4 - Inventing outsides: proto-sovereignty, exempla and the general theory of the state in the Renaissance

Summary

The sea has opened.

Machiavelli

As Carl Schmitt once remarked: ‘All significant concepts of the modem theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure.’

As I have argued above, a genealogy of sovereignty is not a history of its inferential connections with other political concepts, but a history of its articulation within different knowledges, within different ‘systematic structures’. The aim of this chapter is to trace the genealogy of sovereignty from its prehistory within theology to its articulation within Renaissance knowledge. Methodologically, however, this poses problems. The very term sovereignty was not present within political discourse until Beaumanoir introduced it in the thirteenth century, and even after that date, there is no autonomous discourse on sovereignty, if we by autonomous mean a discourse which has a single system for the formation of statements. The same is true of the concept of the state; during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the term status is used to denote many things, but never an abstract entity, wholly disconnected from both ruler and ruled.

Therefore, in this chapter, we must pay attention to the conceptual antecedents of sovereignty and state, and their logical conditions of possibility within theological, legal and political writings in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance.