KAY274 THEORIES OF STATE AND BUREAUCRACY - 4

Prof. Dr. Doğan Nadi Leblebici

Prof. Dr. Mete Yıldız

Barrowed from J.K. Bluntschili «Theory of State»

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History of the development of idea of the State.

I. The Ancient World

A. The Hellenic idea of the State

POLITICAL science does not properly begin till we come to the Greeks. As it was in Greece that the self-consciousness of man first developed itself in art and philosophy, so it was in politics.

Small as was the territory, and limited as was the power of the Greek State, the principles upon which the Greek political conceptions were based were broad and comprehensive, and the political idea expressed by Greek thinkers is idealistic and noble. They base the State upon human nature, and hold that only in the State can man attain his perfection and find true satisfaction. The State is for them the moral order of the world in which human nature fulfils its end.

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PlatoPlato utters the great saying : 'The best State is that which approaches most nearly to the condition of the individual. If a part of the body suffers, the whole body feels the hurt and sympathises altogether with the part affected.' In this he has already recognized the organic and even the human-organic nature of the State, although without following out in its consequences thispregnant thought.The State, according to Plato, is the highest invention of human virtue, the harmonious manifestation of the powers of the human soul, humanity perfected. As the soul of man consists of a rational, a spirited, and a desiring element, and as reason and spirit ought to rule the desires, so in the Platonic ideal, the wise ought to rule, the brave warriors should protect the community, and the classes which are occupied with material acquisition and bodily work should obey the two higher orders. In the body politic justice requires that each part should do its own work.

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Aristotle

Aristotle, for whose political philosophy our admiration rises, the more we consider the works of his successors, is less guided by imagination than Plato, examines reality more carefully and recognizes more acutely the needs of man. Plato cuts off from family life the ruling classes of the philosophers and the guardians in order that they may live completely for the State, and demands for them a community of wives and property. Aristotle, on the contrary, wishes to maintain the great institutions of marriage, the family and private property. He declares the State to be ' the association of clans and village-communities in a complete and self-sufficent life.’ He says that ‘man is by nature a political animal’ and he considers the State as a product of human nature. The State comes into being for the sake of mere life, but exists (or continues to exist) for the sake of the good life.

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In this idea (or ideal) of the State are combined and mixed all the efforts of the Greeks in religion and in law, in morals and social life, in art and science, in the acquisition and management of wealth, in trade and industry. The individual requires the State to give him a legal existence: apart from the State he has neither safety nor freedom. The barbarian is a natural enemy, and conquered enemies become slaves, who are excluded from the political community, and are therefore thrust down into a degraded and ignoble position.

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Defects of the Greek Ide of StateThe Hellenic State, like the ancient State in general, because it was considered all-powerful, actually possessed idea of the too much power. It was all in all. The citizen was nothing, except as a member of the State. His whole existence depended on and was subject to the State. The Athenians indeed possessed and exercised intellectual freedom, but that was only because the Athenian State valued freedom in general highly, not because it recognized the rights of man. This same freest of states allowed Socrates to be executed, and thought it was justified in doing so. The independence of the family, home-life, education, even conjugal fidelity, were in no way secure from State interference; still less of course the private property of the citizens. The State interfered in everything, and knew neither moral nor legal limits to its power. It disposed of the bodies, and even of the talents of its members. It compelled men to accept office as well as to perfortm military service. The individual must first be dead in the State before he could, by means of the State, be born again to a free and noble life.

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Limitation to this absolute power

The absolute power of the State, Limitations apart from the influence of ancient customs, had almost no other limits than the following: In the first place, the citizens themselves had a share in the exercise of this power, and lest the despotism of the demos might become injurious to themselves also, they avoided the extreme consequences of political communism. In the second place, insignificant matters only supplied small material for their passions to work upon, and they were compelled to pay regard to their neighbors. The Greek States were moreover only composed of fragments of the Hellenic people and sub-races of them. They did not rise much beyond mere city-communes. The great idea had thus only a humble form; although referring to mankind, it could only obtain a childish expression in the narrow limits of a mountain valley or a tract of sea-shore.

The ideal omnipotence and actual impotence of the State are thus closely connected; they are the two chief defects of the Hellenic conception of the State, which is in other respects most worthy, true to human nature, and fruitful in results.

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B. The Roman idea of the State

The Romans had a greater genius for Law and Politics than any other people of classical antiquity, and this more by their moral character than by their intellect. They had therefore a greater influence on the world than the Greeks.

At first sight the Roman idea of the State is closely connected with the Greek. Cicero, in his political writings, has Athenian models constantly before his eyes. The Roman jurists, when explaining law and the State in general, follow the Greek philosophers, especially the Stoics.

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Cicero declares the State to be the highest product of human power, and says that there is nothing in which human excellence comes nearer the will of the gods than in the founding and maintenance of States. Occasionally he too compares the State to the individual, and the head of the State to the spirit which rules the body. But in some essential particulars the Roman conception of the State is different from the Greek idea.

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The Romans first distinguished law from morality, and gave it a definite form, and thus they brought out more distinctly the legal nature of the State. Thereby they limited the State, and gave it greater firmness and power. It no longer summed up for them the ethical ordering of the world, but was primarily a common legal organization. The Romans left very much to social customs and to the religious nature of man. The Roman family was more free as against the State. Private property and private rights were in general better protected against the arbitrary exercise even of public authority. Of course they too made the welfare of the State the highest law. They arranged even the worship of the gods from a political point of view. No one could resist the State if it uttered its will. But the Roman State limited itself; it restricted the province of its own power and its own action.

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Further, the Romans recognized the conception of the People, and brought the constitution into an organic connection with the People. They declared the State to be the People organized, and declared the will of the People to be the source of all law. The Roman State was thus not a mere commune, it raised itself to a national State.

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Besides, the Roman State was destined to embrace the world. Through all Roman history runs this tendency to universal dominion; the national civil law was supplemented by the international law. The eternal city, the urbs, became the capital of the world, orbis. The imperium of the Roman magistrate became imperium mundi (the world), the Roman senate became a senate of all peoples and their kings. The majesty of the Roman People culminated in the majesty of the imperial power. The history of Rome, according to the proud expression of Florus, became the history of mankind. This effort gave the Roman idea of the State an impetus which left the Greek States far behind, and a greatness before which they were compelled to bow. It was not an illusion but a reality which ruled the ancient world, and which only the Germans in the West and the Persians in the East had the courage and the strength to resist.

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II. THE MIDDLE AGE

A. Christianity

The Christian religion extended its power over the minds of men, denying alike the authority of the Jewish State and the Roman Empire. Its founder was not a prince of this this world. The ancient State persecuted him and his disciples to the death. If the first Christians were not directly hostile to the State, they cared for other things than political organization and political interests. When the Christian world made its peace with the old Roman State the religious community the ‘Church’ was already conscious of her peculiar spiritual existence, and did not regard herself as a mere State institution. The new idea prevailed that the whole religious life of the community, although not altogether withdrawn from the care and influence of the State, was yet essentially independent. The prominently marked dualism of Church and State became an essential limitation of the State, which was now only a community of law and politics, no longer also of religion and worship.

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When the Church had received in the Pope a visible head independent of the Emperor, and Rome for her capital, the old Roman idea of universal dominion reappeared in a spiritual form. Although, even at the height of her mediaeval reputation, the Church did not succeed in degrading the State into a mere ecclesiastical (belonging to the church)institution, and setting up one universal spiritual dominion of Rome; yet the idea of the State was for a long time far outshone by her magnificance. She could compare herself with the sun, and the State with the moon, and as the ruler over men's souls claimed precedence over the ruler of their bodies. But the dualism of State and Church continued to be recognized, and thus in the main point the independence of the State was saved. The sword of the Emperor, as well as that of the Pope, was derived from God, the supreme and true ruler of the World.

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As far as the teaching of the Church prevailed, the idea of the State again, as formerly in the East, received a religious foundation; the power of the State was derived from God, but at the same time the spiritual significance of the State was overlooked and misunderstood; all spiritual life was to come from the Church, and the State being regarded as merely bodily was put in an inferior position. The elevation of the idea of the State above the narrow limits of nationality was an insufficient compensation. Not humanity, but Christendom was to be organized and governed by it in outward things. The Roman empire was so far renewed in mediaeval forms, but was represented in a superior form by the Roman Church, and in an inferior by the holy Roman Empire of the German people.

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B. The Teutons (Germen)

The power of The old Roman universal empire could not permanently maintain itself against the Teutonic races (Germanic). These warliketribes forcibly wrested one province after another from Roman rule; or it happened that the Roman provincials or the emperors themselves called in to their aid the arms of Teutonic princes, who thus in a peaceable manner acquired territorial sovereignty. During the middle ages the Teutons ruled everywhere in the West. They came under the Christian instruction of the Roman Church and the influence of Roman civilization; but they maintained themselves upon the thrones of princes, and in the fortresses of the aristocracy. The sceptre (kraliyet asası) and the sword were in their hands.

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The Teutons are not, like the Romans, an eminently political people; it is with reluctance that the individual submits to the sovereignty of the whole body. Their strong, confident and self-willed individuality interferes with the common consciousness, and checks its power. (Thus the Teuton stood in need of the political discipline of the Roman.) But in spite of this the development of the State in the world's history owes much to them. Above all the Teutons broke the absolutism of the Roman State, and they have won a place in all modern political institutions for the freedom of persons, associations, and ‘Estates’. Montesquieu said very truly, that the germs of parliamentary constitutions are to be found in the forests of Germany. In the primitive forms described by Tacitus, in which the Teutonic kings cooperated with the local princes and other chiefs on the one side, and with the great community of freemen on the other, we recognize clearly the rude beginnings of the free representative government, which later centuries produced.

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The Teuton does not derive law, at least not directly, from the will of the nation: he claims for himself an inborn right which the State must protect, but which it does not create, and for which he is ready to fight against the whole world, even against the authority of his own government. He rejects strenuously the old idea that the State is all inall. The whole relation is reversed. To the Teuton individual freedom is the supreme thing. He is induced to sacrifice a part of it to the State in order to keep the rest all the more securely.

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It is a necessary consequence of this character, that the Teutonic idea of the State respects the independence of private rights more decidedly than the Roman. The freedom of the person, the family, the association is thus more assured and more extended than in the old Roman empire. The rights of the State are thus limited by the rights of the individual as well as by those of the Church.

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A further consequence for Public Law is that the Teutons in general admit no absolute power of the State, even in matters affecting the community. The Roman conception of imperium is foreign to them. Before obeying they wish to deliberate and vote. Their estates are a political power with which that of the king must be united in order to make laws. Yet the idea of the State as a collective person is still, as a rule, unintelligible to them. They tend rather to break up the State into actual persons or groups of persons. They understand it primarily as embodied in the king or other princes, who are at the head of the courts of justice, and of the assembly of the people, in the chief of the hundred, the tithing, and township. One set of persons sometimes strengthens and sometimes limits another; thus the whole organization of the community, even in its parts, is filled with the spirit of freedom. Unity is relatively weak, but the independence of the parts is strong.

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These alterations of the idea of the State in which we recogniseconsiderable advance showed themselves rather in practice than in theory. The Teutons had no political philosophy of their own. Science in the middle ages was at first in the hands of the Church, and was afterwards determined by the traditions of Roman jurisprudence and Greek philosophy. Even in the old tribal laws are to be found reminiscences of this sort: e. g. in the laws of the Visigoths, after the model of classical literature, the body politic is compared with a man, the king with the head, and the people with the members of the body. But this was only a borrowed rhetorical ornament without deeper significance, and with no definite reference to the actual mediaeval State.

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In some other respects the idea of the State suffered degradation, and that not merely because it was disparaged by the Church. The mediaeval State might be called a legal State, but in a different sense from that of the Romans. It was not the organization of Public Law only: all its institutions were interfused with elements of Private Law. Territorial sovereignty was regarded as the hereditary property of a family, and public duties were treated as burdens upon land. The whole feudal law and the patrimonial State in all its aspects suffer from this admixture. Roman Public Law only served as a starting-point. The feudal law of the middle ages appeared to be the essential end of the mediaeval State, and the welfare of the people was neglected for it.

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The idea of the national State had perished, destroyed by the breaking up of the national and political unity, by the feudal system, by the conflicting claims of territories, estates, and dynasties. What remained of the Roman empire was rather an ideal international, than a political, union of Western Christendom, and this union was held together more by the authority of the Pope and the Roman clergy than by the Empire. On the whole the seeds of a freer and better development of the State had been sown, but the idea of the State had in the middle ages become less precise and vigorous than among the Romans.

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C. The influence of the RenaissanceThe Roman Even during the middle ages the memory of the ancient State had never been completely lost. Rome had remained the spiritual capital of the West. The old Roman Empire had indeed been broken to pieces by the Teutons, but the Teutons who had formed independent kingdoms out of Roman provinces received their civilisation, and, above all, their religion from Rome, and in the place of the fallen city the Roman Church became the ruling power of the middle ages, to which the Teutons themselves in time submitted. In the institutions, method, morals, law and language of the Roman Church, a great, prohibiting the chief, part of the old Roman State was preserved. The old Empire was transformed into the new Papacy, the universal State into the universal Church, in order to rule the nations more easily. The old Roman Emperor had exercised his effect by his representatives and officials with the help of Roman law, in the name of the Roman people, and enforced it by the power of his legions; similarly the Roman Pope commanded reverence in the name of God and the Church by means of his bishops, and with the help of canon law and ecclesiastical discipline, and enforced his decrees by means of the numerous monastic orders.

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But alongside of the Church the memory of the old Empire still remained. We know nowadays how totally unlike was the Roman Empire of the Frankish kings from Charles the Great and of the German kings from Otto the Great to the old Roman Empire, which had had its seat in Rome and in Constantinople. But the whole middle ages believed that the one was only a continuation of the other, and that the Frankish Emperor, or the Roman Emperor of the German people, was the regular successor of Claudius, Antoninus, and Constantine. In any case therenewed dignity of the Emperors implied a reminiscence of the old Roman Empire, and an ideal union of mediaeval ideas and institutions with the ancient world.

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Recollections of the old Roman republic and its majesty sometimes revived and animated the citizens of towns in their effort to found new city republics. The very names of the civic magistrates in Italy and in Germany implied a dim memory of the consuls of the Roman Republic. Twice over in the middle ages the Roman populace in romantic enthusiasm attempted to reawaken and reanimate the long dead republic ; once in the twelfth century under the leadership of Arnold of Brescia, and a second time in the fourteenth century under the tribune Cola Rienzi. Both attempts failed through the political incapacity of the mediaeval Romans, but both testify to the power of the ancient tradition.

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Even Greek political theories were not quite unknown to the Romance civilization of the middle ages. The Politics of Aristotle were studied in many monasteries, and that most famous theologian, Thomas of Aquino, wrote a commentary on the celebrated work of the Greek philosopher. Nevertheless the legal system, and still more the political organization of the middle ages, were totally different from those of antiquity. The institutions of the time were shaped mainly under Teutonic influences, and its ideas dominated by the theology of the Church.

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In the second half of the fifteenth century the recollection of the classical period awoke more vigorously, and the classical spirit of the Greeks and the Romans was born again (the ‘Renaissance’). The works of ancient art produced a liberating and elevating effect on the Italian artists, in architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry. The ideas of ancient science were again held in honor, and broke through the bounds set by mediaeval scholasticism and monastic theology. Humanism rose above the ecclesiastical contempt of the world, and a brighter and more joyous way of looking at life found wide acceptance at courts and in cities. As nearly 2000 years before the Sophists became the teachers of young Greeks of good family, so now the Humanists became the chosen instructors of ambitious youth in Italy, France, and Germany. Educated men were no longer terrified by the reproach that from Christians they were again becoming Pagans. Even the Popes put themselves at the head of this intellectual movement. Nicolas V (1447-1455), Pius II (Aeneas Sylvius, 1458-1464), Julius II (1503-1513), Leo X (1513-1521), protected and encouraged the artistic freedom of the Renaissance. The princely Medici, especially Cosimo (1434-1464) and Lorenzo (14691492), made Florence an Italian Athens.

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The ancient conception of the State and ancient political Revival. theories likewise reappeared in part and influenced public affairs, especially in the following ways:

1. A few bold thinkers dared to explain the rise of States and the nature of political authority by human considerations, and thus to oppose theocratic opinions.

2. Secondly, the idea of policy', consciously and calmly considering means and ends for the guidance of the State and the government of nations, became decisive in political practice and theory, and received its clearest expression in the writings of Machiavelli (1469-1527).

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3. Thirdly, we mark the renewal of a political Imperium and a political Sovereignty before whose single authority everything else must bow. i.e. no absolute authority.

4. Finally, the Renaissance manifested itself also in an opposite form, to which this growing tyranny incited.

But all this revival of ancient political ideas and tendencies was limited to a comparatively narrow circle of highly educated men. The masses had no understanding and no capacity for it. The whole influence of the Renaissance on politics was only partial, and quickly passed by, helping to break up the mediaeval, and to prepare the way for the modern State, but bringing forth no new political organization of its own.

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