The State as Frankenstein

In his essay A Genealogy of the Modern State, historian Quentin Skinner outlines the formation of the concept of the state as it emerges in Anglo-political thought. Quotations from myriad English translations of thinkers over the centuries, from Bodin, to Machiavelli, to Hobbes, to Blackstone, conceive the state as a persona ficta, complete with a human body, the health and status of which is paramount.

The obvious example is in Hobbes. He paints it as Leviathan, “which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended”. The frontispiece on that book displays an illustration of a giant man composed of individual men.



This kind of imagery was the personification of the corpus politicum, the “body politic”, as it reigned in medieval political thought.

Given the conception as the state as a person, it became easier for those in power to afford their State sovereignty and natural rights, the likes of which any real person could only ever dream.

The States of Nature

The idea isn’t entirely outmoded, though. Terms such as “head of state”, “body politic”, “corporation”, are found in modern language today, all employing the metaphor of the corpus in order to represent a multitude of people as one complete being.

As strange as this conception may seem today, those in power still employ a Westphalian system in international affairs. The United Nations, for instance, is based explicitly on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members. These members are, of course, States.

Through membership in organizations such as the United Nations, those in power get together and afford each other the natural rights that would make a lowly anarchist seethe with envy. Perhaps ironically, that dreaded State of Nature Hobbes so feared is regnant on the international stage, based as it is on his conception as the state as a person.

Each state is an equal member in the organization. The state is not represented by some other body, nor is it coerced by some over-arching compulsory judicial system like us subjects, but represents itself and decides on its own affairs within its own dominion. States must “consent to be bound” by any treaty, and are therefor afforded voluntary rather than coercive cooperation among its fellow members, without any positive legal obligations. Each state is afforded dominion over its own territory without interference by any other members—and should any other state interfere, the members get together and seek peaceful resolutions rather than violent ones.

In any case, even with the absence of a world government and the conception of the state as rights-holding individual, the bellum omnium contra omnes seems non-existent in this space. Through the application of equal rights, individual sovereignty, and voluntary cooperation, it appears a viable model of anarchy has arisen to govern states themselves.

The Anarchy of Nations

One has to wonder, why does this State of Nature seem to work on such a grand scale, and with such non-entities, but is refused on the smaller scale and with real, living, flesh-and-blood human beings? Why is it rugged individualism for the powerful and the collective, but a paternal collectivism for the powerless and the individual?