The terms "state" and "society" are loaded. Each carries on its back a few centuries of varied use and purpose. Each owes its origin to a particular thread of circumstances in history. Especially when used in the vicinity of the other, each term incites speaker and hearer to make normative judgements.

The grandfather of contemporary thought, Hegel, must be granted responsibility for much of the latter claim. In The Philosophy of Right, he distinguishes society and state in a manner that became definitive for most of today's social theorists and scientists. Society is the antithesis of the family, which represents a human sociality of force, necessity and absolute hierarchical authority. "Society," in contrast, is the sociality of freedom, choice and individual sovereignty. For Hegel, family and society are each incomplete and excessive, being only exaggerated facets of the complete sociality required for being completely human. Both notions beg the complete sociality for human being wherein force and freedom, necessity and choice, hierarchical authority and individual sovereignty are (in the sense of Hegel's Aufhebung) completed, canceled and transformed into a unity. This complete sociality, of course, was the Hegelian idea of the "state." In this way the idea of the state became normative and critical for all other human conditions of sociality.⁽¹⁾

The idea of the state as criterion for all other human conditions came to exercise a powerful fascination on contemporary thought. Marx, Weber, Scheler, Croce, Schmitt, Spencer, Treitschke--left, right and center: despite the various differences among these social theorists, their basic understanding of state and society remained remarkably consistent with Hegel's formulation. To be sure, some would celebrate the society over the state--Spencer, for example.⁽²⁾ But Hegel's ideals and terms are the lingua franca of the debate.

In light of this, the argument to be made here is intended to interject some suspicion into our use of these terms, and to cast doubts on the normative implications such usage incites. The argument will proceed in two parts: 1) an assessment of the terms themselves; and, 2) an appraisal of the normative implications of the origin and reality of the terms.

THE TERMS "STATE" AND "SOCIETY"

The word "state" traditionally has been traced to the medieval concept of status publicus, literally "public condition."⁽³⁾ State here is understood as standing in, or being present for, this "public state." This is elaborated in the context of the medieval notion of representation, in the manner that a scapegoat re-presents the sins of the community. In the last few decades, study of the intellectual history of the word "state" has uncovered more complex roots to the modern word.⁽⁴⁾ Wolfgang Mager, for example, in his pathbreaking work on the history of the concept of state, has teased out an interesting link between the medieval usage and the contemporary understanding of the word. Differentiating between the medieval usage of state, which was always "state of something" and the modern usage of the term as a thing in itself, Mager finds a turning point toward the modern usage in the northern Italian renaissance. The medieval, Thomistic classification of political communities according to who rules--status principis, status regalis and so forth--gradually allowed a linguistic separation in the vernacular of il stato (the state itself) from whatever authority rules. As Mager argues, "this differentiation led to the terminological differentiation of status, communitas and res publica."⁽⁵⁾ Hence, the idea of the state, now understood as distinct from the political community itself, emerges concomitantly with the emergence of modernity.⁽⁶⁾

This new usage has the state as a sort of generic representative of the political community, an empty husk to be made concrete according to the ad hoc character and desires of the political community. State, then, becomes a universal category to be given flesh by fortuna and the virtues of actors in the political community. In perceiving state in this fashion, Mager contends that a gradual separation of the idea of state from society becomes possible. Where medieval thinking had a fundamental unity of civitas sive societas civilis, the renaissance Italians were already distinguishing the state from the society. Even the linguistic origin of the state/society dichotomy, in other words, is to be found in the transition to modernity.

What was behind this separation, what purpose? Political theorists have traditionally looked at this separation of society from state as part of a wider liberation from the monolithic authority structure of the medieval world. It was seen to parallel the religious pluralism of the Reformation, the aesthetic pluralism made possible by the Renaissance, and the general turn from universal external authority toward individual, private criteria for authority. Just as Descartes would erect a cosmos not on divine authority but upon the multiple private authorities of the cogito, so political thinkers would reject singular divine authority and replace it with the pluralism of individual sovereignties exercised through a serving state.

Recent scholarship, however, has challenged this happy version of the separation of state and society. Albert O. Hirschman, for example, contends that the watershed for the emergence of the ideas of state and society was reached when "a feeling arose in the Renaissance and became firm conviction in the seventeenth and eighteenth century that moralizing philosophy and religious precept could no longer be trusted with restraining the destructive passions of men."⁽⁷⁾ In other words, the supposed liberation that occurs from the fragmentation of authority is suspicious. The fragmentation of authority as in state and society can also be perceived to have led to better techniques for discipline and control. Michel Foucault, in fact, puts this perhaps too strongly when he maintains that the monolithic authority structure of the medieval world (characterized by external force and repression) was jettisoned for the structures of state and society which more effectively put human passions to use through the inculcation of self-discipline by appeal to private interests rather than through simple repression.⁽⁸⁾ Greater management of peoples is maintained at lower "cost" by harnessing passions in the dialectic tension of state and society than was available through more simple monolithic authority structures.

In a recent study of modern authority in state and society, William Connolly elaborates on the themes of Hirschman and Foucault.⁽⁹⁾ Connolly's work leads this essay's argument back to the central figure of Hegel for the problem of state and society by way of the canonical texts of the history of political thought, especially through Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His purpose is to offer a genealogical reading of the canonical texts of modern political theory, all in consideration of the modern problem of authority and difference. Connolly reads Hobbes differently than standard interpretations. He sees Hobbes' starting point to be not a realist appreciation of nature, but only nominalist artifice. Indeed, Hobbes, then, rejects the very idea of nature, since nature is presented as only an automaton created by a God who is Himself presented as a creation of human beings. This reading radically changes Hobbes' political theory. The perversely self-focused individuals of the original condition are now perceived to be not "natural" but contrived. Such an original individual is revealed to be only "a domesticated human," "an artifice made `fit for society'," "whose guided passions protect society from the destructive effects of anarchic behavior."⁽¹⁰⁾

The upshot of this is that Hobbes does not argue for a realist political theory based on human nature. The idea of nature itself is a rhetorical device used to foster a calculative rationality that can then be manipulated to extend a given social order. Hobbes, the student of Bacon, does one better than the Baconian wedding of reason and power; reason is offered as only a creature of power.⁽¹¹⁾

The supposed Hobbesian distinction between society and state evaporates in Connolly's reading. Both the natural state and the civil state turn out to be elements of a common enterprise for externally disciplining human behavior. Society and state mutually reinforce each other in providing the discipline for controlling human behavior. Connolly suggests, however, that there is an inherent problem in the externality of Hobbes' scheme. Because the discipline is overt and transparent to all parties, in order to work its operation would require a vicious circle of ever more rigorous coercion. "Coercive power would penetrate more deeply into the body politic; public space would be defined more broadly; words and conduct would be regulated more extensively; the self would be subjected to more detailed regulations to help it maintain its self-control."⁽¹²⁾ The Hobbesian sovereign devolves to become an external monopoly of authoritative violence designed to bring order to civil society.

On the heels of this, therefore, Connolly's turn to Rousseau is fascinating, for his assessment of Rousseau is just the reverse. Asked the secret for the comportment of her children, in Rousseau's Heloise, Julie wryly turns the question back: "Have you noticed that they disobey me?" "That would be difficult," comes the reply, "when you never command them." Where Hobbes' command theory of political obligation involved ubiquitous external disciplinary examination of individuals by the powers of the sovereign, Connolly maintains Rousseau would use civil virtue to internalize discipline--mimicking the unreflective grip of authority in the natural state. Children are metaphors for all that nature is as it "comes from the hand of the Creator": wholesome, without the alienation that brings reflection and resentment, and unsullied by society. Connolly's thesis has Rousseau gently drawing such children from the natural condition into the human condition. They are drawn from the holistic world of nature which they unreflectively inhabit, into the holistic communitarian world of convention. This new world too, on Connolly's reading of Rousseau, should be one inhabited unreflectively. In political terms the reading has interesting implications: civil virtue in Rousseau's political writings would be a mechanism to constrain reason to the "necessities" of conventional life so that reason more closely resembles the ecstatic instincts of the natural condition.

To triumph in this, civic virtue must incite the self-discipline needed to mold the citizen into the political state as completely as the animal is molded by the Creator into its niche in nature. "Everything in society must be devised so that the self can wage this quiet battle successfully," Connolly writes, "and the very stringency of the external organization Rousseau commends reveals the intensity of the internal battle."⁽¹³⁾ As Connolly reads Rousseau, the crucial external organization for the triumph of civic virtue in this internal struggle is civil religion. Civil religion is the foundation for civic virtue, the mechanism for achieving the unreflective community needed for Rousseau's cohesion of justice and utility.

This comes back, then, to the problem of state and society in the shadow of Hegel. In response to Rousseau, Connolly's Hegel does not endorse philosophizing "by the light of nature". Instead, he sees nature as an otherness--a realm of difference--that must be overcome dialectically by an emerging, comprehensive rationality associated with God realizing his essence in history. Furthermore, Hegel's state clearly is also not the external mechanism of sovereignty necessary to discipline society as imagined by Hobbes. State overcomes both the internality of Gemeinschaft and the externality of Gesellschaft. Connolly's stress in this focuses on the tensions of the dialectic in favor of a focus on Aufhebung--which he reads as the annihilation of difference and the raising up of an (ultimately universal) unity. For politics, the result is what Connolly calls "the politics of inclusivity," where the Aufhebung begs political consensus or concord. "[I]nstilled within us," Connolly explains for Hegel, "is a purpose to pursue each historical moment of concord until the contradictions within it become visible and compelling and then to forge new and higher forms of concord which express more fully both the essence of Being and the essence of humanity."⁽¹⁴⁾ In appraising The Philosophy of Right, wherein Hegel reveals that the state is the final concord, Connolly maintains that human living is presented as an utterly ordered, seamless and rational sociality--without disruptions, tensions or arenas for the creative interplay and enhancement of difference. When Karl Marx comes to preach the end of politics in communist society, it is only an echo of the end of politics preached by Hegel in his concept of the state.

The distance between such thinking and Connolly's post-modern liberalism is striking. Connolly contends that Hegel (and his materialist stand in Marx) would "depreciate the importance of politics in the realized society because each has too much faith in the possibility of transparency and harmony in the realized state." "Hegel and Marx put politics on ice," he continues, wherein "the importance of its disruptive dimension is subtracted from the value of its unifying dimension, squeezing creativity, contestability and tragedy out of the sphere of politics."⁽¹⁵⁾ When Hegel raises the idea of the state to that of the criterion for all human conditions, therefore, he does not hearken back to a God of the medieval world. That civitas sive societas civilis for the medieval does not render civitas a measure for all human sociality. Thomistic politics imagines a harmony; Hegel's dialectics forgoes harmony for Aufhebung. For Hegel, society is only an inferior moment in the course of sociality as it proceeds to completion and perfection in the idea of the state.

If this essay were to follow Connolly, Foucault, Hirschman and Mager in their assessment of the concepts of state and society, suspicion about these terms would seem warranted for the concepts are utterly modern. On one hand, the early modern and liberal separation of state and society is not as certainly linked to prospects for liberation as has traditionally been believed--indeed, if Foucault is to be believed, the separation aims at better techniques of discipline. On the other hand, the dialectical recombination of society into state in the manner of many later modern theories in the shadow of Hegel certainly has no greater attraction. Perhaps, the ideal of society holds greater promise as criterion for the condition of being human.

NORMATIVE IMPLICATIONS

The ideal of a rational society, although an older modern notion, probably exercises the greater hold on the modern mind. Consider the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas, for example, and his famed "legitimation crisis."⁽¹⁶⁾ Habermas begins with a revision of Marxist theory on state and society. Where Marx had seen only an economic structure in human life, he sees three interrelated structures: economic, political and socio-cultural. Borrowing from Marx's crisis theory, Habermas asserts that the basic contradictions of capitalism perceived by Marx remain, and that averting the economic crisis of capitalism was obtained only by shifting the pressures of the contradictions from the economic to the political system. In late capitalism, then, the state is greatly enlarged and granted wider discretion in order to manage the increasing pressures transferred from economics. As the state has shouldered increasingly the burdens of these pressures, resulting in spiraling budgets and irresolvable political demands, a different manifestation of the crisis looms. The crisis shifts from the economic sphere to the political sphere as the state takes the basic contradictions of capitalism into its own bosom. The state is placed in a precarious cycle not only meeting more and more demands, but also continually fostering new demands in order to draw the crisis from the realm of economics. Ultimately, the demand cycle on the state begins to erode the ability of the state to act responsibly and rationally--at this point the state is utterly a creature of the demands it has fostered. Thus, Habermas argues, by sidestepping the tendencies to economic crisis, the contradictions of capitalism only re-emerge in the guise of a "rationality crisis" such that the political sphere of the state is threatened from within by its own inability to engage in rational policymaking.⁽¹⁷⁾

Like the economic crisis, however, Habermas believes that the rationality crisis too can be sidestepped. In a nutshell, the key is to turn to non-rational support for the state. If the state is unable to operate rationally, then rational support for state policies from the people will not be forthcoming. If policies are no longer "rational and responsible," then those who expect rational policies will withdraw their support and the legitimacy of the state will evaporate. Faced with this reality, the state's solution is to change the basis of its support from rational support through participation in rational policymaking into something else. In other words, the state begins to tinker with the hearts and minds of people in the socio-cultural sphere. Subtly, on occasion, but with force nonetheless, the state endeavors to impel the hearts and minds of its citizens to support the state itself as rational legitimacy is leeched from authority. Of course, this turn to the socio-cultural sphere inevitably transfers the crisis pressures to that sphere, resulting (from the perspective of the political system) in Habermas' celebrated "legitimation crisis." Accepting popular sovereignty, the legitimacy of the modern state is based on free and rational support from the people for the state. By enforcing participation and support, the state generates a fundamental contradiction in the political system that results in the crisis of legitimation. The state cannot handle the crisis transferred to the socio-cultural realm:

We have seen now that the state cannot simply take over the cultural system, and that expansion of the areas of state planning actually make problematic matters that were formerly culturally taken for granted. "Meaning" is a scarce resource and is becoming ever scarcer. Consequently, expectations oriented to use values--that is, expectations monitored by success--are rising in the civil public. The rising level of demand is proportional to the growing need for legitimation. The fiscally siphoned-off resource "value" must take the place of the scanty resource "meaning." Missing legitimation must be offset by rewards to the conforming system. A legitimation crisis arises as soon as the demands for such rewards rise faster than the available quantity of value, or when expectations arise that cannot be satisfied with such rewards.⁽¹⁸⁾

Put more prosaically, when it enforces support by replacing meaning with values in the socio-cultural sphere, the state undercuts the possibility of the free and rational support that is the basis for the legitimacy of the state itself. As a result, real politics ceases.⁽¹⁹⁾

From what has been argued before, Habermas' analysis of the interplay of state and society is important. He demonstrates that, on one hand, state manufactured values preclude the modern norm of legitimacy, while on the other hand that the norm cannot be acquired in modern society. But, behind the analysis lies a troublesome ideal human condition as criterion. The most complete elaboration of this condition is Habermas' revised "ideal speech situation" that he calls "discourse ethics," but for the purposes of this review it may better be called by his earlier term "rational society."⁽²⁰⁾ The criterion against which the contemporary state and society are inspected is an Enlightenment ideal of a rational society of participation directing the services of a servant state. But, Habermas' ever-narrower criteria for the rationality of his rational society seems to narrow the playable space for the same politics so necessary for Habermas' own celebrated notion of legitimacy.

On the occasion of Harvard University's 327th commencement, Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn spoke to the dangers implicit in the ideal of a narrowly defined, rational society. The problems of state were obvious to him; he spoke to the dangers of the totalitarian state for the Soviet peoples of his homeland. But, this concern with state was not the focus of his address. He tells his audience of young Americans, "should I be asked whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively." For, he claimed,

If our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some potentially significant points. Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case of our country. But, it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smooth plane of legalism as is the case of yours. After decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.⁽²¹⁾

Looking at the West as an exemplar of the idea of society, he claims that the West has "recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately." This has turned "modern Western civilization on the very dangerous trend of worshipping man and his material needs," such that "everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature were left outside attention."⁽²²⁾ As a result, he maintains:

No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western ideal in its present state of exhaustion does not look attractive.⁽²³⁾

In many respects, Solzhenitsyn's model for human sociality is equally worrisome for what its implementation would pose for the political space needed for being human. But, after the review of the triumph of reason in Hegel's state and of the repressive rationality of Habermas' society, Solzhenitsyn's warning is timely. An irresponsible and oppressive society is the Charybdis to the Scylla of an irresponsible and repressive state. Both, when under the hegemony of modern rationalism, foreclose the space open to responsible and creative human action. Both would narrow the horizon of possibilities open to civilization. We are mistaken, then, to imagine either state or society as criterion for the condition of being human.

A classical ambiance surrounds this notion of being human. Creativity and civilization are celebrated; constraints on creativity or civilization are suspect. The English word "civilization" etymologically carries this ambiance on the tongue: civilization <- civitas <- polis. Perhaps, it is this polis Aristotle had in mind when he imagined the natural condition for being human to be the public life of the citizen in the city. The public life was the locus of creativity and civilization. The polis was a space open and amenable to the conduct of being human. Hannah Arendt, perhaps the most important political philosopher of the 20th century, draws from this understanding of the polis in her critique of state and society. "To be political," she says, "to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence." Indeed, she continues, in the ancient Greek sense of the term "to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis, of home and family life, where the household head ruled with uncontested despotic powers--or of life in the barbarian empires of Asia, whose despotism was frequently likened to the organization of the household."⁽²⁴⁾

The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it men lived together because they were driven by wants and needs. The driving force was life itself; the penates, the household gods, were, according to Plutarch "the gods who make us live and nourish our body" [Plutarch, Questiones Romanae 51].⁽²⁵⁾

The realm of the household (in Greek oikia, root of the English word "economic") was without the open space for creativity and expression available in politics. It was a realm determined by necessity, particularly the private necessity of each individual human life. A politics that did not allow the open, public space for creating civilization--a politics of private necessity such as was perceived in the barbarian empires of Asia--was not really politics:

Under no circumstances could politics be the only means to protect society--a society of the faithful, as in the Middle Ages, or a society of property owners, as in Locke, or a society relentlessly engaged in a process of acquisition, as in Hobbes, or a society of producers, as in Marx. . . .⁽²⁶⁾

"The realm of the polis," in contrast to the realm of oikia, represents, in Arendt's analysis, "the sphere of freedom." Here creative action was celebrated. "At the root of Greek political consciousness," she claims, "we find an unequaled clarity and articulateness in drawing this distinction. No activity that served only the purpose of making a living, of sustaining only the life process, was permitted to enter the political realm."

Without mastering the necessities of life in the household, neither life nor the "good life" is possible, but politics is never for the sake of life. As far as the members of the polis are concerned, household life exists for the sake of the "good life" in the polis.⁽²⁷⁾

In the polis all was public and public-concerned; in the household, all was private. In the polis actions were granted public space for freedom and creativity; in the household (or in politics that took its bearings from the household) no space was granted and all was done for the requirements of material necessity.

Reconsider Solzhenitsyn's rejection of both state and society in the context of Arendt's thesis. Modern society is rejected by Solzhenitsyn because it remains almost utterly at the level of material necessity and private interests. State, too, is rejected because, like the ancient barbarian empires of Asia, it seems no more than the household writ large. Something "warmer" (to borrow from Solzhenitsyn) is required for being human. A genuine public realm in the sense of Arendt's polis is lost to modernity; neither state nor society offers such a condition. With Solzhenitsyn's reasoning on this, Arendt agrees. She argues that the public/private distinction is eliminated in the modern world, that the supposed state/society separation of modernity only conceals a fundamental unity. State and society are two-sides of the same coin, such that the actual possibility of a public realm and a private realm are lost to moderns:

In the modern world, the social and the political realms are much less distinct. That politics is nothing but a function of society, that action, speech, and thought are primarily superstructures upon social interest, is not a discovery of Karl Marx but on the contrary is among the axiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from the political economists of the modern age. This functionalization makes it impossible to perceive any serious gulf between the two realms; and this is not a matter of a theory or an ideology, since with the rise of society, that is, the rise of the "household" (oikia) or of economic activities to the public realm, housekeeping and all matters pertaining formerly to the private sphere of the family have become a "collective" concern. In the modern world, the two realms indeed constantly flow into each other like waves in the never-resting stream of the life process itself.⁽²⁸⁾

From what has been said, state and society are terms to be used with much suspicion. From Mager, it was demonstrated that the origins of the terms and concepts "state" and "society" are to be found in the breakdown of the medieval polity and the emergence of the modern. From Foucault and Hirschman, moreover, it seems that the distinction between the concepts is perhaps linked to more effective technologies aimed at social discipline and control. From Connolly, it seems the Hegelian state would not be an appropriate condition for being human, that the state as ideal and criterion of the human condition dialectically would come to eliminate the space available for human creativity and expression. From Solzhenitsyn, likewise, it seems that modern society--dominated by the fads and fashions of mass culture--would similarly repress this space. And, from Arendt, it has been learned that state and society are not finally distinct, but are only two sides of the common coin of modern sociality, a sociality that has lost the public space wherein genuine human being is possible.

As a modest contribution to the review of the status questionis of the topic state and society, perhaps the best this essay can offer is a sense of confusion and anxiety about the concepts. State and society cannot easily be delineated; in some ways they are only parts of a larger whole. Neither seem to be sufficient for the condition of being human; and, neither simply can serve as normative measure for human sociality. Either notion when taken as criterion for the human condition seems repressive of the space needed for the human condition.⁽²⁹⁾

CONCLUSION

From the foregoing, it might be well to consider state-society as something of a unity, the paradigmatic sociality of modern experience. Indeed, this paradigm largely defines the character of the modern human condition. While for some purposes it may be valuable for analysis to separate the modes of state-society into state-dominant and society-dominant, it should be recognized that focusing on the increasingly slippery difference between the two only serves to obscure the more fundamental singularity of state-society. The "free" market of the West is best recognized as a mechanism for the imposition of authoritative fads and fashions that successfully foreclose possibilities for human expression by reducing human life to labor and consumption. Similarly, Solzhenitsyn even foresees that mass society's demands in the publishing marketplace in the West may more effectively censor literary expression than does the state in the East. Although there are clear and important differences between Madison Avenue and the Soviet samizdat, their similarities justifiably deserve our concern. State-society is a singular reality undergirding whatever significant differences exist between state and society. Liberation from the repression of state-society is not to be found by pursuit of state or society.

In this larger sense, then, state-society can be recognized as something like Hannah Arendt's notion of household raised to ubiquitous generality. The idea connotes a smothering familiarity that instructs the personal soul into an intimately disciplined order. Moreover, this is not a familiarity informed by mutual concern and love for the other as may be the case of family life. Rather, for state-society the other is a reified agent to be directed for the purposes of something like consumption or production. Unlike Arendt's polis, state-society is largely concerned with its requirements. It is not concerned with Solzhenitsyn's "higher, warmer, and purer." State-society opposes diversity and pluralism, filling the space for personal responsibility and creativity with scrutiny. Like Arendt's household, without open space for genuine and creative difference, state-society is the realm of necessity and not freedom.⁽³⁰⁾

The concerns raised in this brief introductory essay are not novel. The issue of state or society is at the heart of the politics of the post-Hegelian world. If there is any contribution to be made by this essay to the extensive literature on the topic, it may be only a "considered uncertainty" about distinctions such terms imply in the light of what has been said. The problems that both state and society pose inevitably are only representations of deeper problems in modern sociality itself. Any consideration of state or society, by this account, must recognize that each concept is but an aspect of the larger, paradigmatic sociality of the modern world.

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.

1. 1. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, various editions. See especially the third part, "Ethical Life," where the dialectic of right reveals an inner dialectic of ethical life comprised of three moments: family, society and state.

2. 2. See Spencer's essays collected in Man versus the State, ed. Truxton Beale (New York: Kennerley, 1916).

3. 3. A well-known version of this traditional argument is made by Ernst H. Kantorowicz in The King's Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 271.

4. 4. Wolfgang Mager's book, Zur Entstehung des modernen Staatsbegriffs (Mainz: Verlag AWL, 1968) is the pathbreaking study on the history of the term state. The history offered here only paraphrases Mager's argument.

5. 5. Mager, p. 419.

6. 6. See my treatment of this from the perspective of Max Scheler's notion of "the bourgeois" in Person and Polis: Max Scheler's Personalism as Political Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), chapter four.

7. 7. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 14-15.

8. 8. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random, 1970) and especially Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

9. 9. William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

10. 10. Connolly, p. 28.

11. 11. It is intriguing in light of this to note the subtle and meaningful distinction between Bacon's famous statement, "Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est" (De Haeresibus), that knowledge itself is power, and Hobbes' somewhat different claim that "scientia propter potentiam" (De Philosophia). By seeing knowledge as leading to the end, which is power, Hobbes implies that knowledge and reason are only instrumental to the acquisition of power; they are not ends in themselves. Cf. Hobbes, "Of Philosophy," English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. & trans. William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839), p. 7. See also De Philosophia, Opera Philosophia, ed. Guliemi Molesworth (Aslen: Scientia Verlag--reprint, 1966), p. 6.

12. 12. Connolly, p. 39.

13. 13. Ibid, p. 58.

14. 14. Ibid, p. 86.

15. 15. Ibid, p. 130.

16. 16. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1975).

17. 17. Habermas, pp. 61-68.

18. 18. Ibid, p. 73.

19. 19. In his book, Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon, 1978), Habermas seizes on the importance of the loss of the political in modern state-society. Sadly, his more recent works have turned away from a political understanding of his rational society toward "scientific" explanations of rational society.

20. 20. Habermas, "Diskursethik--Notizen zu einem Begruendungsprogramm," in Moralbewusstsein und Kommunikatives Handlen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983). Cf. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1970).

21. 21. Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn, "A World Split Apart," in World Split Apart, edited by Thomas Strong (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 12-13.

22. 22. Solzhenitsyn, p. 16.

23. 23. Ibid, p. 12.

24. 24. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 26-27.

25. 25. Ibid, p. 30.

26. 26. Ibid, p. 31.

27. 27. Ibid, p. 37.

28. 28. Ibid, p. 33.

29. 29. In a conference drawing on faculties of two Roman Catholic universities, it is interesting to note that this confusion and anxiety about state and society is also expressed in a long train of papal encyclicals on related topics.

30. 30. Put differently, the space endangered by state-society for the human condition is open to unconstrained (even Nietzschean) politics. This would be a politics that militates against all efforts to constrain the possibilities of the human condition with appeals to universal ends or natures, eidetics of teleologies. Some would argue that such politics can only be described obliquely, but one can imagine certain virtues congruent with the notion. Consider disintegration, distance, impermanence, playfulness, strangeness, disruption or uncertainty. Where the politics associated with state-society seeks ultimate integration of parts into a whole, I see a need for recursive disintegration. Instead of folding parts into the conformity preached by state-society, I believe politics must promote distance and separation. Authority would be transitory, ad hoc and impermanent--not universal; as there is no telos to complete, such completion does not occur (no Hegelian state, no communist society; and the community of saints needs reinterpretation). The social order would be revealed as a construction, not a structure, and its on going playful recreation would be promoted. Strangeness and difference would be recognized as part of the dialectical origin of creativity in the human condition. Disruption maintains and augments this strangeness and guards against permanence, completion and integration. And, a considered uncertainty would be the highest virtue of public life.