From the King’s House to the Reason of State: A Model of the Genesis of the Bureaucratic Field Pierre Bourdieu The aim of this project is to inquire into the genesis of the state in order to try and identify the specific characteristics of the reason of state (raison d’Etat), which the self-evidence associated with the agreement between minds shaped by the state – minds of state – and the structures of the state tends to mask.1 The task at hand is less to probe the factors involved in the emergence of the state than to pinpoint the logic of the historical process which governed the crystallization of this historical reality that is the state, first in its dynastic and then in its bureaucratic form; not so much to describe, in a kind of genealogical narrative, the process of autonomization of a bureaucratic field, obeying a bureaucratic logic, than to construct a model of this process – more precisely, a model of the transition from the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state, from the state reduced to the household of the king to the state constituted as a field of forces and a field of struggles oriented towards the monopoly of the legitimate manipulation of public goods As R.J Bonney points out, when studying the “modern nation-state” we are liable to lose sight of the dynastic state that preceded it: “For the greater part of the period up to 1660 (and, some would say, far beyond that date) the majority of European monarchies were not nation-states as we understand them, with the – perhaps fortuitous – exception of France.”2 Absent a clear distinction between the dynastic state and the nation-state, it is impossible to grasp the specificity of the modern state, which is most clearly revealed in the long transition leading up to the bureaucratic state and in the work of invention, rupture, and redefinition performed in its course (But perhaps we should be more radical still and deny the name of state to the dynastic state, as J.W Stieber does.3 Stieber emphasizes the limited power of the Germanic emperor as a monarch appointed by an election requiring papal sanction: fifteenth-century German history is marked by factional, princely politics characterized by patrimonial strategies oriented towards ensuring the prosperity of the princely families and their estates One finds here none of the features of the modern state It is only in the France and England of the seventeenth century that the main distinctive traits of the emerging modern state appear European politics from 1330 to 1650 remains characterized by the personal, “proprietary” vision of princes over their government, by the weight of the feudal nobility in politics and also by the claim of the Church to define the norms of political life.) Constellations Volume 11, No 1, 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 17 The Specificity of the Dynastic State The initial accumulation of capital is performed according to the logic characteristic of the house (maison), an entirely original economic and social structure, particularly on account of the system of strategies of reproduction through which it ensures its perpetuation The king, acting as “head of the house,” makes use of the properties of the house (in particular nobility as symbolic capital accumulated by a domestic group through a range of strategies, of which the most important is marriage) to construct a state, as administration and as territory, that gradually escapes from the logic of the “house.” We must pause for some methodological preliminaries: the ambiguity of the dynastic state, which, from its origin, presents some “modern” features (e.g., the action of jurists who enjoy a measure of autonomy vis-à-vis dynastic mechanisms due to their technical competency and reliance on the academic mode of reproduction), invites readings that tend to unravel the ambiguity of historical reality The temptation of ethnologism can rest on archaic features such as coronation, which may be reduced to a primitive rite of consecration so long as one forgets that it is preceded by acclamation; or on the curing of scrofula, a warrant of hereditary charisma transmitted by blood and divine delegation Conversely, ethnocentrism (and the anachronism that comes with it) can point to isolated indicators of modernity, such as the existence of abstract principles and laws produced by the canonists But, above all, a superficial understanding of ethnology prevents one from drawing on the teachings of the anthropology of “house-based societies” to carry out a rigorous anthropology of the apex of the state One can posit that the most fundamental features of the dynastic state can, as it were, be deduced from the model of the house For the king and his family, the state is identified with the “king’s house,” understood as a patrimony encompassing a household, that is, the royal family itself, which the king must manage as a good “head of the house” (capmaysouè, as the Béarnais put it) Comprising the whole lineage and its possessions, the house transcends the individuals who incarnate it, starting with its head himself who must be able to sacrifice his particular interests or sentiments to the perpetuation of his material and above all symbolic patrimony (the honor of the house or the name of the lineage) According to Andrew W Lewis, the mode of succession defines the kingdom.4 Royalty is an honor transmissible in hereditary agnatic line (the right of blood) and by primogeniture, and the state or royalty is reduced to the royal family In the dynastic model, first established in the royal family and then generalized to the whole nobility, the principal honor and the individual patrimonial lands go to the eldest son, the heir, whose marriage is treated as a political matter of the utmost importance One guards against the threat of division by assigning apanages to the younger sons, a compensation aimed to ensure harmony among the brothers (in their testaments the kings urge each of them to accept his share and not rebel), by marrying them to heiresses or placing them in the Church © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 18 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 One can apply to the French or English royalty, right up to a fairly late period, what Marc Bloch said of the medieval seigneury, founded on the “fusion of the economic group and the sovereignty group.”5 Paternal power constitutes the pattern of domination: the dominant grants protection and maintenance As in traditional Kabylia, political relationships are not autonomized with respect to kinship relations and are always thought after those relations; the same goes for economic relations Power rests on personal relationships and affective relationships such as fealty,6 “love,” and “credit,” which are socially instituted and actively maintained, especially through “largesses” (gifts and grants) The transcendence of the state with respect to the king who embodies it for a time is the transcendence of the crown, that is, of the “house” and of the dynastic state which, even in its bureaucratic dimension, remains subordinated to it Philip IV (Philippe le Bel) is still the head of a lineage, surrounded by his close kin; the “family” is divided into various “chambers,” specialized services that follow the king in his travels The principle of legitimation is genealogy, the guarantor of the bonds of blood This is how one can understand the mythology of the king’s two bodies, which has so fascinated historians since Kantorowicz, and which symbolically designates this duality of the transcendent institution and the person who temporally and temporarily incarnates it (a duality also observed among the peasants of Béarn, where the male members of the house, understood as the totality of the goods and the totality of the members of the family, were often designated by their forename followed by the name of the house, which implied, in the case of sons-in-law from a different lineage, that they lost their own family name).7 The king is “head of the house,” socially mandated to implement a dynastic policy, within which matrimonial strategies play a decisive role, in the service of the greatness and prosperity of his “house.” A number of matrimonial strategies have the aim of fostering territorial extensions through dynastic unions founded solely in the person of the monarch One could give as an example the Habsburg dynasty, which considerably enlarged its empire in the sixteenth century by means of an astute marriage policy: Maximilian I acquired Franche-Comté and the Netherlands by his marriage to Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold; his son, Philip the Fair, married Johanna the Mad, Queen of Castile, a union from which was born Charles V Likewise, it is clear that many conflicts, starting of course with the so-called wars of succession, are a manner of pursuing successional strategies by other means The war of succession of Castile (1474–79) is a well-known case: if Isabella had not won, the dynastic union of Castile and Portugal rather than of Castile and Aragon would have become possible Charles V’s war against the Duchy of Guelders brought Guelders into Burgundy in 1543; if the Lutheran Duke William had won, a solid anti-Habsburg state would have been formed around Cleves, Jülich, and Berg, extending to the Zuyderzee But the partition of Cleves and Jülich in 1614 after the war of succession put an end to that © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 19 vague possibility In the Baltic, the union of the crowns of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway ended in 1523; but in each of the wars between Denmark and Sweden which followed, the question arose again, and it was only in 1560 that the dynastic struggle between the House of Oldenburg and the House of Vasa was resolved and Sweden attained its ‘natural borders.’ In eastern Europe, from 1386 to 1572 the Jagellon kings established a dynastic union of Poland and Lithuania which became a constitutional union in 1569 But the dynastic union of Sweden and Poland was the declared aim of Sigismund III and continued to be that of the kings of Poland until 1660 They also nursed ambitions in Muscovy and in 1610 Ladislas, the son of Sigismund III, was elected Tsar after a coup d’état by the boyars.8 One of the virtues of the model of the house is that it enables us to escape the teleological vision founded on the retrospective illusion which makes the construction of France a “project” pursued by the successive kings Thus Cheruel, for example, in his Histoire de l’administration monarchique en France, explicitly refers to the “will” of the Capetians to create the French monarchical state and it is not without some surprise that one sees some historians condemning the institution of apanages as a “dismemberment” of the royal domain The dynastic logic accounts well for the political strategies of the dynastic states by allowing us to see in them a reproduction strategy of a particular kind But one must still raise the question of the means or, better, of the particular assets available to the royal family which enabled it to triumph in the competition with its rivals (Norbert Elias, who so far as I know is the only one who explicitly posed the question, offers, with what he calls the “law of monopoly,” a solution that I shall not discuss in detail here but which seems to me to be essentially verbal and almost tautological: “If, in a major social unit, a large number of the smaller social units which, through their interdependence, constitute the larger one, are of roughly equal social power and are thus able to compete freely – unhampered by pre-existing monopolies – for the means to social power, i.e., primarily the means of subsistence and production, the probability is high that some will be victorious and others vanquished, and that gradually, as a result, fewer and fewer will control more and more opportunities, and more and more units will be eliminated from the competition, becoming directly or indirectly dependent on an ever-decreasing number.”9) Endowed with the “semi-liturgical power” that sets him “apart from all other potentates, his rivals,”10 combining sovereignty (Roman law) and suzerainty, which allows him to play on feudal logic as a monarch, the king occupies a distinct and distinctive position which, as such, ensures an initial accumulation of symbolic capital He is a feudal chieftain who has this particular property that he is able to call himself king, with a reasonable chance of having his claim recognized In effect, in accordance with the logic of the “speculative bubble” dear to economists, he is founded to believe he is king because the others believe (at least to some extent) that he is king, each having to reckon with the fact that the others reckon with the fact that he is king A minimum differential thus suffices to create © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 20 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 a maximum gap because it differentiates him from all the others Moreover, the king finds himself placed in the position of center and, due to this, has information on all the others – who, short of forming a coalition, communicate only through him – and he can monitor alliances He is therefore situated above the fray and predisposed to fulfill the function of an arbiter, a court of appeal (One can cite here as an exemplification of this model the analysis of Muzaffar Alam, which shows how, following the decline of the Mughal Empire of Northern India, correlative of the waning of imperial authority and the reinforcement of the authority of local notables and provincial autonomy, the local chieftains continued to perpetuate the “reference to at least an appearance of an imperial center,” invested with a legitimating function: “Again, in the conditions of unfettered political and military adventurism which accompanied and followed the decline of imperial power, none of the adventurers was strong enough to be able to win the allegiance of the others and to replace the imperial power All of them struggled separately to make their fortunes and threatened each other’s position and achievements Only some of them, however, could establish their dominance over the others When they sought institutional validation of their spoils, they needed a centre to legitimize their acquisitions.”11) The Specific Contradictions of the Dynastic State The initial accumulation of capital is effected to the benefit of a person: the nascent bureaucratic state (and the bureaucratic, academic mode of management and reproduction associated with it) remains the personal property of a “house” which continues to follow a patrimonial mode of management and reproduction The king dispossesses private powers but for the benefit of a private power; he perpetuates, within his own dynasty, a familial mode of reproduction antinomic with that he is establishing (or is being established) within the bureaucracy (by reference to merit and competency) He concentrates the various forms of power, in particular economic and symbolic power, and redistributes them in “personal” forms (“largesses”) liable to inducing “personal” forms of attachment Whence all kinds of contradictions that play a decisive role in the transformation of the dynastic state, although historians generally fail to count them among the factors of “rationalization” (such as competition between states – international wars require the concentration and rationalization of power, a self-sustaining process since power is needed to make the war which calls for the concentration of power – or competition between central and local powers) One notes first, until a late date, the permanence of old structures of the patrimonial type There is, for example, the survival, observed by Roland Mousnier, even within the most bureaucratized sector, of the pattern master/faithful servant, protector/“creature.”12 Seeking to show that one cannot rely solely on the history of institutions in order to understand the real functioning of governmental institutions, Richard Bonney writes: © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 21 It was the patronage and clientele system that constituted the active force behind the façade of the official system of administration, which is certainly easier to describe By their very nature, relations of patronage escape the eyes of the historian; but the importance of a minister, a secretary of state, an intendant, or a king’s counselor depended less on his title than on his influence – or that of his patron His influence was determined to a large extent by his personality, but even more by the patronage he enjoyed.13 Another revealing feature is the existence of family-based clans (often designated by the misleading name of “parties”), which paradoxically contributed indirectly to imposing bureaucratization: “The great noble clans, whether loyal or dissident, were structural to the monarchy” and “the ‘favorite,’ either dissident or liable to be so, exerts his absolute power against the royal family.”14 Paradoxically, the ambiguities of a system of government that mingles the domestic and the political, the king’s house and the reason of state, are no doubt one of the major causes of the strengthening of the bureaucracy, owing to the contradictions they engender: the emergence of the state arises in part thanks to the misunderstandings born from the fact that one can, in all good faith, describe the ambiguous structures of the dynastic state in a language, that of law in particular, which gives them a quite different foundation and thereby paves the way for their supersession It was by expressing itself in the language of Roman law, assisted by an ethnocentric interpretation of the juridical texts, that the dynastic principle was gradually converted, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, into a new, properly “statist” principle The dynastic principle, which plays a central role as early as the time of the Capetians (as attested to by the crowning of the heir in childhood), reaches its full development with the constitution of the royal family, consisting of the men and women having royal blood in their veins (“princes of the blood”) The typically dynastic metaphor of the royal blood is elaborated through the logic of Roman law, which uses the word blood to express filiation (jura sanguinis) Thus, when Charles V restructured the necropolis of Saint Denis, all persons of royal blood (even women and children, boys and girls, even if they died young) were buried around Saint Louis The juridical principle relies on reflection about the typically dynastic notion of the crown as a principle of sovereignty standing above the royal person From the fourteenth century, it is an abstract word that designates the king’s estate (“crown domains,” “crown revenue”) and “dynastic continuity, the chain of kings in which his person is but a link.”15 The crown implies the inalienability of the feudal lands and rights of the royal domain, and then of the kingdom itself; it evokes the dignitas and majestas of the royal function (progressively distinguished from the person of the king) Thus, with the idea of the crown, the notion of an autonomous entity, independent of the king as individual, takes shape little by little through a reinterpretation of the idea of the house transcending its own members The jurists are no doubt inclined to effect a creative confusion between the dynastic representation of the house, which still drives them, and the juridical © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 22 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 representation of the state as corpus mysticum in the manner of the Church (according to Kantorowicz’s schema) Paradoxically, it is the weight of kinship structures and the threats that palace wars bring for the perpetuation of the dynasty and the power of the prince that foster everywhere, from ancient empires to modern states, the development of forms of authority independent of kinship in their functioning as in their reproduction The state as concern is the site of an opposition analogous to that which Berle and Means have introduced about the business corporation, between the hereditary owners of power and the managers, recruited for their competency and lacking property titles16 – an opposition that one must be careful not to reify, as happened in the case of the firm The demands of intradynastic struggles (especially among brothers) are at the basis of the first outlines of a division of the labor of domination It is the heirs who must rely on the managers to perpetuate themselves; it is they who, quite often, must resort to the new resources secured by bureaucratic centralization to prevail over the threats represented by their dynastic rivals This is the case, for example, when a king uses the resources accrued by the Treasury to buy off the heads of rival lineages or, more subtly, when he monitors the competition among his kinsmen by hierarchically distributing the symbolic profits granted by the organization of the court One encounters thus, almost universally, a tripartite division of power, with, alongside the king, the king’s brothers (in the broad sense), dynastic rivals whose authority rests on the dynastic principle of the house, and the king’s ministers, typically homines novi, “new men” recruited for their competency One can say, at the cost of some simplification, that the king needs ministers to limit and control the power of his brothers and that, conversely, he can use his brothers to limit and control the power of his ministers The great agrarian empires, composed in their vast majority of small agricultural producers living in communities closed unto themselves and dominated by a minority who ensured the enforcement of order and the management of violence (warriors), and the management of official wisdom conserved in writing (scribes), effect a clear break with family bonds by instituting great bureaucracies of pariahs, excluded from political reproduction: eunuchs, priests vowed to celibacy, foreigners with no kinship links with the people of the country (in the praetorian guards of the palaces and the financial services of the empires) and deprived of rights or, in the extreme cases, slaves who are the property of the state and whose goods and position can revert to the state at any time.17 In ancient Egypt there was a clear-cut distinction between the royal family and the senior administration, with power delegated to “new men” rather than to members of the royal family Likewise, in ancient Assyria (according to Paul Garelli), the wadu was both slave and “functionary”; in the Achemenide Empire, composed of the Medes and Persians, the top civil servants were often Greeks The same was true in the Mongol Empire, where senior administrators were almost all foreigners.18 The most striking examples are provided by the Ottoman Empire From Racine’s Bajazet we are familiar with the permanent threat that his brothers and his Vizir, a © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 23 bureaucratic figure mandated, among others, to control them, represented for the prince A radical solution after the fifteenth century was the law of fratricide, which required the prince’s brothers to be put to death upon his ascent to the throne.19 As in many empires of the ancient East, it was foreigners, in this case renegades, Islamicized Christians, who rose to the positions of high dignitaries.20 The Ottoman Empire was endowed with a cosmopolitan administration;21 what was called the “collecting” of talents ensured a supply of “devoted individuals.” The Ottoman term kul means both “slave” and “servant of the state.” One can thus set out the fundamental law of this initial division of the labor of domination between the heirs, dynastic rivals endowed with reproductive capacity but reduced to political impotence, and the oblates, politically powerful but deprived of reproductive capacity: to limit the power of the hereditary members of the dynasty, the important positions are filled by individuals external to the dynasty, homines novi or oblates who owe everything to the state they serve and who can, at least in theory, lose the power they have received from it at any moment But, to protect against the threat of the monopolization of power presented by any holder of a power based on a specialized competency, more or less scarce, these homines novi are recruited in such a manner that they have no chance of reproducing themselves (the limiting case being eunuchs or clerics vowed to celibacy) and thus of perpetuating their power through channels of a dynastic type, or of durably grounding their power in an autonomous legitimacy, independent of that which the state grants them, conditionally and temporarily, through their status as functionaries (If the papal state evolved so early, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, into a bureaucratic state, it is likely because it escaped from the start the dynastic model of transmission through the family – sometimes perpetuated through the uncle-nephew relationship – and because it had no territory, being limited to taxation and justice.) Countless examples, drawn from the most diverse civilizations, of the effects of this fundamental law could be enumerated, viz measures to prevent the emergence of countervailing powers of the same nature as dynastic power (fiefdoms), i.e., powers that are independent (especially as regards reproduction) and hereditary (this is where feudalism and empire bifurcate) Thus, in the Ottoman Empire, high lords were given a timar, the income from lands, but not ownership of those lands Another very common arrangement is the attribution of powers that are strictly limited to the incumbent’s lifetime (cf priestly celibacy), in particular by recourse to oblates (parvenus, rootless individuals), even pariahs The oblate is the absolute antithesis to the king’s brother: depending on the state (or, in another context, the party) for everything he has and is, he gives everything to the state, to which he has nothing to oppose, having neither personal interest nor personal force The pariah is the extreme form of the oblate, since he can at any moment be cast back into the nothingness from which he was raised by the generosity of the state (as with the “boursiers,” the “scholarship boys,” who achieved miraculous © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 24 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 mobility thanks to the educational system, especially during France’s Third Republic) As in the agrarian empires, in the France of Philippe Auguste the bureaucracy was recruited from among homines novi of low birth And, as has already been seen, the kings of France continually relied on “favorites,” distinguished, as the word itself implies, by an arbitrary choice, to thwart the power of the magnates There were endless struggles between those (genealogically) closest to the king and the favorites who supplanted them in the king’s favor: Catherine de Médicis detests d’Épernon and seek by every means to oust him Marie de Médicis will behave in the same manner later towards Richelieu [in 1630] Gaston d’Orléans will plot endlessly against the minister, whom he accuses of tyranny because he comes between the king and his family On this account, the levy doubles because the ‘favorite,’ now become ‘first minister,’ needs to be rich, powerful, and esteemed in order to attract clienteles who would otherwise swell the ranks of his opponents The fabulous wealth of the d’Épernons, Mazarins, or Richelieus provide them with the means to carry out their policies Through d’Épernon and Joyeuse, Henri II controls the state apparatus, the army, and a certain number of provincial administrations Thanks to his two friends, he felt himself to be rather more King of France.22 One cannot understand the role of the pariahs without taking due note of the ambiguity of the specialist and of technical competency (technè) as principle of a virtually autonomous and therefore potentially dangerous power (as Bernard Guenée points out, until 1388 functionaries prided themselves more on their loyalty than their competency).23 In many ancient societies they were regarded with profound ambivalence: in agrarian communities the artisan (demiourgos, especially the blacksmith but also the goldsmith, the armorer, etc.) was the object of contrasted representations and treatment, and was both feared and despised, even stigmatized Possession of a specialty, whether metallurgy or magic (which were often associated), finance, or, in another order, military capacity (mercenaries, janissaries, elite corps of the army, condottiere, etc.), could confer a dangerous power The same was true of writing: we know that the scribes (katib) of the Ottoman Empire tried to confiscate power, just as the families of the sheikhs of Islam attempted to monopolize religious power According to Garelli, in Assyria the scribes, holders of the monopoly over the use of cuneiform script, held considerable power; they were kept away from the court and, when they were consulted, divided into three groups so that they could not conspire together These worrisome specialties often fell to ethnic groups that were culturally demarcated and stigmatized, and thus excluded from politics and control over the means of coercion and marks of honor They were abandoned to outcasts who allowed the dominant group and its representatives to see them fullfilled while officially rejecting them The powers and privileges that these specialties provided were thus contained, by the very logic of their genesis, within marginal groups that could not reap their full profits, especially in the political arena The holders of dynastic power have an interest in relying on groups which, like the minorities specializing in occupations linked to finance, in particular the Jews (renowned for their professional reliability and their capacity to supply precisely the required goods and services),24 must be or become powerless (militarily or politically) in order to be authorized to manipulate instruments that, placed in the wrong hands, would be very © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 25 dangerous One can also understand in this perspective – that of the division of powers and palace wars – the shift from the feudal army to the mercenary army: the salaried professional army is to the troop of “liegemen” or the “party” as the functionary or “favorite” is to the king’s brothers or the members of the king’s house The principle of the main contradiction within the dynastic state (between the king’s brothers and the king’s ministers) lies in the conflict between two modes of reproduction Indeed, as the dynastic state constitutes itself, as the field of power becomes differentiated (first the king, the bishops, the monks, the knights, then the jurists – who introduce Roman law – and, later, Parliament, then the merchants and the bankers, then the scientists25), and as the beginnings of a division of the labor of domination are instituted, so the mixed, ambiguous, even contradictory character of the mode of reproduction prevailing within the field of power becomes more accentuated: the dynastic state perpetuates a mode of reproduction based on heredity and on the ideology of blood and birth which is antinomic to that it is simutaneously instituting in the state bureaucracy, tied to the development of education, itself linked to the emergence of a body of civil servants It fosters the coexistence of two mutually exclusive modes of reproduction, with the bureaucratic mode, bound up with the school system and therefore with competency and merit, tending to undermine the dynastic, genealogical mode by eroding the principle of its legitimacy, blood and birth The transition from the dynastic state to the bureaucratic state is thus inseparable from the movement whereby the new nobility, the “state nobility” (or noblesse de robe), ousts the old nobility, the nobility of blood On can see in passing that the ruling circles were the first to undergo a process which extended, much later, to the whole of society, namely, the shift from a family-based mode of reproduction (ignoring the distinction between public and private) to a bureaucratic mode of reproduction based on the mediation of the school The Dynastic Oligarchy and the New Mode of Recognition But the essential point is that, like the medieval seigneury as described by Marc Bloch, the dynastic state is “a territory whose exploitation is organized in a manner such that part of its products goes to a single character,” who is “both chief and master of the soil.”26 Notwithstanding the impersonal and bureaucratic elements it may entail, the dynastic state remains oriented towards the person of the king: it concentrates different species of capital, various forms of power and material and symbolic resources (money, distinctions, titles, indulgences, and exemptions) in the hands of the king so that the latter can, by means of selective redistribution, establish or maintain relations of dependency (a clientele) or, better, of personal gratitude, and perpetuate his power Thus, for example, the money accumulated through state taxation is continuously redistributed to very specific categories of subjects (particularly in the form © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 26 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 of the pay of soldiers and the salaries of civil servants, administrators and justice officials), so that the genesis of the state is inseparable from the genesis of a group of agents whose interests are bound up with it, who have a vested interest in its functioning (One would need to examine here the analogy with the Church: the power of the Church is not properly measured, as has often been supposed, by the number of “Easter communicants,” but rather by the number of those who directly or indirectly owe the economic and social foundations of their social existence, in particular their income, to the Church, and who are for this reason “interested” in its existence.) The state is a profitable enterprise, firstly for the king himself and for those to whom he extends the benefit of his largesses The struggle to make the state thus becomes increasingly indissociable from a struggle to appropriate the profits associated with the state (a struggle which shall extend ever more widely with the advent of the welfare state) As Denis Crouzet has shown,27 the battles for influence around the throne had as stake the capture of central positions liable to procure the financial advantages that the nobles needed to maintain their standard of living (whence, for example, the support of Duc de Nevers for Henri II or the young Guise’s siding with Henri IV in exchange for 1.2 million pounds destined to pay off his father’s debts) In short, the dynastic state institutes the private appropriation of public resources by a few Just as the personal bond of the feudal type is made contractual and remunerated no longer with land but with money or power, so the “parties” fight among themselves, especially within the king’s council, for control over the circuit of taxation The ambiguity of the dynastic state is perpetuated (it will continue under other guises after the disappearance of that state) because there exists particular, private interests and profits in appropriating what is public and universal, and because ever-renewed opportunities arise for such appropriation: namely, over and beyond the structural fact of corruption, the venality of public offices – from the fourteenth century on – and the heredity character of public offices – the Paulet edict of 1604 made them private property – instituted “a new feudalism.”28 Royal power must then set up commissioners to regain control of the administration.29 From the point of view of the king (and of central power in general), the ideal would be to concentrate and redistribute the totality of resources, thereby completely controlling the process of production of symbolic capital In reality, however, owing to the division of the labor of domination, there are always leakages: the servants of the state always tend to serve themselves directly (instead of waiting for redistribution) by creaming off and diverting material and symbolic resources Thence a veritable structural corruption which, as PierreÉtienne Will has shown, is above all the deed of intermediate authorities: aside from “regular irregularities,” that is, extortions aimed at covering personal and professional costs, of which it is hard to determine whether it pertains to “institutionalized corruption” or to the “informal financing of expenses,” there are all the advantages that lower-level functionaries can derive from their stra© 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 27 tegic position in the upward and downward circulation of information, either by selling vital data to the higher authorities or by refusing to pass on a request, or by doing so only in exchange for payment, or yet by refusing to transmit an order.30 More generally, the holders of a delegated authority can derive all kinds of profit from their position as intermediaries In accordance with the logic of the law and its exemptions,31 any administrative act or process can be blocked or delayed, or facilitated and speeded up (in exchange for a sum of money) The subordinate often possesses an advantage over his superiors (and over supervising agencies in particular): he is close to the “field” and, when he is well-established in his post, he is often part of the local society (Jean-Jacques Laffont has proposed formal models of “supervision” conceived in terms of the theoy of contracts as a game between three players, the entrepreneur, the supervisor, and the operatives.32 Although the model gives a fairly good account of the strategic position of the supervisor, who can threaten the workers with revealing information – e.g., identify who is responsible for poor results – and hide the truth from the employer, it seems rather unrealistic: it ignores in particular both the effects of dispositions and the constraints of the bureaucratic field, which can impose censorship on egoistic inclinations) This having been said, one can describe corruption as a leakage in the process of accumulation and concentration of statist capital: direct embezzlement and redistribution which allow for the accumulation of economic and symbolic capital at the lower levels (that of the proconsuls or feudal lords who are “kings” on a smaller scale) forbid or slow down the transition from feudalism to empire or foster a regression from empire back to feudalism The Logics of the Process of Bureaucratization Thus the first assertion of the distinction between the public and the private comes within the sphere of power It leads to the constitution of a properly political order of public authorities, endowed with its own logic (the reason of state), its autonomous values, its specific language, and distinct from the domestic (royal) and the private This distinction will eventually spread to the whole of social life; but it must as it were start with the king, in the mind of the king and of his entourage, whom everything inclines, in a kind of institutional narcissism, to confound the resources or interests of the institution with the resources and interests of the person The formula “L’État, c’est moi” expresses above all the conflation of the public order and the private order that defines the dynastic state and against which the bureaucratic state will have to be constructed, based as it is on the dissociation of the position and its occupant, the function and the functionary, the public interest and private interests – disinterestedness being an essential attribute of the civil servant The court is a space at once public and private It can even be described as a confiscation of social capital and symbolic capital for the benefit of one person, © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 28 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 a monopolization of public space Patrimonialism is this kind of permanent coup d’état whereby a private individual appropriates public goods, a diversion of the properties and profits attached to the function for the benefit of the person (it can take very diverse forms and, while particularly visible in the dynastic phase, it remains a permanent possibility in later phases, with the President of the Republic usurping the attributes of the monarch or, in a quite different order of things, the professor playing the “minor prophet stipended by the state” of which Weber writes) Personal power, which need be not at all absolute, is a private appropriation of public might and the private exercise of that might (viz the Italian principalities) The gradual rupture with the dynastic state takes the form of the dissociation between imperium (public might) and dominium (private power), between the public space, the forum, the agora, as the place of aggregation of the congregated people, and the palace (for the Greeks the foremost feature of barbarian cities was their lack of an agora) The concentration of political means is accompanied by the political expropriation of private powers: “Everywhere the development of the modern state is initiated through the action of the prince He paves the way for the expropriation of the autonomous and ‘private’ bearers of executive power who stand beside him, of those who in their own right possess the means of administration, warfare, and financial organization, as well as politically usable goods of all sorts.”33 But, more generally, the process of “defeudalization” implies a severing of “natural” bonds (of kinship) and “natural” processes of reproduction, that is, those not mediated by a non-domestic agency – royal power, bureaucracy, educational institution, etc The state is essentially an antiphysis: it institutes (the noble, the heir, the judge, etc.),” It appoints, it is bound up with institution, constitution, nomos, that which exists “by law,” nomô (ex instituto), as opposed to phusei, “by nature.” It institutes itself in and through the establishment of a specific loyalty that implies a rupture with all original loyalties towards ethnic group, caste, family, etc In all this the state stands in opposition to the specific logic of kinship, which, arbitrary as it is, remains the most “natural” or naturalizable (via blood connections) of social institutions This process of defeudalization of the state goes hand in hand with the development of a specific mode of reproduction in which scholastic education plays an important part (In ancient China, the functionary had to have a specific education and be totally detached from private interests.) The universities, which appeared as early as the twelfth century, burgeoned throughout Europe from the fourteenth century under the impulse of the princes: they fulfilled an essential role in training the servants of the state, lay or clerical But, more generally, the genesis of the state is inseparable from a veritable cultural mutation: from the twelfth century in western Europe, the mendicant orders that developed in the urban setting brought to a lay audience a literature hitherto reserved solely for highly cultured churchmen Thus began an educational process that accelerated with the foundation of urban schools in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the invention of printing © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 29 Correlative of the development of education, the substitution of nomination by public authorities for the inheritance of offices had as its consequence the “clericalization” of the nobility (particularly visible in Japan) As Marc Bloch observed, England was a unified state long before any other European kingdom because there “public office” was not completely identified with fiefdom Very early on, non-hereditary royal officials, the sheriffs, were directly appointed The Crown resisted feudal fragmentation by governing through agents drawn from the local society but appointed by it and similarly liable to being removed from office (Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer situate the generalized shift from the “household” to bureaucratized forms of government around 1530) At the same time, the nobility became demilitarized: “Most of the landowning class was, during the Tudor epoch, turning away from its traditional training in arms to an education at the universities or the Inns of Court.”34 Similarly, the militia became a state prerogative, with the shift “from private magnate, commanding his own servants, to lord lieutenant, acting under royal commission.”35 In the same way that the feudal nobility converted themselves into officers appointed by the king, so the French curia regis turned into a genuine administration In the eleventh and thirteenth centuries the Parlement de Paris and the Chambre des comptes emerged from it, followed by the Grand Conseil in the fifteenth; the process was completed in the middle of the seventeenth century, with the establishment of the Conseils du gouvernement (held in the presence of the king and chancellor) and the Conseils d’administration et de justice.36 (But the process of nominal differentiation – Conseil étroit, Conseil des affaires, Conseil secret, called, after 1643, Conseil d’en haut, Conseil des dépêches, created around 1650, Conseil des finances, Conseil du commerce, 1730 – conceals a deep interlocking of their business.) Feudal government is personal: it is ensured by a group of men surrounding the sovereign, barons, bishops, and commoners on whom the king can count From the middle of the twelfth century the English monarchs started to recruit churchmen, but the development of common law in England and Roman law on the continent led them to rely more on more on laymen A new group thus appeared that owed its position to its professional competency, and therefore to the state and its culture: the civil servants It is in this light that one can understand the decisive role of the “clerks,” whose rise accompanies the emergence of the state and of whom one can say that they create the state which creates them, or that they make themselves by making the state From the beginning, their interests are bound up with it: they have their own mode of reproduction and, as Georges Duby indicates, from the twelfth century “the top- and middle-rank bureaucracy comes almost entirely from the colleges.”37 They would gradually construct their specific institutions, the most typical of which is the Parlement, guardian of the law (especially civil law, which, from the second half of the twelfth century, becomes autonomized from canon law) Endowed with specific resources suited to the needs of administration, such © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 30 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 as writing and law, they secure a monopoly over the most typically statist resources very early on Their intervention indisputably contributes to the rationalization of power: first, as Duby notes, they introduce rigor into the exercise of power, by giving standard form to judgments and keeping records;38 next, they implemented the mode of thinking typical of canon law and the scholastic logic upon which it is founded (with, for example, the distinguo, the quaestio, and the play of arguments for and against, or the inquisitio, the rational inquiry substituting proof for test and leading to a written report) Finally, they construct the idea of state on the model of the Church in treatises on power that refer to Holy Scripture, the Book of Kings, and Saint Augustine, but also to Aristotle, in which kingship is conceived as a magistrature (he who holds it by inheritance is God’s elect but, to show himself to be a good guardian of the res publica, he must take account of its nature and make good use of reason) Following Georges Duby again,39 one can show how they contribute to the genesis of a rational bureaucratic habitus: they invent the virtue of prudence, which inclines one to control affective pulsions, to act lucidly in light of one’s intelligence, with a sense of proportion, and courtesy, an instrument of social regulation (In contrast to Norbert Elias, who portrays the state as the fount of the “civilizing process,” Duby suggests, very rightly, that the clerical invention of courtesy contributed to the invention of the state, which in turn contributed to the development of courtesy; the same is true of sapientia, a general disposition bearing on all aspects of life) Fictio juris, the state is a fiction of jurists who contribute to producing the state by producing a theory of the state, a performative discourse on things public The political philosophy they produce is not descriptive but productive and predictive of its object; and those who treat the works of the jurists, from Guicciardini (one of the first users of the notion of “raison d’État”) or Giovani Botero to Loiseau or Bodin, as simple theories of the state forbid themselves from understanding the distinctively creative contribution that legal thinking made to the birth of state institutions.40 The jurist, master of a joint social store of words, of concepts, offers the means to think realities yet unthinkable (with, for example, the notion of corporatio) and proposes a whole arsenal of organizational techniques and operational models (often borrowed from the ecclesiastical tradition and destined to undergo a process of secularization), a stock of solutions and precedents (As Sarah Hanley shows very clearly, there was a constant to-and-fro between juridical theory and royal or parliamentary practice.41) So much to say that one cannot simply draw from the reality the concepts (e.g., sovereignty, coup d’état) one intends to use to understand that reality, of which they partake and which they helped make It also means that to adequately understand political writings, which, far from being simple theoretical descriptions, are veritable practical prescriptions, intended to bring into being a new type of social practice by giving it a meaning and a purpose, one must reinsert the works and their authors in the enterprise of construction of the state with which they stand in dialectical relationship One must in particular resituate the authors in the nascent juridical field, © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 31 and in the broader social space, since their poitions – in relation to other jurists and also to the central power – can be at the basis of their theoretical construction (A close reading of William Farr Church’s book on constitutional thought in early modern France42 suggests that the “légistes” were distinguished by theoretical stances that varied according to their distance from the court: “absolutist” discourse tended to come from those jurists closest to the central power who established a clear division between the king and his subjects and removed all reference to intermediate powers such as the États généraux, whereas the Parlements had more ambiguous positions) Everything leads one to hypothesize that the writings through which the jurists sought to impose their vision of the state, and in particular their idea of “public benefit” (of which they are the inventors), were also strategies whereby they sought to win recognition of their own importance by asserting the priority of the “public service” with which they were bound up (One thinks here of the attitude of the tiers état during the General Estates of 1614–15 and the policy of the Parliament of Paris, especially during the Fronde, aiming to change the hierarchy of the orders, to secure recognition of the order of magistrates, of “gentlemen of pen and ink” as the first among the orders, to place in the first rank not the armed service but the civil service of the state; and also of the struggles, within the crystallizing field of power, between the king and the Parlement, construed by some as a body legitimating royal power, by others as intended to limit it, to which the “lit de justice” gave rise.43) In short, those who made perhaps the clearest contribution to the advance of reason and the universal had a clear interest in the universal; one can even say that they had a private interest in the public interest.44 But it does not suffice to describe the logic of this process of imperceptible transformation leading to the emergence of this historically unprecedented social reality that is modern bureaucracy, i.e., the institution of a relatively autonomous administrative field, independent of politics (denegation) and of the economy (disinterestedness) and obeying the specific logic of the “public.” Beyond the intuitive half-understanding that springs from our familiarity with the finished state, one must try to reconstruct the deep sense of the series of infinitesimal and yet all equally decisive inventions – the bureau, signature, stamp, decree of appointment, certificate, register, circular, etc – that led to the establishment of a properly bureaucratic logic, an impersonal and interchangeable power that, in this sense, has all the appearances of “rationality” even as it is invested with the most mysterious properties of magical efficacy The Circuit of Delegation and the Genesis of the Administrative Field The progressive dissociation of dynastic authority (the king’s brothers) and bureaucratic authority was concretely effected through the differentiation of power and, more precisely, through the lengthening of the chains of authority and agency One could say, for the sake of a pleasing formula, that the (impersonal) © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 32 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 state is the small change of absolutism, as if the king had been dissolved into the impersonal network of a long chain of mandated plenipotentiaries who are answerable to a superior from whom they receive their authority and their power, but also, to some extent, answerable for him and for the orders they receive from him and which they monitor and ratify by executing To understand what is so extraordinary about this shift from personal to bureaucratic power, one must return once more to a moment typical of the long transition from the dynastic principle to the juridical principle wherein the separation is gradually effected between the “household” and the bureaucracy, i.e., between the hereditary but politically unimportant “great offices” and what the English tradition calls the “cabinet,” non-hereditary but invested with power over the seals This is an extremely complex movement with advances and retreats, which different agents effect at varying rates depending on the interests attached to their positions, and which encounters countless obstacles, linked in particular to habits of thought and unconscious dispositions Thus, as Jacques Le Goff notes, the bureaucracy is first understood according to model of the family; or again, the king’s ministers, still attached to the dynastic vision, sometimes want to ensure the hereditary transmission of offices In his Constitutional History of England, F.W Maitland evokes the evolution of practices regarding the royal seals.45 From the Norman period, the royal will was signified by acts, charters, and letters patent, closed and sealed with the royal seal, which warranted their authenticity The “great seal” was entrusted to the Chancellor, head of the entire secretariat In the late Middle Ages and throughout the whole Tudor period, the Chancellor was the sovereign’s first minister Little by little other seals appeared Because the Chancellor used the “great seal” for many purposes, a “privy seal” was used for matters directly concerning the king The king gave directives to the Chancellor about the use of the great seal under his privy seal The latter was later entrusted to an “officer,” the Keeper of the Privy Seal In due course, an even more private secretary, the “king’s clerk” or “king’s secretary,” intervened between the monarch and these great officers of state as keeper of the “king’s signet.” Under the Tudors, there were two secretaries to the king, who were designated as “secretaries of state.” A routine came to be established whereby documents signed by the king’s hand, the “royal sign manual,” and countersigned by the secretary of state (keeper of the king’s signet), were sent to the Keeper of the Privy Seal as directives for the documents to be issued under the privy seal; these in turn served as instructions to the Chancellor to issue documents bearing the “great seal” of the kingdom This act implied a degree of ministerial responsibility for the acts of the king: no act was legally valid unless it bore the great seal or at least the privy seal, which verified that a minister “had committed himself in this expression of the royal will.” Ministers were therefore very attentive to maintaining this formalism: they feared being challenged over acts of the king and being unable to prove that they were indeed royal acts The Chancellor was fearful of applying the great seal in the absence of © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 33 a document bearing the privy seal as a guarantee; the Keeper of the Privy Seal was anxious to have the king’s hand-written signature validated by the king’s secretary As for the king, he found many advantages in this procedure: it made it incumbent upon the ministers to look after the king’s interests, to know the state of his affairs, and to make sure that he was not being deceived or misled He acted under the warranty but also under the oversight of his ministers, whose responsibility was engaged in the acts of the sovereign which they guaranteed (during the reign of Elizabeth, an oral order could not suffice to commit expenditure and the royal guarantee had to be sealed with the great seal or the privy seal, which, far from being mere ceremonial symbols, were real instruments of rule) One sees here how, through the lengthening of the chain of authorities and responsibilities, came into being a veritable public order founded upon a degree of reciprocity within hierarchical relations themselves: the executant is both controlled and protected by the decision-makers; and, from his vantage point, the executant controls and protects his superior, in particular against the abuse of power and the arbitrary exercise of authority Everything takes place as if the more a ruler’s power increases, the greater his dependency on a whole network of executive relays In one sense, the freedom and responsibility of each agent is reduced, to the point of being completely dissolved in the field In another sense, it increases inasmuch as each agent is forced to act in a responsible manner, under the cover and control of all the other agents engaged in the field Indeed, as the field of power becomes more differentiated, each link in the chain itself became a point (an apex) in a field (The growing differentiation of the field of power takes shape at the same time as the constitution of the bureaucratic field – the state – as a meta-field that determines the rules governing the various fields and is for this reason the stake of struggles among the dominant from the different fields.) The lengthening of the chains of delegation and the development of a complex structure of power not automatically entail the withering-away of the mechanisms aimed at securing private appropriation of economic and symbolic capital (and of all the forms of structural corruption) One could say, on the contrary, that the potential for misappropriation (via direct extraction) increases, since central patrimonialism can coexist with local patrimonialism (based on the familial interests of the civil servants or corporate solidarity) The dissociation of the function from the person occurs only gradually, as if the bureaucratic field were still torn between the dynastic (or personal) principle and the juridical (or impersonal) principle What we call the “civil service” was so bound up with its occupants that it is impossible to retrace the history of a given council or post without writing the history of the individuals who chaired it or held it It is the fact of being held by a personality that gave exceptional importance to an office hitherto considered secondary, or that pushed to a lower tier a post deemed central by virtue of its previous incumbent The man made the function to an extent that is unthinkable now.46 © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 34 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 Nothing is more uncertain and more improbable than the invention, in theory (with the self-interested work of the jurists, always both judge and jury) and in practice (with the imperceptible advance of the division of the labor of domination) of matters public, the public good, and especially of the structural conditions (tied to the emergence of a bureaucratic field) of the dissociation of private interest and public interest, or, to put it more clearly, the sacrifice of egoistic interests, the renunciation of the private use of a public power But the paradox is that the difficult genesis of a public realm comes hand in hand with the appearance and accumulation of a public capital, and with the emergence of the bureaucratic field as a field of struggles for control over this capital and of the corresponding power, i.e., in particular power over the redistribution of public resources and their associated profits The state nobility, which, as Denis Richet has shown, asserted itself in France between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, and whose reign was not to be interrupted – quite the contrary – by the Revolution of 1789, bases its domination on what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called “fiscal capitalism” and on the monopolization of high state positions with high profits.47 The bureaucratic field, gradually conquered against the patrimonial logic of the dynastic state, which subordinated the material and symbolic profits of the capital concentrated by the state to the interests of the sovereign, becomes the site of a struggle for power over statist capital and over the material profits (salaries, benefits) and symbolic profits (honors, titles, etc.) it provides, a struggle reserved in fact for a minority of claimants designated by the quasi-hereditary possession of educational capital One would need to analyze in detail the two-sided process from which the state has issued and which is inseparably universalization and monopolization of the universal (Translated by Richard Nice and Loïc Wacquant) NOTES This article originally appeared as “De la maison du roi la raison d’Etat: un modèle de la genèse du champ bureaucratique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 118 (June 1997): 55–68 It is published here by kind permission of Jérome Bourdieu This text is the lightly revised transcript of a set of lectures given at the Collège de France As a provisional summary intended mainly to serve as a research tool, it extends the analysis of the process of concentration of the various forms of capital ushering the constitution of a bureaucratic field capable of controlling the other fields (cf P Bourdieu, “Esprits d’État: Genèse et structure du champ bureaucratique,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 96–97 (March 1993): 49–62; English transl.: “Rethinking the State: On the Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12–1 (March 1994): 1–19 R.J Bonney, The European Dynastic States 1594–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and “Guerre, fiscalité et activité d’État en France (1500–1660): Quelques remarques préliminaires sur les possibilités de recherche,” in J.-P Genêt and M Le Mené, eds., Genèse de l’Etat moderne Prélèvement et redistribution (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1987), 193–20, esp 194 © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 35 J.W Stieber, Pope Eugenius IV, the Council of Basel and the Secular and Ecclesiastical Authorities in the Empire: Studies in the History of Christian Thought, XIII (Leiden: Brill, 1978), esp 126–31 A.W Lewis, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1981) M Bloch, Seigneurie française et manoir anglais (Paris: Armand Colin, 1960) G Duby, Le Moyen Âge (Paris: Hachette, 1989), 110 [Translator’s note: E Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study In Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); P Bourdieu, Le Bal des célibataires (Paris: Editions du Seuil/Points, 2002).] Bonney, “Guerre, fiscalité et activité d’État,” 195 N Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev ed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, orig 1939), 169 10 G Duby, Preface to the French edition of A.W Lewis, Le Sang royal La famille capétienne et l’État, France, Xe-XIVe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 11 M Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1708–1748 (Oxford & Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 17 (my italics) 12 R Mousnier, Les Institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue, vol (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1974), 89–93 13 Bonney, “Guerre, fiscalité et activité d’État,” 199 14 J.-M Constant, “Clans, partis nobiliaires et politiques au temps des guerres de religion,” in Genêt and Le Mené, eds., Genèse de l’Etat moderne, 224, 223 15 B Guénée, L’Occident aux XIVe et XVe siècles Les États (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971) 16 A.A Berle and G.C Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Macmillan, 1932) 17 K Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); see in particular chapter on the employment of real eunuchs 18 Paul Garelli, Jean-Marie Durant and Hatice Gonnet, Le Proche-Orient asiatique, Vol 1: Ses origines aux invasions des peuples de la mer (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997) 19 R Mantran, ed., L’Histoire de l’empire ottoman (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 27, 165–6 20 Ibid., 119 and 171–5 21 Ibid., 161 and 163–73 22 J.-M Constant, “Clans, partis nobiliaires et politiques au temps des guerres de religion,” 223 23 B Guénée, L’Occident aux XIVe et XVe siècles, 230 24 E Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) 25 G Duby, Le Moyen Âge, 326 26 M Bloch, Seigneurie française et manoir anglais, 17 27 D Crouzet, “La crise de l’aristocratie en France au XVIe siècle,” Histoire, Économie, Société (1982) 28 V.-L Tapie, France in the Age of Louis XIII and Richelieu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 55 29 F Olivier-Martin, Histoire du droit français, des origines la Révolution (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1996), 344 30 P.-E Will, “Bureaucratie officielle et bureaucratie réelle Sur quelques dilemmes de l’administration impériale l’époque des Qing,” Études chinoises 8, no (Spring 1989): 69–141 31 P Bourdieu, “Droit et passe-droit Le champ des pouvoirs territoriaux et la mise en œuvre des règlements,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 81–82 (March 1990): 86–96 32 J.-J Laffont, “Hidden Gaming in Hierarchies: Facts and Models,” The Economic Record (1989): 295–306 33 M Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, tr., ed and with an introduction by H.H Gerth and C Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 82 © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 36 Constellations Volume 11, Number 1, 2004 34 P Williams, The Tudor Régime (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 241 35 P Corrigan and D Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 64 36 P Goubert, Ancien Régime (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973), vol 2: 47 37 G Duby, Le Moyen Âge, 326 38 Ibid., 211 39 Ibid., 222 40 Q Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) 41 S Hanley, The “Lit de Justice” of the Kings of France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) 42 W.F Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France: A Study in the Evolution of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1941 43 S Hanley, “Lit de Justice.” 44 On the history of the longue durée of the rise of the “clerks” and the gradual monopolization of statist capital by the “state nobility,” beyond and because of the French Revolution, see P Bourdieu, State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1996 [1989]), 369–393 45 F.W Maitland, Constitutional History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 202–03 46 D Richet, La France moderne L’esprit des institutions (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), 79–80 47 D Richet, “Élite et noblesse: la formation des grands serviteurs de l’État – fin XVIe-début XVIIe siècle,” Acta Poloniae Historica 36 (1977): 47–63 © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd [...]... which they were bound up (One thinks here of the attitude of the tiers état during the General Estates of 1614–15 and the policy of the Parliament of Paris, especially during the Fronde, aiming to change the hierarchy of the orders, to secure recognition of the order of magistrates, of “gentlemen of pen and ink” as the first among the orders, to place in the first rank not the armed service but the civil... the public space, the forum, the agora, as the place of aggregation of the congregated people, and the palace (for the Greeks the foremost feature of barbarian cities was their lack of an agora) The concentration of political means is accompanied by the political expropriation of private powers: “Everywhere the development of the modern state is initiated through the action of the prince He paves the. .. between the monarch and these great officers of state as keeper of the “king’s signet.” Under the Tudors, there were two secretaries to the king, who were designated as “secretaries of state. ” A routine came to be established whereby documents signed by the king’s hand, the “royal sign manual,” and countersigned by the secretary of state (keeper of the king’s signet), were sent to the Keeper of the Privy... as the États généraux, whereas the Parlements had more ambiguous positions) Everything leads one to hypothesize that the writings through which the jurists sought to impose their vision of the state, and in particular their idea of “public benefit” (of which they are the inventors), were also strategies whereby they sought to win recognition of their own importance by asserting the priority of the. .. beyond the structural fact of corruption, the venality of public offices – from the fourteenth century on – and the heredity character of public offices – the Paulet edict of 1604 made them private property – instituted “a new feudalism.”28 Royal power must then set up commissioners to regain control of the administration.29 From the point of view of the king (and of central power in general), the ideal... culture: the civil servants It is in this light that one can understand the decisive role of the “clerks,” whose rise accompanies the emergence of the state and of whom one can say that they create the state which creates them, or that they make themselves by making the state From the beginning, their interests are bound up with it: they have their own mode of reproduction and, as Georges Duby indicates, from. .. expression of the royal will.” Ministers were therefore very attentive to maintaining this formalism: they feared being challenged over acts of the king and being unable to prove that they were indeed royal acts The Chancellor was fearful of applying the great seal in the absence of © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the King’s House to the Reason of State: Pierre Bourdieu 33 a document bearing the privy... monopolization of high state positions with high profits.47 The bureaucratic field, gradually conquered against the patrimonial logic of the dynastic state, which subordinated the material and symbolic profits of the capital concentrated by the state to the interests of the sovereign, becomes the site of a struggle for power over statist capital and over the material profits (salaries, benefits) and symbolic profits... of jurists who contribute to producing the state by producing a theory of the state, a performative discourse on things public The political philosophy they produce is not descriptive but productive and predictive of its object; and those who treat the works of the jurists, from Guicciardini (one of the first users of the notion of “raison d’État”) or Giovani Botero to Loiseau or Bodin, as simple theories... theories of the state forbid themselves from understanding the distinctively creative contribution that legal thinking made to the birth of state institutions.40 The jurist, master of a joint social store of words, of concepts, offers the means to think realities yet unthinkable (with, for example, the notion of corporatio) and proposes a whole arsenal of organizational techniques and operational models (often ... Contradictions of the Dynastic State The initial accumulation of capital is effected to the benefit of a person: the nascent bureaucratic state (and the bureaucratic, academic mode of management and... the male members of the house, understood as the totality of the goods and the totality of the members of the family, were often designated by their forename followed by the name of the house, ... renunciation of the private use of a public power But the paradox is that the difficult genesis of a public realm comes hand in hand with the appearance and accumulation of a public capital, and