State

STATE. - The term has not always been used in the sense that is presently customarily attributed to it. For a long time it served to indicate the personal condition of individuals, according as they were free or slaves, citizens or foreigners. Traces of such usage are still found today in the expressions "personal status" or "family status." By extension it was later applied to designate the condition of certain social classes, as, for example, in France, where, until the revolution of 1789, the assembly of the classes was given the name of States General. With the 15th century the modern meaning makes its appearance in the history of political doctrines, introduced by Machiavelli into the Italian language and from it passed into the other European languages. French has État, English State, German Staat, Spanish Estado, and in all of them the term has the same fundamental meaning of a supreme political society more or less independent.

Apart from this generic meaning accepted by all, the rest is a matter of controversy in contemporary doctrine. The State can be subjected to a twofold investigation. The first considers it as a social formation, really existing on the plane of reality, having appeared at an unspecified time in the history of humanity, and seeks its origin, tracing back to the historical causes by which the fact was produced. Under this aspect the State falls within the scope of sociology, understood however as an empirical science, which otherwise becomes confused with social philosophy. The second considers it in its constituent elements, investigates its origin, tracing back to natural and constant causes, determines its end and strives to establish the laws of its operation, in relation to the essential purposes toward which it tends. This is the part of legal science which is commonly given the name of general doctrine of the State. The first task of an organic doctrine consists in the exact determination of its object, by means of a substantial definition, which expresses its concept and its essential elements, which must be found in any social formation, in order that a State may be recognized in it. The theorists, however, prove to be profoundly divided on this point. The definitions they give of the State are as many as the theories from which each one starts.

Despite this extreme divergence of opinions, one cannot subscribe to the exaggeration of Bastiat, who promised a prize to the writer who might have been capable of proposing an acceptable definition of the State. The various currents and theories agree on certain elements, from which one can reconstruct with some approximation what the most common concept may be. Bluntschli, for example, defined the State as the political and organized personification of a nation in a determined territory; Jellinek, a territorial and organic community that knows no superior bond; Orlando, a society politically organized for the protection of law. The difference between the definitions cited is notable and the influence of particular theories is evident, and yet they contain certain common elements, which can be reduced to the following: the State is an organized and independent society, which lives in a determined territory.

I. CONCEPT AND NATURE OF THE STATE

This common concept must nevertheless be refined and better specified in order to arrive at a substantial definition that offers all and only the essential elements of the State. First of all, it is an insuperable datum of experience that the State is a social formation. To discover its concept it is necessary, therefore, to go back to that of society and from this to borrow the first elements, which must be present in any State. Now a society exists when several intelligent individuals conspire stably toward the attainment of the same end. The essential elements that constitute it are consequently two: a plurality of rational subjects, the material cause, and a stable bond of a moral nature, the formal cause, which joins their free wills and makes them tend toward a common goal, for the attainment of which they collaborate in a union of intentions and forces. The extrinsic cause, which produces the union of wills, is this collective end, which becomes, from the moment it receives the conscious adherence of individuals, the end of the community.

It is enough to transfer these first data to the State in order to have its generic element. The State, in the first place, requires a plurality of human individuals, isolated or already grouped into smaller societies, to whose complex is given the name of people. There is no State without a more or less numerous people, since number does not interfere with its nature. Both the great political complexes, such as modern nations, and the small republics, of which some example is still preserved, are States. Nor is a people homogeneous in language, customs, traditions and culture required for its existence, as was maintained with the principle of nationality (v.), but for its arising and establishing itself the universal similarities of human nature and the identity of the fundamental aspirations of man suffice, by which the instinct of solidarity is effectively stimulated and guided. The State is not identified with the nation, but can exist and does exist independently of it.

Nevertheless the plurality of subjects alone is not enough for the formation of the State, if it is not reduced to unity by an interior principle of mutual cohesion, by virtue of which the original dispersion is succeeded by the drawing together of the parts and their suturing into a higher entity. Such a principle consists in the convergence of wills toward a common goal. A morally united people is a State. The internal unity that the State requires as its constitutive element is not, nor can it in any way be, of a physical or biological order, since upon rational subjects, which represent the matter to be unified, no cause can have an influence except one of a moral order, a common ideal, toward which particular wills spontaneously and freely polarize. The State is consequently an essentially moral entity.

It must be observed, however, further that not any moral union forms the State. For its existence a stable and permanent union is required. Just as individuals casually gathered in a convoy or voluntarily assembled in a square do not form a society, so too more subjects who cooperated temporarily in an undertaking do not form a State, which, according to what etymology itself indicates, requires a union indefinite in time and ideally perpetual in the intention of the members, who precisely because of this perpetuity of bond feel themselves bound to a common destiny. The State therefore is not identified with individuals, nor does it result from their arithmetical sum. It is instead a moral entity distinct from the component parts, although in an inadequate way, which possesses its own being, separate and distinct from the being of the subjects: it is a subject standing on its own and therefore a bearer of its own ends, which are not the ends of individuals taken in isolation or summed together. This being, on which its moral subjectivity rests, consists in the bundle of relations that constitute the fabric of social life, and therefore it is a relational being and not a substantial one, emerging from a principle of order and not from a physical cause.

The rationality of the parts of which the State is composed requires that another element be brought into evidence which, although it is not intrinsic, is necessary for identifying social formations and classifying them. Such an element is the common end, toward which the free wills of the subjects converge, « societas specificatur a fine ». The State is an eminently finalistic entity. Internal unity, in fact, could not be produced if the intelligence of the parts did not glimpse an aim worthy of being pursued and attained and the will, enlightened by intellectual reflection, did not make it the object of its aspirations. Man, when he acts consciously, always acts for an end, nor can he escape this law of his rationality in the case of the creation of the social being. If he, then, wills stable coexistence with his fellows and accepts collaboration, with all the burdens and limitations of his freedom that it entails, he wills and accepts it for a well-determined purpose.

As a finalistic entity the State comes under the dominion of morality. Its whole operation, dominated by an intrinsic and essential finalism, is susceptible of an evaluation on the basis of the criterion of approach to or departure from the end toward which the wills tend, and this is a moral evaluation. Just as the physical subject is an ethical subject, in the sense that all its actions are subject to the laws of its ultimate finality, so the moral subject, the State, is an ethical subject, not in the pejorative sense that the source of ethics is found in it, but in the sense that all its operations are subject to the laws that are deduced from its intrinsic finality.

The complete concept of the State is nevertheless not yet attained. The constitutive elements highlighted thus far are found present in other social formations: family, tribe, commune, nation, and therefore they offer only the genus or the generic aspect of the State. It is necessary, then, to determine its specific aspect. The first and fundamental note that separates and distinguishes the State from other social formations consists, as Aristotle had well intuited, in its self-sufficiency, or, as scholasticism had maintained, in its perfection. The State is a perfect or self-sufficient society. This property must, however, be well understood so as not to fall into equivocations. From experimental analysis it is gathered that all social formations, natural or voluntary, inferior to the State, have an end limited to the satisfaction of certain needs of human life and, beyond this, do not possess in themselves all the means necessary to meet them. The family, for example, the first human social nucleus, has as its end the propagation of the species and the suitable education of offspring and is not by itself sufficient to satisfy its many needs. From this limitedness and insufficiency there derives for these societies the necessity of inserting themselves into a broader society, which embraces in its end all the goods of human life and possesses the means indispensable for procuring them. They are, then, essentially subordinate and dependent societies.

The self-sufficiency of the S[tate] therefore refers to two terms, but not in the same way or with the same extent. The first of these is the natural end, with respect to which it is autonomous on the temporal plane. The end of the S[tate] is comprehensive of all the goods of life, that is, it is universal in its scope and in its content, since it must procure for its subjects the sufficientia situs. As such it is not subordinate to other ends, it is supreme in the hierarchy of human values, and, on the temporal plane, it subordinates to itself the particular ends of individuals and of lesser social formations. It nevertheless remains intermediate with regard to the transcendent end of the person, which it is called to serve. The second term to which self-sufficiency refers is the means useful and necessary for the attainment of that end, with respect to which it is only relative. The perfection of the S[tate] does not require an absolute autarchy, utopian and never attainable, but a relative sufficiency in the means indispensable to a humanly ordered collective life, variable according to the degree of civilization attained by peoples.

This perfection of its own, with respect to the lesser societies living within its bosom, and with respect to the others of equal rank with which it enters into relations, is visibly concretized in its independence, otherwise called sovereignty. The S[tate] is an independent and sovereign moral subject. Since its natural and essential end is not subordinate to another end of the same human order, it too is not subordinate to another society of the same order, and therefore it is autonomous, both with respect to the inferior societies that it subordinates to itself and with respect to the equal societies with which it enters into relation on a plane of perfect parity. To autonomous ends correspond autonomous subjects, independent and sovereign internally and externally. This essential autonomy must not, however, be understood in the absolute sense, as contemporary thought has done with the dogma of sovereignty (v.), but in the relative sense of independence of will and of action with regard to societies of the same rank, so that its decisions need not be referred to a higher instance for approval. The S[tate] remains subordinate to God, as author of social life, to his laws and prescriptions; in the temporal order, to the transcendent end of the human person, with respect to which it is a means; in the supernatural order, indirectly to the Church as regards things spiritual.

At the point reached in the analysis, the S[tate] can be defined, as Catholic thought has always defined it, as a perfect civil society. The terms of this definition should by now be easily understood. It is necessary, however, to make explicit an essential note that is implied in it. The being of the S[tate], as has already been said, results from the bundle of intersubjective relations of which society is composed and lives. Now these relations have the particular characteristic of being juridical, both because they have a right as their foundation and because they are regulated by right, so that this, both in the subjective sense of faculty and in the objective sense of norm, must be considered as a fact coeval with the S[tate]. There is no S[tate] without right, although a right can exist without the S[tate]. At the very moment in which wills join together to give life to the S[tate], right is spontaneously produced within its bosom, the embryonic ordering is born, otherwise called the substantial constitution, which must guide and govern its action, just as the power of government is produced equally spontaneously. The juridical ordering always accompanies the birth of the S[tate] and for this reason it has been defined with good ground as original. It is not possible, however, to identify the S[tate] with its juridical ordering, since the subject is always distinct from the norm that regulates its conduct.

The juridical essence of social relations is reflected upon the S[tate] itself, to which it impresses the character of a juridical subject holding rights. The juridical personality of the S[tate] is not a fiction or a formalistic construction, but a reality that strikes its roots in its moral unity and in the autonomy of its ends and of its value. It would, however, be an error to transfer to such a personality the concept of person valid for the physical subject, or to conceive it according to the terms of private law. In this regard analogy plays its full part, and account must be taken of it in the transposition of concepts to the moral entity that the S[tate] is.

The most common doctrine holds the S[tate] to be, besides a juridical subject, a territorial entity, counting territory among its constitutive elements. This opinion is not accepted by the majority of Catholic theorists, for whom territory is only an integrating element. If the S[tate], in fact, is a social formation, for the production of which a plurality of rational subjects and the convergence of wills toward the same end suffice, together with an embryonic right and a supreme authority, then in order for it to exist and be operative a fixed territory is not in itself necessary. Nevertheless, in the present development of civilization it is not possible to conceive of an S[tate] without a territory of its own, from which the people draws the primary means of subsistence and with which it enters into an almost vital communion. The bond, however, that links territory to the S[tate] cannot be configured as a right of the same over its proprium corpus, nor be classified with the common patrimonial rights. Territory must rather be considered as an object over which the jurisdiction of the S[tate] is exercised, a limit to its jurisdictional power, a substratum in which it lives and dominates. It is not, therefore, a property of its own, nor with regard to it can the concept of high dominion in use among the more ancient writers be applied.

II. ORIGIN OF THE STATE

On the origin of the State opinions are conflicting even within the ambit of Catholic doctrine. The contractualist theory retains only a historical value. Criticism has demonstrated that the state of pure nature, conceived and described differently by Hobbes and by Rousseau, never historically existed, and therefore the supposed contract, by which man would have put an end to his condition of absolute liberty in order to create social life, is nothing but a poetic construction without support in reality. More recent thought, particularly outside Catholic doctrine, is oriented toward a threefold direction. There are those who consider the question of the origin of the State idle, since the State, it is affirmed, has no need of justification, because it imposes itself as a fact produced by particular politico-social conditions, upon which law is superimposed.

Others attribute its birth to the spontaneous evolution to which nature is subject. Under the impulse of the forces immanent in it, nature evolves, giving rise to the variety of beings and organisms, among which the greatest would be the State, whose genesis must therefore be attributed solely to the physical-biological laws of the cosmos. Others again assign physical force as its cause. The State would be the effect of violent subjugation, a theory supported by so-called social Darwinism, which placed the struggle for existence at the foundation of political life, with the principle of the dominion of the stronger over the weaker.

Within Catholic thought two opinions still hold the field: the first traces its origin to a conscious and voluntary act of man, who together with other subjects tends toward the attainment of an end. To this collective voluntary act, however, is not given the value of a contract, whether tacit or express. The second, on the other hand, traces it back to certain facts, from whose simple existence the State would arise spontaneously, whose birth would not depend on the causal influence of the will of the subjects, although it cannot then exclude a subsequent act of spiritual adherence to the fact. The facts to which the causality in question is attributed, called for that very reason associative, would be the natural development of the patriarchal family, economic and commercial relations, subjugation as a consequence of a lost war, and others still (cf. T. Tischleder, Ursprung und Träger der Staatsgewalt nach der Lehre des hl. Thomas, Gladbach 1923).

Regarding the question of origin, it must first of all be made clear that it does not refer to the historical origin of this or that State, nor to its remote and first cause, but to its proximate cause, from whose action its being always results. It is undoubted that more than one State historically owes its origin to force, just as it is undoubted that certain facts may have influenced its appearance. The question, however, is whether these are the true causes or only occasions, in whose presence the true cause has operated. With respect to the remote and ultimate cause, moreover, no divergence of opinion exists in Catholic thought. It is placed in God, who, having grafted into human nature, created by him, the insuperable instinct of sociability, stands as the supreme principle of every social formation and, therefore, also of the State. With this problem, which is nevertheless fundamental in social theory, contemporary doctrine does not concern itself at all, and within it there is no lack, as has been seen, of those who even simply exclude the question of the proximate origin.

Wrongly, nevertheless, since a doctrine concerning the being, nature, ends and powers of the State remains without foundation if one does not go back to its source. True science does not accept experimental facts in their heavy materiality, but from this transcends to the investigation of causes, in order to establish universal principles. Granted, then, that the State is a fact, in order to have an adequate knowledge of it one must necessarily find the causes that explain it. The objective analysis of the real permits the establishment of two points essential to the resolution of the question.

First of all, the elements of which the organism of the State is composed are rational subjects, who possess an intelligence directed toward the search for truth and a will turned toward the attainment of the good, and as such are free, conscious and responsible for their actions. From this first datum, which only a short-sighted materialism can call into doubt, there results negatively the exclusion of all mechanistic, evolutionistic and biological theories, which with their determinism are opposed to the spirituality of the human being and to his rationality and liberty, and positively it is deduced that the causes of the State must necessarily be of a higher order.

The second point, which the objective analysis of the real permits the establishment of, consists in the determination of the deepest and most universal motives that stimulate man's natural tendency toward social life. Such motives are two: the irrepressible need to expand one's own self and one's own personality outside the narrow circle of individuality, by means of an affective bond, with which, while the sentiment of solidarity is satisfied, which at bottom is nothing but natural love toward all who bear the same nature, the person is also dilated either in offspring or in the exchange of goods: the necessity of filling with the help of others the deficiencies with which man is born. Since he cannot by himself alone obtain conditions of life adequate to his rational nature, nor by himself alone attain the physical, intellectual and moral perfection toward which his higher faculties tend by natural impulse in a particular way, man seeks the stable collaboration of his fellow men, in order to fill his own indigence. The motives described are insuperable demands of nature, but at the same time they rise to the plane of the moral order, since, becoming spiritualized in the rational creature, they act upon his free will and effectively stimulate it to emerge from isolation.

The proximate cause of the State resides, then, in the will of the subjects, in that act of free and conscious adherence to a common end, which, generating the unity of intents, produces the being of the State. This conclusion is reinforced by the first of the points established above. If the material part of the State is constituted by rational, free and conscious beings, and these, by virtue of their essential rationality, always act for an end known and willed, even in the production of the political entity they must act in the same way. It is imposed, then, once again to admit that the proximate cause of the State cannot reside anywhere but in the will of man. The associative facts are therefore not the true causes of the State, but only external conditions that have more or less facilitated the moral cohesion of wills. The principal of them, the patriarchal family, could not transform itself into a State except when the family relationship changed into a juridical relationship, and this could not come about except at the moment when individual families or individuals recognized in the patriarch the new quality of social head, no longer invested with a simple private function but with an essentially public function.

At the origin of the State therefore stands the free and conscious human person, who by an act of his will creates it first and then maintains it in being, by means of continued adherence to the collective end once accepted. It remains, however, free to the Catholic to uphold the theory of associative facts, as a probable explanation of the origin of the State. That set forth here was dominant until the 18th century and has again become the most common.

III. THE STRUCTURE OF THE STATE

The opinions concerning the natural structure of the State are divided into two extreme currents, which can be designated by the names of atomism and monism, and into an intermediate one, which reconciles the contrasting positions of the former two with a synthesis between individuality and the social.

Atomism recognizes in man an autonomous value, with a reason that is the sole criterion of truth, and an absolutely free will, an independent source of every law. As such, man cannot be subject to an authority that he himself has not recognized. The State, consequently, is not a unitary entity, an effect of the convergence of individual wills, but the arithmetical sum of individuals, drawn to collaborate by the impulse of their private interest, like atoms that do not fuse into a common social being. Its authority is the sum of partial sovereignties, computed according to the calculation of the greatest number; its end does not differ from the private ends of individuals; its task is exhausted in the protection of private interests and rights. This is, schematically, the individualistic conception of the French Revolution and of the liberal current derived from it.

Monism branches out into various theories, some spiritualistic, others materialistic, of which it will suffice to give the general lines. Immanentist monism rests on the concept of the uniqueness of the absolute spirit, which, evolving by virtue of an internal and necessary dialectic, takes consciousness of itself in man and becomes in the State the reality of the ethical idea, which thinks and accomplishes what it knows insofar as it knows it. The State is the reality of the substantial will and the rational in itself and for itself; in its appearance is to be seen the entry of God into the world. The individual is a transient phenomenon of it, without any autonomous value, destined to serve it. There exist no ends that transcend the State, which cannot be other than an end in itself.

On this monistic foundation several of the nationalistic conceptions have rested, that of Fichte being immanentist, the others contaminated by materialistic elements. Society, according to the latter, would be a fraction of the human species, and the nation a summarizing unity of the series of generations, an organism that functions by means of other organs, that has its own immanent laws of life and in which individuals are infinitesimal and transient elements, totally subordinate to its superior ends.

Materialist monism has more numerous ramifications. In a general way it rests on the biological concept of organism. The State would be a living organism, governed by its own laws, within which individuals are nothing but caducous cells. Substance, being and living person, the State carries on its own activity in a manner entirely independent of men, who have a value only insofar as they are integral parts of its organism and lose it if they are detached from it as the cell is from the living body. To this crude organicism the evolutionistic theories gave their support. If not all those who embraced it arrived at the exaggerations of Schäffle, who described the anatomy of the State, designating its muscles, veins, nervous system and so on, and of Bluntschli, who discovered its sex, for all of them the organic theory served to absorb the individual into the unity of the State, annulling him as an autonomous person. Racism and materialist classism are but variants of this materialism; both, in fact, with a different framing, arrive at the annihilation of the individual in the State identified with the race or with the class.

Of another nature is juridical monism, which dissolves the State into law. Kelsen and the Viennese school founded by him identified the State with the juridical order, to which they attributed sovereignty, succeeding in this way in detaching its concept from the human reality on which its existence rests. A few observations suffice to bring down the castle erected by all these theories.

Atomism shatters the State into its elements and gives no account of its internal unity, of the cohesion of wills and of its organic character. To immanentist monism is opposed the response of consciousness, which has never grasped and testified to the existence of a universal substance. It affirms on the contrary a principle entirely opposed, namely the distinction, the separation and the complete subjectivity of each human person, who insists on proclaiming himself the source of his own acting and responsible for his actions, a claim that would have no foundation if the spirit were one and universal. Experience then teaches that the State is not a substance standing by itself, endowed with its own principle of operation, but an aggregate in which individuals preserve intact their substantiality and their freedom of action.

Biological-organicist monism lacks every scientific foundation. As Sombart observed, soul and organism are bound to life and cannot be found except where there exists a true unity of life, which occurs only in individuals, and therefore in the State there exists no other subject truly and properly organic apart from the single components. Physical organism and social organism, Jellinek further affirms, differ substantially in this: that in the State the unity of will is never the work of the creative hand of nature, but is the effect of conscious procedures; that the will of the State very often is realized through coercion practiced consciously, whereas in unitary organisms there are by no means conceivable either a will that results from several wills, or the coercion of one will by another.

In its less crude forms social monism configures the State as an entity distinct from individuals, provided with its own free and autonomous will. But such a construction proves as fantastic as that of biological organicism, since the being of the State is not substantial and results from the bundle of intersubjective relations, and the will, as a faculty, resides only in the human person. Only man thinks and wills; the State thinks and wills through persons, who place their own capacities at its service.

The natural structure of the State cannot be defined either with atomism or with monism, but with a theory that, preserving intact the two terms of the social relationship, individual and State, then reduces them to unity by means of a moral principle. This is precisely the orientation of Catholic thought, respectful of all the values of nature and jealous above all of keeping safe the human person, suffocated by the preceding conceptions or excessively exalted. It accepts the organic character of the State, but to organicism it does not give a physical value, but rather an analogical one, as an image suited to explaining its unity. In the State man does not lose his own being, nor does he renounce his own rights and transcendent ends; his personality continues to exist intact with all its rational exigencies, subordinated only to the ends of the collectivity and of its authority, insofar as it concerns the common good. He nevertheless is cemented with other men by a bond that is not substantial but accidental, not physical but moral, which gives rise to a superior entity, the State, one in its compages and bearer of ends of its own, which are not properly the ends of individuals, whom nonetheless it must serve as a means for attaining earthly well-being.

The analogy in the application of the organicist theory to the State permits avoiding the double reef of social atomism, which crumbles it into its elements, and of monism, which dissolves these into the State, thus resolving the age-old question of the relations between individual and State with a harmonious conception, which neither depreciates the State nor annuls the individual, but makes both coexist in the unity of political life, as terms that presuppose and complete each other.

As regards the essential end of the State and political power — questions or aspects of the general doctrine that would still need to be illustrated — see RENE COMUNE E AUTORITÀ, where they have been amply treated. For the forms of government see ARISTOCRAZIA; AUTOCRAZIA; DEMOCRAZIA; MONARCHIA, etc.

Antonio Messineo