Gianfranco Poggi THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN STATE A Sociological Introduction & Stanford University PressAcknowledgments ‘Ant grateful to my colleagues Tom Burns, Tony Giddens, David Holloway, Michael Mann, Pierangelo Schiera, and Harrison ‘White for their comments on and criticisms of previous versions of sections of this book. Special thanks are due to Professor Janos Bek: of the Department of History at the University of British Colum- bia for actempting to save me from my worst mistakes in Chapters 2 and 5; if in my ignorance I have at some points frustrated that ateempr, I apologize to him. On the home front, Iam once more much indebted to my wife Pat and our child Maria for the invaluable assistance they have lent to my work on this book. Preface . Introduction: The Business of Rule Politics as Allocation, 2 Politics as Us Againse the Other, s. Contrasting the Two Views, 9. Reconciling the Two Views, 11, ‘The Theory of Institutional Differentiation, 13, |. The Feudal System of Rule The Rise of Feadalion 7. The Nature ofthe Feudal Relationship, 20. the System, 5. The Political Legacy of the Feudal Systeriiy 3+ . The Stindestaat ‘The Rice of Towns, 6, Stand, Seinde, and Stindestat, 2 Dualism 2s a Scraccural Principle, 46. The Component Groups, 51. ‘The Political Legacy of the Stindestat, 56 The Absolutist System of Rule ‘The Towns and the Decline of the Stindest ‘The Feudal Elemenc and the Decline of the Seandestat, 65. ‘The Ruler and His Court: France, 67. New Aspects fof Role, 71. The Ruler and His Bureaucracy: Prossi, 14 ‘The Emergence of the Civil Society, 7. The Civil Society's Political Challenge, 9 The Ninéteenth-Century Constitutional State Sovercignty and the States System, 87. The Unity ‘of the State, 9. The “Modernity” of the Stace, 95. Legal- vilCONTENTS Rational Legitimacy, ror. Constcutional Guarantees, 104 ‘Significant Features of the Political Process, 108. Significant Classes of Political Issues, 113 State and Society Under Liberalism and After 7 ‘The Pressure of Collective Interess, 122. Capitalist Developments: Effects on the Occupational System, 125. Gapitalise Developments: Efects on the Production System, 127 ‘The Search for Legitimacy, 132. Intersal Pressares Toward the Expansion of Rule, 134. Consequences of the Pressures from Seate and Society, 138, Notes 153 Index 169 viii Preface Socistecists in Western countries have of late become more and more concerned with various problems relating centrally to the notion of the state. One sich problem isto identify the state's basic structural features, and che range and significance of their variations over time or from country to country. Another is co understand causes, modalities, and effects of the state's apparently ever-increasing involvement in all manner of societal affairs. Still another is to assess the-causes and effects of the state's policies, its relations to other institutional’ complexes and to various interna- tional forces and agencies, Until very recently, such themes were mostly considered for- ‘eign, or at best peripheral, to sociology’s domain. This was so for at least three reasons. First, sociology had arisen in societies where an institutional distinction between the “political” and the prop- erly “social” realm was widely taken for granted; by electing the latter as its area of concern, sociology in effect chose to ignore the political realm, which was of course centered around the state. Second, in societies like the United States and Britain, where the state and civil society were not as explicitly distinguished, soci- ologists had largely defined their mission as exploring the humbler, more spontaneous, down-to-earth—often hidden and unsavory— aspects of social life. Their interest was in latent as against manifest forces and processes, informal as against formal arrangements, ixPREFACE, “natural” as against “planned” institutions, the underside as against the official and conspicuous side of society. Such concerns neces- sarily turned their attention away from an institutional complex as visible and official as the state. Finally, in most Western countries sociology had to contend for acceptance as an academic discipline against such established and respected disciplines as political phi- Josophy, constitutional law, and political science. When it came to defining domains, the state, being central to these other disciplines, ‘was “off limits" to sociology. Given this background, sociology today cannot draw from its own tradition enough of what it reeds to come to grips with the problem of the state. Of the greater sociologists, only Max Weber made political phenomena, and signally the state, a central theme of his work. Yet he did not live to write his “sociology of the state”; his writings on the subject are mostly essays or were left in draft form; and most sociologists, however mistakenly, consider the typology of legitimate domination his main contribution to the sociological study of politics? Another great sociologist with strong and weighty views on the state was of course Karl Marx; and we owe much of the current literature on the state (in sociology as well as in other social sci- fences) to students who appeal primarily to Marx for their inspir- ation Though ie draws at various points on Marxian insights, this book emphatically is not intended as a contribution to that litera- ture, For one thing, the texts of Marx (and Engels) that directly ‘address political phenomena, and the state in particular, are not that ‘many and often deal with specific and highly contingent issues of policy; and I prefer to leave the collation of and commentary upon Such texts to expert Marxologists.* Furthermore, the current effort to bring the Marxian “critique of political economy” to bear on the policies of contemporary Western states, valuable as itis, is of limited help to sociologists seeking in the first place an understand ing of the nature and origins of the state. Marx and Engels took such problems largely for granted; and so did and do most of their followers. Their concer is not with the x PREFACE state's institutional features or with political processes per se, but with how, if at all, state power affects the class struggle, capital accumulation and expansion, and the struggles over the world market. Such issues may well be weightier than those that concern us in this book. But the latter appear to me significant not only in view of the task of constructing a sociology of the state, but also in view of that of developing a radical, “debunking” critique of the uses to which state power is put today. After all, I submit, the first duty of an iconoclast is to know his icons. The Marxists’ rendency to discuss political structures only from the perspective (however enlightening in itself) of the “critique of political economy” has had some unfortunate pragmatic conse- quences for political movements appealing to Marx as their chief inspiration, But even leaving these aside, sociologists intending to remedy their discipline’s traditional lack of concern with the state should not seek help exclusively or in the first place within the Marxian tradition, Where, then, are they to turn? ‘There are various alternatives, of which this book explores only ‘one, I have chosen to discuss the main phases in the development of the modem state up to the nineteenth century, after which I have considered somelater changes in the relation of the My focus’is exclusively on the evolution of the state's internal institutional arrangements—not on the policies of states, how these policies affect other social structures, or how they have contributed to the emergence of separate national societies. T have deawn chiefly on two bodies of literature: the history of ‘Western political institutions and, to a lesser extent, constitutional law. Further, I have relied almost exclusively on Continental works, and in particular on publications in German. I have favored Ger- man (and Austrian and Swiss) writers for several reasons, One is that they more frequently write in general terms and from a com- patative perspective, instead of dealing exclusively with this or that individual variane of a given institutional development. An- other and related reason is that German works contribute more xiPREFACE ‘often and more explicitly to the kind of conceptual argument that Tam interested in conducting. A third reason is that in German works the history of political institutions and their juridical analy- sis arc more often seen as interrelated, A limitation of my approach is that it does not consider the developments in political theory and ideology that accompanied the formation of the modern state.‘ It has no room for Marsilius of Padua, Locke, or Hegel, or for the interaction between their thought and the politics of their time. That interaction is itself of the greatest historical interest, and I regret having no room for it in the conception of this book. Finally, the organization of my argument as a sequence of ty pological constructs puts it at variance with s properly histori cal account. From the continuity and diversity of the historical Process are extracted a few highly abstract models, cach treated as a closer approximation of the nineteenth-century constitutional state, which I consider the most mature embodiment of the ‘the modern state.” I have chosen this approach, with its obvious liabil ties, a8 a compromise between a full-fledged historical analysis, in which a welter of individual variants and transitional conditions would obscure the distinctiveness and unity of inspiration of cach successive model, and the kind of overly generalized treatment (to be discussed briefly at the end of the first chapter) that would view the last thousand years in Western political history as the inevitable unfolding of a universal evolutionary model, Naturally, the ideal types I employ should net be treated as explanatory devices in their own right. Rather, they conceptualize changing Patterns of accommodation between the contrasting interests of groups that themselves change and that constitute the ultimate Protagonists of the historical process. Thus the model states I de- scribe are introduced to make the process more intelligible; they do not themselves account for it. My choices of theme, approach, and sources could easily be contrasted with alternatives I have forgone. I have no doubt that sociologists concerned with the state could benefit, in particular, xii PREFACE from exploring the contributions of other disciplines, such as an- thropology, economics (including the Marxian critique of political economy), and political science. But I myself have made no effort to draw on any of these disciplines. I find anthropology boring. I do not understand economics. As for political science, over the last thirty years or so it seems to me to have gone to incredible lengths in order to forget the state; and among those political scientists of whom this is not true, a majority are probably committed to the Marxist approach (es) that I have chosen not to adopt. : ‘AS against these alternatives, I find the history of political institu- tions congenial, indeed at times outright fascinating, especially the best German writings in the field. As for constitutional law, which can be quite as boring as anthropology and nearly as difficult as economics, I have learned to avoid the less rewarding writers and concentrate on those who are themselves sociologically or historic- ally informed, and whose concern with juridical analysis aids rather than impedes their grasp of larger political structures. ‘Whatever this combination of emphases and aversions may in the end be worth, it should at least fill serious gaps in the interests and information of many sociologists, and at best provide a handy framework for a coherent account of the secular process by which, from beginnings in the ninth century, rule over vast Western terti- tories came to be exercised within and by the institutional complex we call the modern state.” The big question for sociologists is of course that of gaining a clearer understanding of the workings of the state in contemporary societies. This small exercise is intended only as a prolegomenon to that large and difficult task. GP. xiiiTHE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN STATECHAPTER I Introduction: The Business of Rule HE MODERN STATE is perhaps best seen as a complex set of "Tinscsiona arrangements for rule operating through the ‘continuous and regulated activities of individuals acting as occu- pants of offices. The state, as the sum total of such offices, reserves to itself the business of rule over a territorially bounded society; it ‘monopolizes, in law and as far as possible in fact, all faculties and facilities pertaining to chat business. And in principle it attends exclusively to that same business, as perceived in the light of its own particular interests and rules of-canduct, But what is the business of rule? The modern state is a set of institutional arrangements for doing what? Those questions are the concern of this chapter. In its title I have used the expression “rule,” as I shall do throughout the book (if rarely in this chapter), because it suitably conveys the asymmetrical nature of the social relations to which it refers, and because it points to the giving and obeying of commands as the everyday substance of those relations. ‘An alternative and more frequent formulation of our questions em- ploys the expressions “politics” or “political.” Thus we might ask ‘what is the nature of politics? Or, perhaps, what is political business alll about? In this chapter we shall consider two significant, and significantly different, definitions of the nature of politics. One derives from a discussion of the problem put forward in the 1950's by the Ameri- tINTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE «can political scientist David Easton, The other was formulated in the 1920's by the redoubtable German legal theorist and right-wing political ideologist Carl Schmitt Politics as Allocation ‘The two formulations differ, to begin with, in the imagery of social life that serves them as backdrop. Easton’s discussion’ pro- jects a view of the social process as a continuous flow of diverse activities by which a limited number of valuable objects are trans- ferred to and from interacting individuals whose primary interest is in appropriating and enjoying such objects. The objects may range from physical goods to abstractions like power and the right to deference. Further, the allocation process is not a random one. If social life is to have any pattern and continuity, the process must bbe to a considerable extent institutionalized. It must produce or validate the assignment to certain individuals of certain objects, disvalued as well as valued. Let us consider three basic ways of structuring this allocation process, of making it relatively predictable and stable. One is cus- tom: a universally or widely shared understanding according to which valued or disvalued things rightfully pertain to certain peo- ple or positions. (“A title on the door rates a Bigelow on the floor.”) Another is exchange: a transaction whereby one party relinquishes 2 valued object to another party in return for some other valued ‘object. (“You pays your money and you takes your choice.) A. third is command: a mechanism by which valued objects are al located on somebody's say-so. (“I'm the boss here.”) Easton construes the whole realm of politics as related to this last modality: allocation by command. In his view, within a given in- teraction context you have “policies” insofar as atleast some value allocations take place otherwise than by custom or exchange. ‘Typically, customary allocations reflect consensus among all par- ticipants, not submission to someone's individual will. Typically also, parties to an exchange are equal; they agree with rather than, INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE submit to one another. Political allocations, by contrast, necessarily involve the submission of one party to another's will. Yer since the objects in question are valued and scarce, political allocations cannot rest exclusively on someone's will. Effective al- locations can take place only when commands are binding: that is, when my submission to a command does not depend on my spontaneous goodwill or indifference but is enforceable against my ‘opposition. The giver of the command must be able to back up his say-so with sanctions, typically punishment for noncompliance rather than reward for compliance. Politics, then, deals with the allocation and handling of a resource (che ability to issue enforceable, sanctioned commands) that in turn can be used for making further allocations of other valued objects. If politics be so understood, it follows that itis an unglam- orous, mundane business, working out its allocations in bits and pieces everywhere. Yet we feel intuitively that politics is instead a significant, momentous order of social business, involving major actors and taking place at the very centepof society. Easton under- takes to reconcile these views by Sipating that not just any com- ‘mand-based allocation can be.considered political-only those that take place within relatively broad and durable social contexts with broadly defined constituencies. A father's commands, the rulings of a club's chaitman, or even the decisions of a corporation's ex- ‘cutive are not properly political. Memberships in local groupings are very often voluntary; and voluntary or not, they can often be surrendered by a disaffected member without serious loss to him- self, Buc such groupings in turn form pare of a much wider one, one in which membership cannot be easily surrendered or dis- pensed with, Let us call this comprehensive grouping, which typically is ter- ritorially bounded, “society.” Then Easton would apply the term “political” only to those command-based allocations whose effects are directly or indirectly valid for society as a whole. So under- stood, political business involves particularly visible, multifaceted, 3INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE demanding relations of superiority-inferiority, and ie generally uses as its ultimate sanction the uniquely compelling one of physical coercion. In any case, in Easton's view politics essentially takes place within bounded interaction contexts, which can of course be seen as existing side by side with other such contexts. Furthermore, «as we have seen, politics deals with a functional problem (allocating values among interacting units) that can in prin in at least wo other institutional weys: by custom and by exchange. Given these theoretical alternatives, are there grounds fer think- ing chat some valuc allocations must be on the basis of command? Or, to rephrase the question, is politics a necessary feature and component of social life? The answer is unquestionably yes, except perhaps in the very’ simplest interaction contexts. It is demonstra- bly clear that neither custom nor exchange, nor both together, can do all the allocating that has to be done, There are bound to be contingencies that cannot be met except by command-based allocations. Why? Because a comprehensive and rigid body of custom, mi- nutely allocating values, cannot by its very nature allow for the mobilization of resources, the bypassing of routines, the explora- tion of new lines of action, which from time to time become neces- saty if a society is to persis, to preserve its store of values, to patrol and maintain its boundaries with nature and with other societies, A wholly custom-controlled society can persist in the face of new contingencies only if its customs empower some members to mobilize others in response to such contingencies, to devise new routines, to choose among alternative patterns of action and have their choices accepted. But this is of course to accept the necessity of command." As for exchange, Durkheim showed long ago that even the most sophisticated and flexible exchange system presup- poses the existence of enforceable, policed rules In Durkheim's terms, effective contracts depend on the existence of the institution ‘of contract, which itself cannot be contractual but must be bind- ingly established and enforced. Here again we are back to the necessity of command. 4 INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE The argument that some allocation must take place through command (in Easton's terms, the argument for the necessity of Politics) leaves open the question of the mix between the three modes of allocation, a mix that will obviously vary in different circumstances. What matters here is simply that interaction con- texts beyond a certain level of complexity, duration, and size must have a mechanism of allocating at least some values on the basis of command. And it follows that society must make some permanent provisions for recourse, however intermiteent, to this mechanism, Politics as Us Against the Other Plausible as Easton's position may seem, it remains questionable whether politics ough to be defined solely or even primarily with reference to value allocations within interaction contexts. Some weighty arguments to the contrary are offered by Schmitt in his provocative book Der Begriff des politischen# In 1927, when this book was first published, Schmitt was a respected if controversial practitioner of “the theory of the state,” 2,branch of German legal scholarship bordering on political scieneé. His book was intended to challenge what he saw as his colicagues’ maddeningly circular definition of the seate as a political entity and politics a the province of thestate, ‘Schmitt held that to define the nature of politics it was necessary to identify « distinctive realm of decisions to which the term “politi- cal” could legitimately be applied. In his view this required finding ‘two contrasting terms that bounded the political realm in the same ‘way the realm of ethical decisions is bounded by “good /evil,” thae of economic decisions by “profitable/unprofitable,” or that of juridical decisions by “lega/illegai.” No such pair of terms had yet been agreed on for politics, Schmitt charged, because his col- leagues’ liberal and humanitarian prejudices kept them from seeing the true nature of the problem. We may pause here to compare Schmitt's basic imagery of social life with Easton’s, Easton, as we have seen, envisaged a number of bounded interaction contexts, each with certain ongoing sets of 3INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE relatively ordered allocation processes of which at least some, though functionally equivalent to others, were best characterized as political. To Schmitt, by contrast, social life is intrinsically dis- orderly and menacing. Relatively orderly interaction can be main- tained only within discrete contexts or societies, each of which must first and foremost keep at bay the threat of disorder and disaster permanently posed by other, outside societies that are inimical to its interests and bent on expansion at its expense. Legal, religious, economic, scientific, and other experiences are perma- nent potentialities of human existence; but they can be actualized ‘only on the condition that political activity preserve those fragile (because historically produced) boundaries that separate one so- ciety from another. Although cecasional activities involve par- ticipants from more than one society, by and large orderly social life goes on within individual societies none of which is coextensive with humanity. Politics is accordingly concerned with setting and maintaining the boundaries between collectivities, and in particular with protecting each collectivity’s cultural identity from outside threats. Schmitt accordingly finds his political realm defined by the distinction “friend/foe.” A colkectiviey's quintessential political function is to decide which other collectivities are its friends and \hich ts foes. In the confrontation between Us and the Other,’ we define as friends those collectivities whose own definition of all other collectivites, including Us, s friend or foe appears compati- ble, in che given circumstances, with our preservation as an atton- omous, integral society; we define as foes those whose existence or political activity threatens our integrity or autonomy. Our integrity and autonomy are paramount concerns; for only if they are pre~ served can we perform such other activities as may be appropriate to the spirit of our collectivit But if this is so, some widely accepted approaches to political business (and to the “theory of state”) are untenable, notably the equating of political business and law as preached by proponents of the Rechtsstaat.? In Schmite’s view political decisions proper 6 INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE bear no relationship whatever to legal rules or che distinction “egaV/illegal.” For law can concern itself only with decisions that are or can be standardized; and decisions between friend and foe— resulting as they do from the confrontation among independent and self-serving collectivities operating outside any encompassing system. of rule~are too momentous, too unpredictable, too open ended, to be subjected to standards. Each properly political decision, then, is inherently a decision about an emergency, an unstable and consequence-laden situation in which rapidly apprchended necessity and expediency dictate action. Effectiveness, not legality, is what counts If anything, poli- tics is prior to law rather than vice versa, and legal theory must acknowledge the inherent priority of the emergency over the rou- tine of social existence.* Nor should we allow conceptual manipulation or ideological angument to confuse political decisions with other realms of de- cision. A foe may or may not be also a collectivity with which we cannot profitably engage in economic transactions, or one that is morally evil: no matter. The decision between friend and foe is distinctive and overriding. To deal-with it properly, the political decision-maker must clear his mind of sll secondary considerations (jaridical, moral, economic, etc.), however significant they may be within their respective nonpolitical realms. The ultimate political decision is existential, not normative: ic isa response to a condition imposed on Us by the Other. If the Other defines Us as a foe and acts as a foe to us—never mind why it does—we can only reciprocate in kind, And our re- sponse must perforce ental, if not the actuality, at lease the possi- bility, of armed conflict: When all is said and done, the real sense of the concept of foe, of political conflict, ete. is to be found in the possibility of the sccual ‘exercise of physical violenee, culminating in the physical annihil of the foe. ... War is but the consequent actualization of foe-nes. .. ‘War is not the content, the end, or the sole means of politics, but @ condition whose actual possibility politics presupposes. The “political 7INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE clement” lies not ia war itself, which has techniques of its own, but in conduct relating to the actual possibilty of war, in the acknowledgment of the situation it creates for the colletivity.? “Thus polities involves @ continuous preparedness for possible conflict with inimical Others. Further, although politics is only one of many distinctive and mutually irreducible forms of human ac- tivity, itis intrinsically superior to all others because itis centrally concerned with preserving the collectivity without whose existence all other activities could not properly take place. Political decisions deal with the intrinsically disordered and thus menace-laden nature of the relations between collectivities. No other decisions approach them in importance, ‘What Easton sees as politics Schmitt would see as at best a deriva- fe, low-grade variety of political experience, To be sure, in the course of dealing with other collectivitis as friends and foes, a so- ciety will necessarily encounter some internal allocative problems. Someone will have to decree, for example, which organs will be charged with which decisions, what their powers will be, who is to man them, and how they will impinge on the distribution of which social values among individuals and groups. But woe to the col- lectivity that reduces its politics to these problems alone, For how is such a collectivity to decide normatively who is its foe, or deal with him by invoking rules? However it may be within collectivi- ties, the relations between them take place in a normative vacuum; the readiness is all. In Schmite’s view, the fact that the world is pluralistically con- stivuted, in the sense of being made up of more than one political entity, makes it imperative that no collectivity permit any internal political pluralism, any multiplication or dispersion of the centers of political decision. Within each collectivity, only one center can have the right to make such decisions, and this right must be jealously guarded. Indeed, ultimately a single individual mast make each properly political decision, since only a single mind can ef- fectively weigh the momentous contingencies involved in deciding the paramount question of who are the collectivity’s friends and 8 INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE foes. Normative considerations, however dear to the liberal mind, are inherently irrelevant to the desperate business at hand: ‘War, the fighting men’s readiness to die, the physical annihilation of other men on the side of the foe-all this has no normative significance, but purely an existential one; and this lies in the reality of the actual struggle, not in any ideals, programs, or norms. There is no goal so rational, no norm so right, no program so exemplary, no social ideal so areractive, no legitimacy or legality so compelling as to justify men’s killing one another. ....A war does not make sense by virtue of being fought for ideals or over rights, but by virtue of being fought against an actual foe!” Obviously Schmitt is all to0 willing to go beyond mere tough- mindedness to outright bloody-mindedness. But before we impute this willingness exclusively to his undeniable fascist irrationalism, we must acknowledge that modern history offers no examples whatever in which the application of moral, ideological, or juridi- cal criteria to the conduct of international affairs has effectively curbed international tensions or moderated the ferocity of military conflict. eer Contrasting th? Lavo Views Let us now consider some important contrasts between Easton's and Schmitt's views of the business of rule. First, Easton's view is inward, concerned above all with the internal concerns of the polity. Schmitt's is outward, focused on the polity’s external con- cers, Second, the ultimate aspect of the human condition for Easton is scarcity; for Schmitt it is danger. Third, Easton puts forward what might be called an economistic view of politics: political processes, as he understands them, are concerned with assigning to individuals things that they can enjoy in their private capacities. In Schmitt's view the single function of politics, to preserve the security and integrity of the collectivity, can be of significance to individuals only insofar as they share membership in the collectivity. Easton’s politics are epitomized in the deliber- ations of a legislative assembly or the rulings of a judge: symbolic 9INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE discursive, civilian. In Schmitt’s vision such aspects of polities are secondary to sheer, factual armed force as the ultimate foundation of the collectivity’s ability to meant or counter a military threat. Finally, chese two views represent a twentieth-century echo of a long-standing European intellectual debate over the nature of poli- tics.#! Easton's view, which echoes Thomas More's in Utopia, re~ sponds to the distinctive political experience of post-Norman England, In a country protecteé by the sea from the direct and continuous threat of aggressive neighbors, political thought and praxis nacurally turn inward, adopting as their standard the well- being of the commonwealth (the very expression “commonwealth” is significant) and the shaping of internal hierarchies of honor and advantage. Here, public controversy, the safeguarding of rights, and the framing and enforcing of laws appear as the very essence of political business. Schmitt, by contrast, restates 2 distinetly Con- tinental conception, one first and most sharply articulated by Machiavelli in the sixteenth century as the operational code of the emergent sovereign states of Western and Central Europe. Here the prime fact of political experience is the continuous threat, potential or actual, that each country poses to its neighbor's bound- aries and the ensuing continuous struggle for an equilibrium ac- ceptable to all countries involved. Under these conditions political thought and praxis necessarily turn outward, according the highest priority to diplomacy and war. Whatever the shortcomings of Easton’s and Schmitt's views, I doubt that any other view of modern politics at this conceptual level deserves equal consideration. In particular, the Marxian view of politics, focused on the use of organized, society-wide coercion to secure (or end) the dominance of a class possessing the means of production, can probably be seen as a ctitical variant of Easton's view. Although the Marxian view, with its emphasis on coercion and class conflict, has a tough-mindedness missing from Faston’s, the two views share a primary reference to allocative processes taking place within a collectivity understood in the first instance as 2 division of labor. INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE Reconciling the Two Views ‘The extreme contrast between Easton's and Schmitt's views ‘makes all the more striking their agreement on one basic structural feature of political business, namely that whatever agency is re- sponsible for that business must have privileged access to faci for physical coercion, To be sure, Easton insists less than Schmitt that such access need be exclusive, and sees the exercise of coercion as typically occurring internally rather than externally. But their common emphasis on the necessity of coercion suggests that the ‘two views may somehow be reconciled: indeed, that each may perhaps be seen as stating one aspect of politics rather than a self- sufficient, integral view of the whole. It might seem reasonable at first to reconcile the two views by simply conceding Schmitt's and granting Easton’sa kind of second- ine validity. After all, the direct concern with preserving a col- lectivity’s territorial and cultural integrity and historical continuity seemingly takes both logical and chronological precedence over the mere internal alocatton che values its members produce, It seems almost absurd, by contrat to subordinate Schmitt's view to Easton’sto derive the very maintenance of the collectivity’s in- dependent existence from the business of internal value allocation. But things are not that simple. Entirely apare from its repulsive moral undertones, Schmite’s view suffers from too many serious inadequacies to serve as an adequate point of departure. His chief error is to take the collectivity of reference (Us) as a datum, from which he goes on to stress how fragile, threatened, and conditional that datum is. But to constitute the collectivity, to impart to it the distinctiveness or sense of common destiny that politics, as Schmitt understands it, is designed to safeguard—all this, surely, is political business of the highest order. The collectivity is not a datum. It is itself the product of polities, which must first create it and can only then defend it. And in creating the collectivity in the first place, politics can hardly do without precisely those symbolic public processes that Easton emphasizes and Schmite disdains. uINTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE “Where Easton for his part erts is in seeing those processes a5 amounting to politics only insofar as they bear upon value alloca- tions. As we have seen, values must be generated before they can be allocated; and the generating may well be more important than the allocating. Furthermore, some of the values so generated—e-g. 1 public park, the right to vote—cannot be allocated between indi- viduals, but can only be possessed and enjoyed collectivel If there is something brutal and demoniac about Schmitt's con- cept of the politcal, there is something petty and philistine about Easton's, Politics is surely more than 2 process of allocating valued objects carried out before greedy eyes by the grasping hands of a multitude of “antagonistic cooperators.” Catlin is closer when he defines politics as “concerned with the relations of men, in asso- ciation and competition, submission and control, in so far as they seek, not the production and consumption of some article, but to have their way with their fellow men.” Yer it is hard to sce how ‘else than through those processes Easton emphasizes—the framing and sanctioning of collectively binding decisions, the explicit pat- terning of interaction, the achievement and maintenance of in- terna} order—collectivities can ever attain the distinctive identity that Schmitt sees as their essence. Perhaps Schmitt is in some sense right in suggesting that col- lectivities can only define their identity by denying others what they regard as theirs. But how can a collectivity discriminate be- ween friend and foc if not by referring to a conception of what makes Us into Us; and how can such a conception be generated except by ordering in some distinctive fashion the internal life of the collectivity? But if this isso, why deny the term “political” to the processes by which such a conception is produced and main- tained against the threat of intemal disorder? In sum, if we divest Easton's inward-looking conception of its overemphasis on allocation and extend it to comprehend values central to the collectivity that can be possessed by its members only jointly and not singly, we have 2 view that points just as surely as n } | t INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE Schmitt's to 2 prime, distinetive, essential aspect of politics. The two views are in effect complementary, Much as one might dis- count Schmitt's view as demoniac or fascist,* history has repeat edly borne him out. Once the dangerousness and the ultimate disorderliness of social life are recognized, their implications remain utterly amoral and—today more than ever—utterly frightening. For all the advances of the last two centuries, we have as much reason today to hope with Adam Smith, and as little reason to believe, that “the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring ‘mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another.” The Theory of Institutional Differentiation So far we have sought to identify some basic requirements of social existence involving activities that can be meaningfully labeled “political.” We have not asked how those requirements are at- tended to, how those activities are patterned, except to the extent of suggesting thet rule always involves a mote or less exclusive disposition over means-of-coezcion. These are the questions that will occupy the rest of this book. fn the light of the broad concept discussed in this chapter, our concer will be to examine the de- velopment over time of the distinctive structural features of one system of rule, the modern state. Since it is in the very nature of the modern state thar there should be many states, and since modem states have historically exhibited an enormous variety of institutional arrangements, clearly one speaks of the modern state as one system of rule only at a high level of abstraction, At such a level it secms appropriate to some sociologists to regard che formation of the modern state as an in- stance of “institutional differentiation,” the process whereby the ‘major functional problems of a society give rise in the course of time to various increasingly elaborated and distinctive sets of structural arrangements. In this view, the formation of the modern BINTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE state parallels and complements various similar processes of instiu- tional differentiation affecting, say, the economy, the family, and religion. This approach has illustrious proponents both among the great sociologists of the past, who usec it to get a conceptual hold on the nature of modern society, and among their contemporary epigones.* Ie also has attractive links to other disciplines dealing with evolutionary change. And it can be applied at various levels, ‘Thus one mighe say that the key phenomenon in the development of the modern state was the institutionalization, within “moderniz~ ing” Western societies, of the distinction between the private/ social realm and the public/ political realm, and that the same pro- ‘cess was later carried further within each realm, In the public realm, for instance, the “division of powers” assigned different functions of rule to different constitutional organs; in the private realm, the occupational system became further differentiated from, say, the sphere of the family. And so on. “Thus a proponent of this approach has the considerable ad- vantage of applying a single more or less elaborate model of the differentiation process, with appropriate specifications and adjust- ‘ments, to a great range of events, showing how in each case the same “logic” operates. And indeed at several points in this book I have found this approach useful. But on the whole I have not adopted it, for three reasons. First, by its affinity (ofcen explicitly asserted) with biological evolutionism, the approach seems to claim the status of a proper scientific theory, notably the ability to explain the phenomena it discusses. Yet entirely apart from the question of whether sociolo- gists may legitimately aspire to such an aim, no one has yet specified ‘mechanisms of social evotution with any where near the explanatory power of those worked out for nacural evolution by Darwin or Mendel."* Second, whatever its strengths or weaknesses, the theory postu lates 2 cumulative, irreversible process of differentiation, Thus it can shed no light, explanatory or otherwise, on those recent phe- 4 INTRODUCTION: THE BUSINESS OF RULE nomena that are rending to displace the distinction between scate and society, thus suggesting a process not of differentiation but of de-differentiation. Finally, any attempt to render the institutional story of the modem state purely in terms of a general theory of social change ‘can at best trace the diffusion of the state as an existing entity from its European heartland to outlying areas. But that is not enough for cour purposes in this book. Such a general theory cannot encompass the state's origins. It cannot identify within a given society the dis- tinctive forces and interests (“material and ideal,” in Weber's terms) from whose interaction that new system of rule emerged. Nor can it begin to do justice to such weighty components of the development of the modern state as the Greek conception of the political process, with its distinctive duality of public argument at fone end and enforceable law at the other; the religious individual- ism and universalism of Christianity; and the Germanic view that encroachment upon one's rights can be legitimately resisted even, against one’s own superior." T cannot claim that the typological treatment attempted in the following chapters gives such factors their full due. I hope only that by employing a scheme in which they have a place, Tcan take the reader beyond the felatively-shallow notion of “institutional differentiation” to a deeper insight into the complexity of the his- torical events that have gone into the making of the modern state, 15CHAPTER IL The Feudal System of Rule HIS CHAPTER and the two that follow discuss a historical "Tcquence of three types of rule systems: feudalism, the Sti- destaat, and absolutism. This typology has often been used by students of the historical and legal aspects of political institutions working within the German tradition; students from the French and the Anglo-American traditions have been less familiar with it, or have shown themselves less inclined to concede the structural distinctiveness of the Stindesteat (a term to be explained below) as an intermediate system between feudalism, on the one hand, and absolutism, on the other." A further objection to this typology will undoubtedly be raised by those many historians who balk at reduc- ing che vastness and diversity of human events and arrangements (for rule, in this case) to a few sharply contrasted conceptual de- vices. Yet such a practice 's unavoidable in a work of sociology aimed at making comparative statements or some kind of develop- mental synthesis, and I follow some notable precedents in treating about one thousand years in the history of Western political insti- tutions through a sequence of only three constructs, each more closely approximating the “mature modern state” of the nineteenth century.* My starting point is the creation of the Carolingian empire, which I take as the context of the rise of the feudal system of rule ‘The switch to the Stindesteat system I place, in most of the lands 16 THE FEUDAL SYSTEM OF RULE under consideration, between the late twelfth and eatly fourteenth centuries; that from the Stindestaat to the absolutist system of rule I place between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the early eighteenth century, absolutism was already on the decline in some important countries under the pressure of devclopments— many of them not of a specifically political nature—that I shall des- ignate as “the rise of civil society.” (The expression ancien régime, at any rate in the narrow meaning it has in Tocqueville, can be seen as another designation for this last transition.) ‘The geographical focus of the discussion is on continental West- ern Europe, especially the lands now making up Germany and France, I include developments in the Iberian peninsula, too, but gencrally leave to one side those in the Italian peninsula. The “Eng- lish case,” particularly after feudalism, does not fit easily into the argument, even in the highly abstract terms in which I phrase it. To a lesser extent, the same thing can be said of Scandinavia. On the other hand, parts of Eastern Europe—particularly Prussia, the Baltic lands, and those areas progressively brought under Hapsburg domination—may be seen as “covered” by the argument for some periods and aspects of their political history. However, I pay lite attention to the regional wo on variants of the rule systems in question, and refer to developmignts in individual countries only for general examples.* The Rise of Feudalism Although the typology introduced at the beginning of this chapter concerns the development of Western political institutions, each system of rule must be seen against a broader background of cultural, economic, social, and technological phenomena, All these phenomena were continually changing during the period under examination here (late eighth to early fourteenth centuries), but we may begin by considering the features characteristic of the carly part of the period and relating them to the establishment of feudalism as a system of rule.’ Before the outset of our period, three developments had profoundly disrupted the material and "7THE FEUDAL SYSTRM OF RULE institutional landscape of Western Europe: (1) the breakdown of the Western Roman Empire, both as a centralized system of gov- ernment and as an administrative system centered around munici- palities; (2) the massive cistocation of populations in the Valker- swanderungen; and (3) the shift away from the Mediterranean of the main lines of communication and trade among Western Euro- pean populations and between them and others. From these developments stemmed some features of the histori- cal context whose significance for the establishment and manage- ment of a system of rule is fairly apparent: widespread disruption, disrepair, and insecurity of the lines of transport and communi- cation; thoroughgoing decommercialization of economic processes, now almost exclusively isolated rural undertakings operating at very low levels of productivity and unable to rely on support and demand from the urban centers, themselves mostly in a state of abandon and economically weak; an extremely low level of liver- acy, with reading and writing practically a monopoly of the clergy and confined to Latin, which outside the clergy is ceasing to be a lingua fanca; and a population attaining at best very low levels of nutrition, health, comfort, and security, with the result that life expectancy is appallingly short and population density in many areas below viable levels. Alll things considered, itis not unreasonable to apply the designa- tion “Dark Ages,” however biased in tone, to this historical con- text. Yet within it, in the latter part of the eighth century, the Carolingian dynasty ambitiously (and for a few decades success- fully) undertook to reconstitute a comprehensive, translocal frame- work of rule, Ie sought thereby to recover the now distant and dimly perceived Roman legacy of ordet and unity, and to impart to the social existence of Western Christianity a greater measure of coherence, of secutity from invasion, banditry, naked oppression, ‘and misery, than the ecclesiastical system of leadership alone could provide, ‘The celebrated event that marks the culmination of this under- taking—the crowning of Charlemagne, king of the Franks since 18 THE FEUDAL SYSTEM OF RULE 768, emperor in Rome by the Pope on Christmas Day, 8008 visibly reveals two major components of the undertaking: the reference to Imperial Rome, and the close association with Christianity and the Church. To these correspond two significant aspects of the sys- tem of rule the Carolingians sought to operate. First, there was the attempt to structure rule vertically through the establishment of two distinctively public offices; I refer here to the appointment of comites (counts) and missi dominici (envoys of the ruler), the latter having the responsibility for activating and controlling at in- tervals, according to central directives, the business of rule carried ‘out locally by the former. Second, there was the reliance on bish- optics and abbeys (whose boundaries often corresponded to those of the Roman municipalities and large landed estates, respectively) as the main horizontal elements of the administrative structure, Buta third component of the original Carolingian design was not as visibly in evidence as the Roman and the ecclesiastical ones in the ceremony of Christmas Day, 800. Yet this element, of barbaric and particularly of Germanic origin, was to make a profound, and in the long run largely" destructive, impact upon the new system of rule, This was the relationship-of Gefolgschafe, “followership,” a personal bond of mutual loyalty and affection between a warrior chief and his hand-picked retinue of close associates, his crusted companions in honor, adventure, and leadership.” Already wide- spread in 800, these typically close and highly personal relation- ships between near-peers were to become an indispensable instita- tional component of the Carolingian empire, and were to survive its demise and deeply affect Western arrangements for rule for several centuries afterward. ‘Why was this so? Let us reconsider the historical context sketched out above—in particular, the insecurity and irregularity of communications; the impossibility, under conditions approxi- mating the notion of a “natural” (as against a “money”) economy, of building up through taxes a treasury from which to finance an apparatus of rule actually ran from the center; and the necessity, in the face of invasion and banditry, of orienting the business of 19THE FEUDAL SYSTEM OF RULE xrale primarily to military tasks. Clearly, under such conditions it ‘was impossible to maintain a unitary political system based ex clusively on counts and missi dominici, and in which the letter were to be treated as holders of public, centrally bestowed and con- trolled faculties of rule, supported from public funds, and subject to territorial rotation, recall, accountability, and dismissal. Such offices (and up to a point, 100, the ecclesiastical ones) had to be qualified and complemented by understandings and arrangements derived essentially from Gefolgschaft, from the notion of the chosen retinue of warriors clustered around the chief. The Nature of the Feudal Relationship To become a vital component of the feudal system of rule, Ge- folgschaft itself had to be enriched and qualified by institutional traits not themselves of Germanic or barbaric origin, but rather of Jace Roman origin. These traits are best signaled by the Latin desig- nations of three significant arrangements. Commendatio. This was originally a highly skewed relation- ship whereby an inferior (though normally free) party entrusted mself to the protection of a superior, powerful one, and assumed toward him duties of submission (if not outright subjection) and, ‘when necessary, of personal aid. Beneficium: (ater fevum, then feudum; hence “fief”). This was 4 grant of rights, chiefly to land but including the land's popula- tion (slave, serf, or free) and agricultural appurtenances, intended to supply the material needs of an individual or community taking charge of some ecclesiastical or governmental responsibil Tnamuenitas. Here, the household and possessions of an individual ora collectivity (the latter generally ecclesiastical) became exempt from the fiscal, military, and judicial powers normally exercised by the holder of a public office over the territory including them. In the feudal system of rule, these three arrangements became integrated with Gefolgscheft, modifying it and being modified by it, The result was a profound (and for a long time irreversible) dis- location of the vertical axis of the original Carolingian design—the 20 THE FEUDAL SYSTEM OF RULE relationship between the emperor, at one end, and the counts and ‘miss, at the other. Let us see how this happened. ‘As a result of the influence of Gefolgschaft, the prefeudal com- mendatio lost some of its skewness, as it were; its gradient became less steep. Both in its typical content and in the ritual forms of its enactment, the commendatio gradually came to be perceived as a suitable arrangement for two parties who were in principle near- peers (a5 in the Gefolgschaft). This is not to say that the new, feudal commendatio assumed total equality between the parties, or made their respective obligations cotally symmetrical or otherwise equivalent. Nonetheless, there was enough equality to indicate that the party who “commended” himself (the vassal) and the party who received the commendatio (the lord) belonged in principle to the same, exclusive social world. Typically, both were practi- tioners of the same mode of warfare, one that required great skill and that was economically and physically exacting: shock combat between mounted, heavily armnored warriors. The relation between the parties co the commendatib committed the lord to protect the vassal, che vassal to lend his aif and advice to the lord, and both to hold each other in affection and respect. They thus acknow!- edged each other as companigns, just as the members of the Ger- manic Gefolgschaft were expected to do toward one another and toward the chief they jointly followed, Thus understood, the fendal commendatio is something more than a relationship at once contractual (ie, resting on the free, reciprocal choice of the part- ners and generating mutual obligations) and hierarchical (ie, rec~ ognizing some degree of inequality between the parties); itis also, in its typical form, colored by emotional content (loyalty, affec- tion, trust, comradeship) not often found in either contractual or hierarchical relations. Ie is thus an intensely personal relation, en visaging two partners who choose, aid, and respect each other as individuals. The beneficium (fief) was affected by the notion of Gefolg- schafe by being drawn into the arrangements of the feudal com- mendatio. A fief was granted by the lord to the vassal on the under- at‘THE FEUDAL SYSTEM OF RULE standing that by exploiting it economically the vassal would be ‘enabled to render the services he owed the lord: to equip himself ‘with weapons and mounts; to train, equip, reward, and lead an esquire and the small team of subalterns necessary to support @ mounted warrior in the field; co join the lord's host or his council when required; to maintain a household befitting one who was a near-peer of the lord, and often his guest or host; and so forth. Thus the land grant was implicitly, and often explicitly, a corollary to the logic of the commendatio: indeed, it came to constitute 2 much more significant expression of the lord’s favor than the simple promise of protection and amity to the vassal In fact, the grant of the fief was designed precisely to enable the vassal to look after his own protection and that of his dependents, and if necessary to aid the lord, As for immunitas, originally its significance was chiefly negative: an “immune” household and estate simply constituted a gap within the territorial reach of the powers normally exercised by the gran ‘or, an enclave where his writ did not run, Feudalism attached posi tive significance to the same phenomenon. Insofar as it became tied to the commendatio and the grant of land, immunity entailed that the vassal was not just permitted bue expected to exercise over his fief a number of prerogatives of rule—levying contributions (in kind, in labor, possibly in specie), declating and enforcing the law, defending and policing the land, leading armed dependents into battle, and so on. The vassal was expected to do all this on his own behalf, using his prerogatives 2s a means to the economic exploita- tion of the land he held in grant and of its resident dependents. His doing so was itself construed as a vital aspect of his service to the lord; it was a means of decentralizing, of extending into the peri- phery, the lord’s own activities of rule. ‘Thus, to repeat, the fief became built into the commendatio; the lord's obligation to leave the vassal undiscurbed (“immune”) in the possession and governance of the fief became the most significant ‘counterpart to the vassa’s obligation to aid and counsel his lord, and to extend and mediate his powers atthe local level. At the same 22 ‘THE FEUDAL SYSTEM OF RULE time, the fief constituted the source of the vassa’s economic self- sufficiency and the spatial frame of the exercise of his rights (and. duties) of command. In this way, on the one hand the relationship built around the fief bound into a complex elaboration of the original Gefolgschafe two individuals who belonged, by birth or by proven vocation, to the same high social stratum of leaders and warriors (and who were also rentiers, since their military preoccupations and social stend- ing were not compatible with their taking too active a part in the ‘management of their possessions). On the other hand, the relation- ship voluntarily entered into by the two near-peers had significant effects on vast numbers of humbler people (peasants, villeins, do- mestic dependents, serfs, and sometimes slaves), who simply had to submit to those effects. Such people, of conrse, made up the great majority of the population, except in the few regions where the peasantry were mostly settled on allodia, L¢., lands not subject to feudal burdens. For the great bulk of the population, then, the “skew” in rule relationships that feudal developments had “flat- tened” between the parties in the commendatio sharply increased. Such people were deeply affected by the feudal relationship with- out being parties to it; the parties themselves looked on them es- sentially as the objects of rule, and occasionally and incidentally as the beneficiaries of rule, but never as the subjects of a political relationship. The economic aspeets of the feudal relationship, too, ‘were essentially oriented to the advantage of the vassal as rentier and consumer. ‘The lord-vassal relation—the cell, as it were, of the feudal sys- tem of rule—should thus be viewed as lying right at the edge of @ steep gradient dividing both its partners from the lower social groups. The steepness of that gradient stemmed from the sharp inequalities in the relationship between the vassal and his depen- dents and social inferiors, a relationship denoted by the term seig- neurie® The vassal's rights inherent in seigneurie, to lead, control, exploit, and often oppress his dependents, presupposed (and rein- forced) an inequality between the patties long absent from the 33‘THE FEUDAL SYSTEM OF RULE commendatio. Seigneurial relations were not wholly devoid of reciprocities, some of which were the same in content and emo- tional undertones as those in feudal relations (particularly the ex- change of protection for loyalty). But seignenrial relations were of a different institutional nature from lord-vassal ones; after all, they often connected a warrior with serfs of a different ethnic and linguistic group, ‘The abuses to which seigneurial relations often led were bitterly commented on by Estienne de Fougeres, himself a member of the Knightly estate: “The knight ought to take the sword in order to render justice and fend off those who cause ills to others. But the majority escape chese obligations. . .. They collect the rents due them, ... then go on bothering and deceiving (the people], giving no thought to the protection they owe them. ... And yet we ought to cherish our men, since the villeins bear the burdens on which depends the livelihood of all of us—knights, cleties, and masters.”* If we conceive of the feudal relation es entailing significant ef- fects (for good or ill) for those who were not parties to it, then we ‘can see that it would function as the chief structural component of a wider, comprehensive system of rule, extending over larger populations, by being replicated and extended upward: the knight who protected and exploited the villeins did so as the vassal of a Jord who might in cura have been the vassal of a higher lord still. In two or three steps this extension and replication of the feudal relationship would arrive at an overlord bearing typically a title of Roman origin (ree, princeps, dux); this overlord claims a greater plenitude of faculties of rule than those normally allocated through the feudal relation proper, and seeks to exercise them with refer~ ‘ence to a territory rather than to individual sections of land held in feudal tenure. (In the rest of this chapter and in the following two 1 shall refer to an overlord of this kind as the “territorial ruler.”) Historically, however, the elaboration of the lord-vassal relation mostly advanced downwerd. Typically, a territorial ruler, finding it impossible to operate a system of rule constituted of impersonal, oo THE FEUDAL SYSTEM OF RULE official roles, sought to bridge the gap between himself and the ultimate objects of rule—the populace—by relying primarily on his retinue of trusted warriors. To this end, he endowed them with fiefs from the landed domain under his charge (which he treated as the patrimony of his dynasty); but his immediate vassals often carved from their own fiefs smaller ones for the members of their retinues. At other times, the territorial ruler might use the feudal relation to strengthen his ties to the holders of offices (as with the counts and, below them, the counts’ deputies or zicarii), But his succes- sors might then find that the feudal component in the position of such individuals (and their successors) had become preponderant over the official component, with its obligations of impersonal service and accountability; in other words, the fief, with its lucra- tive seigneurial rights, ee now much the more salient feature of their relations to the lofd than the office. On yet other occasions, wealthy and powerfuldords might force their nominal overlord to enter into somewhat/constrained feudal relations with themselves as vassals simply to make their own possessions more secure. Trends in the System Under different circumstances, and with different tempos in different lands, between the middle of the ninth and the middle of the eleventh century the feudal relation became the key com- ponent of the system of rule in most of the territories covered by my argument. In most places it left its imprint on the ecclesiastical system of offices, too; in many, it sharply proclaimed its exclusive- ress in the maxim mulle terre sans seigneur—a maxim significant not only with respect to the phenomenon of rule as such, but also with respect to the overlapping framework of property relations and the mode of production. The relevance of this development to my argument is that it made 2 network of interpersonal relations into the chief carrying structure of rule, To use Theodor Mayer's somewhat anachronistic 25 niversitest Katonhanest ©> & Botazic‘THE FEUDAL SYSTEM OF RULE phrase, it amounted to building up “the state as an association of persons.”""* But the “state” so constituted possessed an inherent tendency to shift the seat of effective power, the fulcrum of rule, dowaward toward the lower links in the chain of lord-vassal rela- tions. To this extent the “feudal state” is one that undermines itself, making unified rule over large areas increasingly difficult. Georges Duby’s outstanding monograph on the Maconnais—an area in what is today east-central France—supplies an example of this long-term phenomenon.# In this area where the king of France was a dimly perceived, politically ineffective figure, the ‘main change in the system of rule during the eleventh and twelfth ‘centuries was the weakening of the count’s position and the shift of his powers to pettier lords, particularly those who had erected or ccome inco possession of castes (the castellari, or castellans). By the late eleventh century, the count’s plaid (court) had become a pscudojadicial, patrimonial organ of exclusively private signifi- cance. The castellans no longer attended it, for they had already incorporated the powers over the rural population originally dele- sated to them by the count into their patrimonies. Thus the count could no longer exercise direct leadership over the free men of his territory. Each castle in the county had become “a center of rule inde- pendent of the [count's) main castle; the seat of a court settling disputes independently of the count’s court; the rallying place of a clientele of vassals competing with that centered on the count.” Each powerful castellan exploited to his own advantage preroga- tives of rule over the outlying peasants, from military levies and ‘exactions to criminal and civil jurisdiction. As a result: ‘The nature itself of rule has become transformed. One no longer dis- ttoguishes between the power of bam, which, owing to its origin in the king's might, was previously considered a higher form of command, and the de facto domination individuals enjoy over their own private fote references followed by as ive material in addition to cations. 26 ‘THE FEUDAL SYSTEM OF RULE dependents. .. All those who protect and lead are considered to be fon the same plane. The hicrarchy of powers has been replaced by a cris-crossing pattern of competing networks of clients. General and sharply defined duties toward the community as a whole have been replaced by individual arrangements for limited and different services: the commitment of the vassal to his lord, the submission of the humble dependent to his dominus.2® ‘As Duby and many others have shown, the main trend through ‘most (but not all) of the feudal period was the fragmenting of ‘each large system of rule into many smaller, and increasingly au- tonomovs, systems that differed widely in the way they carried out the business of rule and that were often at war with one another. Let us see what lies behind this trend, First, from early on it was normal for each Jord to have more than one vassal, Since in principle each feudal relationship was entered intuit personae; that is by taking into account the indi- viduality of the participants, the mutual obligations of lord and vassal could differ considerably from relationship to relationship. As a result, the lord’s relationship to the ultimate objects of rule, the populace, was mediated differently by each vassal. The size of the fief, the exact terms on which it was granted, the rights of rule over it that remained with the lord or that were vested in the vvassal~as these aspects of the basic relationship varied, so did the modalities and content of the exercise of rule. Its day-to-day rou- tines might thus differ considerably even between adjacent fiefs carved out of the same lord’s landholdings. The differences in the terms on which a lord enfeoffed his several vassals might be further compounded by the diverse terms under which the former, as @ vassal himself, held land from a higher lord. Second, one man could become the vassal of more than one lord, which further increased the diversity in the ways fiefs were held, exploited, and ruled, Furthermore, should one vassal’s several lords quarrel with one another and all appeal to that vassals aid and support, the latter might use this confused situation as a pretext for suspending his obligations toward all of them and asserting his 27