The French Revolution and the Modern State

1. The French Revolution and the Modern State Week 3

2. Overview • The French Revolution: • debates over political authority and sovereignty • political power vested in ‘the people’ • emergence of the modern nation-state and ideas of nationalism • The Modern State • key features of the modern state • nationalism as the ideology of the modern state

3. Debates Over Political Authority • Debates about the nature and limits of political power go back to the Peace of Westphalia (1648) which followed the Thirty Years War in Europe • These events raised fundamental questions about political obligation and obedience, challenging the hitherto theocratic nature of political authority • Identifying the monarch with the notion of legitimate governance allowed the centralizing states of the 17th century to break away from papal claims to dominion

4. Political Authority: Hobbes • For Hobbes, the state, and the King’s right to rule, stemmed from a preordained contract between people • He distinguished the political realm from the religious one, and identified the monarch with the notion of legitimate governance • This principle of state-sovereignty entailed that people cede all authority to the monarch in exchange for security and protection within a delimited territory • Hobbes did not believe that it was possible to have both liberty and law, and so deemed it necessary for people to give up their liberty to a sovereign who would ensure the rule of law

5. Political Authority: Rousseau • Rousseau’s principle of the ‘common will’, suggested a different solution to the problem of how individuals, composed of differing wills, could rule themselves • By transforming themselves from an unselfconscious grouping of individuals, with many wills, into a singular group with a self-consciously ‘common’ will, they could become ‘the people’ • The community would be sovereign over itself and, through public discourse and agreement, work towards the common good • To both retain one’s liberty and enjoy a stable, ordered society, required subsuming individual rights to the whole of the community

6. Political Authority: Hobbes vsRousseau • Hobbes solved the ‘problem’ of how individuals become a collective by subordinating individuals to the authority of the monarch • For Rousseau, however, it is the collective that is sovereign and political authority should be based on protecting the rights and liberties of everybody • Rousseau’s re-interpretation of the idea of the social contract became a central aspect of the nature and form of the subsequent French, and American, Revolutions

7. The French Revolution • The Revolution brought into being the modern nation-state and transformed the earlier debates around sovereignty and the nature of political obligation • It is seen to have invented the political form of modern society • And was heralded as the advent of a new age of political equality, to be expressed through the establishment of new political institutions: the modern state

8. The Modern State: key features • Intervening in society • through the establishment of state-controlled public education • Maintenance of civil order and protection of private property • National and centralised - local centres of power became less important • The uniform Civil Code regulated the administration of the new state • New bureaucratic class and standards of efficiency • Monopolised the legitimate use of violence, • with this coming to be seen as one of its constitutive functions (Weber)

9. Universalisation of the State • The ‘universal’ principles of 1789 were, under Napoleon, nationalized and put at the service of a specifically French imperial order • The countries under Napoleon’s rule were restructured according to the French model • administrative systems, military requirements, and taxation procedures were streamlined • principles of centralization implemented • privileged groups reformed • a uniform code of law imposed • the power of the state was extended over the lives and resources of its citizens

10. Ideologies of the State • The resistance to Napoleon inspired people to start thinking about the state in national terms • old solidarities of language, community, and religion were strengthened and reinforced • there was an affirmation of loyalty to traditional monarchies and governments • Europe became embroiled in conflict between the forces of reaction, liberalism, nationalism, and socialism • Initially, movements for national independence were strongly linked to universal, social(ist) ideologies and pan-European workers movements • By the time of the (failure of the) 1848 revolutions, however, a narrow nationalism had triumphed over any claims for universal workers’ solidarity • The universalism of the Enlightenment was transformed into the more popular language of political Romanticism, with nationalism a key aspect of this

11. Ideologies of the Nation-State • The French Revolution, and its Napoleonic aftermath, inspired the emergence and development of two differing understandings of nationalism: • the nation as consisting of the conscious and voluntary consent of a self-defined population that wishes to live under a particular administrative regime • followingHerder, the nation as a living organism based on the unconscious ‘spirit’ of a people

12. Ideologies of the Nation-State • Until Rousseau provided legitimacy for the idea of the nation, independent of that of the kingdom, it had been the king who had ‘constituted’ France, and who had united the peoples divided by conflicting loyalties • The emerging ideology of nationalism made this role of the sovereign redundant as the nation was understood as developing out of the general will of the people self-defined and was not limited to the boundaries of the pre-existing state • The question then became: Who are the people?

13. Ideologies of the Nation: Civic Nationalism • For Rousseau, the nation preceded the state, but once constituted the state was seen to have the potential to strengthen nationalist feelings • Education and culture were deemed to be of vital importance, particularly in the rural areas, and the Napoleonic regime was the first to utilize the resources at its disposal to ‘make’ a people • The state derives legitimacy from active political participation by its citizens: ‘a daily plebiscite’

14. Ideologies of the Nation: Cultural Nationalism • For Herder, linguistic differences were not to be understood in political or ideological terms, but were taken as forming the basis for the organic growth of peoples and nations • Each nation, with its own distinct language, was seen as representing a unique truth of its own • The nation was an organic totality and he believed that the natural and sole basis of a territorial state was its unique spirit and society

15. Ideologies of the Nation-State • The analytical border between nation-states was made co-extensive with the recognition of their territorial separation and conflated with the category of ‘a people’, whether organised around language, culture, or ethnie • Although there are theorists who place the emergence of the origins of nations in a more distant past, the majority of scholars agree that the political ideology of nationalism began to take shape when Rousseau identified ‘nation’ and ‘people’ • The modern state, thus became the national state

16. Nation-State and Modernity • The emergence of the nation-state has formed a central aspect of the theory of modernity • in terms of its transitional status located at the cusp of the move from the traditional to the modern • and, as a signifier of the modern political form

17. In sum … • From the 17th century, the idea of sovereignty becomes central to the establishment of states • The basis of political legitimacy shifts from divine right, to existing laws and traditions, to the will of the people • The identification of the sovereign with the state gives way to the state being identified with ‘the people’, who are considered a nation • The problem of politics becomes a question of discovering a true ‘common’ interest among a mass of particular interests • This becomes one of the central problematics of sociology in the 19th and 20th centuries, with concepts of national self-determination vying with those of universal workers’ revolution

18. Questions to consider: • What makes the state modern? • What are the institutions of the state? • What role does bureaucracy play in modern states? • Why is democracy important? • What is the role of nationalism in modern states? Essential Reading: • Nisbet, Robert A. 1943. ‘The French Revolution and the Rise of Sociology in France’, The American Journal of Sociology, 49 (2): 156-64Available via JSTOR • Poggi, Gianfranco 1978. ‘The Nineteenth-Century Constitutional State’ in The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction. Stanford University Press: CaliforniaAvailable via the course extracts page