Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Community
Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts
Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users
Free resources
Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors
The development of the Body Politic metaphor in Western Civilization, focusing on the works of John of Salisbury, Christine de Pizan, Johannes Althusius, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The author argues that each theorist contributed to the shifting commitments and self-conceptions of the civilization, with John's Body Politic reflecting the Christian understanding of humanity's essential nature and protecting a public function for religion. Christine's soulless, classical Body Politic paved the way for secularization and monarchical absolutism, while Althusius' theory affirmed and updated Calvinist political ideas and marked a partial decoupling of political science from religious concerns. Rousseau took the Body Politic to its logical conclusion by focusing on the individual as the sole source of political will.
What you will learn
Typology: Study notes
1 / 193
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
A Dissertation by JESSE ALLEN CHUPP
Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
May 2012
Major Subject: Political Science
A Dissertation by JESSE ALLEN CHUPP Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofTexas A&M University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Approved by: Chair of Committee, Cary J. Nederman Committee Members, Robert Harmel Judith BaerLeah DeVun Head of Department, James Rogers
May 2012
Major Subject: Political Science
iv
This work is dedicated to my Family, whose love, patience, and sacrifices made it possible.
v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my committee chair, Cary Nederman, for the manifold ways in which he provided this project with inspiration and guidance, and my committee members, past and present, Ed Portis, Robert Harmel, Judith Baer, and Leah DeVun, for their patience and thoughtful suggestions. Thanks also to the Department of Political Science office staff, especially Carl Richard, Carrie Kilpatrick, Lou Ellen Herr, and Dianne Adams, whose many helps were invaluable to this project and other situations over the years.
Thanks also go to my many colleagues and friends among the cohort of graduate students in the Department of Political Science at Texas A&M University and in other departments as well. Their professional and personal contributions to my graduate experience and this work are too numerous to list individually. However, special thanks are due to Phillip Gray for his mentoring me as a novice political theorist and to Robert Puckett, David Rossbach, Nathan Ilderton, and Tyler Johnson for putting up with the good and the bad from me for so many years.
Thanks to my parents, Greg and Ruth Chupp, for their love, help, and direction, and to my in-laws, Jim and Geri Elsberry, for their many considerate gestures of support. Many thanks are due as to all my siblings, my wife’s siblings, and their families, especially Robert and Jennifer Puckett, for their help and support during the time that
vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT......................................................................................................... iii DEDICATION..................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………….. vii
The modern nation-state, the current dominant expression of the Body Politic, is the heir to the following development regarding the theory and motivation of political and religious institutions: the ancient Greeks and Romans ordered society towards political justice and virtue, and political religion and its officers were concerned primarily with inculcating civil allegiance; this social arrangement occurred first in the Body Politic of cities and then, later, in empires. Christian civilization, especially in Western Europe, retained some of the political institutions of the classical period but added an otherworldly teleology of the soul as the ultimate concern of human life and created a synthetic religious-political construct commonly called the Two Swords in which priests exercised a much more prominent position than they did in the classical institutional order. In this period, the Body Politic was thought to repose in local political sovereignties but also, even if only mystically, in the entire Christian community under the spiritual administration of the Chief Christian Pastor, the Pope. The Reformation nation-states, the precursors of the modern structure of the Body Politic, retained the Christian religious motivations of the medieval theory but collapsed the religious- political authority into the hands of national sovereigns, thus returning religious officials to a position of political subservience. These political sovereigns, after an initial phase of religious vigor and conflict, became so manifestly disinterested in the otherworldly
____________This dissertation follows the style of the American Political Science Review.
that the Reformed Christian political theory of Althusius, which can be understood as an analogue to the Body Politic metaphor, though stripped of its unifying principle, is Christian in name but not by necessity since its focus is ultimately secular as implied by his subjection of the ministers of religion to the civil power, his complete abrogation, as a Calvinist Protestant, of the hagiographic elements in John and Christine, and his severe diminishing of the sacramental life; and that Rousseau’s General Will theory, another conceptual device related to the Body Politic, is an attempt to recover the moral consensus that the organic medieval synthesis fostered minus any specific religious commitment other than a nod to the ability of religion to foster civic loyalty in the classical sense. Concern for the salvation of souls, so explicit in John's theory, is absent from Rousseau's. Before moving to the thinkers just mentioned, I will discuss the Body Politic metaphor generally, first by describing the political ambiguity that necessitates such conceptual devices and then by an examination of the actual use of the Body Politic metaphor by other scholars. In so doing, I will offer a brief historical interpretation of the classical and early medieval political circumstances in which these ideas and institutions were fleshed out. Following this introduction, which provides the conceptual and historical background for my first author, John of Salisbury, I will turn my attention to the textual development that I propose to trace in the four authors just mentioned. Finally, I will conclude with an appraisal of the future prospects of the modern nation- state, as a Body Politic with a lost, or at least problematic soul, in light of the foregoing analysis.
From the earliest attempts at its description, political life has resisted classification. Social relationships are ubiquitous and impossible to deny, but nearly every such relationship contains unique elements that make generalized, systematic descriptions difficult (Barnes 1924). The biological family of mother, father, and siblings is often thought to be pre-political or, perhaps better, more than political with its intense familiarity and emotional attachments (Lasch 1977). The small village and the large city have certain similarities, such as the contiguous proximity of neighbors, but cities have the added characteristic challenges of large absolute populations and increased population densities (Robson 1955). The ancient multi-city empires resemble modern nation-states in size but not in their self-conceptions of the rights of members and the legitimacy of their institutions (Wimmer and Min 2006). Additionally, every society, large or small, must have a principle of identity that works to promote cohesion and cooperation; while such identities have broad similarities, each specific society has its own that distinguishes it from others (Mackenzie 1978; Norton 1988). Finally, the general complexity of human interaction, taken by itself, makes exact description difficult to formulate and communicate; since each human relationship is unique, the act of communicating its attributes will be prone to introduce misunderstanding as each person has a unique frame of reference for such relations: “The meaning of a metaphor is the product of an interpretation of an utterance in a given context. Its meaning is thus inherently unstable given the variety of possible contexts” (Rayner 1984, 537). Thus, political theorists are in need of conceptual metaphors, like the Body Politic, capable of expressing the characteristics of complex social relations in parsimonious and
although clearly different from the personal rule of tribal monarchy, difficult to characterize under a simple description. The imperial Greeks, under Alexander and his heirs, and the later Romans, in their consolidation of the Hellenistic Mediterranean civilization, sought to expand the conceptual category of the polis to an Empire of universal citizenship. The Body Politic suffered under this stretching as it was difficult to provide a unifying principle that could synthesize so broad a diversity of cultures and institutions, although Cicero and other Stoics made significant attempts at this extension. Finally, the Christian appropriation of the Body Politic, first for the Church and then for the Christianized Roman Empire, especially in papal-dominated Western Europe, provided a unity under the mystical Body of Christ that was capable of overcoming, and perhaps overwhelming, the superficial diversity of local customs and political institutions. In general, the use of the Body Politic metaphor was modest in early and late classical periods compared with its later explosion of meaning and application in the Christian civilization and its later appropriation by early modern theorists. I will trace this growth in social and conceptual complexity starting with the dispute between Aristotle and Plato about the character of the polis and its debt to the family relation.
The family, both in the nuclear form and its extension by biological development over generations into the consanguineous tribe, is a natural starting point for an investigation of the political relation. Aristotle describes tribes as a pre-political form of human association because he agrees that within tribes there are not the differing conceptions about the nature of human flourishing and the good life that exist across tribes, “who are
said to be suckled with the same milk” (Aristotle 2001, 1128), the milk signifying the common mind and goals of the tribe. Friendship forms the basis of human association for Aristotle (2000, 90). Agreement and shared understanding form the bases of friendship. Naturally, our families are our closest friends because of all people they are the ones with whom we have the most common understanding. In fact, the shared understanding in the family and tribe is so strong that Aristotle considers the fact of family friendship to be almost trivial or so obvious that it does not require a strong demonstration other than the strong one already provided by nature and obvious to every person from a family. For he says, “it is…more terrible to wound a father than anyone else” (Aristotle 2001, 1068), as if to imply that the bond of father to son is so strong and sacred that it is manifest injustice to injure or fail to help one’s father or parent. The polis and politics, for Aristotle, arise when a group of tribes or non-blood related persons find some common understanding that is capable of making them wish to associate permanently.
Although this mutual understanding is sufficient, for Aristotle, to form the polis, it is not sufficient to make the polis a family or tribe. Disagreement with Plato’s attempt to make the kallipolis a tribe or family forms the heart of Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s political ideal in Book II of the Politics. The polis arises out of the association of several families, tribes, and villages (Aristotle 2001, 1128). However, since, for Aristotle, justice is reduced by the lessening intensity of friendship, justice in the polis must be less than justice in the tribe: “and the demands of justice also seem to increase with the
solve several difficulties of the political association that he characterizes later in the Republic. His familial citizen psychology will foster a strong patriotism; “and so, their country being their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for her good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are to regard as children of the earth and their own brothers” (Plato 1942, 303). This use of the political as worthy of family devotion is not shocking to most political theorists; the very word patriotism implies allegiance to fathers and ancestors. Perhaps Plato’s boldest usage of the family dynamic in his city comes when he asserts that a community of children will obviate the jealousies and difficulties fostered by status and political inheritance. Plato recognizes that the traditional family expects its children to inherit or practice the same political status as the parents. However, Plato asserts that the progeny of his citizens are not guaranteed to occupy the same position as their parents; “and the species will generally be preserved in the children. But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son” (Plato 1942, 303). By removing the traditional family relation for conception and child rearing, Plato means to make the harmony of the city the only test for citizen development. Since the city is now the family, every family member will have an equal dignity regardless of the functional role he plays.
Aristotle understands Plato’s motivation, namely, the strengthening of the political association, but he argues that the two are of different natures and the good of one is not identical with the other. In fact, Aristotle argues that, by making the polis a family and
by distributing the family relation throughout, Plato actually destroys both the proper function of the family and the polis in the training of citizens. “Whereas in a state having women and children common, love will be watery; and the father will certainly not say 'my son,' or the son 'my father’” (Aristotle 1981, 111). Far from inspiring a stronger love between citizens, Aristotle believes that Plato will destroy the necessary love and affection of the traditional family. Additionally, even if such a plan were effected, it would be impossible to prevent biological parents, children and siblings from discovering each other (Aristotle 1943, 84). Thus, Plato’s plan, according to Aristotle, is unworkable and contrary to nature. For Aristotle, citizens can only feel the bond of political affection for fellow citizens; they cannot and should not feel the same love for fellow citizens that they experience towards members of their families.
Although Plato and Aristotle had different conceptions of the meaning of the political relation within a city, they both were able to utilize the Body Politic metaphor to provide an heuristic unity (Goggans 2004, 532; Mussolff 2010, 81). Both understood that the state, in this case the city-state of the polis, must bring its diverse members into a coordinated whole. To them, the human body represented, in a singular way, the coordination and harmony necessary: “Is not that the best-ordered state...which most nearly approaches the condition of the individual – as in the body? (Plato 1942, 350). Additionally, Plato makes many arguments in the Republic relating health in the polis to health in a body: he uses the metaphor to describe the power of injustice: “Yet is not the power which injustice exercises of such a nature that wherever she takes up her abode,
was implied in our own comparison of a well-ordered State to the relation of the body and the members, when affected by pleasure or pain? (Plato 1942, 350).
For Plato, the State can fall ill like a body: In a body which is diseased the addition of a touch from without may bring on illness, and sometimes even when there is no external provocation a commotion may arise within-in the same way wherever there is weakness in the State there is also likely to be illness, of which the occasions may be very slight, the one party introducing from without their oligarchical, the other their democratical allies, and then the State falls sick, and is at war with herself; and may be at times distracted, even when there is no external cause (Plato 1942, 445). And it can require drastic, health-restoring measures: “These two classes are the plagues of every city in which they are generated, being what phlegm and bile are to the body. And the good physician and lawgiver of the State ought, like the wise bee-master, to keep them at a distance and prevent, if possible, their ever coming in; and if they have anyhow found a way in, then he should have them and their cells cut out as speedily as possible” (Plato 1942, 454). Even tyrants, says Plato, understand the means, analogically related, if opposite, to that used by doctors, to keep the State in the condition that they wish to achieve: And the tyrant...must look about him and see who is valiant, who is high-
minded, who is wise, who is wealthy; happy man, he is the enemy of them all, and must seek occasion against them whether he will or no, until he has made a purgation of the State...not the sort of purgation which the physicians make of the body; for they take away the worse and leave the better part, but he does the reverse (Plato 1942, 458).
Aristotle agrees that the polis can be understood, analogically, as a living body: “The state has priority over the household and over any individual among us. For the whole must be prior to the part. Separate hand or foot from the whole body, and they will no longer be hand or foot except in name...” (Aristotle 1981, 60). And again when describing the elements of the political community, Aristotle compares the state to a living body while introducing the idea of the soul of the state, a concept central to this project: “A state is made up of unlike parts. As an animate creature consists of body and soul, and soul consists of reasoning and desiring, and a household consists of husband and wife, and property consists of master and slave, so also a state is made up of these and many other sorts of people besides, all different” (Aristotle 1981, 180). He further extends the idea of the soul and body in relation to the political community in his commentary on Plato's four-fold division of citizenship: “If the soul is to be regarded as part of the living creature even more than its body, then in states too we must regard the corresponding elements as being parts in a fuller sense than those which merely conduce to utility and necessity: I mean such things as the fighting force and all those connected with the judicial administration of justice” (Aristotle 1981, 247-248). For Aristotle, the
