jurisdiction, and as long as the principal political agent was not the individual citizen but the bearer of some jurisdictional authority – a feudal lord, perhaps, or some corporate entity endowed with legal rights and liberties – there was no obvious connection between individual rights and limitations on the state, nor, indeed, any need to demonstrate by systematic argument that individual rights do not preclude almost unlimited civil power.
A monarch might, for instance, invoke a doctrine of consent, based on rights, to buttress his own authority against the claims of popes or emperors. What may look to us like a paradox seemed to medieval thinkers not so paradoxical. The creation of the body politic was quite distinct from the conditions of rule. The idea that civil authority is constituted by the ‘people’ (typically conceived as a corporate body) was perfectly consistent with the view that such authority was almost unconditional – not least because the right of resistance to illegitimate authority, if it existed at all, was typically vested not in individual citizens but in jurisdictional authorities. Even in the ‘early modern’ period, there would continue to be doctrines of resistance in which the right to resist civil authority was not a right of private individuals or citizens but an attribute of office, the authority of one jurisdiction pitted against another.
A right of private property might be emphatically acknowledged; but even that right was conceived in the context of competing jurisdictions, typically to assert lordly autonomy or to mark out a domain of private power, the power of the head of the household over his family and possessions, or perhaps the remnant of jurisdictional authority construed as a right of dominium, against some higher imperium.
If the universal possession of natural rights and natural liberty did not guarantee universal entitlements to full political rights, much the same can be said about notions of natural equality. It is, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, a striking characteristic of Western political thought throughout much of its history that ideas of natural equality among men did not rule out the unequal distribution of political rights; and elaborate arguments have been constructed to legitimate relationships of rule and domination among naturally equal men. Men might all be equal under God or natural law, but some might be entitled to rule others nonetheless. The determinants of property and class could trump all natural equalities.
It has even been possible for political thinkers to go some distance in conceding the equality of women, while taking for granted their complete exclusion from the political domain – for example, on the grounds of their child-bearing functions or men’s monopoly of coercive force. Few thinkers exceed Thomas Hobbes in acknowledging the natural equality of men and women, just as few go beyond him in insisting on natural equality among all men; yet none of these concessions to equality pose any obstacles to his convictions on the legitimacy of absolutist rule. Nor is John Locke inhibited in his views on the unequal distribution of political rights among men by his belief in their natural equality, or the total exclusion of women from politics by his denial that God decreed the subjection of Eve to Adam or women to men.
The compatibility of natural equality with political inequality would remain a persistent theme in Western political thought. But the emergence of a sovereign state in which the contest among jurisdictions ceased to play a central role undoubtedly created, as we shall see, conditions for new conceptions of ‘natural right’; and, in that respect, the rise of sovereign territorial states clearly had a bearing on the development of Western political theory. Yet the differences among the European states were no less decisive in shaping ‘traditions of discourse’. If we look beyond the most formal characteristics of a centralized state, the ‘material’ conditions in the two cases identified by Skinner as the sources of ‘modern’ ideas of the state look very different. It is not unreasonable to identify those cases as, in one way or another, emblematic of the ‘modern’ state, in theory and in practice; and, largely for that reason, the chapters devoted here to England and France will be longer than the others. But, even if we ignore the fact that it was England more than France that first experienced a centralization of the state unencumbered by ‘parcellized sovereignty’, while French absolutism even at its height remained in constant tension with various competing jurisdictions, their patterns of political and economic development are strikingly divergent.
This is not to deny that France and England shared a common intellectual legacy and, indeed, important material roots traceable at least to imperial Rome, its mode of imperial rule and its system of property. Nor is it to deny that their national histories were always inextricably intertwined, by virtue of proximity, shifting territorial boundaries, war, trade, commercial rivalries, and even recurrent alliances. But the historical moment we are exploring here – the moment of rising territorial states and national economies – is precisely the period of diverging national histories, with their distinctive patterns of development.
As we shall see in what follows, the national differences we have already observed had fundamental implications for the development of political thought. When, for instance, French political theory, especially in the person of Jean Bodin, clearly and systematically articulated a ‘modern’ conception of state sovereignty, it was not because the French had already established one clear and undisputed centre of political authority but, on the contrary, because the centralizing power was still contending with competing jurisdictions. Bodin’s political theory, in other words, reflected not the reality of undivided sovereignty in France but its absence. He was proposing his idea of a single, indivisible and absolute power in order to support the king’s claims to authority over the nobility and other autonomous powers, at a time, during the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, when the monarchy was being challenged by rebellion and radical ideas about the right of resistance.
Those ideas of resistance were themselves deeply rooted in the persistent tension between the central state and the remnants of parcellized sovereignty. When the French monarchomachs insisted on the people’s rights of resistance to the monarchy, the people they had in mind were not private citizens. They were corporate bodies, provincial aristocrats and local magistrates, who claimed a right of resistance in their capacity as office-holders. The main resistance tracts – which will be discussed in a subsequent chapter – were expressing the interests of local aristocracies and various corporate entities. When they invoked some kind of popular sovereignty, they did so as officers asserting their jurisdictional rights against the central state; and, when the absolutist monarchy invoked the concept of state sovereignty against them, it was professing to represent a more general interest, as opposed to the particularities of these fragmented jurisdictions. It claimed to be acting on behalf of a more universal corporation than the particularistic corporate bodies that were challenging its sovereignty. Even as late as the eighteenth century, when revolutionaries challenged the existing hierarchy of corporate power and privilege, they purported to act on behalf of the corporate ‘nation’. The concept of equality that has figured so prominently in French political discourse and the revolutionary tradition owes much to the Third Estate’s struggles over corporate privilege and its battle for access to office, ‘careers open to talent’.
In England, where there was no such fundamental conflict of jurisdiction between the monarchy and ruling classes, there was no strategic need to assert the power of one against the other with a clear idea of indivisible sovereignty. In fact, the English tended to avoid the issue of sovereignty altogether (a thinker like Thomas Hobbes was one striking exception, and even he formulated an idea of sovereignty significantly different from the French). The idea of a ‘mixed constitution’ – anathema to Jean Bodin – conformed very nicely to English conditions and the interests of the ruling class. The partnership between Crown and Parliament had created a delicate balance which neither side was anxious to upset by claiming ultimate authority. Even when the conflicts between them came to a head, as the king threatened the partnership with Parliament, parliamentarians were very slow to invoke their own sovereignty as representatives of the people. To assert the sovereignty of Parliament against the king and on behalf of the people threatened to unleash more dangerous claims to popular sovereignty from the truly radical forces mobilized by the Revolution, without the protection of intermediate powers between Parliament and people. A degree of vagueness seemed prudent even among republican elements
