V. The Modern State: A Revolutionary Hybrid

States can be conservative—or even lazy—institutions that seek stability and develop progressively when impelled to do so by resistance or adversity. European states stumbled upon a great advantage in the process of developing biopower and colonialism to fuel themselves, arguably as a response to a series of crises of governance. To the extent that capitalism provoked so much resistance and instability, any state seeking to ride this new force would constantly have to adapt, plot, spy, mobilize, militarize, and grow. Capitalism inaugurated an unending social war that has constituted a ceaseless learning process for states.

Rephrasing an essentially anarchist hypothesis [72] and backing it up with extensive research and novel analyzes, Giovanni Arrighi argues for a dichotomous nature of the modern state, combining a commercial power that inhabits a space of flows with a territorial power that inhabits a space of places. In The Long 20th Century, he traces the evolution of this marriage expertly, from the city-states of northern Italy, [73] to its first prototype in the partnership between Genovese merchants and the Castilian Crown that began a global cycle of capitalist accumulation, to its perfection by the United Provinces of the Netherlands, authors of the Westphalia or interstate system, to its global expansion by Great Britain and its intensification under the guidance of the United States.

We can complement a reading of Arrighi’s detailed history with a consideration of the factors that laid the groundwork for the emergence of the modern state, some of which are glanced over in his work and others of which fall outside its scope.

The lack of strong family ties and clan systems in most of Western Europe, as will be discussed in another chapter, strongly advantaged both the democratic militarism that was essential for the development of a large number of Europe’s early states, and for the restructuring that the emergence of the modern state required. There was no strong structural resistance to bureaucratization and the emergence of a new paradigm of sovereignty: in fact, the culture of individual advancement that may only arise in a context of weak family ties was simultaneously instrumental to the bourgeois supersession of the nobility, to the practices of education necessary for training a bureaucratic class closely complicit with the commercial class (rather than unquestioningly loyal to a despotic ruler, or “corrupted” by loyalty to kin), and to the new labor ethic that had to be inculcated in the lower classes.

The war on heresy and the war on the commune were also vital factors. The repressive institutions and methodologies necessary to the emergence of the modern state arose in the war on heresy, the witch hunts, and the bloody legal and paralegal campaigns that facilitated the enclosure of the commons. E.P. Thompson’s seminal study, Whigs and Hunters, on the application of the Black Act to punish resistance to enclosure reveals the new practice at work. Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, in The Many-Headed Hydra, explore the origins and some of the parallel lines of development of repressive methodologies related to the private property regime, while Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, and Arthur Evans, in Witchcraft in the Gay Counterculture, dig even deeper, tracing the process farther back and revealing a missing link—patriarchy—which has modulated the entire repressive evolution. Christianity’s previously mentioned preference for intolerance and for a separation of secular and ecclesiastical space, allowed this repressive evolution to take place.

R.I. Moore convincingly argues that the bonfire, though it has become the very symbol for the state campaign against heretics, represented a failure for the authorities. Punishment of heresy was systematically designed to discipline, to gain repentance. And though there were clearly exceptions to this, when political enemies needed to be eliminated or elites judged it better to burn “one to educate one hundred,” [74] the spectacle of supreme punishment was sometimes used by the heretics and witches themselves. Refusing to repent and facing execution was often a form of insubordination: some heretics even threw themselves into the bonfire as an ultimate act of defiance against the Church. [75]

Falling into the peculiarly postmodern, post-Holocaust error of rating the relative importance of historical phenomena according to their body count, Silvia Federici exaggerates the number of deaths in the witch hunts, claiming a million killed when the true figure is almost certainly less than 100,000. But far more important were those who weren’t killed. Even if “only” 50,000 were executed [76] (a huge figure, relative to the population of early modern Europe), this also represents tens of thousands of communities traumatized and threatened, tens of thousands of people who received non-lethal punishment, and many more tens of thousands of people who repented to avoid punishment.

Another criticism against her work and of Witches, Midwives, and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English disputes the feminist hypothesis that the war on witches was in part a patriarchal attempt to eradicate the tradition of women healers. This criticism is demonstrably misguided. The argument [77] is based on what appears to be a solid but completely misinterpreted fact: the majority of the victims of the witch hunts were probably not healers, and in fact a disproportionate number of state’s witnesses were officially licensed midwives and nurses. While it is true that we must avoid a simplified, homogenous, and romanticized vision of who these people were, it is also true, as Federici documents, that the witch burnings were complemented by a process of increased state regulation of women and of feminine professions. The newly professionalized male doctors were appearing on the scene and attempting to monopolize healing practices. A place was reserved for women who were willing to subordinate themselves to the doctors as nurses, and to subordinate themselves to the state by getting licensed. In other words, these sellouts were also frequently snitches against their sisters who continued to practice autonomously and without permission. On consideration, this troublesome fact only reinforces the analysis of Federici, Ehrenreich, and English. And the documents of the witch trials demonstrate a direct link between the repression and the Church and secular elite’s fear of women healers; “No one does more harm to the Catholic Church than midwives,” as the Malleus Maleficarum claims. [78]

As Federici and Evans both amply demonstrate, in their ways, the emergence of the modern state was preceded by and in turn aided the renewal (a renaissance, if you will?) of patriarchal social relations, accomplished by the Church and other ruling institutions of the day. Roman patriarchy had been eroded to a large extent after the collapse of the Western Empire, first thanks to the relatively egalitarian gender relations among the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic tribes, and later thanks to the resistance of women, queer people, trans people, and heretics or traditionalists/pagans. First Christian philosophy and then, in a seamless transition, Enlightenment philosophy, served to coordinate the offensive that restored an absolute patriarchy utilizing a broad array of state and non-state institutions, from the municipal to the continental level.

Another important element of the interstate system the Dutch and their allies inaugurated with the Settlement of Westphalia was the nation. It’s important to distinguish the European context, in which the term arose, and non-Western contexts, spanning a great variety of processes, in which some peoples subsequently chose to term themselves as nations. For the time being, however, I am referring to the Western context. Contrary to nationalist mythologies, nations in the West did not arise as part of a slow process of linguistic and cultural unification, nor did they even appear within their own borders. Confirming a plank of postmodern theory, this particular self was only defined when it came in contact with an other. Following Jacques Le Goff and Giovanni Arrighi, we can contend that nations arose between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries in the universities and the trade posts, respectively. As Le Goff documents in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, students at Europe’s new universities organized themselves according to nation. They were, after all, an international body. And I would surmise that, while their own prior identities might have predisposed them to relate only with those of their own immediate city or polity (because of course, there were no Italians there, only Paduans, Bolognese, and so forth), their relatively reduced numbers pushed them to seek out other companions with whom they now saw similarities. Previously they would have only seen linguistic and cultural differences, but in contrast to other students who might hail from as far away as Brittany, Flanders, or Saxony, now they found a common identity. And the same process would play out in a university in Bologna, Paris, or Augsburg. Students, far away from home, organized themselves as Italians, Flemish, French, or Germans, whereas before they had been Genovese, Antwerpers, Provençals, Hannoverian, and so forth.

Similarly, at the trade posts that were popping up in Europe’s hubs of commerce, and which in certain inchoate moments were indistinguishable from embassies, birds of a feather flocked together. In this instance, their ornithological affinity had less to do with the anxieties of young men away from home for the first time, and more to do with the need to trade reliable information with colleagues who could be more easily trusted and more easily communicated with, due to speaking similar dialects and broadcasting various cultural cues that could provide the basis for solidarity in a strange land. What’s more, a businessman is more likely to treat someone with respect if they know they will likely coincide in the future, and though the merchants inhabited a space of flows and not a space of places, trade volume and thus interactions were at least somewhat proportional to distance. Proximity, therefore, also favored a common identity.

These two classes of people, students and traders, played a dynamic, essential role in the subsequent creation of nation-states. They had already formulated their nations in the special petri dish constituted by those hubs of education and commerce, and they transposed the same identities and etiquettes onto the state structures when they were called on to help govern, filling in functions of bureaucracy, social control, and productivity that were lacking in the feudal state.

R.I. Moore also highlights the need of the emerging modern state to dismantle the feudal system of dual power, which had been necessary to hold society together while the state was weak, but which constituted a major obstacle to the accumulation of power once productive, cultural, and repressive forces had evolved to the point where totalitarian states were feasible (and I would insist that all modern states are fundamentally totalitarian, differing by degree and strategies for disguising or celebrating this fact). This conflict with preexisting state structures was above all a process in which power was streamlined, centralized, and made more efficient. But it had profound impacts on the Western mentality and provided new tools for state control. Modernizing state elites could present themselves as rebels, and almost without exception they used marginalized and exploited elements of society to help them topple the old regime so they could institute a new one. For this reason, nearly every revolution in modern Western history is accompanied by aftershocks, from the enragés and peasant insurrections of France, to Shays’ Rebellion, to Kronstadt, when the oppressed realize that though the forms of power have changed, they are still at the bottom of an even more potent social hierarchy.

Progressive movements systematically redirect popular rage, which is inspired by nothing less than the violence of being governed, at elements of power that are ineffective and potentially obsolete. The goal (at least of those who command such movements) and the result is to make power more powerful. Progressives’ favorite whipping boy has long been corruption, but corruption is the last vestige of humanity in an increasingly inhuman system.

The organizational ambiguity of medieval democracy, which resulted in situations of dual or even triple power, presented opportunities for would-be state architects to play their rivals off one another. Forward-thinking monarchs often favored the commoners in order to use them against the feudal lords, similar to how the burgers would subsequently use the peasants and urban laborers against the monarchs in a number of democratic revolutions. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, a great number of towns, cities, and rural communities won their economic independence and defended it vigorously against the encroachments of different elites. The independence of the rural communities had a communal rather than commercial character, based in a universal access to the commons. Faced with the conflict between commoners and nobles, monarchs were sometimes forced and sometimes astutely chose to legally recognize and codify the rights of the commoners, either as “uses and customs” as regarded the commons, or as charters in the case of politically independent towns and cities.

The Church was able to wield its monopoly on spiritual rituals to impede the commoners’ autonomy, imposing taxes in exchange for the rights to marry and bury community members. And the nobles used war and debt to gradually impose serfdom or land alienation on the peasant economy. Though peasant and urban militias meant that the nobles never had a true monopoly on military force, it was the nobles who were the recipients of land titles doled out by monarchs in exchange for fealty, participation in military campaigns, and other services. Title did not extinguish preexisting communal and usufructary rights of the peasant inhabitants, but it did give the nobles a claim for exacting payments in goods and services. In the Iberian Peninsula, as Christian warrior-kings pushed out the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus, the new elites were particularly opportunistic, declaring their conquest terra nullis even though it often came with peasant inhabitants attached. They were also able to monopolize the castles, which in many cases had been communally maintained and garrisoned. Because self-defense was seen as a collective obligation, nobles could use it as another excuse to impose levies and taxes.

Medieval monarchs won power as the arbiters of the conflicts that this increasing exploitation provoked, enacting legal compromises in response to the frequent lawsuits and rebellions with which nobles and commoners pressed their interests. They also intervened in the evolution of the institutions of medieval democracy. Free villages, towns, and cities made their decisions in open assemblies, often given legal recognition by the monarch, against the wishes of the nobles trying to extend their authority. But the political equality of the democratic structures served to mask the growing economic inequalities that were an inevitable consequence of the currency-based commerce subsidized by the elite. As guild masters, merchants, and peasant landowners grew in power, all of them using legal, monetary, and infrastructural devices created or defended by the monarch, the commoners were divided against themselves and could no longer pursue common interests that might have obstructed the growth of the State. The new commoner elite easily took over the democratic structures that once constituted the bulwark of their kind. It bears noting that majoritarian, centralized structures of unitary decision-making have never successfully prevented the emergence of an elite; to the contrary, they have generally been complicit in the process.

In 1265, the city of Barcelona created the Consell de Cent, the Council of One Hundred, a representative body composed of probi homines or first-class citizens selected primarily from among the guild masters and merchants of the city, which supplanted the power of the open assemblies of neighbors. King Jaume I was a direct instigator of this process. In 1284, King Pere III granted the Council the power to directly seize the goods and properties of those who did not pay their rents. In 1285, the inhabitants of Barcelona revolted against the patricians and attempted to recover control of the municipality, but the king intervened on the oligarchs’ behalf. The model of rule by closed councils and magistrates spread throughout the rest of Catalunya, replacing the open assemblies in all but a few rural communities in the mountains. Urban merchants quickly became more important to the monarch than the landed nobility for funding the many wars by which he cemented his power, and by which the merchants expanded their trade networks. Wars between trade rivals Catalunya and Genova reflected this mercantile turn of logic. The oligarchs, in turn, quickly discovered the usefulness of patriotism, a key force in the birth of the nation and the modern state, in convincing the poor and middle-class commoners to support the wars and the taxes that accompanied them. Within a couple of centuries, municipalities small and large throughout Catalunya became mired in war-related debts. How did they resolve these? By selling off the commons. [79]

The Enlightenment, and the philosophy of scientific rationalism that accompanied it, were also a sine qua non for the development of the modern state. Silvia Federici illuminates some of the horrors perpetrated by the rational worldview and subsequently blamed by the dominant historiography on the “irrationality” of the Middle Ages. Going considerably further, Alex Gorrion writes that scientific rationalism is a mythical system directly descended from Christianity that unconsciously posits anthropocentrism, ecocide, a supremacist, unilineal progressivism, and a Cartesian worldview, and that functions at the service of the perpetual accumulation of power. [80]

There is also much to be said about the restoration of Roman law favoring private property and allowing land to be alienated, the development of new productive techniques and modes of production, and new forms of economic and political organization. On the one hand, these are the aspects of the transition that have already been most studied, and on the other hand, the latter of these aspects are more the flourishes rather than the driving forces of the process. I will, however, include one example that challenges the linear temporality of such progress, and illustrates the simultaneity of military development, scientific development, and historical identity Arrighi writes:

By rediscovering and bringing to perfection long-forgotten Roman military techniques, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, achieved for the Dutch army in the early seventeenth century what scientific management would achieve for US industry two centuries later […] Siege techniques were transformed (1) to increase the efficiency of military labor-power, (2) to cut costs in terms of casualties, and (3) to facilitate the maintenance of discipline in the army’s ranks. Marching and the loading and firing of guns were standardized, and drilling was made a regular activity. The army was divided into smaller tactical units, the numbers of commissioned and noncommissioned officers were increased, and lines of command rationalized. [81]

When Robert McNamara went from the Ford Motor Company to the Defense Department, he was coming full circle, completing a motion started by the Prince of Orange. In warfare, elite planners found the perfect terrain for developing the rational organization that is primarily associated with capitalist economics.