This article is taken from the keynote lecture at the Libertarian Scholars Conference, March 20, 2025, in Auburn, Alabama.
The Origin of the State
What needs to be asked is, How have things gone historically? What is the historical origin of the state?
A realistic vision of the state must start from the assumption of the historicity of the state. The state has not always existed. It has its own place of origin and history: its birthplace is Continental Europe, and its origin roughly coincides with the beginnings of the modern age, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Three major events mark the entry into the modern age: the fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, which marked the end of the Eastern Roman Empire; the discovery of America in 1492; and the Protestant Reformation, which was sparked by Martin Luther on October 31, 1517. The modern age was a break with the Middle Ages and in particular with that structure of political power which had characterized European history for almost a millennium—a structure in which power was not centralized but dispersed among multiple centers of power.
The state is modern. The Middle Ages and the ancient age did not know state forms because political organization of those periods was not even remotely comparable to that of the modern age. It is therefore necessary to be aware of the fact that, as Gianfranco Miglio (1918–2001) writes in Le regolarità della politica (The regularities of politics) (1988), “the type of political order in force today, far from being the only and inevitable product of universal reason, is only the result, basically quite occasional, of a series of historical conjunctures.”
There can certainly be no doubts about the typically European origin of state institutions. The model of political organization called the state spread around the world, but it started it in Europe. The theory that situated the birth of the state in modernity alone is now largely accepted, but it developed only in the twentieth century, thanks to a group of scholars in Germany: Max Weber (1864–1920), Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), Otto Brunner (1898–1982), and Otto Hintze (1861–1940). Until the beginning of the last century, in fact, the term “state” was a sort of superconcept used to indicate any type of organized political community, and it must be said that this use of the term has not completely disappeared.
The birth of the state was everywhere marked by the attempt at territorial pacification. If we look at the internal problems of territories, we are faced with the problem of order. To the ancient problems of concentrating judicial power in the hands of the king to prevent feuds and of acquiring or eradicating feudal principalities and lordships in order to achieve the territoriality of the state was added a new, modern problem: the wars of religion, which in fact were civil wars. In France, there was the struggle between Catholics and Huguenots (1559–98); in the German Empire, the conflict between Catholics and Protestants during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48); and in England, the civil war (1642–51) between Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Independents. There were also the pressures of the international environment: the wars for domination over Italy (1494–1559); the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48); the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14); and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63).
In order to establish peace and to protect the people, a state must establish itself as the sole holder of power in a territory and must not tolerate competitors. To be successful, the state must prohibit the private use of force and credibly present itself as the sole repository of the power to use violence. Max Weber, whose definition of the state is one of the most famous in the history of the social sciences, was among the first to highlight this aspect of modern statehood. Weber seems to be well aware of the genuinely modern nature of the state when he depicts its emergence in Economy and Society (1921): “The spread of pacification and the expansion of the market thus constitute a development which is accompanied, along parallel lines, by (1) that monopolization of legitimate violence by the political organization which finds its culmination in the modern concept of the state as the ultimate source of every kind of legitimacy of the use of physical force; and (2) that rationalization of the rules of its application which has come to culminate in the concept of the legitimate legal order.”
But the state must make its protection an offer that cannot be refused. And to do that, it must first disarm society. The unilateral offer becomes binding if the population is deprived of weapons (i.e., if it is unable to defend itself, either from private individuals or, of course, from state officials). Otto Brunner, in his classic study Land und Herrschaft (Land and Lordship) 1939, showed that the legal and political rationalization of modernity implied the disarmament of citizens, followed by the creation of a caste of armed servants of the state. All the classical functions of the state, starting with the monopoly of legislation, arise from the imposition of disarmament on the whole of society.
The true cradle of the modern state was sixteenth-century France. It is precisely in the absolute French monarchy that emerged from the religious wars between Catholics and Huguenots that it is possible to observe that bureaucratization and centralization of the exercise of power which is a fundamental characteristic of the state. The beginning of the state can be placed in the second half of the sixteenth century. The state has to aim above all at its own survival in an unstable world where it is perpetually exposed to risk; and to survive means to enlarge and strengthen its dominance from within.
The prince is the crucial figure of the modern state. He manages to centralize power with the help of his officials and through a new administrative system, the machinery of the state. As Federico Chabod pointed out, this machinery is created through the establishment of a series of functions that acquire a character of stability in the territory. First, standing armies that exist even in peacetime and are made up of mercenary soldiers dependent only on the king, then stable diplomacy and an ever-growing state bureaucracy.
The state, however, is not separable from its ideological construction. All modern politics is reformulated with the vocabulary of the state. On the one hand, the state appears to be a historically determined concept that marks the period from the era of absolute monarchies to today’s democracies. On the other hand, the state positions itself as the greatest and only possible form of political order: the political cannot be thought of outside the framework of the state and its paradigms. The state represents itself as the sole and unequivocal answer to the problem of political order. This construction that has accompanied us for five centuries also exercises conceptual tyranny over us because it tries to prevent us from thinking about politics differently, outside the framework of the state.
The Reason of State as a Political Science
The heart of all the novelties introduced by power organized in state form lies in the principle of sovereignty—unique, absolute, indivisible, certain, and perpetual, as defined by Jean Bodin (1529/30–96) in his Les six livres de la république (The Six Books of the Commonweal) (1576). The instrument used by the king is the law to which he alone is not subject. Here we see the modernity of Bodin: the sovereign power is the power to decide for everybody without restrictions. The sovereign authority is not limited by law or by consent. The term “state,” roughly as we understand it today, appears in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), in particular in the The Prince (1513): “All the states, all the dominions under whose authority men have lived in the past and live now have been and are either republics or principalities.” At this point, the medieval period was definitely over.
All the political writers of the mid-sixteenth century had to take note of the new institutional situations and the conditions under which political life in the Italian Peninsula and in the Catholic states actually took place. There were monarchical regimes of ancient origin and well-established principalities, so the writers generally took for granted the form that states had assumed in the second half of the sixteenth century, posing only the question of the best form of government. The fact that the Reformation, in its Calvinist component, had chosen republican forms of government, as in Switzerland and the United Provinces of the Netherlands, generated in the climate of the Counter-Reformation a prejudice against the republic and favorable toward princely government as a regime more suitable for preserving religious unity and respect for traditions. These writers worked, therefore, for their princes and for their states, mostly with encomiastic intent, helping to consecrate the model of the absolute principality and to secure the professional role of the prince’s agents and advisers, the future bureaucrats. Once the papacy occupied the center of the political scene after the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453, the Catholic politics of the Counter-Reformation was also presented with the problem of elaborating a theory of the state and a political ethics consistent with the program that emerged from the Council of Trent (1545–63), which sought to recover conscience, to control intellectual production, to educate rulers, and to guide the practical morality of the masses. The new era was characterized by the affirmation of absolute states.
The political theories that had begun to respond to the need for political realism—foremost the thought of Machiavelli—began to separate the political sphere from the religious and ecclesiastical one. In fact, the affirmation of the principality and of the modern state meant that the Catholic societies of the Counter-Reformation had to confront the objective autonomy and unscrupulousness of politics. There were writers who evinced a political realism, or, if you like, that practical Machiavellianism which was constantly present on the flip side of the Counter-Reformation. The men of action gave suggestions with which they showed they believed in the truth of Francesco Guicciardini’s saying that “political power cannot be wielded according to the dictates of good conscience,” and of Cosimo the Elder’s that “the power of states [is] not maintained by Paternosters.”
Among the Catholic intellectuals who were able to satisfy the need for realism in the management of states, we find Giovanni Botero (1544–1617). Forced to abandon the Society of Jesus in 1580 due to disagreements with his superiors, he entered the service of the cardinal of Milan, Carlo Borromeo. His major work, Della ragion di stato (The Reason of the State), was published in Venice in 1589. The work referred not to a strictly Italian princely model, but to the dominant state form in Europe in the late sixteenth century: the absolute monarchical state. Botero mentioned in his treatise the sixteenth-century political literature that had realistically described and discussed the actual policy of states on the level of pure political art, interests, and the maintenance of states—that is, of the “raison d’état.” Botero defines the reason of state as “knowledge of the means suitable to found, conserve, and expand dominion.” Botero intended to rescue the reason of state from its condition of immoral and unscrupulous political praxis and elevate it into the objective sphere by giving it the neutral character of political science.
The reason of state is connected to the birth of the modern state. At this stage, the object of the reason of state will be the formation of the state; once the state has been formed, its object will be its preservation. The stability of states depends on the obedience of the subjects, and obedience is achieved through the virtues of the prince—that is, through political prudence and valor. Prudence must be applied to the waging of war; to the control of internal order and external security; and to the regulation of the monetary, agricultural, and commercial economies.
Botero has expanded the raison d’état into the economic terrain, thus opening up to a more advanced reality than does Machiavelli.
Botero’s purpose of taking political reality into account, of not falling into the vacuous idealization of the just and therefore beloved prince, can be seen throughout The Reason of the State, in which a practical mentality dominates and the interest of the state is taken into account. The doctrine of the reason of state affirms that the security of the state is a requirement of such importance that, in order to guarantee it, the rulers of states are forced to violate the juridical, moral, political, and economic norms which they consider imperative when the security of the state is not threatened. The reason of state is the need for state security that imposes certain conduct on rulers. The thinkers of the sixteenth century ended up convincing themselves that politics could be reduced to that set of methods, means, and decisions put in place by governments regardless of laws and moral values.
In the states of the sixteenth century, the rule that allowed exceptions to law and morality during a state of emergency seems to have become the ordinary practice of governments. In France, precisely in the context of the affirmation of the central power of the state, with Henri IV and then with Cardinal Richelieu, political literature was oriented toward political realism. Subsequently, Cardin Le Bret (1558–1655) argued in De la souveraineté du roi (On the sovereignty of the king) (1632) that the public utility, understood as the interest of the state, should prevail over all other considerations.
The absolutist Europe of the seventeenth century was about to put aside the ethical problem without solving it. The Italian and Machiavellian reason of state that the writers of the Counter- Reformation had tried to tame and exorcise was evoked in the seventeenth century by Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653) in a clandestine publication entitled Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état (Political considerations concerning coups d’état) (1632). It was a work written in Barberinian Rome, the scene of the maneuvers of the ambassadors of all the Catholic states: a text of provocative frankness in enumerating the crimes committed by governments in the name of the interest of the state. Naudé did not even try to judge these crimes from a moral or religious point of view: the effectiveness of political action was the only criterion for judging politics.
Thus, over time, a double morality has been established in judging the same actions when carried out by the state and when committed by private citizens. That double standard, condemned without appeal by Murray Rothbard, leads people to consider as legitimate acts carried out by the state and its officials which would be considered crimes if committed by private citizens.
The state, born at the dawn of the modern age for the needs of pacification, to protect people, has in reality become, as Rothbard writes in For a New Liberty, “the supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public.”
