduct that constitutes and actualizes the state's power."** The other half of the partition, private law, does not give directives for the operation of state organs but rather sets frameworks for the autonomous activity of individuals pursuing their own private interests. Insofar as individuals see it as in their interest to enter into relations with one another, the state provides through legislation the means whereby, if necessary, those individuals can secure the interest in question by calling upon the state's judicial and law-enforcement apparatus. By making such provisions the state determines (generally, and on the face of it impartially) which classes of interests are worthy of its support. It sets out the conditions under which those interests may be pursued—for instance, the degree of mental maturity and awareness required for the individual to commit his resources, the standards of good faith to be observed in transactions, and the formalities required to make transactions binding—and establishes the consequences that will derive from transactions involved in that pursuit. Moreover, the state establishes the duties and prerogatives following from the possession of property and other rights, or following from such statuses as spouse, heir, or guardian. Insofar as they fulfill the conditions laid down in general terms by such laws, individuals are said to possess rights, duties, and obligations; they can produce, or must submit to, determinate modifications in their mutual relations. The rules indicated above, and others that complement them, obviously all express the state's [end of page 103] authority vis-a-vis its citizens; but they are designed to support and control the individual's search for his own advantage by making precise and predictable his relations to other individuals and thus rendering the interplay of "antagonistic cooperators" transparent, calculable, and noncoercive. Constitutional Guarantees The prevalently liberal, antiauthoritarian inspiration of the nineteenth-century constitutional state is revealed in two overlapping arrangements that are typical of its public law. In the first place, since all positive law is changeable, there is a danger that new legislation may destroy vested rights or disturb the holders of such rights in their peaceable and unrestricted enjoyment of them. To guard against this, some substantive legal principles are enshrined in a special, higher legal standing as "constitutional" enactments; laws violating or limiting such principles are denied validity, or are recognized as valid only if particularly demanding procedural requirements are met in framing them. In the second place, citizens are vested with rights in the public sphere just as they are in the private one (again, mostly through constitutional enactments). State organs, including in some cases legislative organs, are directly prohibited from encroaching on those rights. Furthermore, as we shall see in a moment, some of those rights allow individual citizens fulfilling eligibility requirements to monitor and take part in the formation of public decisions, particularly the enactment of laws (through elections and representative legislatures) and judicial proceedings (through the institution of the jury). In this way the individual citizen is "plugged into" the operations of the state, in however mediated a fashion; this is intended to afford him a guarantee both of his rights against abuse and of his legitimate interests against disregard by public organs. Habermas classifies as follows the rights that nineteenth-century constitutions and similar enactments most frequently attribute to the individual: rights pertaining to the sphere of what he calls [end of page 104] "the reasoning public" (freedoms of speech, opinion, assembly, association) and pertaining to the political prerogatives of private individuals (electoral rights, rights of petition, etc.); rights making up the status of the individual as a free person (inviolability of his residence, his correspondence, etc.; prohibition of transactions disposing of personal freedom); and rights referring to the transactions of private property owners in the sphere of the civil society (equality before the Jaw, freedom from control, protection of private property, protection of rights to inheritance, etc.).28 Now these rights had more positive implications than the somewhat negative one of bounding the state's power to make laws.29* This latter significance flowed from the intent of committing the state legally to its own laws, something very different from, and not easily brought into accord with, the point previously made that the law was the state's very language, the chief medium of its functioning. For that notion entailed that the state could "speak" or produce any law at all; and it was exactly that intrinsic changeability of the law that was dangerous, from the liberal viewpoint. But placing legally valid boundaries around positive law was logically impossible. The constitution might "bind" normal legislation, and the latter establish safeguards of the citizens' rights (public and private) "binding" in turn upon the executive and the judiciary; but the constitution itself was a piece, however exalted, of positive legislation, and as such it was inherently modifiable whatever the restrictions. To deal with this quandary, political and legal theorists used various devices—for instance, ideas drawn from the notion of natural law (such as the existence of rights of man prior to and above those of the citizen), or interpretations of constitution-framing reminiscent of the theory of social contract. But these attempted solutions contrasted with the prevalently secular and progress-minded temper of the times, which in "legal positivism" had celebrated a victory over natural-law and social-contract theories. Besides, these latter theories had egalitarian im-plications that made them an awkward weapon for the bourgeoisie to use. [end of page 105] Ultimately, even such a vigorous and lucid thinker as Georg Jellinek (a close associate of Max Weber at Heidelberg at the end of the nineteenth century, and an outstanding public-law theorist) was reduced to pleading his own firm—but not satisfactorily argued—conviction that the state was indeed bound by and to its own law and had to respect certain rights of the citizen.30 In the following passage, I have emphasized places where the weakness of his reasoning seems to me particularly apparent. Criminal law does not simply give directions to the judge; tax law does not simply give instructions to the tax inspector. They entail an assurance given the subjects that such laws will be followed. All norms establish an expectation that, unless a legally valid reason for their suspension obtains, they will be complied with [by public officials].... Without such assurance, the individual would not be able to calculate his own action and its consequences. ... As it creates law, the state obliges itself vis-a-vis the subjects to apply and enforce such law. The personalities (whether individuals or groups) that operate within the state possess rights of their own, not at the discretion of or as a concession from the sovereign state, nor as the state's delegates. They possess their rights because they are considered as carriers of rights, as persons—a quality that it is wholly outside the real power of the state to take away from them.31 As this last sentence shows, the ultimate guarantee of the state's respect for the individual's rights, since it cannot be either juridical (if circular reasoning is to be avoided) or metaphysical (since natural-law and similar constructions have been discarded), must be sociological; hence the reference to "the real power" of the state. There is nothing wrong with that, except that Jellinek's is very poor sociology: it is in fact wholly within "the real power" of the state to treat individuals otherwise than as the carriers of rights. This was clear from pre-nineteenth-century systems of rule, about which Jellinek knew a great deal. Nonetheless, he disregarded that evidence, presumably because he did not think of those systems as "proper" states. He seems to have felt (though he could not satisfactorily argue) that somehow by its very nature the state as it had [end of page 106] come to full realization in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was unable to do certain things. Let us now return briefly to the problem of legitimacy, with which we started this section. Referring to Weber's typology of legitimacy, Carl Schmitt argues that the modern state's (and Weber's) emphasis on legality—that is, on the observance of stated procedural rules for the formation and execution of the state's decisions—does not so much embody a distinctive type of legitimacy (as Weber himself thought) as dispense with legitimacy proper, supplant it.32 The very idea of legitimacy, according to Schmitt, refers to some idea of moral goodness, to some intrinsically valid and commanding substantive ideal that somehow communicates validity to individual commands seen as reflecting it; whereas the procedural rules that supposedly validate commands under "legal-rational legitimacy" are purely formal and do not possess and cannot communicate any intrinsic Tightness, and thus any authentic legitimacy, to commands ultimately grounded in them. (It might be argued that Weber himself conceded this when he distinguished between formal and material legal rationality, only the former being seen as characteristic of modern legal systems.) One must concede some force to Carl Schmitt's argument. Yet it seems to me that within Western culture, at any rate, the principle of the depersonalization of power—which I have suggested is entailed in the Weberian norton of legal-rational legitimacy—does possess a distinctive moral significance, and thus a true, if perhaps weak, legitimizing force. So does the notion, embodied in the characteristic liberal preference for having collective decisions emerge from the public confrontation of opinion in open-ended debate, that as far as possible law should be the product of ratio (reason) rather than of voluntas (will). This involves a distinctive moral design whereby, in the words of Hegel, the validity of law is made to resting longer upon force, nor primarily upon habits and mores, but upon insights and arguments."33 [end of page 107] Significant Features of the Political Process In the early phases of the development of the modern state, as we have seen, the prime theme of the internal political process was the tug-of-war among autonomous power centers (individual or corporate, secular or ecclesiastical) over the extent and security of their respective jurisdictional prerogatives and immunities. Following up the achievements of absolutism, the nineteenth-century state appears to have settled this political issue by institutionalizing the principle we have previously called "unity" or "internal sovereignty." Now the main internal political issue becomes the content and direction of the powers of rule monopolized by the state, especially as they bear on the distribution of the national product and on the control over the means of its production. In the next section I shall divide that issue into a number of component ones; here, though, I want to point up some broad features of the internal political process in the nineteenth-century state. "Civility." Rulership always entails control over means of coercion. In comparison with other systems of rule, the nineteenth-century state builds up this aspect of rule by strengthening its monopoly of legitimate coercion, and by making coercion technically more sophisticated and more formidable. However, it also differentiates and separates coercion from other aspects of the internal political process, which results in that process becoming more "civil." Within the increasingly vast and ramified apparatus of the state, only two sectors of the executive branch—the military and the police—remain directly concerned with coercion. But the key decisions about their organization and financing, and about the deployment of their might, are vested in other organs (legislative, executive). Thus legitimate coercion becomes a less diffuse, pervasive, and visible, and a more controlled and specialized aspect of rule. (For that matter, a similar reduction in the visible sway of coercion can be observed in social life at large. In particular, the [end of page 108] dominant capitalist mode of production does not involve the direct use of coercion. Another manifestation of "civility" is the widespread adoption, over the entire Europe-centered system of states, of more humane forms of criminal prosecution and punishment. Furthermore, under normal conditions, violent forms of political expression become less frequent. Following the lead of England, many states institutionalize opposition to the current political leadership or to current policies, and make the occupancy of many political posts the object of regulated, peaceable competition. The "public rights" discussed above make possible organized dissent, and the constitutional removal of certain issues from the political arena—particularly religious issues, which in the past had been highly inflammatory— reduces the scope and intensity of that dissent. The legislative organs, which normally operate as the visible seat of the state's sovereignty, function essentially as "talking shops" under elaborate, formal rules for ordering debate; they are increasingly peopled by members of the professional and business classes, men mostly of relatively peaceable dispositions. Both here and even more within administrative organs, men trained in the law are increasingly in the majority among those transacting the day-to-day business of the state. Thus that business is generally dealt with in a sober, discursive manner; the state is run increasingly on the basis of matter-of-fact judgment and sophisticated, trained reasoning, and less and less on the basis of brawn, ceremonial pomp, and warlike display. As against this internal civility, let us remember that such wars as are fought between states become more and more massive and murderous; moreover, their occurrence awakens and expresses, in ever wider circles among the population, passions of unusual and frightening ferocity. Also, in those colonial dependencies that constitute an integral part of the productive system of many Western states, systematic and brutal coercion plays an open and direct role, not just in keeping native populations under subjection but [end of page 109] in exploiting them economically. Finally, internally the state sometimes deploys openly and harshly its potential for coercion—in particular when political dissent or the resistance to exploitation of subaltern strata seem to threaten the internal allocation of political and economic power. In such circumstances even the distinction between the military and the police is often violated; the army is brought in to break strikes, put down riots, and sometimes take over the policing of whole regions.34 Plurality of foci. Though unitarily constituted, the nineteenth-century state is also articulated into many organs and offices, with varied competences and concerns. Thus the political process becomes correspondingly differentiated; it becomes focused around a number of organs, layers of regulation, issues, organized bodies of opinion, and sets of collective interests. The many nodes and junc-tions of the system's structure offer many points of entry into the process. In the hope of exercising leverage on the formation of policy, progressively wider sections of the population become involved in the political process; and their increasing participation in turn generates many, often overlapping alignments. For instance, the array of interests, views, and people competing for power and influence at the national level generally differs from that at the regional or municipal level. The alignments of opinion on foreign-policy issues often cut across those focused on fiscal, welfare, or educational policies. Open-endedness. We have seen that in earlier stages of the state's development individuals and bodies typically voiced traditional claims to take part in the political process, and articulated demands largely by appealing to time-hallowed privileges. Thus their struggles, persistent and bitter as they were, went on under the assumption that there had existed in the past and could be restored in the present a condition of balance among their various privileges and claims. No such assumption applies to the nineteenth-century state. Here political business is transacted (continuously and publicly) [end of page 110] by reference not to traditional, differentiated, autonomously held prerogatives of the parties, but to the open-ended potential of the unitary power of the state, a thoroughly secular entity capable in principle of indefinite elaboration, definition, and expansion. As we have also seen, positive law, the state's very language, is intrinsically changeable and can orient and empower an indefinite variety of acts of rule. The political process has accordingly become oriented to abstract, ever-receding targets—be they the promotion of the state's power in the comity of nations, the people's welfare, or the indi-vidual's pursuit of happiness. In the name of these targets (as they are defined and mutually adjusted through the political contest), changes may legitimately be made at any time in the balance of individual and collective interests. Even leaving aside the dynamic character of the society it complements, such a political system must of necessity always be generating new themes for public concern and for authoritative action. Accordingly, it tends to require for its functioning ever new resources, ever new faculties and facilities of rule to be applied to its open-ended aims. Controversy. What I have just called open-endedness is not a peculiarity of the nineteenth-century state; as Tocqueville's Ancien Regime ['former' or 'previous' regime] shows, it was already well in evidence in late-absolutist France, with its urge to push back continually the boundaries of state action, to regulate ever-newer aspects and areas of social business. However, the "ancien regime" was semidespotic. It possessed no constituted arena for public discussion and control of the state's action, which received all its impulses from above. The nineteenth-century state, on the other hand, is constructed in a way that does not just allow but requires public debate, the confrontation of opinion. Conflict, however bounded; controversy, however regulated—these are features not incidental but essential to the operation of the political system.88 The centrality of representative institutions. Many of the characteristics already discussed—for instance the key significance of [end of page 111] and the role of controversy in its formation—find expression in the central position of representative institutions in the nineteenth-century political process. Naturally, what I call "centrality" is a matter of degree—and thus of conflict. Parliament is obviously more central to a parliamentary system of government than either to a presidential system or to one where the personal confidence of a monarch, not the political composition of the legislature, decides who is to lead the executive. Yet it is necessarily in parliament (however organized) that laws are formed; moreover, parliament represents the public realm par excellence, not merely as an arena for discussion but as the seat of vital decision-making processes. Parliament must mediate between the "severalness" of individually held opinions (each secured some expression by "public rights") and the need for univocal, general commands to resolve and reduce the diversity of those opinions. To do this, parliament cannot function purely as a condensed reflection of the distribution of opinion within the public; it must also simplify that distribution, focus it on issues, and generate alignments, majorities, and oppositions. Parliament must, at the same time, "couple" and "uncouple" the society and the state—the former as the locus where private individuals freely form and express views and preferences, the latter as a machine for framing and executing binding commands. To this end, each member of parliament is seen as empowered by an open-ended mandate issuing not from individual voters or even his entire particular constituency but from the politically significant public at large. He is expected to join a relatively stable alignment of like-minded fellow members, and it is understood that to this end he will have to play down some of his personal views and play up some of those the alignment holds in common. To the same end, most parliaments have a fixed or at any rate relatively lengthy duration in a given composition in order to allow the members to distance themselves from the all-too-fluid developments of opinion in the broader public and either to "lead" those [end of page 112] developments or to "lag behind" them. The spectrum of opinion and of political will that parliament represents is necessarily narrower than that within the electorate; it is further reduced by compromises and alliances, and above all by the tendency for controversy in parliament to become focused on the formation of a majority, on the contrast between "ins" and "cuts." In all these ways parliament acquires autonomy vis-a-vis the broad public, and maintains, or seeks to acquire, primacy with respect to the executive. Parliament is central to the system because it does not simply transmit political impulses originating elsewhere; it produces political impulses by processing the orientations of the electorate it represents. It is central, too, in that by commenting on and criticizing actions of government and ongoing social developments it feeds information back to the electorate and thereby increases the people's awareness of public issues and both the choices those issues open and the burdens and opportunities they involve. Finally, it is central because and insofar as it forms and selects leaders—individuals capable of formulating issues, projecting solutions, voicing and forming public opinion, taking responsibility.36
I shall attempt here only the sketchiest classification of the most significant classes of issues that come most frequently and materially to the fore in the nineteenth-century state. Constitutional issues. Among these issues we find the question of whether the head of state should be an elected president or a hereditary monarch, and of what his specific powers should be. We also find the issues of the distribution of powers between legislative, executive, and judicial organs, and the allocation of tasks and resources to central and local administrative organs. Finally, we find a variety of issues concerning the relations between state and church(es), the constitutional position of the army, and the extension of the franchise.* Foreign-policy issues. The "little versus great England" debate is the most sharply contoured and exemplary among these, involving [end of page 113] as it does questions of alliances, tariffs, armaments, and tempos and directions of colonial expansion. These are, indeed, the central issues of the nineteenth-century states system, and bring about its disastrous collapse in 1914. The "social question." In the nineteenth century this expression designated a set of issues arising from the commercialization and industrialization of national economies. It concerned such disparate phenomena as demographic pressure; proletarianization of the subaltern [of junior rank] strata; urban epidemics; criminality; destitution; industrial accidents; mass de-Christianization; the growth of organized unionism and socialism; illiteracy; "vice" in the form of prostitution, juvenile delinquency, illegitimacy, alcoholism, etc.; social rootless-ness and political subversiveness; and strikes and unemployment. It was by no means universally accepted that all such issues (or any such, according to some currents of opinion) were political, in the sense that state activities other than purely police ones ought to be brought to bear upon them. But as we shall see in the next chapter, a number of these issues became progressively locked into the political process largely by (1) the enfranchisement of social groups that expected the state to attend to such issues, (2) the resulting emergence of the notion of "social" rights of citizenship, and (3) the assumption by the state of some responsibility for ameliorating the phenomena in question. But the decisions involved in this protracted development were contested bitterly and widely. Within the complex story of the relations between liberalism, democracy, and socialism in the nineteenth century, much revolved around those decisions. Issues of economic management. The state's action concerning the "social question" may perhaps be considered as the more dramatic and visible aspect of the role it played in the latter part of the nineteenth century in sustaining and advancing capitalism and in allocating the national product among various claimant interests. Another, less conspicuous set of issues bearing essentially on the same problem might be labeled "issues of economic management." The reason why these issues (and the attendant state action) [end of page 114] were less conspicuous is twofold. First, through most of the nineteenth century in most states public action on these matters consisted largely of the construction and management of legal, fiscal, monetary, and financial frameworks for the autonomous, self-regulating operations of the allocative mechanisms constituted by the markets for land, labor, and capital. Second, the state played a positive, but again relatively unobtrusive role in the accumulation and reproduction of capital, and in the moderation of economic imbalances that the market system could not adequately control. This second type of action involved such diverse things as the granting of land to railway companies; the floating and servicing of the national debt; the erection of tariff walls; the granting of patents and of corporate prerogatives to firms; the public financing of major industrial undertakings; the repression, containment, or regulation of unions and of collective bargaining; and the oven or covert diplomatic, military, and financial backing of colonial undertakings. It might be suggested that the four classes of issues we have discussed in this section represent for the nineteenth-century state the legacy of different phases in its historical development. In a sense, the constitutional issues project into the unitary framework of the nineteenth-century state those disputes over the allocation of independent powers of rule that we have seen were most actively carried on under the feudal and standisch [stratified] systems of rule. The foreign-policy issues revolve around the implications for the nineteenth-century state of the states system consecrated originally by the Peace of Westphalia [of 1648]. And we may view what I have called the issues of economic management as the legacy of absolutist mercantilism, however modified and disguised by the liberal theory and practice prevalent in the nineteenth century. However, the issues making up the "social question" are almost wholly new in their multiplicity, intractability, and political significance. They are in fact placed upon the state's agenda largely by the workings of the capitalist mode of production as it enters its advanced industrial phase; they thus reflect the ever-increasing [end of page 115] hold of that mode of production on the totality of social life in the nineteenth-century West. In fact, the dominance of the capitalist mode of production can be seen as largely dictating the form in which all the other classes of issues are posed and at the same time limiting the range of their possible solutions. The issues of economic management, at any rate in the states where capitalism reached its industrial phase relatively early, had to be confronted within the framework set by the institutions of private enterprise and the market, and by the logic of capital accumulation; these elements necessarily excluded the mercantilist emphasis on bullion, state enterprise, and authoritative regulation of business activities. The private nature of the dominant economic interests, and their apparently uncoercive relation to the subaltern ones, set limits to the constitutional struggles; these, as I have indicated, developed accordingly as a contest over the access to and the exercise of influence upon the organs of (unitary) state power, and did not take the form of open claims for the appropriation of political prerogatives. Finally, interstate tensions are moderated to a point, and heightened beyond that point, by becoming focused on the competition, among metropolitan centers of capital accumulation, over the markets and resources of nonstate or pseudostate areas of the world. But if it is true, as I have suggested, that the dominant mode of production largely shaped the agenda of state action itself and the attendant political contrasts, clearly this points to a close relation of complementarity between the nineteenth-century state and the bourgeois civil society of the time. The import of this relation and its modifications in the twentieth century are the themes of my final chapter. [end of page 116]
|