The Development of the Modern State

1. The Business of Rule: Coercion and Collective Identity

The modern state is perhaps best seen as a complex set of institutional arrangements for rule operating through the continuous and regulated activities of individuals acting as occupants of offices.

Defining politics. The fundamental "business of rule" or politics can be understood through two contrasting lenses: David Easton's view of politics as the authoritative allocation of scarce values within a society, and Carl Schmitt's view of politics as the existential distinction between "friend" and "foe" for a collectivity's survival. While Easton focuses on internal processes and scarcity, Schmitt emphasizes external threats and danger, highlighting the state's role in defining and defending collective identity. Both perspectives, however, converge on one crucial element: the necessity of coercion.

Coercion's centrality. Regardless of whether politics is about internal allocation or external defense, any effective system of rule must possess privileged access to facilities for physical coercion. This ability to issue and enforce sanctioned commands is what distinguishes political allocations from those based on custom or voluntary exchange. The state, in its modern form, seeks to monopolize this coercive power, reserving to itself the ultimate right to enforce its will over a defined territory and its population.

Beyond allocation. While Easton's focus on value allocation is plausible, it overlooks the prior need to generate values and, more importantly, to constitute the collectivity itself. The state doesn't just manage existing values; it actively shapes the collective identity and internal order that make other social activities possible. This involves symbolic public processes and the establishment of shared norms, which are essential for a society to define itself and distinguish "Us" from "the Other," as Schmitt argues.

2. Feudalism: A System of Fragmented, Personal Rule

The feudal relationship, one might say, became depersonalized, but not by institutionalizing more general, abstract, rationally ordered understandings and patterns of rule; rather, the relationship became bound up with a lineage's exclusive particularism, its dynastic pride, its fierce commitment to maintaining and increasing its patrimony, to asserting its status.

Post-Carolingian collapse. Emerging from the breakdown of the Western Roman Empire and the Carolingian attempt at centralized rule, feudalism became the dominant system in Western Europe from the 9th to 14th centuries. Characterized by widespread insecurity, a decommercialized economy, and low literacy, it relied on personal bonds rather than impersonal public offices. The core of this system was the Gefolgschaft (followership) principle, integrated with Roman-derived concepts:

• Commendatio: A personal bond of mutual loyalty between lord and vassal.
• Beneficium (fief): A grant of land and rights to support the vassal's service.
• Immunitas: Exemption from public powers, allowing vassals to exercise rule over their fiefs.

Decentralization and anarchy. This system inherently tended to fragment power, shifting the effective fulcrum of rule downward. Vassals, initially near-peers to their lords, gained increasing autonomy, treating their fiefs as patrimonial possessions. This led to:

• Jurisdictional rivalries and boundary disputes.
• "Private wars" as legitimate means of redress.
• A network of competing clienteles rather than a coherent hierarchy.
  The result was often "feudal anarchy," where local lords exercised extensive, often oppressive, powers over the dependent rural population (seigneurie), with little effective oversight from higher authorities.

Legacy of rights. Despite its fragmentation and violence, feudalism left a significant political legacy. It rooted a warrior class in the land, forcing them to govern and protect populations, slowly fostering a sense of responsibility. Crucially, it established the notion that individuals possessed rights that could be upheld, even forcibly, against superiors. This "right to resist a prevaricating ruler" became a distinctively Western legal conception, laying groundwork for future constitutional thought, even as territorial rulers later used feudal language (like suzerainty) to reassert their own authority.

3. The Ständestaat: Dualism and the Rise of Corporate Power

In the Ständestaat, powerful individuals and groups gathered more or less frequently, personally or through delegates, into variously constituted assemblies and there dealt with the ruler or his agents, voiced their protests, restated their rights, formulated their advice, established the terms of their collaboration with the ruler, and shouldered their share of the burdens of rule.

Towns as new political actors. The rise of towns from the 12th century marked a pivotal shift from feudalism to the Ständestaat (polity of the Estates). Towns emerged as politically autonomous entities, often through collective action (Genossenschaft or communis) of individually powerless equals, driven by commercial and productive interests. They sought distinct juridical spaces, "immune" from feudal rules, and military self-sufficiency (city walls, urban militias). This new force challenged the existing lord-vassal dynamic, often aligning with territorial rulers against feudal magnates to secure wider, more uniform frameworks for trade.

Dualistic rule. The Ständestaat was characterized by a "dualism" where the territorial ruler and the Stände (Estates—clergy, nobility, and towns) jointly constituted the polity as separate, mutually acknowledged power centers. Unlike ad hoc feudal gatherings, the Estates were institutionalized, territorial assemblies with defined rules and prerogatives, representing the territory to the ruler. Their chief power often lay in controlling financial subsidies, which they leveraged to assert their claims and influence policy.

Limited representation. While the Estates represented a step towards more institutionalized and legalistic politics, their "dualism" also meant excluding the vast majority of the population. The meliores terrae (privileged minority) saw themselves as embodying the territory, voicing their own rights rather than genuinely representing the voiceless, oppressed populace. The political process revolved around the privileges and rights of these estates, often leading to three-cornered power struggles between the ruler, the feudal element, and the towns, with shifting alliances based on specific issues.

4. Absolutism: Centralization of Sovereign Will

In the absolutist state the political process is no longer structured primarily by the continuous, legitimate tension and collaboration between two independent centers of rule, the ruler and the Stande; it develops around and from the former only.

Interstate competition and internal consolidation. The transition to absolutism (16th-18th centuries) was driven by the evolving system of sovereign states, which placed a premium on internal political unity and effective mobilization of resources for external power struggles. Internally, the necessity of curbing post-Reformation religious conflicts also favored a stronger central authority. This led to the ruler's drive to monopolize rule, overcoming the dualism of the Ständestaat.

Decline of the Estates. The Estates' power waned due to several factors:

• Urban interests: Towns increasingly relied on the ruler for wider economic frameworks and protection of foreign markets, willingly renouncing political autonomy.
• Nobility's decline: The feudal element lost military significance and economic standing due to commercialization, becoming dependent on court preferment rather than independent power.
• Ruler's policies: Monarchs actively suppressed independent bodies and created new administrative apparatuses (e.g., urban excises in Prussia bypassing Estates).
  The result was the effective confiscation of the Estates' political prerogatives, reducing them to holders of private privileges.

New forms of rule. Absolutism saw the state's power concentrated solely in the monarch, who ruled either from a magnificent court (France, epitomized by Louis XIV) or through a professional bureaucracy (Prussia, under Frederick William I and the Great). The court served to magnify the ruler's majesty and neutralize the nobility through status competition. The bureaucracy, staffed by commissarii (functionaries without proprietary rights in their posts), became an increasingly effective, systematic, and impersonal instrument of the ruler's will. Law transformed from a framework of traditional rights into an instrument of the sovereign's will, applicable uniformly across the territory, with the ruler himself considered legibus solutus (unbound by law).

5. The Nineteenth-Century Constitutional State: Unity and Legal Rationality

The modern states system is made up of coordinate, juxtaposed, sovereign units.

A system of sovereign states. By the 19th century, the modern state operated within a unique international system of coordinate, juxtaposed, and sovereign units, fundamentally different from earlier empires. This system, solidified by the Peace of Westphalia (1648), was inherently dynamic and precarious, driven by each state's pursuit of self-interest and aggrandizement (raison d'état). The abstract equality of states was often belied by the "effectiveness principle"—might made right—leading to continuous diplomatic maneuvering and the threat of war, though the "hundred years peace" before 1914 showed some capacity for accommodation.

Internal unity and "modernity." Internally, the 19th-century state achieved unprecedented unity:

• Territorial integrity: Defined by continuous, defensible frontiers.
• Unified systems: Single currency, fiscal system, national language, and legal system.
• Artificial construction: The state was seen as an "engineered" institutional complex, a deliberate framework rather than a spontaneous accretion, operating with functional specificity and universalistic principles.
  This drive for unity, often linked to ideas of nationality, aimed to create a cohesive national society, though it often met resistance from local particularisms and generated internal contradictions, such as the de facto autonomy of various state organs and the state's role in guaranteeing class-based power relations.

Legal-rational legitimacy. The modern state's legitimacy rested on legal-rational principles, where obedience was owed to commands issued in conformity with valid general norms, themselves derived from a constitution. This aimed to tame power through depersonalization, ensuring individuals obeyed the law, not arbitrary personal will. Modern law was positive law, enacted by the state, and became its primary mode of expression. Public law regulated state organs, while private law set frameworks for autonomous individual activity, supporting private interests and making social relations predictable. Constitutional guarantees, enshrining substantive rights and enabling citizen participation (e.g., elections, juries), aimed to further safeguard individual liberties against state encroachment.

6. The Liberal State: An Instrument of Bourgeois Dominance

Essentially, the liberal state was constructed to favor and sustain through its acts of rule the class domination of the bourgeoisie over the society as a whole.

State and society as complementary. In the liberal era, the state and society, despite their apparent institutional differences (unitary, coercive state vs. fragmented, self-interested society), were intrinsically compatible and complementary. The liberal state, with its abstract laws and formal equality, served as an instrumentality for the class domination of the bourgeoisie. It provided the legal framework for capitalist production, ensuring:

• Free disposal of individual resources (for labor power).
• Market autonomy (regulating money, enforcing contracts).
• Protection of private property (favoring propertied groups).
  The state's institutional principles thus expressed and concealed the functional subordination of political to economic power.

Beyond economic determinism. While Marxian interpretations highlight the state's role in capitalist class dominance, the state/society distinction also has deeper historical roots, particularly in the disentanglement of the Western state from the Church. Matters of creed and cult were among the first to be claimed as "private" and beyond state interference. However, the capitalist economy presented a far more dynamic and expansive challenge than religion, progressively dictating the terms of its separation from the state and subordinating other societal factors.

The "political economy" as anatomy. Under capitalism, the economy became the "anatomy" of civil society, with exchange values increasingly dominating use values and market rules permeating all aspects of human interests. This raised the question of the state's autonomy: could it maintain its distinctiveness and leverage, or would it become increasingly intertwined with and shaped by the economic process? This foreshadowed the progressive blurring of the state/society line, where the state's political and juridical forms would be modified and distorted by its growing entanglement with societal forces.

7. Societal Pressures: Collective Interests and Capitalist Evolution

The existence of the liberal "public realm," where issues could be debated and associations formed among individuals sharing interests and views, was used not only by the lower classes to agitate for electoral rights but by both privileged and underprivileged economic actors to organize coalitions to further their economic and status advantage.

Franchise expansion and class interests. Pressures originating from society significantly eroded the liberal state/society divide. The initial restriction of suffrage aimed to exclude interests incompatible with capitalism. However, the disfranchised masses, increasingly engaged by the state's fiscal and military needs, eventually gained the franchise. This brought "unbalanceable" class interests into the political arena, leading to demands for state intervention to ameliorate economic inequality.

Rise of organized interests. The liberal "public realm" facilitated the formation of powerful coalitions like trade unions and employers' associations. These organizations introduced elements of coercion and bargaining into the allocation of the social product, modifying market rules and directly influencing public policy outside parliamentary channels. The state, finding it in its interest, began to co-opt these organizations into its operations, consulting them on legislation and expecting them to discipline their members. This blurred the line between private interests and public policy, making the allocation of the social product a central political issue.

Capitalism's evolving impact. Changes in the capitalist mode of production further intensified these pressures:

• Occupational shifts: The rise of a large employee middle class, resembling the manual working class in its dependence, led to demands for state-provided economic security and welfare provisions, extending beyond the traditional family unit.
• Corporate dominance: The growth of large joint-stock companies and corporations, often operating as "semipublic" or "quasipublic" entities, challenged liberal ideology. These firms exerted massive influence over the economic process and, consequently, over the state itself, often dictating policies that served their private profit logic, even if financed by public funds.

8. Internal State Dynamics: The Drive for Expanded Rule

The state is constituted to exercise rule over society whether - on behalf of all or part of the society. Hence the state tends to increase its power by widening the scope of its activities, by extending the range of societal interests on which rule is brought to bear.

State's inherent expansionism. Beyond societal pressures, the very nature and internal constitution of the modern state "pushed" it into what was traditionally societal territory. As a specialized political organization, the state inherently seeks to maximize its own returns and expand its power. Its monopoly on coercive power exempts it from market-like curbs, and its role as the chief referent of solidarity allows it to demand submission. The state's ability to produce and enforce law, which is intrinsically changeable, further enables it to transgress its own boundaries.

Division of powers as a driver. While intended to safeguard societal autonomy by "checking and balancing" state organs, the division of powers paradoxically fueled the state's overall expansion. Competition among state units (ministries, departments) for autonomy, standing, and resources incentivized them to define new societal interests as legitimate targets for their activity. This constant struggle for prerogative led to a collective increase in the state's reach at the expense of society, rather than a direct limitation of each other's power.

Bureaucratic self-interest and historical memory. Individual career interests within the state apparatus also contributed to this expansion, as civil servants sought to increase staff and openings by defining new administrative tasks. This "power-grasping" tendency, particularly intense within the administrative apparatus, is supported by several factors:

• Budget maximization: State organs tend to maximize their budgets, seeking ever-increasing societal resources.
• Isolation: The sheer size and complexity of bureaucracy insulate it from direct societal counterpressures.
• Control imperative: Agencies often incorporate societal sections to reduce environmental complexity, preferring administrative control over autonomous entities.
• Institutional traditions: Pre-liberal, anti-liberal traditions within professionalized public agencies can bias policies against respecting the state/society line.
• Lessons from total war/dictatorship: The 20th century's experiences of total war and dictatorship left a "tempting memory" of how rapidly and ruthlessly the state can expand its grip on society.

9. The Erosion of Parliamentary Centrality

In comparison with these two determinants, the merits of the issue are relatively insignificant and are not effectively weighed in debate.

Parliament's diminished role. The progressive displacement of the state/society line has profoundly impacted parliamentary institutions, eroding their unique position in the 19th-century state. The extension of the franchise, while democratizing, also transformed the electoral and legislative processes. Previously, parliamentary debate among relatively uncommitted members, accountable to the nation as a whole, allowed for "creative" and open-ended decision-making.

Rise of organized parties. With mass enfranchisement, organized parties became essential for mobilizing the electorate. These parties, reflecting societal cleavages, exerted tight control over their parliament members, forming stable majority and minority alignments. This diminished parliamentary autonomy, reducing it to a stage for ritualized confrontations between preformed, ideologically characterized blocs. The merits of an issue became secondary to its ideological color and its bearing on the party's power.

Technocracy and administrative dominance. The post-mid-20th century focus on "industrial development" and "affluence" further devalued ideological debate, framing political issues as "technical" rather than political. This vacuum was filled by "experts" in macroeconomic and administrative management, shifting influence away from parliament to the professional civil service, research institutes, and corporate spokesmen. Administrative decisions, articulated in technical language, became shielded from parliamentary criticism.

Legislative and oversight failures. Parliament's legislative and oversight functions have been severely weakened:

• Executive control: Legislation is largely drafted outside parliament, often serving to validate administrative decisions.
• Loss of generality: Laws become ad hoc, administrative measures, losing their "classical" generality and abstractness.
• Oversight strain: The bewildering size and complexity of public budgets and administrative agencies make effective parliamentary control increasingly impossible.
  The cumulative effect is to shunt parliament away from the effective center of political life, leaving executive organs and the administrative apparatus, thoroughly "interlaced" with non-state forces, in control.

10. The Modern State's Enduring Legitimacy Crisis

Thus the legitimacy formula in question (like any other such formula in a comparable situation) threatens to "go into reverse," to increase rather than fill the legitimacy vacuum.

Weakness of legal-rational legitimacy. The modern state's legal-rational legitimacy, based on procedural correctness rather than substantive ideals, is inherently weak. This weakness has been exacerbated by the erosion of parliamentary centrality, the decline of law's supremacy, and the increasing political leverage of social forces willing to bypass the rule of law. As the state's "web of rules" expands, the need for a robust legitimizing formula becomes urgent.

Shifting legitimacy formulas. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, states sought legitimacy through imperial and colonial gains. Post-WWII, with the decline of overt interstate power politics among Western nations, "industrial growth," "economic development," or "affluence" became the dominant legitimizing ideal. This "social eudaemonic" legitimacy, as some term it, justified the state's increasing involvement in the economy by promising an ever-increasing flow of goods and services to consumers.

The current crisis. However, this formula has faced challenges:

• Moral questioning: Minorities began questioning the moral significance of continuous material advance.
• Economic uncertainty: The 1970s saw economic stagnation, revealing unequal distribution of benefits and questioning the state's capacity for effective societal management.
• State failures: Political dissent, welfare system inadequacies, leadership failures, and law enforcement breakdowns further undermined trust.
  This has led to a "legitimacy vacuum," threatening to reverse the state's legitimizing efforts.

Unattractive futures. Faced with this crisis, the state has limited, unattractive options:

• Repression: Rely on intimidation and repression, favoring some citizens over others.
• Power politics revival: Revert to old-fashioned power politics, pointing to external threats.
• New, vague formulas: "Sell" society on superficially attractive, generic ideals like "The Quality of Life."
  All these options continue the trend of expanding state power while paradoxically making the state less effective in controlling social processes. They also risk forsaking the liberal idea of the rule of law and the democratic idea of participation, which are crucial to the West's moral heritage.