Modern State and Its “Normal” Languages:

History and Other Stories

Gabriella Valera

[English Translation of an essay published in “Utopia e Patologia della libertà,

ed. by Nestore Pirillo, Liguori 2013, pp.241-266]

1. The State as a Paradigm of Modernity

Normal science, the puzzle-solving activity we have just examined, is a highly

cumulative enterprise, eminently successful in its aim, the steady extension of the

scope and precision of scientific knowledge. In all these respects it fits with great

precision the most usual image of scientific work. Yet one standard product of the

scientific enterprise is missing. Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or

theory and, when successful, finds none1.

It is with these words that Thomas Samuel Kuhn, in his renowned work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, introduces a chapter dedicated to “Anomaly

and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries”. Fittingly, in the previous chapter

he considers normal science in its relationship with scientific paradigms, as a

«strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes

supplied by professional education»2. Nevertheless, says Kuhn, this attempt not

only proves useful, perhaps it is even necessary to the progress of research and

science. In fact, «without such boxes, whatever the element of arbitrariness in

their historic origins and, occasionally, in their subsequent development»3,

progress is unlikely to advance. Normal science thus appears to be the aptest

among puzzle-solving activities. Its fascination relies on the fact that «though its

outcome can be anticipated, often in detail so great that what remains to be

known is itself uninteresting, the way to achieve that outcome remains very

much in doubt»4. Therefore normal science does not aim at discovering

unexpected novelties, but rather insists, with cleverness and obstinacy, on

improving the structure of the very paradigm within which problems are set5.

1 Th. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition, Chicago, University of

Chicago Press, 2012 (1st ed. 1962), p. 52. 2 Ibid., p. 5. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 36. 5 Since the first publication of the book, more than once Kuhn has reconsidered and reviewed the

theses expressed in 1962. Nevertheless, for many important authors, these theses never ceased to

provide a stimulating point of departure for further reflections. I will just mention here the

relationship between Foucault and Kuhn, as discussed by H. White, The Content of the Form.

But why, while we introduce a short historic essay on the State as a paradigm of

Modernity, should we refer to Thomas Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions? The answer lies in the afore-mentioned expression. The State, which

is usually qualified as modern6, can be without much hesitation considered as a

paradigm of Modernity, because it represents Modernity in the most comprehensive

meaning the term representation is able to convey. As a paradigm of Modernity,

the State embraces its articulations and antinomies, its splendors and failures. As

a paradigm, for a long time it has been exposed to assaults and criticism7, and yet

no new paradigms were ever able to take its place. A long and uneven process of

stabilization was implemented by normal sciences and disciplinary traditions, in

order to maintain and institutionalize the antinomies that were a distinctive

mark of the reason, which permeated the State. Therefore these antinomies

become evident in the process of accumulation of knowledge, which, far from

being purely contemplative, is at work within the very body and structure of the

State. Furthermore, such process affects those tangible articulations of the

paradigm, which can no longer be represented, because they are far too

anomalous and intricate to provide the space for a possible synthesis.

Accordingly, it seems that the task we must undertake today is to forsake normal

science and put to the test, each by each, the categories, which were discovered,

perfected and polished to serve the construction and confirmation of the

paradigm. Only this way we will be able to trace back the path of stories, which

Narrative, Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1987, p. 59 (on the professionalizing of disciplines and Politics of historical

Interpretation), in which the work of Kuhn is discussed and compared with Foucault’s

reconstructions and theories. 6 In this respect, a reference should be made to the work of P. Schiera, Lo stato moderno: origini e degenerazione, Bologna, CLUEB, 2004. 7 Examples of criticism oriented toward a radical discussion in the relationship between political

rationality and state can be found in G. Marramao, Dopo il Leviatano. Individuo e Comunità nella filosofia politica, Torino, Giappichelli, 1995; R. Esposito, Categorie dell’impolitico, Bologna, il Mulino,

1988; G. Agamben, Stato di eccezione (Homo sacer II, 1), Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. In

particular, Agamben refers to Hannah Arendt’s work in his reflection on human rights, which he

examines through the bio-political perspective of the naked life: G. Agamben, Mezzi senza fine: note sulla politica, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1996. Among other critiques, focusing on current

discussions on constitutionalism, democracy and globalisation, of particular significance are: N.

Urbinati, Ai confini della democrazia. Opportunità e rischi dell’universalismo democratico, Roma,

Donzelli, 2007; N. Urbinati, Democrazia rappresentativa. Sovranità e controllo dei poteri, Roma,

Donzelli, 2010; Sui concetti giuridici e politici della costituzione dell’Europa, ed. by S. Chignola and G.

Duso, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2005; A. Di Martino, Il territorio: dallo stato-nazione alla globalizzazione. Sfide e prospettive dello stato costituzionale aperto, Milano, Giuffré, 2010.

appear not to be as consistent and sharp, as the past and current reconstructions

seem to suggest8.

For example, Pierangelo Schiera draws a linear path in the history of (modern)

State, addressing the three countries (France, England and Germany), which he

considered the most representative among European cases. In an essay written in

1971, and republished in 2004 – which offers the appraisal of an entire lifetime

densely consecrated to the study of State-related issues9 – Schiera frankly

acknowledges the limits of his choice. Nevertheless, he justifies such reduction of

the world to three single countries as a «didactic necessity»: that of focusing and

summarizing the state of an issue, which was already regarded by some as a

redundant topic. In fact,

the new man, produced by the development of capitalism, this man knows that

the connection between nature and history is obscure, though it has its own

reality, which is constructed and suffered through the work and the exploitation

determined by the organization of work. Thus he feels this connection as an

imposture to remove, while all the forms through which the State becomes a

reality of domination must be destroyed.

Schiera agrees with the new man: the state is dissolving. The concept is old, as

old-fashioned is the subject it claims to represent. Its exhumation can appear

anachronistic and immediately assume a conservative meaning. So, it may be

legitimate to move the focus of our scientific interest away from what the State is

today, because it no longer exists «as a unity», «as a centralization».

Nevertheless, «it doesn’t follow that drawing today the history of the State of

yesterday has to be regarded as something illegitimate, useless or conservative».

Historic State, as it arose, developed, and, we might say, died, i.e., the state as a

monopoly of legitimate power, as a sovereignty, as a unity and centralization in the management of public matters, the State as a machine, the State as an organizer, the

State as repression indeed existed. To comprehend the historic state for what it was

8 This essay constitutes an arrival point, and at the same time it stands as the possibility for a new

departure in my research. A working program, with a constant focus on the issues related to the

“modern subject” and its statute, has displaced my research from one discipline to another.

Therefore it forced me to engage strictly disciplinary inquiries (in the fields of historiography, of

the history of political and also juridical disciplines), while I always took into account trans-

disciplinary categories and frameworks, together with the underlying scientific paradigms. Given

the complexity and the variety of the topics I will address, I will be forced to reduce to a

minimum the bibliographical references, while I will often refer to some of my previous works. 9 P. Schiera, Lo stato moderno, cit., in particular, pp. 16-20.

implicitly means to understand it for what it no longer is [italics mine].

The application of Kuhn’s methodology to our field of observation thus appears

today as a highly productive approach.

The questions we place here and to which we would like to give an answer are

the following:

1) Is it possible to understand the paradigm, described by Schiera, of a

declining modernity, as one of the normal reductions achieved by State

historiography and State sciences? In fact, these latter, in the long term,

during and after the Nineteenth century, have organized, included and

excluded the material complexity of modern politics by polishing, and

giving a rational and technical shape to its anomalies.

2) If the normalizations of an outworn paradigm start leaving themselves

vulnerable, what happens to its history, the one we have been recounting

for such a long time? What happens to all other disciplined narratives that

in the past have made the paradigm understandable and practicable?

In particular my purpose is to show that the consolidated form of representation10 of the political world and its relationship with the State overshadowed all the

problematic aspects connected to the modern paradigm. On the one hand, this

representation found its expression within the tradition of the sciences of the

state, a tradition mainly German, but able to give new general functions to a

doctrinaire and practical matter that was overall European. On the other hand,

the various master narratives provided by constitutionalism and the rule of law

implemented the modern paradigm in its different forms. Furthermore, I would

like to point out at the figure of sovereignty, at its rather multiple and complex

public incarnations11. In fact, as the root and essence (if I may say so) of the

modern state, this figure evokes all the antinomies that traverse the whole

10 “To represent”, “representation” are by now terms filled with methodological and conceptual

implications, as they have been in particular the focus of new historicism (the content and

practice of which still remain to be understood) in relation to issues raised by the question of

narration. See H. White, The Content, cit., p. 26 ss.; Representing the English Renaissance, ed. by S.

Greenblatt, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, University of California. 11 For a truly comprehensive and complex synthesis of the different lines of thought intertwining

in European and Western constitutionalism, see M. Fioravanti, Costituzionalismo. Percorsi della storia e tendenze attuali, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2009; on American constitutionalism, see also N.

Urbinati, Individualismo democratico: Emerson, Dewey e la cultura politica americana, Roma, Donzelli,

2007.

history of democracy12. It also encourages a comparative reflection upon the

statute of subjectivity and individuality, within the frame of an ever-difficult

relationship between science and ethics, a relationship that was once mediated by

the juridical discourse, and was later destructively resolved by a philosophy of values.

2. Power and Rights: the Space of the Sovereign

No wonder we should turn now to a crucial text, which in many respects can be

seen as a foundation for modern politics13.

The book at concern here is of course Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in

1651, in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia. Although written during the

exile in France, the text was published at the author’s return to his homeland, i.e.,

when in Cromwell’s England theories on absolutism confronted Stuart regalism.

Hobbes’s construction of a paradigm for modern politics revolves around the

notion of State (the Commonwealth, i.e., “the great Leviathan”). On the one

hand, this construction is the outcome of a set of multiple factors subverting and

re-fashioning the structure and the positions of the forces involved. On the other

hand, it reflects the loss of consistency of the entire cognitive apparatus that used

to sustain “old” politics. In England, as well as elsewhere in Europe – although in

different ways varying from one context to another – it was a whole world that

was put into question: the foundation and the divine origin of a “cosmos” of

values, dignities, functions, hierarchies and positions, within which also politics

and government had their space guaranteed.

12 With implications that go far beyond the French history, see P. Rosanvallon, La démocratie inachevée. Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France, Paris, Gallimard, 2000; La contre-démocratie: la politique à l’âge de la défiance, Paris, Seuil, 2006. 13 See C. Galli, “All’insegna del Leviatano. Saggio introduttivo”, in Th. Hobbes, «Leviatano», It.

transl. by Gianni Micheli, Milano, Rizzoli, 2011. Galli acknowledges the Leviathan as an

extraordinary «work of scientific simplification of politics, removed, in a logical and

argumentative way, from a magmatic complexity, which was previously taken in charge by a

tradition of juridical knowledge represented by Bodin, Grozio, Gentili». The outcome of such

simplification, as we will show, is the unification of rights and powers in a single right and a

single power, which transforms the sovereign subject in an individual. Along my reading of the

Leviathan, paragraph after paragraph, I have been confronting myself with Carlo Galli’s

introductive essay – among the most beautiful pages I have ever read on Thomas Hobbes.

Nevertheless, although I agree with many of his statements, more than my text is likely to reveal

(because it would be impossible to constantly quote his pages), the outcome of my investigation

completely diverges from his conclusions.

An orderly conception of time and space14 was about to crumble, together with

the relationship between sacred and human history it supported.

It was the beginning of that great crisis of the European mind15, to which Samuel

von Pufendorf, as well as Thomas Hobbes, and later Giambattista Vico,

attempted to give an explanation. Although their respective attempts followed

each their own categorical references and offered distinct constructive outcomes,

they all considered man, rather than God, as the maker of the historical world

and its orders16.

As the Introduction to the Leviathan declares:

NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of

man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial

animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some

principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move

themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what

is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so

many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the

Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of

Nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a

14 The dramatic renewal in the perception of space and time seems to be a typical feature of great

crises. In this direction points the evocative suggestion advanced by Ph. Ariès about the trauma

of 1940: «By then history could no longer be a simple object of disinterested knowledge or

oriented speculation. It simply was there, in front of us, and we could no longer escape facing

it… Until that time men were protected by the thickness of their private lives and had no such

tangible feelings of the world of their time. But by now everyone is placed in front of a world and

situated in time. History is the conscience that arises from this dreadful presence» (Ph. Ariès, Il tempo della storia [Le temps de l’histoire, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1986], It. transl. by M. Gerin,

Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1987, p. 214). 15 The reference is to P. Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne. 1680-1715, Paris, Boivin, 1935.

Although quoting the title of Paul Hazard’s book has become a topos in historiography, used to

indicate a whole epoch, even beyond the chronological boundaries marked by the author, we

must keep in mind that the book was written, as many other works, in those years of European

catastrophe, and therefore must be situated in the context of a cultural historiography, which

engaged, looking for their roots, a comparison between different crises in history. 16 Convincing is Vico’s famous statement: «Just as divine truth is what God orders and produces

as He comes to know it, so human truth is what man arranges and makes as he knows it» (G.

Vico, “L’antichissima sapienza degli italici da estrarsi dalle origini della lingua latina” (1710), in

La scienza Nuova e altri scritti di Giambattista Vico, ed. by N. Abbagnano, Torino, UTET, p. 195). On

Vico and Hobbes see G. Valera, “Fra descrizione e norma: Intorno a qualche contributo recente su

diritto naturale, utilità, ragion pratica”, «Materiali per la storia del pensiero giuridico», XXV,

1995, pp. 225-242.

COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial

man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection

and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as

giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of

judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which

fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to

perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth

and riches of all the particular members are the strength; Salus populi (the people's

safety) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are

suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will;

concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and

covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together,

and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the

Creation17.

The text is a model of clarity. The analogy between divine and human artifact is

perfect: nature is not the product of an act of creation, but rather the art that

governs such act; nature is a set of rules according to which the world is created.

Through the elaboration of these rules man is able to create a device, which is

“artificial” as much as the physical world is (i.e., technically produced and

technically controllable – in a meaning close to the Aristotelian notion of art). Such is the great Leviathan, in other words, the body politic, which constitutes

Hobbes’s primary object of interest. In fact, originally the sovereign and the

Leviathan share the same body politic.

But the parallelism between the two artificial worlds is more than a telling

rhetorical construction merely inserted to introduce the book.

On the contrary, it totally pervades the subsequent pages18. In fact, the first part

of the Leviathan is consecrated to the different ways in which knowledge can be

defined (from sense to imagination to reason), and culminates in a synoptic table

where everything is reduced to the two branches of natural philosophy. Defined as

the «consequences from accidents of bodies natural», natural philosophy

17 Th. Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, London, Andrew Crooke, 1651, p. 1. Although for this work the quotations from the Latin edition

of 1668 were not strictly necessary, they might lead to further in-depth analyses. 18 Nor we can refer to the theological sources of Hobbes, rapidly touched by C. Galli (“All’insegna

del Leviatano”, cit.), who considers the two final parts of the Leviathan as an extraordinary

political theology. Instead, we can perhaps remind the reader of the ancient analogy between art

and nature, noted by Foucault in his analysis of the theory of the early modern raison d’état (M.

Foucault, Dits et écrits: 1954-1988, 2: 1970-1975, Paris, Gallimard, 1994), in which he quotes Saint

Thomas’s De regimine principum ad regem principis Cypri: «art in its ambit must imitate what nature

fulfils in its own». Yet, such analogy refers to the government, and does not imply the powerful

act of creation displayed by the “fiat” attributed by Hobbes to both man and God.

includes ethics, poetry, logic, rhetoric, the science of just and unjust, while a rather

small space – even visually – is left to politics or civil philosophy, which deal with

the «consequences from accidents of politic bodies»19. What we do see here is

something more than a solid materialistic conception deriving from an

investigation of the real world. The parallelism between the two sets of rules,

between the two arts, is productive as well as revolutionary, because the

powerful act of creation is equally ascribed to both makers. Hobbes here

addresses the “fiat”, which makes things according to the rules, but then allows

for their existence in a space, on a ground and within a “body”, which all have

their own autonomy (made of time), as well-assembled and almost sovereign

devices: the sovereignty of the body politic is indeed only an articulation of the

whole device. But the crucial point here is that, in front of their artifacts, the two makers, man

and God, are credited with the same fundamental attributes: liberty, and power.

Hobbes contrived the entire Leviathan upon these connections among liberty,

rights, and power.

Even more than the resulting conception of Commonwealth, as a founding

representation of sovereignty, it is this very connection that constitutes not only

the main core of Hobbes’s modernity, but also the origin of modern subjectivity

and its relationship with objectivity.

The book thus unravels a sequence of chapters and paragraphs that aim at

defining power20. For Hobbes, power, «to take it universally», is an attribute of

man as a body: it is «the eminence of the faculties», a means with which man is

provided in the specific time of every single action he effects in order to obtain

some apparent future good. Like in all his arguments, Hobbes proceeds here following a bipartite scheme,

and distinguishes what is natural – speaking of power he uses in an

interchangeable way the terms originall and natural – from what is artificial – but

in this case the specific word he employs is instrumental. The distinction opposes

one technique, which has produced the physical world (God’s creation), to

another that has produced the historical world (the great Leviathan created by

man). The relationship between the two techniques is already represented here

as a scope-oriented rationality, which subsumes within its rules the features of

the modern raison d’état, well before its absorption within the debates of counter-

19 Th. Hobbes, Leviathan, cit., p. 40. 20 Ibid., pp. 41 ss.

reformation politics21. Natural power is indeed «the eminence of the faculties of

body, or mind; as extraordinary strength, form, prudence, arts, eloquence,

liberality, nobility». On the contrary, «instrumental are those powers which,

acquired by these, or by fortune, are means and instruments to acquire more: as

riches, reputation, friends, and the secret working of God, which men call good

luck».

The way in which these goods are assigned to their respective areas of jurisdiction

becomes clear in the following reasoning, where the thick network of social

relations is described as the capability of exercising power, which belongs to

every subject in the life of the community.

Therefore we discover that «to have servants is power; to have friends is power:

for they are strengths united» (i.e., “natural” power to acquire more); «also, riches

joined with liberality is power; because it procureth friends and servants:

without liberality, not so; because in this case they defend not, but expose men to

envy, as a prey».

Reputation of power is power; because it draweth with it the adherence of those

that need protection. […] Nobility is power, not in all places, but only in those

Commonwealths where it has privileges; for in such privileges consisteth their

power. Eloquence is power; because it is seeming prudence. Form is power;

because being a promise of good, it recommendeth men to the favour of women

and strangers. The sciences are small powers; because not eminent, and therefore,

not acknowledged in any man; nor are at all, but in a few, and in them, but of a few things22.

I would now urge the reader to go back to the list quoted above, and to pay

special attention to the words I chose to highlight with italics. In fact, these

different and tangible forms, taken by power in common life, are likely to reveal

two fundamental features of the systematic description of power undertaken by

Hobbes in his work. On the one hand, we can notice an emphasis on the fact that

the good, towards which the power tends, is an apparent Good, while nothing

reminds us of the distinction between apparent goods (fallacious and morally

subordinated) and True good (ethically relevant). An apparent Good is a good

that we recognize as such and only because we recognize it as such it

21 On the different aspects of the raison d’état, see G. Borrelli, Ragion di Stato e leviatano: conservazione e scambio alle origini della modernità politica, Bologna, il Mulino, 1993; M. Stolleis, Staat und Staaträson in der Neuzeit. Studien zur Geschichte des Öffentliches Rechts, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,

1990; M. Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State. The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250-1600, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 22 Th. Hobbes, Leviathan, cit., p. 41.

incorporates Power. On the other hand, this incorporation occurs within a

dynamics between present (Present means) and future (Future apparent Good),

an aspect, which proves fundamental in the entire work of Hobbes – we may just

mention here the definitions he provided for the state of war and the state of

peace, which both require a consistent time-space for their deployment23.

At this point, we can highlight an important element of our reasoning: the

reality/quality of the power attributed to the (modern) subject24 is expressed in

the form of a comparative relationship, which can be represented in terms of

values. Value, as a relationship-wise device generating power, informs the vast

and complex pattern regulating the status of every single person, in reference to

the natural body as well as to the body politic.

But let us read further Hobbes’s text.

«The value or worth of a man is, as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so

much as would be given for the use of his power, and therefore is not absolute,

but a thing dependent on the need and judgement of another». «Not the seller,

but the buyer determines the price»25. Power (i.e., all the “capabilities” – if we can

use this present-day term, which nonetheless has undeniable ancestry in the texts

of the epoch)26 is here a consumer good, and its value is determined by the need

of someone who is lacking such power. Therefore the consumer good

23 Ibid., p. 63. 24 References to statutes and their changing hierarchies can also be found in the Leviathan: «Titles

of honour, such as are duke, count, marquis, and baron, are honourable; as signifying the value

set upon them by the sovereign power of the Commonwealth: which titles were in old time titles

of office and command derived some from the Romans, some from the Germans and French. […]

In process of time these offices of honour, by occasion of trouble, and for reasons of good and

peaceable government, were turned into mere titles, serving, for the most part, to distinguish the

precedence, place, and order of subjects in the Commonwealth: and men were made dukes,

counts, marquises, and barons of places, wherein they had neither possession nor command, and

other titles also were devised to the same end» (Ibid., p. 46). 25 Ibid., p. 42. 26 About contemporary definitions of rights as capabilities (understood in the various terms of

identities of social actors stabilized through recognition), see M. C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities. The Human Development Approach, © M. C. Nussbaum, 2011; A. Sen, L’idea di Giustizia

[The Idea of Justice, London, Penguin Books, 2009], It. transl. by L. Vanni, Milano, Mondadori,

2010, third part, pp. 235 ss.; Measuring Justice. Primary Goods and Capabilities, ed. by H. Brighouse

and I. Robeyns, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010. However, it must be noted that

the term and the notion, although deeply revisited, have a significant origin in the concept of

juridical capability as constitutive of the subject; see, e.g., the controversial notion of Rechtsfähigkeit in

C. Fr. von Savigny, System des heutigen römischen Rechts, Berlin, Veit und Comp., 1840, II, § 89, pp.

275 and 277.

automatically converts in a form of power. If someone standing in front of me

needs my power, my value will represent my power and will be signified by

forms of honor, dignity, and public praise. Likewise, thanks to these

instrumental powers, the natural power of the subject who is entitled to them

(«Eminence of the Faculties of the Body or Mind») is increased in the form of

honoring and/or obeying: «to obey is to honour; because no man obeys them

who they think have no power to help or hurt them»27. But, as Hobbes adds, also

«to love and to fear is to value» (please note the constant interchange between

power and value). In fact, as the thinker continues

The manifestation of the value we set on one another is that which is commonly

called honouring and dishonouring. To value a man at a high rate is to honour

him; at a low rate is to dishonour him. But high and low, in this case, is to be

understood by comparison to the rate that each man setteth on himself. The public

worth of a man, which is the value set on him by the Commonwealth, is that

which men commonly call dignity. […] Honourable is whatsoever possession,

action, or quality is an argument and sign of power. And therefore to be honoured,

loved, or feared of many is honourable, as arguments of power. To be honoured of

few or none, dishonourable. Dominion and victory is honourable because acquired

by power; and servitude, for need or fear, is dishonourable28.

After its argumentative construction, Hobbes sets his systematic description of

power against the backdrop of history. This way he urges our understanding, in

all its complexity, of a society of unequal subjects, in which juridical, economical,

political and cultural factors intertwine in a disciplinary undifferentiated way. The

modes of action of these factors can be described and, as we will se, is indeed

presented by Hobbes, by means of a spatial metaphor, which can be reproduced

at different quantitative scales.

The nature of power, in fact, is «like to fame, increasing as it proceeds; or like the

motion of heavy bodies, which, the further they go, make still the more haste»29.

This movement, which in the pattern of relations is determined in space as in

time, provides also a definition for felicity:

the felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no

such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of

in the books of the old moral philosophers. [...] Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another [please note the spatial determination indicated by

27 Th. Hobbes, Leviathan, cit., p. 42. 28 Ibid., pp. 42-44. 29 Ibid., p. 41.

the line of movement leading from one object to another], the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter [note here the argumentative resemblance with the

connection between natural and instrumental power, eventually leading to the

increase of any power in itself]. The cause whereof is that the object of man’s

desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time, but to assure forever

the way of his future desire [note the connection between present and future]30.

Therefore, Hobbes concludes, «in the first place, I put for a general inclination of

all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only

in death»31.

Then, a change occurs, in the shift from the (dutiful) pursuit of the highest good

to the (natural) search for felicity and to its materialization through power. And

this change gives new functions to a whole set of roles and relations, which place

the ancien régime society, particularly that of mid-Seventeenth century England,

within a frame in which the establishment of a modern subjectivity relies on the

relationships among power, law and liberty.

In the first part of the Leviathan, which is dedicated to man (“Of Man”), Hobbes

analyses the inequalities in the diverse expressions of power, while he objectifies,

describes, and defines the scientific criteria of such analysis.

At this juncture, in the second part of the book entitled “Of Commonwealth”, a

daring step will lead Hobbes to the explanation of the origin of the Leviathan, «of

the causes, generation, and definition of Commonwealth”, on the strength of a

presentation of the laws of nature, which he had already announced in the last

chapter of the section “Of Man”.

Thus, in the systematic description of power undertaken by Hobbes, there is a

constant reference to the network of all possible social inequalities. These

inequalities must be evaluated through the fourfold scheme articulated by the

connections among power-need-value-power. Natural laws instead abide by a

system, which establishes a radical opposition between two extreme poles. On

one side, stands the state of nature, characterized by the absolute equality of

men; on the other side, the political state is dramatically represented by the

inequality, which knows no mediation, between the subject, qualified by need,

and the sovereign, qualified by power.

Again, we must closely follow the words of Hobbes.

30 Ibid., p. 47 (italics mine). 31 Ibid. (italics mine).

Chapter XIII is dedicated to «the natural condition of mankind, as concerning

their felicity and misery». Hobbes writes:

NATURE hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that,

though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of

quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference

between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim

to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he32.

The equality Hobbes here represents is a matter of strengths of the body and

mind: because strength is power, natural equality is equality of power. Any man

can exercise such power towards any other man, and because the equality of

power allows him to “claim” benefits (claim technically is a juridical term), it can

be seen as an equality of rights. In this very condition of equality of rights the

permanent state of war finds its true origin. Natural state of war is thus the

consequence of the contradiction between the equality of powers/rights (tending to

a possible felicity) and the pursuit of felicity (implemented through the

exercise/increase of natural and instrumental powers). In this contradiction lies

the principle that governs the whole system of social inequalities.

Therefore the introduction to the egalitarian scheme of the state of nature does

not escape the contradiction with the very nature of man. In the next scene of this

ongoing drama, entitled by Hobbes Bellum omnium contra omnes, come into play

three leading characters: jus, liberty and law, each provided with an objective

definition relying once more on a spatial metaphor. Hobbes writes:

The right of nature, which writers commonly call jus naturale, is the liberty each man

hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature;

that is to say, of his own life; and consequently, of doing anything which, in his

own judgement and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto33.

«In such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another’s

body»34, as Hobbes will underline in another chapter, in which the distinction

between right and law will be introduced35.

32 Ibid., p. 60. 33 Ibid., p. 64. 34 Ibid. 35 This aspect becomes particularly relevant, when we consider that the prerogative of a right

over the people will prove essential to a “coercive” conception of the state (right of coercion,

legitimate use of force). See for example J. Darjes, Institutiones iurisprudentiae in quibus omnia juris

The right, for every man, to exercise his own power, coherently with the

characteristics and needs of his natural status, tends to be unlimited. However, it

must be noted, it is not irresistible. In fact, every man is constrained within a space of liberty, which constitutes his objective condition. The «preservation of his own

nature», i.e., of life with all its characteristics, coincides with the minimum space

to which a man can be reduced by another man. This other man, as powerful as

he might be, will always find a legitimate resistance in the threshold of such

space.

Moreover, Hobbes says:

By liberty is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the

absence of external impediments; which impediments may oft take away part of a man's power to do what he would, but cannot hinder him from using the power left him

according as his judgement and reason shall dictate to him36.

In another context, Hobbes further argues that:

Liberty, or freedom, signifieth properly the absence of opposition (by opposition, I

mean external impediments of motion); and may be applied no less to irrational and

inanimate creatures than to rational. For whatsoever is so tied, or environed, as it

cannot move but within a certain space, which space is determined by the opposition of some external body, we say it hath not liberty to go further. And so of all living

creatures, whilst they are imprisoned, or restrained with walls or chains; and of

the water whilst it is kept in by banks or vessels that otherwise would spread itself

into a larger space; we use to say they are not at liberty to move in such manner as

without those external impediments they would. […] And according to this proper

naturae socialis et gentium capita explanatur, Jenae, 1751, p. 83: «the status, according to which a

person is entitled to a perfect affirmative right over another person, is called society». Such state

allows the cancellation of liberty and stands as the characteristic condition of the civitas: «every

civitas is a status in which a person is entitled to a perfect affirmative right over other persons»

(Ibid., p. 85). According to C. S. Zachariae (Grundlinien einer wissenschaftlichen juristischen Enzyclopaedie, Leipzig, 1795, p. 20), the perfect right, the strict right, the coercive right «is the

moral faculty to use others as pure means, i.e., in other words, the moral faculty to compel other

persons» (translations mine). On the complex history of the formation of a “coercive right” as the

overall essence of right, see G. Valera, “Dalla scienza generale alla enciclopedia: l’enciclopedia

giuridica in Germania durante la seconda metà del Settecento”, Il diritto e le scienze sociali nell’Enciclopedia giuridica italiana, ed. by A. Mazzacane and P. Schiera, Bologna, il Mulino, 1990,

pp. 67-118, in particular see p. 106 ss.; G. Valera, “Profili giuridici della felicità”, La felicità è un’idea nuova in Europa. Contributo al lessico della rivoluzione francese, ed. by C. Vetter, Trieste, EUT,

2005, I, pp. 80-100. 36 Th. Hobbes, Leviathan, cit., p. 64.

and generally received meaning of the word, a freeman is he that, in those things

which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to37.

Thus the jus is a subjective power, the capability of the subject of doing something

without the hindrance of objective conditions that would oppose his actions.

Liberty instead is an objective condition determined by the absence of obstacles.

In the quoted passages the paradigm emerges with clarity: the right (jus naturae), to which the subject is entitled, is exercised as a power within an objective space,

in which he has the faculty of free movement. According to the reasoning

previously made by Hobbes about power and felicity, every subject tends to

enlarge such space in his own favor, while restricting the residual space of liberty

(absence of oppositions) of another man.

Space is a fundamental device in the systematic connections Hobbes traces

among right/power/liberty: opening up, closing up, space measures the

equalities and inequalities triggered by needs, strengths, and values. The system

of strengths expressed by the relationship liberty, right, power thus defines the

opposition “external/internal”, as a logic necessity, intrinsic to the spatial

metaphor and to its “physical” concreteness. This opposition is filled with

consequences in the formation of Western conscience: from the disciplinary

organization of the relationship between right and ethics38, to the aspects – even

technical – of codification of international law39, to the issues inherent to the

processes of colonization and decolonization, culturalization and interculturality.

The jus/power “paradigm”, in other words, includes the constitutive elements of

the modern subject, its spheres of action and the relationship it establishes with

37 Ibid., pp. 107-108. 38 This aspect is connected with the complex issues engaging the definition of the relationship

between public and private, and the reorganization of the system of practical philosophy.

Addressing rather different contexts, I have dealt with these issues in many essays. Concerning

the first aspect, I will just mention: G. Valera, “Il repubblicanesimo di area kantiana e il

linguaggio giuridico-costituzionale tedesco”, «Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica»,

2000, XXX, pp, 31-72; G. Valera, “Regole vs. metodo vs. scienza: la ‘professione’ fra impegno

tecnico e sapere scientifico”, La forma della libertà: Categorie della razionalizzazione e storiografia, ed.

by G.Valera, London, Lothian Foundation Press, 2000. On the transformations of practical

philosophy, see G. Valera, “Il potere, la scienza, la legge. La politica moderna fra virtù e ragione”,

in «Filosofia politica», XIX, 2005, 2, pp. 243-252. 39 A. Di Martino, Il territorio, cit.

its own interiority and exteriority. It also includes, even if it is not yet or not fully

expressed in the work of Hobbes – but with implications already entailed by this

paradigm – the relationship of the subject with identity and alterity. The

fundamental feature of this modern subject, as we will soon illustrate, consists in

being inseparably individual and sovereign. Such feature, in fact, applies to three

distinct levels of man, Commonwealth and God.

Of man we have already spoken. His space can be dilated or reduce up to the

minimum, which proves necessary for the preservation of life. In his space, man

exercises an irresistible right: it is an undivided space, which is not tangible, until

we reach its boundary – either real or metaphorical, but in both cases well

determined in juridical life. This boundary marks the beginning of another space,

open to the movement of another subject, holder of its own jus. But shifts

happen, as this limit is exposed to the game of strengths and to man’s pursuit of

felicity (i.e., towards an increasingly higher measure of power). Someone gives

his own right up, however

to lay down a man's right to anything is to divest himself of the liberty of hindering

another of the benefit of his own right to the same. For he that renounceth or

passeth away his right giveth not to any other man a right which he had not

before, because there is nothing to which every man had not right by nature, but

only standeth out of his way [note the materiality of the gesture of liberating space

for action] that he may enjoy his own original right without hindrance from him,

not without hindrance from another40.

On the extreme opposite stands God’s jus naturae, which is irresistible without

any hindrance. Man is powerful, and exercises power in variable measures. God is

omnipotent. The objective conditions determined by the varying geometries of

liberty define the subjective quality of man’s individual right; on the contrary,

God knows no limits, neither given by objective conditions nor by spaces of

power, which might be alternative to his own.

However, the internal rule of the spatial metaphor never ceases to function.

While speaking of atheists and of those who do not recognize the power of God,

Hobbes argues that they are not mere sinners, but rather enemies: they are out of God’s kingdom, they are excluded41.

40 Th. Hobbes, Leviathan, cit., p. 65. 41 Ibid., pp. 186-187.

The paradigmatic character of power, which, as we said, works at different scales

in qualitatively similar ways, is thus confirmed: it works as a jus in a unified

space, undivided/individuum; it is perpetually involved in the bellum omnia contra omnes; it even counts at the level of infinite divine omnipotence.

At an intermediate level between man and God, finds place the great Leviathan,

«that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and

defence»42.

At this point, it is necessary to clarify the way in which the Commonwealth

participates in this systematic configuration of power that is inscribed within the

objective conditions of a space (sphere of liberty), which in turn is subjectively

constructed as a status (jus, i.e., the juridical statute of the subject). In other

words, our task is to understand how the Commonwealth fits the paradigm of

modern subjectivity we are describing43.

Chapter XVII of the Leviathan: of the causes, generation, and definition of a state.

On closer inspection, at this juncture of his discourse, Hobbes resumes the

fourfold scheme (power/right-need-value-power), which above we have seen at

work in his treatise dedicated to the definition of natural and instrumental

powers. The rights/powers to which all men are entitled are naturally equal only

in strength of the hypostatization of a logic model. In fact, this model is instantly

contradicted in the real world by the “passion” for felicity and the pursuit of

greater powers. The state of war is not a state of equals, it is rather the result of

an extreme inequality triggered by the tension between need and power.

Reciprocal confrontation and mutual competition elaborate such tension and

establish the hierarchy of values/powers/social rights: in other words, the

hierarchy of statuses.

42 Ibid., p. 87. 43 Status is a rather complex notion, which in three centuries (XVII-XVIII-XIX) of scientific

production acquired multiple and various meanings. For a general overview, see G. Valera,

“Regole”, cit.; G. Valera, “Percorsi”, cit.; G. Valera, “Zwang und Gewalt: diritto e storia nella

dottrina dei diritti pubblici soggettivi di G. Jellinek”, Saperi della borghesia e storia dei concetti fra Otto e Novecento, ed. by R. Gherardi and G., Bologna, il Mulino, pp. 53-119, with further

bibliographical references. Also, see M. Ricciardi, Status. Genealogia di un concetto giuridico,

Milano, Giuffré, 2008.

Again, helpful and worthy appears a close reading of Hobbes’s text (and, as

above, in quotations emphasis will be added to indicate the keywords of the

discourse, which prove relevant to the purpose of our analysis).

Men love liberty, the objective condition in which their movement in the physical

and moral space is not hindered by any obstacle. However, spaces of liberty are

constantly fashioned and re-shaped up to their vital minimum: to the power of

some men corresponds the need of others. As a result, what follows is the

common decision to introduce «that restraint upon themselves, in which we see

them live in Commonwealths», in «the foresight of their own preservation, and

of a more contented life thereby»44.

Such restriction of the spaces of liberty is guaranteed by a «visible power»

committing men to the observance of the laws of nature.

The visibility of power is an essential requirement. In fact, in the condition of

inequality – described by the fourfold scheme power/rights-need-value-power –

competition entails, within a complex plot of recognitions and subjections, the

quantification of the forces contending for spaces of power.

Therefore if the superiority of this power is not established in a visible way, it is

«not great enough for our security». In this case «every man will and may lawfully rely on his own strength and art for caution against all other men»:

The multitude sufficient to confide in for our security is not determined by any certain number, but by comparison with the enemy we fear; and is then sufficient when the odds of the enemy is not of so visible and conspicuous moment to determine the

event of war, as to move him to attempt45.

Competition, reciprocal comparison, attribution of honors and thus of power on

the basis of what is visible (or shown) are the very distinctive features that set

men apart from those animals, which are said to live naturally in society.

Men do not live naturally in society, they need a juridical pact, which must be

guaranteed by a common power, «able to defend them from the invasion of

foreigners, and the injuries of one another».

The only way in which such result can be achieved is

44 Th. Hobbes, Leviathan, cit., p. 85. 45 Ibid., p. 86.

to confer all their power [and by now we know this is the same as to confer all their

rights] and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce

all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will: which is as much as to say, to

appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person; and every one to own

and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their

person shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concern the common

peace and safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their

judgements to his judgement. This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man46.

«This is the generation of that great Leviathan […] of that mortal god», which by

terror «is enabled to form the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid

against their enemies abroad».

State can therefore be defined as

one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another,

have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength

and means of them all as he shall think expedient for their peace and common

defence. And he that carryeth this person is called sovereign, and said to have

sovereign power; and every one besides, his subject47.

In the first passage of his argumentation, Hobbes refers to a “restriction”, in the

exercise of right/power, up to the limits marked by the preservation of life. In

other words, what is at stake here is the restriction of the status, of what jurists

and moralists of the time used to call the moral space, or, as we will later

illustrate, the juridical statute.

As we have seen, quitclaiming the exercise of one’s own right does not lead to

the creation of a new right, which would be capable to compete with other

existing rights. It is rather a “standing out of the way”, a withdrawing resistance.

Once the spaces of liberty of the particulars have been restricted to their pure

survival, the whole space of power is unified and occupied by the

Commonwealth and its expanding right. The state here is the spatial metaphor

within which and through which the new subject is constructed: as a sovereign

and an individual, it is likely to bear the name of “Commonwealth” and assume

the characteristics of the Leviathan. It does not matter whether it is represented

by a single or an assembly, what counts is the particulars’ commitment, sealed by

reciprocal covenants, to recognize themselves as the authors of its actions.

46 Ibid., p. 87. 47 Ibid., p. 88.

Therefore, what allows the reproduction of the paradigm is the hypostatization

of the Commonwealth as an individual and sovereign subject, i.e., as the holder

of a juridical capability, credited with the exercise of an unlimited power within

its area of jurisdiction. This unified space, in which such power deploys,

supplants the spaces of the particulars, which themselves are equally

circumscribed, undivided and in a certain way sovereign in an extant or latent

state of war48. The state is a “person” because the person is precisely a juridical

figure, indeed qualified by a status (a moral space or a juridical sphere,

depending on the variable terms employed at the time).

What we do see here is the fulfillment of the paradigm, the functions of which

we have already illustrated as a far as they concerned the jus naturae – exercised

by single men within the objective boundaries of a well defined space of liberty –

as well as they gave account for God’s jus naturae.

Within the unlimited space of the kingdom of God, the divine jus/power is

irresistible, sovereign and undivided. Only enemies are left out of its hypostasis.

Similarly, in the state of nature, irresistible, sovereign and undivided is also the

jus/power of man, at least up to the threshold in which it encounters the

hindrance and the resistance of the other. The other, in turn – precisely because it

is excluded in an external space – becomes an enemy, always willing to assault in

order to enlarge its area of jurisdiction. Finally, irresistible, sovereign and

undivided is the power of the Commonwealth or Leviathan, within the unified

space of the state, and up to the limits set by external enemies.

Indivisibility, identity (as opposed to the alterity of what lies in the outside) and

irresistibility are the common features shared by the different figures of

subjectivity. These were the figures Hobbes chose to draw in his impressive

effort to reconstruct on scientific bases the cosmos, which the crisis of the European mind had broken into pieces.

The real effect of secularization that this view will enact on the historical world

and its figures of power will be briefly discussed below.

By now we can definitely acknowledge that while in Hobbes the definition of

sovereignty provides the crucial juncture in the construction of modern state, the

sovereign also functions a figure of the subject, in so far as it provides a figure for

48 The constant reference Hobbes makes in the Leviathan to physical space, meanwhile he points at

a unified moral space, ultimately does not diverge from the physical conception of space he will

express in 1655 in his De corpore. See F. Toto, “L’individualità dei corpi”, «Consecutio

temporum», www.consecutiotemporum.org, 2011.

the indivisibility/identity of the individual.

The modern subject inseparably bears the attributes of individuality and

sovereignty and we may say that the State (similarly to the status) functions as a

(spatial) metaphor, within which and through which modern subjectivity is

shaped and constructed. Ultimately, the “space of the sovereign”, which has

been the focus of this close reading of Hobbes’s text, is the space of the

individual, understood as the principal target for the action of modern political

culture.