The State as One: The ‘Union of Men’, the ‘People’ and the ‘State’ in Early Modernity

Abstract

This chapter interrogates early-modern juridico-political thought by showing that from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries it is in the idea of the state that the fantasy of congruency emerges. The state is in a state of void, as there is nothing essential about the state. The state is thus imbued with the notion of congruency and unity but at the same time the state never fully realises its potentiality for complete unity. The congruent nature of the state is both pre-supposed and envisioned; it is both assumed and set as the ultima ratio of its own existence. This chapter serves as modernity’s ‘pre-history’ and is thus key to the book’s analysis of the rise of nation/state congruency in modernity.

… [A] state is defined as a composite moral person, whose will blended and combined from the agreement of many is taken as the will of all so that it may employ the forces and capacities of every individual for the common peace and security.

(Pufendorf 1991 [1673]: 137)

It is worth noting that the idea of congruency in European thought is about men. Men are the people who unite and covenant (Hobbes 2003 [1642]), men are the heads of families (Grotius 2005 [1625]: Book II, Chap. V, Section XXIII, 552), and women, to Hobbes, are ‘… dependent, needing help’ (Carver 2004: 132, see also Lloyd 1984). In this sense, one could further point to the interaction of gender, heteronormativity and nationalism in the history of European state making and in contemporary discourses (see Peterson 2013; Yuval-Davis 1997) or indeed the changing nature of nationalism and sexuality in settler societies (Morgensen 2010; Puar 2017). Whilst this offers an important and interesting gender perspective and critique of the nation/state fantasy, due to my focus on the fantasmatic nature of congruency I leave this issue unexplored in this book.