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The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics , by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow
5. The Liberal State:
Sovereignty Universalized
From the sixteenth century, states in Europe came to take for granted that their survival depended on absolute control over a bounded, territorial space. Sovereignty was imagined as the unifying “soul” inscribed on the landscape and population within the state’s territory, which was protected, and extended, by a centralized military and economy under the control of the absolute sovereign, whether crown or parliament.
In order to institute sovereignty, states such as France had to conquer and draw into their centralizing orbits local nobles and the independent centers of power such as the bourgeoisie of the towns. Absolutist monarchical states, then, inscribed sovereignty on the territories they ruled through the grid of bureaucratic and administrative units that linked local jurisdictions to the central monarchy. In states in which the parliament emerged as absolute sovereign, the struggle to institute territorial sovereignty focused more on the juridical, legalistic struggles over forms of property rights. Although these states also developed bureaucracies, including a military, in order to link the local to the central state, this institutional grid meant something different for state sovereignty. Facing a different configuration of social power in which the state much earlier came to depend on the bourgeoisie for its revenue and was forced into compromises with it, parliamentary states eventually subordinated the state apparatus and crown to parliament.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, developments in capitalism and reactions to absolutism (both in absolutist monarchies and absolutist parliamentary states) combined to produce a new imaginary of sovereignty and a new form of the state. We call this new formation the liberal state, at the center of which is a new imaginary of sovereignty as inhering in the people. The focus of this chapter is on the way liberal states arose out of the dilemmas faced by early modern states, especially the dilemma of procuring the resources needed to make war and managing the expanding capitalist economy while maintaining the legitimacy of state power.
The Paradox Of Popular Sovereignty
As the modern state came to be more highly developed, the problematic of instituting sovereignty shifted. Sovereignty came to be seen as inhering in the population of a territory, and not in the ruler (the king) or ruling assembly (parliament). This new imaginary of sovereignty, which came to be called popular sovereignty, had roots in the republican theories of the Renaissance, especially those of Machiavelli, which described the common good of the state as the necessary outcome of political power. In seventeenth-century England, the republican idea of the common good was combined with, and transformed by, arguments that individual subjects had a prior right to private property. This led to the association of the interests of the state with the protection and furtherance of the property of its subjects. 1
Sovereignty could be represented as “popular,” that is, as inhering in the population of the state, in two primary ways. One was as a possession of the people, as a utility, a tool for the protection of their property and their private lives. This was the idea enacted by the Glorious Revolution (1689) in England. The other representation of popular sovereignty was as the expression of the collective, or general, will of the people. This was the idea formulated most clearly by the eighteenth-century French-speaking Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), whose ideas would influence the French Revolution. The American Revolution would oscillate between both, and come to rest in the constitution of 1789 with the former, more conservative version. 2 In both cases the meaning of the state’s population shifted from being an object of administration by the state apparatus to being an almost organic entity endowed with a separate being and will of its own.
Both versions of popular sovereignty positioned the sovereign as protector of a separate private sphere consisting of the market economy and the sphere of private conscience. Therefore, both were inseparable from the gendered structure of individualist and capitalist societies. In the imaginary of popular sovereignty, the state was conceived as a creation of a preexistent people either as its useful property or as its expression. The “people” was constituted as prior to the state primarily via two processes and institutions: the economy, in which private property was produced, and the family, in which the rational individuals who authorized the sovereign were nurtured. Both were by law and custom the preserves of men, as we discussed in the previous chapter. Owning and managing private property were considered male pursuits. Innovation and competition were thought to require physical and mental toughness, attributes coded as masculine. The world of private property was opposed to a sphere of love, nurturing, and tenderness in the family, a sphere associated with the feminine.
States based on an imaginary of popular sovereignty continued to perform those functions performed by the early modern territorial states. Armies continued to be raised. Such states continued to mediate class conflicts between the bourgeoisie and landed nobility, and increasingly between the bourgeoisie and the working class (i.e., the class of laborers dependent on wages). States based on popular sovereignty remained dependent on their ability to impose taxes, put tariffs on imports, and otherwise extract economic resources to make war. 3
States based on the idea of popular sovereigny developed an idea of politics as police power to regulate the population and maintain order. Police power was needed to regulate the working classes and those caught in the often painful and unsettling transition from rural peasant to wage laborer. Such states also kept the inequalities of the capitalist economy from erupting into open social conflict. The “science of the police,” as political science was often called during the eighteenth century, encompassed the regulation of the social habits of the population to ensure that people conformed to the model of the rational individual, necessary to the functioning of the private property economy and the private family. Maintaining order meant not only doing what the bourgeoisie expressly considered to be in its economic interests, but also the state’s intervening in the direction of everyday life to ensure those social habits of behavior that would lead to civil order.
In short, the representation of sovereignty as popular sovereignty created a new realm of individual freedom that weakened the absolutist state in favor of the individual, while paradoxically subjecting the individual to new forms of power, exercised by the state and others and aimed at molding and regulating public behavior. Behavior came to be watched, catalogued, measured, anticipated, calculated, and managed. 4 Rather than weakening the state to the point of near disappearance, the interpenetration of capitalism and the state and the new imaginary of popular sovereignty made possible the expansion of state power, although in new forms.
Liberalism
From the late seventeenth century, attempts to reform the absolutist state to make it protective of private property rights and responsive to the freedom of individuals to pursue profit in the market became popular, both among intellectuals and the bourgeoisie. By the nineteenth century this reformist movement would be called liberalism, and its defenders would be called liberals, a term first used to refer to the party of the bourgeoisie in early nineteenth-century Spain. By the middle of the century it had spread throughout Europe, becoming a name adopted by major bourgeois political parties. 5
Liberal ideas circulated not through religious channels or through official state-sanctioned media, but through the new commercial markets of civil society, primarily in the political pamphlets and books made possible by combining the technology of the printing press with the increasing wealth of the middle class. Public opinion was created by the new newspapers and magazines, such as The Spectator and The Tattler, published by two English liberals, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Richard Steele (1672–1729). On the European continent, especially, liberal ideas circulated through the private clubs of intellectuals and the middle class (the most famous of which was the Freemasons ) and in the scientific associations in which intellectuals published and otherwise circulated their writings. The most important of these was the initiative in France of the Encyclopedia, a massive publishing project under the direction of the French philosopher and intellectual Denis Diderot (1713–1784), which brought together in a unified set of volumes all the latest knowledge of natural and human sciences. In some places, the German states and Scotland, for example, universities played an important role in developing and spreading liberal ideas. 6
Liberalism developed in opposition to dogmatic religion, arguing that all forms of knowing, including religious knowledge, should be subjected to rational (i.e., reasoned) forms of discussion and debate. To be a “subject”—increasingly used to refer to individuals not only in a political but also in a moral sense—was to be an agent who acted rationally. Liberals set out self-consciously to reform the state so that it would support the private world of the individual in civil society, which they understood as the voluntary social interactions and organizations of rational individuals. They did so not only for economic reasons but for moral reasons as well. In Enlightenment liberalism, the economic and moral were intertwined. Liberalism developed a distinctive form of ideology that accepted the state only insofar as it could be justified by a rational discourse appealing to universal standards of human nature and justice.
By positing a universal rational knowledge as the basis of truth, liberalism solved one of the most vexing problems of the early modern territorial state: that is, how to make war and effectively exercise power, yet, at the same time, maintain the willingness of the people to provide the state with the necessary human and economic resources to do so. In return for subordinating the subjectivity of the individual to the rules of a reason that would maximize productivity and social wealth, which the state could then appropriate for its military and other purposes, the state would subordinate itself to the universal laws of reason and thereby limit its own power. In this way, liberalism, by promoting an ideology based on universal principles, made room within the sovereign state for capitalism and civil society, as well as for state sovereignty within capitalism and civil society.
To see how liberalism and the liberal state emerged out of the absolutist state, it is necessary to look briefly at the relation between politics and morality. During the religious wars of the seventeenth century, absolutist monarchies sought to resolve moral conflicts politically—that is, by distinguishing morals from politics and subordinating the former, especially in the form of religious beliefs, to the latter by granting to the state the power to do what was necessary to maintain order. Although morality was considered a matter for the individual subject’s conscience (i.e., his or her inward belief), the absolutist state compelled that inward belief in the name of public order. 7 Public order was the supreme good, and private conscience and morality were to be subordinated to it. 8
Against absolutism, the philosopher and political writer John Locke (1632–1704), in his Letter on Toleration (1689), articulated a position that would later come to define liberalism. In this pamphlet, Locke accepted the idea that morals are a matter of individual conscience and that they should be determined by reason and not by custom, nature, or political power. Counter to the logic of the absolutist state, Locke wrote that toleration is a universal good that states should accept and that should guide their acceptance of the rule of law. Locke’s point was that the state, rather than reigning supreme over the individual conscience, as the absolutist would argue, should be subordinated to the universal principles of reason that govern the private conscience. 9
Religion, Locke argued, should not dictate laws for the state, which exists in Locke’s view “for the procuring, preserving, and advancing” of the individual’s “life, liberty, health and indolence of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.” 10 Neither should the magistrates of the state “forbid the preaching or professing of any speculative opinions in any church, because they have no manner of relation to the civil rights of the subjects.” 11
The Liberal State As A Rights-Based State
By subordinating the territorial state to universal principles derived by reason, individual subjects and the civil society they circulated in came to be seen as existing independently of and prior to the state. This meant that subjects came to be seen in the liberal state as bearers of certain rights, which accrued to them as autonomous individuals. To justify this, many liberal thinkers drew initially on the tradition of natural rights, as when the drafters of the American constitution argued that all individuals were endowed by “their Creator” with “inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Specifically, two rights, which Locke alluded to in his Letter on Toleration, were most important to liberals: the right to private property and the right to be protected from arbitrary and unfair treatment by the state. Each of these requires brief mention.
The general right to private property entailed, first, the right to secure possession of one’s belongings, which was based on the belief that individuals had a natural right to choose how they wanted to live their lives by selecting their own occupation, religion, associates, leisure-time activities, and so forth. Second, it entailed the right to private property, which included the right to alienate one’s possessions, that is, to be able to buy and sell property at will. Third, the general right to private property entailed the right to accumulate as much wealth as one wished, so long as one did so through buying and selling.
In effect, natural rights supported a capitalist market society, that is, a society in which the economic market is paramount. Adam Smith (1723– 1790), the Scottish philosopher and political economist, developed the theory of the market and its implications in his book The Wealth of Nations (1776). In this work, Smith introduced the idea that the market was self-regulating. Smith’s liberalism is based on the assumption that human beings are rational creatures who should be permitted to develop their inherent capacities to the fullest. Moreover, he assumed that all are born with “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” 12 All barriers to the individual’s inherent ability to achieve his or her capacities must be removed. Doing so would encourage people to act according to reason, and subordinate their passions by subjecting them to the rule of rational self-interest. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that the economic restrictions of mercantilism retarded economic growth and with it the general welfare of the subjects because it restricted individual economic freedom.
Smith argued that an economy free of state interference and monopoly would produce prosperity efficiently if the law of supply and demand were allowed to operate unfettered by state controls. Efficient producers would prosper and inefficient ones would fail. He believed that the unseen hand of the market, that is, the rational calculations of a myriad of individual consumers making their buying decisions based on economic self-interest, would automatically produce economic growth and prosperity for all. This presumed harmony of interests extended to the international economy, which Smith did not explicitly distinguish from the domestic economy, although nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberals would. If states were left free to trade without any tariff barriers, everyone subject to the world capitalist economy would benefit and a general peace would prevail among states. Or so liberals argued.
The liberal state, then, is in one respect a minimal state; that is, it is deliberately structured not to be itself a threat to the “natural right” of property ownership, which is the ultimate justification for the dominant position of the bourgeoisie within the state. Participation is restricted by property-owning requirements to eliminate a threat to the bourgeoisie’s control of the state from economically less advantaged groups from below. 13
The second right that liberals considered inalienable was the right to protection from arbitrary and capricious treatment by the state. Being free of the arbitrary and capricious state power characteristic of the absolutist states meant first and foremost the application of the principle of the rule of law. The theory that a state was legitimate only when it was subordinated to the rule of law, and not the rule of men unrestrained by law, went back to the ancient Greek and Roman idea of a republic. For Greek political philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato, and for the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, states were to be ruled by the laws made by citizens. The rule of law for them was justified because citizens themselves made the law. The aim of politics was to ensure that those citizens who were best able to make the laws actually ruled, although different republican philosophers differed on how this condition could best be met. This idea was revived by the civic republican tradition in the Renaissance, whose most famous theorist was Machiavelli (see Chapter 3).
In the civic republican tradition, the rule of law was grounded in the idea of the public good. That is, the rule of law was justified because it served the public benefit, and any state that did not respect the rule of law would, in the long run, work against the public good and lead itself to a general decline. States governed according to the rule of law, this tradition believed, would be secure, prosperous, and less inclined to factionalism, civil war, and general violence than states in which rulers could impose a personal and arbitrary authority. This republican tradition provided considerable ammunition for the critical struggle against the absolutist state.
Liberalism defended the rule of law, but did so on different grounds. It supported the rule of law because it would protect citizens best from arbitrary and capricious personal rule and leave individuals the most freedom to pursue their own private lives and, especially, to trade and accumulate wealth and property. That is, liberalism grounded the rule of law negatively: the law should rule not because it promotes the public good but because it allows individuals the greatest freedom by protecting their private interests.
Liberals recognized that the law might itself treat individuals unequally or might contradict some of their rights; to prevent this, liberalism committed to the equal treatment of individual subjects. Liberals reduced all subjects to a common denominator, an abstract concept of the person that eliminated his or her particular differences, the so-called abstract individual. To liberals, being protected from arbitrary and capricious power and authority meant that the state had to treat all individuals as essentially the same. That is, no natural attributes of birth, such as social class, sex, or race, should matter. Much of liberal political theory during the twentieth century has been concerned with defining these extralegal principles on which the rule of law is seen to rest.
Liberalism And Democracy
It should be noted that liberals were not, at first, democrats in the modern sense of that word. 14 Liberals came to accept democracy only reluctantly, because it was the best way to protect individual liberty from the growing power of the state. 15 This was the argument of utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and James Mill (1773–1836). For these liberals, the state was needed to maintain order and defense, as John Locke had argued, and in general to promote a condition of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” the main principle of utilitarian philosophy. Utilitarians did not argue against the state, but for a state in which reason, in the sense of the efficient matching of means to ends, ruled. This sort of state would continue to exercise considerable power, especially police and military power, and would continue to promote a rational society, especially by providing education for all, even if it had limited power to regulate economic activity.
In his Essay On Government (1820), James Mill averred that the main end of politics was to permit people to become rational and mature individuals. This can be done, he argued, only when they are able to make decisions that affect their own lives. Even though a wise and benevolent absolute ruler might make better decisions than individuals could make for themselves, a limited representative state would be better, he argued, because individuals would be responsible for their own mistakes. Therefore, some form of representative state would be better than an absolute monarchy, even a benevolent one.
The liberal idea of democracy, or liberal democracy as it has come to be called, advocates democracy not as a value in itself but as a way of checking the power of the state while subjecting it to rational debate among citizens. The most powerful defense of liberty of thought and discussion can be found in John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) essay On Liberty (1859). In this essay, Mill, who was James Mill’s son, argued that the real threat to liberty came from irrational citizens who unquestioningly followed social norms and prejudices. A rational and well-educated public was the best guarantee against the state’s becoming too powerful and violating individual rights. Indeed, when Mill did advocate a universal franchise in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), he coupled it with a system of weighted voting so that those who were highly educated and commercially successful, which he took to be evidence of their rationality, would cast more votes!
Liberals at first believed that the right to vote and to hold office should be restricted to those individuals who owned a certain amount of property. Such restrictions were justified by the belief that the ability to decide political issues in an enlightened and critical manner was present only in individuals who owned property. Thus, when liberals gained power, the right to vote was restricted to property owners.
Under pressure from the working classes and from women in the suffragette movements, liberals eventually began to accept the universal franchise, but they always did so within constitutional frameworks that limited the power the masses could exercise. John Stuart Mill was one of the first liberals to argue for the vote not only for the working classes but also for women. But nineteenth-century liberals like John Stuart Mill in England and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) in France worried about the general trend toward equality that democratization represented in modern states. They believed that this would lead to mediocrity in the population and a loss of a communal spirit and solidarity among the people.
Although women began to agitate for the franchise in the nineteenth century, women’s suffrage in most liberal states was not granted until the twentieth. Even after having been enfranchised, women still faced barriers that prevented the equal exercise of their formal rights. Some barriers were legal, such as laws restricting the autonomy of married women and their rights to own property independently of their husbands. Some were the persistence of customs and social prejudices regarding motherhood, women’s bodies, and their “proper” roles in the family; these barriers prevented women from being considered citizens with the same rights as men.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), a philosopher who shared liberalism’s commitments to the rational development of individuals, exposed many of these prejudices as well as how the state promoted them by denying equal education to women. She argued that only through a system of education in which men and women were educated equally and in a culture that was blind to gender difference would society realize its potential as a free society. Mill and his wife Harriet Taylor extended Wollstonecraft’s argument in On the Subjection of Women (1869), which attacked the laws that restricted women’s roles and positions.
Varieties Of The Liberal State
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, liberals challenged monarchical and parliamentary absolutists for control of the emerging European, territorial states. Liberalism flourished in Britain and its colonies in North America primarily because Britain had the largest bourgeoisie of all European monarchies, thanks to its early industrialization and the extensive commercialization of its economy. Liberalism spread more easily in Britain, too, because the absolutist parliamentary state that had emerged out of the struggle between the crown and the estates proved easier to capture than did the absolutist monarchies in Europe On the continent, absolutists were not definitely defeated and were able to resist the imposition of the liberal state for a considerable time. This resulted in prolonged and often bloody struggles between liberals and monarchists in these realms. It was in the English colonies in North America that liberalism achieved its greatest triumph.
Britain: A Liberal Parliamentary State
After the English civil war and the Act of Settlement, which forbade monarchical absolutism in Britain, two factions struggled for control of the state within Parliament based on personal, regional, religious, and family loyalties. One faction was known as the Whigs (meaning cattle thieves in Scots-Gaelic) and favored the gentry’s commercial interests and such Protestant sects as the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists because they did not conform to the hierarchy and liturgy of the Anglican Church, the established Church of England. The other faction was known as the Tories (meaning Irish papist outlaws) and favored the interests of the traditional aristocracy and the Anglican Church. During this period seats in Parliament were controlled by powerful families and many were openly bought and sold. 16
In the early 1800s demands by Britain’s growing bourgeoisie for an end to the practice of buying and selling of seats and for admission to Parliament resulted in reforms in the way that members of Parliament (MPs) were chosen. The first reform was the Great Reform Act of 1832, which extended the franchise to 14 percent of the adult males, and made it possible for the Whigs, who thereafter became known as Liberals, to come to power. Note that the Reform Act conceded the right to vote only to those who had already accepted the tenets of liberalism, the new bourgeoisie. The Liberals were supported by the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and adherents of the nonconformist Protestant sects, who favored minimal interference into economic and social life. Tories, who became known as Conservatives, were supported by the traditional aristocracy and adherents of Anglicanism, who favored an absolutist monarchical state that would interfere with economic and social life to protect people from their irrational impulses.
The Reform Act of 1867, which doubled the electorate by reducing property-owning restrictions for voting, allowed portions of the working class to cast ballots for the first time. The Reform Act of 1884 provided for a secret ballot and created universal male suffrage. These reforms co-opted not only the bourgeoisie but also segments of the emergent working class to pursue political aims through Parliament. England was thus peacefully and gradually transformed into a liberal parliamentary state based on the defense of private property, individual liberties, religious equality, and universal male suffrage. 17
The United States: A Liberal Federal State
A received truth of American politics is that the United States does not constitute a state. 18 The Founding Fathers never used the word when speaking or writing about the new state that they were creating. Instead, they called it either a government, a republic, or a union. When they used the term state, they were referring to one of the constituent states of the new entity or to Britain. The founders were also compelled to avoid the term to more easily gain ratification for the new constitution among those for whom the term state conjured images of the all-powerful absolutist states of Europe. Despite the Founding Fathers calling it something else, a state was, in fact, what they created. Moreover, its purpose was not fundamentally different from that of the absolutist states of the day, including the extraction of resources in order to maintain a standing army. 19 The format of the state was, however, different because the Founding Fathers were imbued with liberal ideas about rational knowledge, toleration, natural rights, the rule of law, equality, and a free market economy.
The movement for independence began as a protest against the extra taxes levied on the colonies by the British Parliament to cover extraordinary expenses incurred during the French and Indian Wars (1755–1763) and to pay for western garrisons to protect settlers against continuing attack by Native Americans. These new taxes included the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1767, which required that revenue stamps be affixed to all legal and printed documents. These taxes affected the two groups in colonial society with the most extensive commercial interests: New England merchants and southern planters. Using the slogan “No taxation without representation,” New England merchants and southern planters formed an alliance with shopkeepers, artisans, and small farmers to protest the new taxes and boycott British-made goods. In response, the British Parliament rescinded the new taxes; the New England merchants and southern planters, now satisfied, sought to calm a situation that had exposed the more radical elements of colonial society: shopkeepers, artisans, and small farmers. Mobilized over taxes, these elements asserted that British power maintained an unjust colonial economic and social structure; they began to agitate for independence, a state the New England merchants and southern planters did not want. 20
In 1773 the British granted a monopoly on the export of tea to the East India Company; this ended a lucrative trade for New England merchants. Colonial merchants sought to persuade the British to rescind the Tea Act. Meanwhile, the radicals led by Samuel Adams (1722–1803), who hoped to goad the British to take action that would alienate the New England merchants and southern planters, dumped tea from East India Company ships into Boston Harbor. After the Boston Tea Party, as this event is known, the British Parliament took harsh measures: the port of Boston was closed to commerce, the colonial government of Massachusetts was changed, persons accused of crime were taken to England for trial, and movement west was restricted; this last measure especially aggravated southern planters, who were in constant need of new land for their main crop, cotton. A cycle of provocative actions by the colonists and harsh retaliation by the British resulted in the convening of the First Continental Congress in 1774. Delegates from all the colonies attended and called for a complete boycott of British goods and, prodded by the radicals, considered the possibility of independence from Britain. 21
The Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776), written by Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and adopted by the Second Continental Congress (1776), began by stating the tenets of liberalism: natural law, social contract, inalienable rights, popular sovereignty, and limited government. These were followed by a list of grievances the colonial elite harbored against the British. By the end of the following year, the colonists declared independence and adopted a written constitution, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which stayed in force until March 1789. The Articles created a confederal state —that is, one in which the central government enjoys only those powers the constituent member states are willing to give it. There was no national-level executive, and laws passed by the Continental Congress were to be executed by the member states. Although the Continental Congress could declare war, make peace, ratify treaties, coin or borrow money, and regulate trade with Native Americans, it could neither levy direct taxes nor regulate commerce among the member states. There was no standing army and each state maintained its own militia. 22
The Articles of Confederation, did not, then, create a state strong enough to promote the economic interests of New England merchants and southern planters. The newly independent states competed with one another for foreign commerce, and European states treated each state of the Confederation as a sovereign state. At the same time, the influence of radicals in the Continental Congress and the legislatures of certain states, such as Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, increased, threatening dominant economic interests. Faced with these threats, the Virginia state legislature called a conference of state leaders, which met in 1786 in Annapolis, Maryland, in order to organize a subsequent conference to revise the Articles of Confederation. In the meantime, Daniel Shays (1747?–1825), a former Revolutionary War army captain, led a rebellion of debt-ridden farmers against the state of Massachusetts to prevent foreclosures on their land. Although Shays’s Rebellion (1786), as this event is known, ended peacefully when fourteen of the captured rebels were eventually pardoned and the state legislature met some of their demands, it demonstrated the weakness of state militias and the growing influence of the radicals.
A conference was convened in May 1789 in Philadelphia for the purpose of revising the Articles. All states except Rhode Island sent a delegation. 23 The 55 delegates, representatives of New England merchants and southern planters, agreed upon the broad ideological principles on which the new state should be based. As adherents of liberal principles, they wanted a new state capable of promoting commerce and protecting property from radical state legislatures. 24
The constitution produced by the convention in Philadelphia brought into being a state strong enough to promote commerce and protect private property, but not to become itself a threat to commerce and property as radical state legislatures had become. To accomplish both power and protection, the central government was separated into coequal legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The legislative branch (Congress) was subdivided into two houses: the Senate, appointed by state legislatures to six-year terms, staggered such that only one-third of the Senate would be appointed every two years, and the House, directly elected for two-year terms. 25
Power and protection were also accomplished by dividing governmental responsibilities between the central government and the constituent state governments. A strong, but not too strong, national state was imposed upon the preexisting states, which had been autonomous from one another under the Articles of Confederation and as colonies of Britain. The Constitution rescinded the right of states to maintain armies in peacetime, and gave the central state the power to conduct foreign policy and command the national army as well as the state militias (if called into national service). To Congress the Constitution granted the right to declare war, to call the state militias into national service, and to appropriate money to support the armed forces. In addition, Congress was given the responsibility of assisting commerce by making “internal improvements,” such as building roads, bridges, and canals, creating a national currency, controlling patents, collecting tariffs, and providing subsidies. To the states were given the power to make law in a host of areas, including property, banking, business, family, public health, education, crime, elections, local government, occupation, and land-use.
To ratify the new Constitution, it was necessary that a bargain be struck with those who believed that, despite separation of powers and federalism, the state was still too strong and might still threaten economic interests and individual rights. A Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791 in the form of amendments to the original document. In spite of the guarantee of individual rights to all persons, the Constitution maintained the Three-fifths Compromise, which stipulated that five slaves would be counted as three persons for purposes of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives.
Thus, the purpose of the liberal federal state built by the drafters of the Constitution was to strengthen the national government (“form a more perfect Union”) and create a national army (“provide for the common defence”), while at the same time making certain that the new state itself could not be easily taken over by radical forces.
France: A Liberal Republican StateThe establishment of a liberal state was relatively easy in the former colonies of British North America, which were dominated by the commercial classes. The colonies never had a peasantry or nobility in the European sense. There was no deeply entrenched Catholic Church, and no traditional landed nobility. This was not the case in Europe, where, as was shown in Chapter 4, strong absolutist monarchies supported by the Catholic Church had been built. In France, liberals had a difficult time gaining control of the state and were not immediately successful. Although French liberals were able to overthrow the monarchy, a long and difficult struggle between liberals and conservative absolutists ensued in the years following the French Revolution. Even after successfully gaining control, the resultant liberal republican state retained many aspects of the previous absolutist state, especially its centralized, unitary character.
As was shown in the previous chapter, the state-making process in France resulted in the most absolute monarchy for its day in all of Europe. In 1789, Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) summoned the Estates General, its first meeting since 1628, to gain support and consent for new taxes to pay debts associated with France’s recent war with Britain in North America. The nobility and the clergy refused the king’s request and challenged his authority by demanding a say in the governance of the realm in exchange for the relinquishment of their immunity from taxation. This challenge to the king’s authority encouraged the Third Estate, that is, the bourgeoisie, which was already very heavily taxed, to make their own demands. The Third Estate declared itself the only true representative of the French people. Rioting and protests broke out in Paris and on July 14, 1789, a mob stormed the Bastille prison. Rioting and civil unrest soon spread to the rest of France; an attempt to form a constitutional monarchy was unsuccessful and France was proclaimed a republic in 1792. Louis was tried and executed as a traitor on January 21, 1793.
Although in Britain and the United States civic republicanism had been transformed in ways supportive of property and capitalist commercial interests, in France a more radical republicanism gained influence and circulated in political writings, in theater, music, opera, and scientific circles. French radical republicans, who were called Jacobins (from the name of their meeting place, a former Dominican convent), placed the claim of equality for all citizens—an implicit element of liberal claims of individual rights, which moderate liberals more responsive to the concerns of the property-owning bourgeoisie avoided—above all else, even the protection of private property. Drawing liberalism toward one of its possible poles, the Jacobins promulgated the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man (August 26, 1789) and abolished provincial administrative units of monarchical France as well as serfdom and noble privileges. Important Jacobin leaders such as Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) and the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) combined radical liberal individualism with an intense commitment to freedom and independence in republicanism; they argued for a widened sphere of individual liberty that would encompass all aspects of individual life, not only property ownership but also moral and sexual life. 26 Although France was declared a republic in 1792, the stiff resistance of the nobility and the clergy prevented liberals from gaining full control of the French state. Moreover, France was invaded by several European kings, who saw the survival of the new French republic as a direct challenge to their monarchies.
In order to deal with these threats, the republic ordered universal conscription (levée en masse) in August 1793. At the same time, all of France’s economic resources were placed under the authority of the new republican government, called the Directory. These two actions were truly radical: for the first time, an army of citizen-soldiers loyal to the nation was raised and supported by mobilizing the vast resources of an entire national economy. To compensate for its weakness at home, the republican régime waged war against its absolutist, monarchical enemies abroad. As the cost of these wars in terms of blood and treasure began to rise, rioting against the new republic began; France plunged into turmoil. Internal disorder, military threats from abroad, and rising sentiments for a return to strong centralized rule encouraged Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821), the republic’s most successful general, to seize dictatorial power in 1799.
Napoléon sought to unify France around the liberal ideals of the revolution— liberté, egalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, and brotherhood)—and to restore order. Between 1799 and 1804, he reorganized the state’s central administration, provided France with a constitution and a uniform legal system called the Code Napoléon (1804), and expanded territorial administration. He placed préfects under the absolute control of the central government in charge of the 83 départements into which France had been divided by the previous revolutionary government. Napoléon also revived the Conseil d’état, which since the time of Louis XIV had been composed of salaried counsellors—lawyers and administrators—who worked under the direction of the king.
Napoléon sought not only to unify France but to unify Europe around French leadership, which he attempted to do by force. He declared himself emperor of France in 1804, raised an army of 600,000 men, and, from 1804 to 1815, invaded and defeated monarchies across Europe from the German principalities to Portugal in what are known today as the Napoleonic Wars (1804–1815). Defeated in 1814 by an allied army of Austrian, Prussian, Russian, and British troops, Napoléon was banished to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean. Within nine months he had escaped from Elba and secretly returned to France, where he rallied liberals against the restored monarchy. After taking power, Napoléon once again raised a huge army and attempted to establish French hegemony over Europe. Once again he was defeated by a combined Austrian, Prussian, Russian, and British army at Waterloo in 1815. Napoléon was again banished from France, this time to St. Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821.
After Napoléon’s second banishment, the monarchy was restored with constitutional limitations and a parliament. A number of political groups appeared, which fought a seesaw battle for control of the French state. On one side were the Royalists, conservative members of the aristocracy, who fulminated against the French Revolution and sought to reestablish the monarchy and to restore the prerogatives of the Catholic Church. On the opposite side were the Jacobins, or radical liberals, who continued to fight for a secular, egalitarian republic. Numerous moderate groups took positions between these two.
The constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII (r. 1815–1824) and Charles X (r. 1824–1830) was overthrown by Louis Philippe (r. 1830–1848), who reestablished absolutism. In 1848, liberals overthrew the monarchy once again and established France’s Second Republic, which lasted only until 1851. During this short period, France was governed by a popularly elected president and a unicameral parliament. The Second Republic was overthrown in 1851 by Louis Napoléon, the nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte, who established the Second Empire, which he ruled as Napoléon III (r. 1851–1870) until his armies were defeated by the Prussians in 1870.
In the wake of Napoléon III’s defeat, in 1871 liberals established the Third Republic, which lasted until the Germans invaded France in 1940. The Third Republic had a two-house legislature. The Chamber of Deputies was elected by universal male suffrage and the Senate by indirect election by local notables. In liberal fashion, the terms of office were staggered: senators served longer than deputies and their age requirements were higher. The executive was divided between a president and a council of ministers headed by a prime minister. The president appointed all members of the council, including the prime minister, but it was collectively responsible to the legislature. The president was elected by a joint meeting of the two houses of the legislature for a seven-year term of office and was given the power to dissolve the legislature, a traditional monarchical prerogative. This basic format was carried over to the Fourth Republic, which was organized in 1945 and lasted until 1957, when it collapsed under the weight of the Algerian crisis, and to the present Fifth Republic, which was established in 1958 by General Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970).
Summary
In this chapter we have concentrated on the formation of liberal states. Liberalism’s ideas of popular sovereignty were deployed in different ways under different circumstances to transform absolutist states into ones more readily able to resolve the problem of the mutual dependence of sovereign and subject. Liberalism established the conditions under which the property of the bourgeoisie could be protected and expanded while maintaining the state’s ability to organize for war and provide public justice. It is important to recognize that liberalism also created opportunities for critical movements to create a space in which working classes, women, slaves, and religious and racial minorities could organize politically and could claim access to and otherwise challenge state power. The way liberal states have been transformed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be discussed in the next two chapters; its role in the globalization of the European state–system will be discussed in Part 3.
Endnotes
Note 1: On this discursive transformation see John Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). Back.
Note 2: For an interpretation of the American Revolutionary period as moving from a more radical interpretation of popular sovereignty more consistent with Rousseau to one more compatible with a capitalist order and the writings of John Locke, see Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Back.
Note 3: Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 99–101. Back.
Note 4: See Pasquale Pasquino, “Theatrum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital—Police and the State of Prosperity,” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 105–118. Back.
Note 5: See the “Introduction” to E. K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish, eds., Western Liberalism (London: Longman Group, 1978). For the connection between enlightenment ideals and capitalism, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), and for a somewhat different view see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Defenses of Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Back.
Note 6: On the emergence of bourgeois civil society, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Back.
Note 7: For a graphic illustration of how the compelling of belief was central to order in the absolutist state, see Michel Foucault’s recounting of the execution of Damian by the eighteenth-century French state, which comes at the beginning of his book Discipline and Punishment, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977). The state did not simply set out to punish Damian but to put him through an elaborate and tortuous ceremony of public execution in order to exact from him public remorse and a public confession of his sin and renewed religious faith. In the liberal state, on the contrary, punishment and the judicial practices did not set out to compel inward faith through the spectacle of punishment in public. Punishment of criminals, including executions (where they remained legal), became private and were conducted behind closed doors as the liberal state took hold in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the liberal state aimed at disciplining people through the promotion of regimens of normality to prevent people from committing crimes in the first place and by reforming criminals when they do commit crimes. Back.
Note 8: See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). Back.
Note 9: Locke’s argument raised one of the most important issues of seventeenth-century philosophy and politics. The absolutist state compelled the individual subject to believe in those religious and moral principles that the state deemed necessary to impose to keep order. Locke’s argument rendered this practice illegitimate, subordinating the sovereign to the universal principles of reason and morality that guided the individual conscience. If the state could compel neither inward belief, one of the important arguments in the Letter on Toleration, nor blind obedience to the sovereign, what would ensure that people would obey the sovereign, especially if their conscience might tell them that the sovereign was acting immorally and, therefore, should not be obeyed? As Hobbes had earlier argued, subjects might view the sovereign as immoral and illegitimate whenever the sovereign did something that went against their private interests. This question has haunted liberal theory ever since. Locke answered by restricting the principle of toleration to religious believers. Atheists, he said, could not be trusted to act morally and, therefore, the state had to tolerate any religious system in its subjects, but it did not have to tolerate atheism. He argued that reason confirmed the existence of God and that all rational men and women therefore would accept some version of Christianity. This was a position others such as René Descartes (1596–1650) and Blaíse Pascal (1623–1662) had argued more thoroughly. But it represented a belief in the consistency of reason and faith that many liberals during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would reject, whereas others, such as the writers of the U.S. constitution, would continue to accept it. Back.
Note 10: John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, introduced by Patrick Romanell (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), 17. Back.
Note 12: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. I, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 17. Back.
Note 13: Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), 119–125. Back.
Note 14: On the relationship between liberalism and democracy see Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy (London: Verso Press, 1990). See also C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Back.
Note 15: See Macpherson, Life and Times, and David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 16: Stanley Rothman, European Society and Politics (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 314–315. Back.
Note 17: David Judge, The Parliamentary State (London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993). Back.
Note 18: See, for example, Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). Back.
Note 19: Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 243–244. Back.
Note 20: Theodore J. Lowi and Benjamin Ginsberg, American Government: Freedom and Power, 3d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994), 27–30. Back.
Note 24: Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913). Back.
Note 25: Changed to direct popular election by the Seventeenth Amendment. Back.
Note 26: For a reading of the relationship of the Marquis de Sade to republicanism and liberalism, see William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 68–85. Back.
The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics
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