1

How we acquired the concept of the state (and what concept(s) we

acquired)

Quentin Skinner
University of Cambridge

I
When we talk nowadays about the state, we are usually referring to the bearer of
sovereignty over some determinate territory. But this is not how the term state and its
equivalents were originally employed in political argument. My main purpose in
what follows will be to try to show how the application of the term evolved in such a
way that it eventually came to express the concept of political supremacy. As we
shall see, this process was essentially complete by the end of the seventeenth century.
The outcome, however, was far from being an agreed concept of the sovereign state.
There remained a great deal of discussion and confusion as to what agency should be
regarded as the bearer of sovereignty, and hence as the agency that can in turn be
identified as the state. It is arguable, moreover, that these confusions have continued
to bedevil a great deal of current debate about the nature of state sovereignty. My
hope is that, by tracing (albeit very briefly) the genealogy of the concept of the state,
it may be possible to reveal how these confusions arose, and thereby to provide us,
perhaps, with a means of dissipating them.

II
The first way in which we find the term state and its equivalents (lo stato, letat etc.)
employed in political contexts is to refer to the status or standing of rulers
themselves. 1 When their status was discussed, it was generally with the aim of

In this first part of my argument I draw some details from Skinner 2002a.

stressing that it ought to be a state of majesty, a high estate, a condition of stateliness.

In France and England we first regularly come upon these formulae in chronicles and
official documents in the latter half of the fourteenth century. The same formulae can
be found even earlier in Italy, where the use of the term lo stato to denote the political
standing of rulers, together with the discussion of how they should behave if they
wish mantenere lo stato, can be traced in numerous advice-books from the duecento
onwards. By the time we reach Machiavellis Il principe of 1513, the question of
what rulers should do to maintain their princely state had become the chief topic of
debate. Machiavellis advice is almost entirely directed at new princes who wish
mantenere lo stato, to uphold their positions in whatever territories they may have
inherited or acquired. 2
There was a further way in which the term state and its equivalents was
regularly employed in political contexts from an early period. This was to refer to the
general state or estate of kingdoms and communities. The earliest advice-books for
elected magistrates in the Italian communes already refer to the status or stato of the
people as a whole. 3 So do the earliest humanist political treatises of Renaissance
England. Thomas Starkey, for example, in his Dialogue of the 1530s describes how
everyone lives together under the same governance and state, 4 while John Ponet in
his Short Treatise of Politic Power of 1556 contrasts the behaviour of an evil persone
comyng to the governement of any state with a good ruler who will recognise that he
has been to suche office called for his vertue, to see the whole state well governed. 5
When these writers speak of the general state or condition of the people, they
often make clear that they have in mind the different social states or estates in which
they live.

This in turn means that, when describing the meetings at which

representatives of the people came together, these writers often characterise such
assemblies as meetings of the principal states or estates of the realm. In France these
assemblies came to be known as the tats generaux, the States or Estates General,

Machiavelli 1960, pp. 16, 19, 22, 25-6, 27, 28, 35, et passim.
Oculus Pastoralis 1966, pp. 26, 27; 28 et passim; Viterbo 1901, pp. 230, 231, 232 et passim.
4
Starkey 1948, p. 71.
5
[Ponet] 1556, Sig. G, 1v.
2
3

while in England they came to be described as meetings of the three Estates, that is,
the nobility, the clergy and the representatives of the people at large.
As these usages already suggest, the principal concern of those who wrote
about the state or standing of kingdoms and communities was to insist that their rulers
have a duty to maintain them in a good or prosperous state, aspiring if possible to
bring about the best state of the commonwealth. As early as the mid-quattrocento, we
find the humanist Filippo Beroaldo writing a tract entitled De optimo statu -concerning the best state of a commonwealth. 6 Soon afterwards we find the same
topic enthusiastically taken up by the Erasmian humanists in northern Europe.
Erasmus himself contrasts the optimus with the pessimus reipublicae status in his
Institutio principis christiani of 1516, 7 while in Thomas Mores Utopia we are
assured that, because the Utopians live in a society in which the laws embody the
principles of justice, they may be said to have attained the optimus status reipublicae,
the best state of a commonwealth. 8
During this period, it was generally agreed that the relationship between rulers
and subjects was that rulers hold supreme power over all the estates of the realm, and
hence over the general state or estate of their kingdom or commonwealth.

For

forthright declarations to this effect, we can hardly do better than turn to the speeches
delivered by king James I of England to his Parliaments. James repeatedly draws
attention to his own sovereign power over the whole body of the state, while
accepting at the same time that his duty is to uphold the flourishing State of the
whole Common-wealth. 9

Writing at the same moment in the early seventeenth

century, the royalist Sir John Hayward firmly agrees that anyone in possession of
sovereign power may be said to be a protector of the state, and to have a right to
exercise this high power of state over every estate of the realm. 10

Beroaldo 1508, fo. xvv.

Erasmus 1974, p. 162.
8
More 1965, p. cxcv.
9
King James VI and I 1994, pp. 144, 145, 148, 149, 158.
10
Hayward 1603, Sig. A 1v and Sig. L 1v.
6
7

III

During the latter part of the period I have been discussing, we begin to come upon a
striking semantic change. We find the term state and its equivalents being used to
refer not merely to bodies of people over whom sovereigns hold sway, but also to the
bearer of sovereignty itself. To explain the change, it is important to begin by noting
that the Latin term status and its vernacular equivalents had for a long time been used
to designate different types of regime. Aquinas has sometimes been credited with
popularising this usage, since there are versions of his Expositio of Aristotles Politics
in which oligarchies are described as status paucorum and the rule of the people as
the status popularis. 11

These usages later became widespread in Renaissance

humanist thought. Beroaldo, for example, begins his De optimo statu with a typology
of legitimate regimes, speaking of the status popularis, the status paucorum and even
the status unius when referring to monarchies. 12 Writing in the vernacular soon
afterwards, Machiavelli similarly uses lo stato in just this fashion in a number of
passages in Il principe, 13 most notably in the opening sentence of his book, in which
he informs us that all the stati, all the dominions that have had or now have power
over men, either have been or are republics or principalities. 14
Under the status popularis, the people were generally described by the
Renaissance theorists of republican government as enjoying a vivere libero, a free
way of life. This usage arose from the fact that these writers invariably contrasted the
state of freedom with that of dependence on the will of others.

To live in a

community in which the citizen body rules itself, and is thus subject only to its own
will, was thus taken to be equivalent to living in a state of liberty, a free state. As a
result, republics came to be described as free states, or sometimes simply as states

11

See Aquinas 1966, III. V, 385, p. 136 on living in statu populari and in statu paucorum. Cf. VI.
IV, 973, p. 319; VI. VI, 1008, p. 328. Rubinstein 1971, p. 322 credits Aquinas with popularising these
usages, but they were largely the product of humanist revisions of his text in the 1490s. See Mansfield
1996, p. 346 and further references there.
12
Beroaldo 1508, fos. xir and xiiv.
13
Machiavelli 1960, pp. 28-9.
14
Machiavelli 1960, p. 15: Tutti li stati, tutti e dominii che hanno avuto et hanno imperio sopra li
uomini, sono stati e sono o republiche o principati.

by contrast with monarchies.

This distinction is commonplace among such

Renaissance writers on republics as Machiavelli and Guicciardini, and was wellestablished in the English language by the beginning of the seventeenth century. A
good example is furnished by Francis Bacons essay Of the true greatness of
kingdoms and estates. There Bacon describes how monarchies as well as republics
are able to grow in reputation as well as in wealth, and in tracing this process he
speaks -- as in his title -- of republics by contrast with kingdoms as estates or
states. 15 By the time we come to a work such as John Lockes Two Treatises of
Government, first published in 1690, we find the term state continually used in the
same way to refer to the governments of republics and commonwealths by contrast
with the rule of princes and kings. 16
By this time the defenders of popular sovereignty among the radical political
writers of the English revolution had taken a further and crucial step. Arguing that the
true bearer of sovereignty is always the body of the people, they began to express this
commitment by saying that, since the people can in turn be said to comprise all the
different estates of a commonwealth, and hence amount to the whole state, one can
speak of sovereignty as the property of the state. As early as 1642 we find Henry
Parker, one of the leading propagandists on behalf of Parliament, claiming in his
Observations that, because Parliament can be viewed as a representation of the
sovereign people, it can in turn be regarded as equivalent to the whole body of the
State. 17 Soon afterwards we find John Goodwin in his Anti-cavalierisme speaking in
identical terms, claiming that, because it represents the sovereign people, Parliament
can be looked upon as the whole State. 18
A yet more important moment in the genealogy I am tracing was reached
when these exponents of popular sovereignty were denounced by those who wished to
defend the cause of absolute monarchy. 19

Among these adversaries, the most

formidable was Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan of 1651. Hobbes sees himself, as he

15

Bacon 1996, pp. 397-403.

Locke 1988, paras. 9, 45, 230.
17
Parker 1933, p. 211.
18
Goodwin 1642, p. 28.
19
My ensuing discussion of Hobbes draws on Skinner 2005.
16

tells us at the start of his analysis, as trying to tread a pathway between two
extremes. 20 At one end stand the parliamentarian writers, who according to Hobbes
are demanding too much liberty for the people. At the other end stand the defenders
of divine right, who according to Hobbes are demanding too much authority for kings.
Let us next see how he tries, as he puts it, to pass unwounded between these two
enemies.
One of Hobbess aims in Leviathan is to discredit the claims made by Henry
Parker and his followers to the effect that the true bearer of sovereignty is the body of
the people, and thus that the power of the people and the power of the state are the
same. Hobbess desire to undermine this argument helps to explain his melodramatic
account of the natural condition of mankind in Chapter 13 of Leviathan, the rhetorical
purpose of which is to persuade us that there is no such thing as the body of the
people. If we look beyond the confines of civil associations, Hobbes declares, what
we find is nothing more than men in multitudes. To which he adds that the
multitude is not one but many, not a unified society but a mere throng or aggregation
of particular men living in a state of war. 21
It is true, Hobbes concedes, that the multitude eventually mutates into a united
body of people. It does so when its individual members agree among themselves to
authorise a man or assembly to act as their sovereign representative. This has the
effect of giving them a single will and voice -- that of their representative -- and
thereby converts them into a single legal Person.

As Hobbes summarises, a

Multitude of men are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person,
Represented. 22 The sovereign serves in turn as the representative of the Person
brought into existence by the decision of the multitude to be represented. As Hobbes
explains, the act of covenanting has the effect of converting the multitude into One
Person and of authorising a representative to bear or carry that Person at the same
time. 23

20

Hobbes 1996, p. 3.
Hobbes 1996, pp. 109, 114; cf. also pp. 89-90.
22
Hobbes 1996, p. 114.
23
Hobbes 1996, pp. 114, 121.
21

One implication of Hobbess analysis is that the body of the people cannot
possibly be the bearer of sovereign power. The reason is simply that there is no such
thing as a body of people anterior to the instituting of a sovereign representative.
Hobbes is very far from concluding, however, that the true bearer of supreme
authority must therefore be the figure of the sovereign instituted by the multitude. As
he makes clear, the status of sovereigns can never be any higher than that of
authorised representatives, mere holders of offices assigned to them by the multitude
as a means of improving their own welfare and security.
It might seem, however, that this analysis leaves Hobbes with an awkward
difficulty. Of whom, on this account, is sovereignty to be predicated?

To put the

question the other way round -- as Henry Parker had done -- who is to be identified as
the proper Subject of sovereign power? 24

The defenders of divine right had

responded that sovereignty is the defining attribute of kings. But according to Hobbes
kings are nothing more than representatives. The protagonists of Parliament had
retorted that the body of the people is the true subject of sovereignty. But according
to Hobbes there is no such thing as the body of the people. If, however, sovereignty is
the property neither of the king nor of the people, who can possibly lay claim to it?
To this conundrum Hobbes supplies an epoch-making answer. To see how he
arrives at it, we need to begin by recalling the two distinctive claims he makes about
the political covenant.

The first is that, when a multitude authorises a man or

assembly to serve as their representative, the effect is to transform them from a mere
aggregation into one Person.

Hobbess other claim is that the sovereign is the

representative of the Person engendered by the multitude out of its agreement to be

represented. What we need to know, therefore, is the name of the Person generated
out of the agreement of the multitude. This will be to know the true subject of the
sovereignty that the sovereign representative merely holds the right to exercise.
Hobbes answers in the pivotal passage from Chapter 17 in which he describes
the moment at which the political covenant takes place. When the members of the
multitude agree every man with every man to authorise a man or assembly to

24

Parker 1933, p. 210.

represent them, the name of the Person they generate is a COMMON-WEALTH, in

latine CIVITAS. 25

Hobbes thereupon summarises his doctrine in two crucial

definitions that immediately follow. First we are told that a COMMON-WEALTH,

or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) 26 can be defined as One Person, of whose Acts a
great Multitude, by mutuall Covenants one with another, have made themselves every
one the Author. Then we are told that the name of the man or assembly that bears
or carries this Person is the SOVERAIGNE, who may consequently be said to
represent or Present the Person of the commonwealth or state. 27
It is true that the living person of the sovereign is always liable to occlude the
purely fictional Person of the commonwealth or state. As Hobbes acknowledges, a
Common-wealth, without Soveraign Power, is but a word, without substance, and
cannot stand. 28 But this consideration only renders him the more anxious to insist
that the sovereign is nothing more than an actor who speaks and acts for the Person of
the state. When a natural person or assembly of persons receives authorisation to
represent a state, the actions they perform in the name of the state will always be
attributable to the state itself. Hobbes makes this commitment unambiguously clear at
the outset of his discussion of civil law in Chapter 26. Although the state can do
nothing but by the Person that Represents it the state remains the Legislator, and the
name of the person Commanding is Persona Civitatis, the Person of the state. 29
Hobbes tells us in the Epistle Dedicatory to Leviathan that I speak not of the
men, but (in the Abstract) of the Seat of Power. 30 He concludes by insisting that this
seat is occupied not by any natural person or body of persons, but rather by the
disembodied and fictional Person whose generic name is the state. 31 However, he is
conventional enough to believe that, like the offspring of any lawful union, the Person
generated by the union of the multitude deserves its own name as well. Following out
his metaphor of marriage and procreation, he accordingly goes on to perform the

25

Hobbes 1996, p. 120.

Hobbes 1996, p. 9.
27
Hobbes 1996, p. 121.
28
Hobbes 1996, p. 245
29
Hobbes 1996, pp 171, 183-4.
30
Hobbes 1996, p. 3.
31
See Runciman 2000 on the state as a person by fiction and cf. Skinner 2002b.
26

appropriate act of baptism. He announces in his gravest tones that, this is the
Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently) of that
Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence. 32
Hobbess is the classic attack on the claim that the powers of the state can be
equated with the powers of the people. This analysis, however, for a long time
remained heterodox in Anglophone political philosophy. With the final victory of
Parliament over the absolutist pretensions of the crown in the so-called Glorious
Revolution of 1688, the more democratic understanding of the state as equivalent in
its powers to the powers of the community came to be firmly entrenched; and with the
deployment of this understanding to legitimise the American Revolution, this
equivalence became central to the political vocabulary of the new republic as well.
Within this tradition, we even find a disposition to avoid the term state altogether, and
to speak instead of the sovereign power of civil society or the commonwealth. But
when writers in this tradition allow themselves to speak of the state -- as for example
John Locke occasionally does in his Two Treatises -- they generally make it clear that
they regard the force of the state, as Locke puts it, as equivalent to the force of the
community as a whole. 33
While this understanding of the state became central to English and American
political theory in the age of the Enlightenment, the rival Hobbesian analysis had a
major impact on the discussion of public law in continental Europe. Perhaps the most
important conduit for its transmission was Samuel Pufendorfs treatise of 1672, De
Iure Naturae et gentium, which appeared in an English version by Basil Kennet in
1717. 34 For Pufendorf the most proper Definition of a Civil State is that it is a
compound Moral Person, whose Will, united and tied together by those Covenants
which before passd among the Multitude, is deemd the Will of all. 35 It follows that
we cannot speak of the holders of sovereign power, even when acting in their public
capacities, as the true bearers of sovereignty. Rather the subject of sovereignty is
the fictional Person of the state, in whose name the actions of sovereigns are

32

Hobbes 1996, p. 120.

Locke 1988, para. 218.
34
See Pufendorf 1717. It is from this version that I quote.
33

10

performed.

The will that sovereigns express remains that one Will, which we

attribute to the State. 36 As in Hobbes, the role of sovereigns is that of representing

the Will of the State. 37
By the middle of the eighteenth century, this vision of the state as a fictional
person whose powers are exercised by sovereign representatives had become widely
accepted in continental Europe. Perhaps the clearest reflection of this acceptance can
be found in the attempt made by Louis de Jaucourt to summarise conventional
wisdom in the article he contributed to the Encyclopdie in 1756 under the title Letat.
There we read that what distinguishes the state from a multitude is that the state is a
society animated by a single soul. 38 Like Pufendorf, Jaucourt concedes that, if the
state is to be animated in this way, it stands in need of a sovereign to act in its name.
Nevertheless, the powers assigned to such sovereigns remain the powers of the
fictional Person of the state, which can therefore be considered as a distinct moral
person, of which the sovereign is the head and all individuals are the members. 39

IV

As I began by remarking, when we speak in contemporary political theory about the

state, we are usually referring to the bearer of sovereign power over some determinate
territory. What I have now shown is that the use of the term state to refer in this way
to the subject of sovereignty was well-established by the early decades of the
eighteenth century. What I have also shown, however, is something more directly and
perhaps disquietingly relevant to our own talk about the concept of the state. This is
that, even though most political theorists came to agree that the state is the name of

35

Pufendorf 1717, VII. II. XIII, p. 475.

Pufendorf 1717, VII. IV. II, p. 491.
37
Pufendorf 1717, VII. II. XIV, p. 476.
38
Jaucourt 1756, p. 19: [Ce que] distingue ltat, dune multitude [est] que ltat est une socit
anime par une seule ame.
39
Jaucourt 1756, p. 19: On peut considrer letat comme une personne morale, dont le souverain est
la tte, & les particuliers les membres.
36

11

the sovereign power, they were completely unable to agree about the range of
reference of the term state itself.
Recall first the exponents of the idea of popular sovereignty. They agree that,
when we speak about the state, we are speaking about the bearer of sovereign power.
To which they add that, when we speak about the bearer of sovereign power, we are
speaking about the body of the people. The powers of the state are thus held to be
equivalent to those of the community as a whole. But now recall, by contrast, the
theorists of public law who followed in Hobbess wake. They fully agree that, when
we speak about the state, we are speaking about the bearer of sovereignty. But they
insist that the bearer of sovereignty is a purely fictional Person whom the figure of the
sovereign bodies forth. The powers of the state are thus equated not with the powers
of the community but rather with those of its sovereign representative.
This brings me to the upshot of the genealogy I have traced. It turns out that,
in acquiring our view of the state as the name of the bearer of sovereignty, we
acquired two contrasting concepts, both of which have unfortunately come to be
designated by the same term. To put it more pointedly, there has never been an
agreed concept of the state. As a result, much current debate about the character of
state authority remains unclear and sometimes confused. As I intimated at the outset,
however, this is what makes the attempt to supply a genealogy of the concept a
worthwhile exercise. The moral of the story I have been telling is that we need to
give up the idea that the term state names an unambiguous concept. But the story
itself provides a survey of the different concepts that the term has come to express.
My hope is that, armed with this genealogy, we may find it easier to explain more
clearly what we ourselves have in mind when we talk about the character of the state.
We may not agree; but we shall at least know what we are disagreeing about, which is
always a help.

12

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