This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s critical engagement with thinkers from his own era. It notes that Schopenhauer often focused his scrutiny of Kant and Hegel on their political arguments. In the former case, Schopenhauer claimed that Kant’s moral theory was in fact a concealed political theory. In the latter case, he claimed that Hegel’s philosophy of the state conflated politics, religion, and morality for the purpose of serving the Prussian state. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s reputation as an apolitical thinker is misleading since his elaborate criticisms of Kant and Hegel are partly generated by his conception of politics. It also argues that Schopenhauer’s demystifying critique of statehood in German Idealism places him in a position similar to the radical Young Hegelians, including the early Marx. Yet while the young Marx attacked the bourgeois vision of state rule over a market society composed of atomized, competitive individuals, Schopenhauer affirmed it.

Scholars have observed that Schopenhauer did not develop much of a political philosophy but have failed to recognize that this is a deliberate deflationary strategy. Schopenhauer’s aim was to circumscribe the function of politics narrowly and assign it a place in a broader range of human responses to the agony of existence. However, his attempt to differentiate politics from religion and the state from the church led to contradictions. One the one hand, Schopenhauer favored a strong state that could control social strife and noted that political leadership can rely on religious justifications to ensure stability. On the other hand, he observed that state-affiliated religious institutions often eliminate critical perspectives on their doctrines by silencing philosophical reflection, an attitude he could not accept. Schopenhauer thus ended up with an ambivalent conception of statehood as simultaneously protective of life and property and damaging to free inquiry.

A summing up, touching upon the role of the state and nationalism both in creating central institutions for the study and preservation of medieval manuscript material and in pursuing increasingly destructive warfare that often annihilated that same material.

Chapter 1 sets out the main questions and contentions in the book. It explores the concept of freedom and identifies it as a central concept in Athenian democratic ideology in both the private and public spheres. Scholarly debates on the concept of freedom are outlined, with an especial emphasis on Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive and negative freedom and its application to Athens in subsequent scholarship. Distinguishing democratic freedom from negative and republican versions, I argue that Athenians understood freedom as the ability to do “whatever one wished,” which I classify as a modified version of positive freedom. The focus on citizen agency in accomplishing his will differentiates Athenian democracy from other constitution types and affects its institutional features. The chapter closes with a brief overview of the rest of the chapters.

In Chapter 4, I offer a new theory of citizen power. Every adult male citizen would have been free, but this also made him kurios, or empowered, as opposed to ceding his power to a slave master. When substantivized, kurios indicated a male citizen’s institutionalized role as the head of a household. The lens of the household kurios generates an understanding of citizen power that encompasses both private and public domains. Not simply power as domination, kurios also indicated a shared power to act. As a conceptual metaphor, kurios was applied to the political sphere and structured thought across these different domains. Thus, qualities of the term kurios in its original domain, the household, corresponded systemically in the applied domain, the city. The laws and the corporate citizen body, too, were understood as kurioi. While there may be competing claims to power, the identification of the citizen as sharing in power with and through the laws and the dēmos is distinct from the modern conception of the individual versus the state. The negotiation of power in this way has repercussions for debates regarding sovereignty and the rule of law.

This chapter establishes the broader contours of politics, conceived as a discrete domain of ethical behaviour. It begins by detailing some paradigmatic instances of political action, organised into two categories: 'direct' and 'indirect'. Next, it examines the relationship between political action and violence, arguing that although individual violent acts might instantiate ethically valuable politics to some degree, truly endemic violence is inimical to politics. Having established this, it turns to the relationship between politics, equality, and inclusion, arguing that politics takes place primarily within geographically demarcated communities and that, as a result, we are justified in prioritising the participation of our compatriots. Finally, this chapter examines the role played by governance institutions within contemporary states, arguing that they fulfil an essential facilitating function. This grants them 'quasi-independent' value as political 'artefacts', 'focuses', and 'forums'. Taken together, these various arguments bridge the conceptual and normative gap between the analysis of the previous chapter and the account of state creation advanced later in the book.

This conclusion briefly summarises the argument of the book before considering its implications for two connected questions: the 'nature' or 'essence' of statehood under international law and the principle of state continuity. In relation to the latter, it advances a tentative additional principle for political membership that might be taken to explain the presumption of continuity as it applies to contemporary states. It also considers, albeit briefly, the current position of small island states, many of which are at risk of losing their inhabitable land due to human-caused climate change. As regards the nature or essence of statehood, the conclusion takes a somewhat sceptical view of attempts to characterise states in relation to one or more discrete concepts, arguing that not even statehood as political community should be viewed as an exhaustive account of what states 'really' are.

Chapter 6 has three interrelated aims. First, to identify the relationship between the modern nation-state, international humanitarian law (IHL), and notions of civility; second, through a historical exploration of the relationship between military necessity, proportionality, and discrimination in IHL, to make the argument that the claimed shift from sovereignty to humanitarianism is not as complete as often argued, and that rather, raison d’état continues to be a motivating factor informing constraint during combat; and third, through an exploration of ‘the standard of civilisation’, to identify how this relationship informs discord between the universal underpinnings of contemporary IHL, and ongoing violations of the law. The chapter concludes by proposing that the oft-maligned concept of a ‘standard of civilisation’ remains valuable in exploring continuities of double standards as they relate to protections afforded by the modern laws of war.

Chapter 1 brings the American state into full view by showing the ways in which its policy arm reinforces gender, economic, and racial inequality. The chapter situates this institutional function within a larger historical context of patriarchal systems that reproduce these inequalities in ways that must be understood when it comes to addressing gendered violence. The chapter then introduces the original concept of intersectional advocacy and explains its theoretical and empirical contours: how it is rooted in Black Feminist theory and developed from a practical understanding of how advocacy groups represent intersectionally marginalized constituents. After establishing the theoretical and empirical groundwork for intersectional advocacy, the chapter ends with a discussion of why this practice is important, how it travels across issue contexts, and how it is studied throughout the book.

The introduction sets out the book’s analytical framework. It begins with the long history of gendered state power, then discusses previous scholarship on early modern policing and its entanglement with the history of officeholding. It shows how both subjects are connected to the history of state formation and explains how the book bridges the gap between them. The central arguments of the book are outlined and the key categories of sources introduced.

This chapter shows how the ties between office and household were loosened from the early seventeenth century by a new legal approach to officeholding. The authority of certain officers began to be treated as separable from their personal identity, meaning they no longer had to be ‘independent’ heads of household. MPs passed statutes to protect officers from lawsuits, providing they acted in accordance with the authority granted to them by higher powers. Judges developed a distinction between ‘judicial’ and ‘ministerial’ officers: the first required personal qualities associated with independence, the second did not. ‘Ministerial’ officers wielded an impersonal form of authority which had nothing to do with their individual identities. In interactions with other people, they conjured this authority with an array of special words and props, which granted them legal protection as servants of the state. This was especially clear in homicide law, where the question of whether or not an officer had properly conjured authority could determine the outcome of a trial. The impersonal model of official authority laid the foundations for a new style of masculine officeholding.

Communal politics is an important and still largely unexplored aspect of social and political relations under the Ancien Régime. This chapter attempts to get at the village view by means of a vendetta which has left a rich trail of archival sources. We get an invaluable and rare insight into non-elite politics before 1789 that goes beyond the standard historical conventions of peasant resistance and rebellion, shedding light on villagers’ motives, deliberations and divisions, as well as their capacity to organise, use the law and exploit the protection offered by local lords and officials. The story that emerges is not simply one of resistance to the royal fisc, centre against the periphery, or the people versus the nobility. Rather, the demands of the state after 1635 divided local society among itself and led to faction and violence within the corps politique. While in the short term these internal divisions posed a challenge to traditional local order, they paradoxically offered an opportunity for the state and its agents to intervene as arbiters, an opportunity that was realised by Louis XIV’s redeployment of the intendants after 1661.